Alexandra Kennon
If a poll were conducted asking people to name a great New Orleans Jazz musician from the genre’s early days, the same few names would likely arise repeatedly: Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Fats Domino, King Oliver. Some with an affinity for jazz might throw out Buddy Bolden or Sidney Bechet. Kid Ory’s name might be an unexpected one, because besides his composition “Muskrat Ramble,” Ory’s contribution to the legacy of jazz is primarily remembered as that of a sideman.
But according to John McCusker—Ory’s biographer and now the Founder/Managing Director of the 1811 Kid Ory Historic House in LaPlace—to consider Ory’s contribution to jazz as only that of a trombone player on the 1920s records of Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, and King Oliver is to not give Ory his due credit.
“The future jazz stars that are going to make recordings capturing the zeitgeist of the jazz age—their common musical experience is Kid Ory’s band,” McCusker told me following the 1811 Kid Ory Historic House’s grand opening on February 2, 2021.
Before they rose to prominence, Louis Armstrong and three members of his famous Hot Five, King Oliver and much of his Creole Jazz Band, Johnny Dodds, and other influential early jazz artists all played in Kid Ory’s New Orleans band. “That’s kind of how Ory was: all of those folks, their common experience was Kid Ory and New Orleans,” McCusker said. He also credits Ory with being the link between Buddy Bolden—thought of as one of jazz’s earliest pioneers—and the “ultimate jazz man,” Louis Armstrong. Bolden was Ory’s first major influence, and Ory would later give Armstrong his first regular professional job playing in a New Orleans band.
“That’s kind of how Ory was: all of those folks, their common experience was Kid Ory and New Orleans,” McCusker said.
McCusker has spent a great deal of time and research mulling over such nuanced music history questions. He spent fifteen years working on his biography of Ory, Creole Trombone: Kid Ory and the Early Years of Jazz (2012), with admitted distractions along the way working full-time for the Times-Picayune and raising three children.
His initial interest in New Orleans jazz was born in the early 1990s from a two-part series of articles he co-wrote for the Times-Picayune on its history, which then led to him curating and leading “Cradle of Jazz” tours beginning in 1995, on which he linked the early pioneering musicians with the New Orleans sites at which they once lived and played. Early on, McCusker said his understanding of Ory was based on what could be found in most jazz history books, which touched on Ory’s role as a sideman with the likes of Armstrong and Morton. “But paradoxically, the fact that he’s known best as a sideman obscures what his really significant contribution was, which was developing the polyphonic band sound in New Orleans between 1910 and 1919,” McCusker said.
[Read about the legacy of Ibrahima, the West African prince sold into slavery in Natchez, here.]
McCusker believes that the kind of polyphonic improvisation born with jazz is emblematic of the United States’ motto: “E pluribus unum,” or, “out of many, one.” “In New Orleans jazz, the trumpet’s playing the melody, the clarinet’s playing arpeggios and variations on it, the trombone is providing the punctuation, if you will, with growls and slurs and bass figures and so forth—it’s a conversation,” McCusker explained. “And no part of that is any more important than the other is. It’s a totally interconnected thing, and everyone’s saying something different, but it’s in that differentness—going together, tongue in groove—that the beauty of the music comes together. And to me that’s the American ideal. It isn’t one way, it’s many voices, but speaking as one.”
“In New Orleans jazz, the trumpet’s playing the melody, the clarinet’s playing arpeggios and variations on it, the trombone is providing the punctuation, if you will, with growls and slurs and bass figures and so forth—it’s a conversation,” McCusker explained.
The uplifting story of Ory connecting some of the greatest and earliest jazz musicians with his leading musicianship is not the only narrative on display at the new museum in LaPlace. The 1811 Kid Ory House is housed in one of the oldest structures remaining in St. John the Baptist Parish, on a property once referred to as Woodland Plantation, the former sugar cane farm where Edward “Kid” Ory was born on Christmas Day in 1886.
Alexandra Kennon
On February 2, 2021, Founder and Managing Director John McCusker cut the ribbon to a soundtrack of Ory’s “Muskrat Ramble,” officially marking the opening of the Kid Ory House Museum in LaPlace.
The site is also where, on January 8, 1811, Charles Deslondes led a group of individuals enslaved at the plantation—then called the Andry Plantation—to revolt, attacking plantation owner Manuel Andry with an axe and killing his son Gilbert. Armed with Andry’s guns and ammunition, the revolution continued as a two-day march down River Road to New Orleans, drawing in over five hundred others enslaved at nearby plantations, and growing into the largest insurrection of enslaved people in the history of the United States.
Today, the museum is the first stop on Louisiana’s River Parishes Tourist Commission’s 1811 Slave Revolt Trail, which via audio-narrated stops recorded by New Orleans-raised actor Wendell Pierce, “follows closely the pathway the original participants took on their journey toward freedom,” from the Kid Ory House, to Destrehan Plantation, down to Jacques Fortier Plantation, where the group encountered military troops and were halted.
In 2016, McCusker received a tip that the home, which had at that point been left vacant for a decade, was on the market. He pitched the story to The Advocate and went to shoot some photographs to accompany. “That was the first time I’d set foot on the grounds, because it had always been shut off, no trespassing signs and all of that.” A year later Tim Sheehan purchased the home, and a historic architect he had hired reached out to McCusker for some background information on the house. Sheehan and McCusker began corresponding in the summer of 2019, and by January of 2020, the pair had decided to “take a shot and try to put a museum here,” according to McCusker.
In the highly-publicized November 2019 reenactment of the uprising, organized by artist Dread Scott and documented by filmmaker John Akomfrah, McCusker took on the role of Manuel Andry—the slave owner whose blood was the first shed in the 1811 rebellion. “I took a hit from a machete for the team on that one,” McCusker said.
Aside from both being pivotal moments of African American history, it might not initially seem that the history of jazz music and the history of the 1811 Revolt have much in common. McCusker has come to believe that, in fact, these two narratives are inextricably connected. “The constant is human experience, whether you’re talking about 1811 or whether you’re talking about Kid Ory seventy-five years later,” McCusker explained. “History is occupied by human beings. And human beings do the same things that human beings always do: sometimes they’re noble, sometimes they’re not. Sometimes they’re downright cruel, sometimes they create things of incredible beauty. So, the stories really aren’t different, you’re just seeing different parts of the human experience.”
“Both stories highlight that a single place, and the people who inhabit that space, can spur a movement with far-reaching effects,” said Charlotte Jones, the 1811 Kid Ory Historic House’s Operations and Programming Manager. “The Ory exhibit shows how a boy who grew up in the back quarters cultivated jazz as both a musician and as a uniquely American art form. The 1811 exhibit highlights a different movement in American history, one that began as a march for liberation from a suppressive and cruel labor system.”
“Both stories highlight that a single place, and the people who inhabit that space, can spur a movement with far-reaching effects,” said Charlotte Jones, the 1811 Kid Ory Historic House’s Operations and Programming Manager.
Alexandra Kennon
Johm McCusker’s personal phonograph collection from the era completed the Ory exhibit.
Presenting such different historical narratives in the museum’s exhibits while being mindful not to glorify “the big house” posed some challenges. McCusker’s fifteen years of research on his Ory biography made the Ory display easy enough to complete. “I’d never designed panels before, but I’ve designed newspaper pages,” McCusker said. “So really all of the panels are designed the way I would have designed a newspaper page.” Then members of the Ory family donated Ory’s trombone and two boxes of music from the 1920s, along with other memorabilia, giving the museum the largest Kid Ory archive in the world. McCusker had a personal phonograph collection from the era that made a perfect addition.
Jones, formerly a mule-drawn carriage driver in the French Quarter with a particular affinity for mules and their history, curated an exhibit for the museum called Stomping Grounds about the hard-working equines. When she first visited the Woodland property in early 2020, she and McCusker were chatting in the driveway about Kid Ory and mules when they spotted something and dug it up with a screwdriver. “It ended up being a rusted part of an old equine bit. I already volunteered to do an exhibit on mules for the house, and that seemed to have sealed the deal,” Jones said. “I scoured old haylofts in New Orleans, cotton-warehouses-turned antique markets in Mississippi, eBay, and flea markets in Florida for various tack and artifacts that tell the story of the mule.” After incorporating artifacts from Woodland itself—like an antique corn barrel and plow—Jones said the exhibition felt complete. Her mule, Chica, has even found a home at the Kid Ory House since March of 2021, and is available to visitors for pets and admiration.
Alexandra Kennon
Charlotte Jones’ “Stomping Grounds” exhibit educates viewers about the role of mules in sharecropping and beyond.
Curating a display for the 1811 room proved more difficult. But through social networking, historians in special fields began to reach out to McCusker with their own suggestions, many of which were incorporated. It was decided that the 1811 room would be the only room that would be furnished with antiques—with the goal of removing emphasis from the plantation owners and placing it on the enslaved. COVID caused the price of antiques to plunge, meaning they were able to purchase a period butterfly armoire for a fraction of its usual price for the exhibition. “We were able to get that furniture for pennies on the dollar for what we would normally pay,” McCusker marveled. “Otherwise, we could not have done this exhibit.” The team was able to track down the Ory-Andry descendants who had the original portrait of Gilbert Andry (the first of the slave owners killed in the revolt), and had a reproduction painting made from the image for the room.
The 1811 display continues to challenge the historians involved, according to McCusker. When former volunteer Daniel Senentz Jr. uncovered new information that provided previously-unknown context to the historical narrative, they had to completely scrap and redo the original panels McCusker made. “Particularly when you’re talking about the slave revolt, all of the records are written down by the enslavers. So, trying to find the humanity of the enslaved in that is like trying to get blood from a stone,” McCusker explained. “So that’s why you have to follow hypothesis, and look at other explanations besides in some cases what was originally written in the record.”
Those involved in the museum hope they will continue to gain more context and insight into the storied history of the property. University of New Orleans’ Archeology students have completed initial shovel testing to begin digs around the site of the Kid Ory House. “I can only imagine,” said McCusker. “You’re talking about land that’s been inhabited since the 1720s by Europeans, and before that, Calopesa Indians. So, they could find anything from stuff from one hundred years ago to Indian artifacts, who knows. It’s just a big open thing, and I’m excited to see whatever it is they uncover.” Jones added that she’s particularly interested to learn more about the out-buildings and other aspects of the property beyond the home itself. “Of course, the house itself is an incredible historical resource, but I look forward to learning more about the working spaces—from tenant quarters to sugar processing—of the plantation, particularly after the Civil War,” Jones said.
[Read about how early New Orleans Jazz musicians invented the early drum kit here.]
Since the Kid Ory House’s opening in February, visitors have ranged from current members of the Ory family to young contemporary New Orleans Jazz musicians. On one occasion, four carloads of Ory descendants from St. John the Baptist Parish came for a tour, and McCusker shot a family photo of the group on the porch of the house. “I’m hoping once COVID’s over, we can have a big family reunion here and put the genealogy chart up on the wall and everybody can figure out who their cousin is,” McCusker said. On another day, three musicians drove up from New Orleans to take the tour, then took out their instruments and began playing on the porch of the home. “They just wanted to be able to be on Kid Ory’s porch and play some music,” McCusker said. “It was just beautiful, these guys just wanted to be in the space.”
Even more poignantly, McCusker hopes that the museum can present the history in a way that is humanizing to all parties, and therefore empowering. “For people of color, I want them to come here and see their ancestors treated with honesty, dignity, and nuance. Treated as people who had all the complexities and contradictions that every one of us gives ourselves credit for,” McCusker explained. “And that everyone be seen as human beings—not masters, not slaves, but as human beings.”
“For people of color, I want them to come here and see their ancestors treated with honesty, dignity, and nuance. Treated as people who had all the complexities and contradictions that every one of us gives ourselves credit for,” McCusker explained.
While history is frequently viewed as having a linear progression or evolution (for example, transportation technology’s progression from horseback, to trains, to automobiles, to space shuttles), McCusker argues that the cyclical nature of the highs and lows of human behavior through time—at its most noble and most inhumane—is more akin to a revolving helix than a line. “You could say the Kid Ory story represents the nobility we like to think about ourselves as humans—that we’re creative, we’re improvisational, we want to put something in the world that wasn’t there before we came along—that’s the nobility of humanity. But then when you look at slavery in 1811, and human beings treating other human beings with inhumanity, then you’re seeing the low streak of what man is capable of,” McCusker said. “It’s sort of like a helix that turns around, and you simply see repetitions of human behavior over, and over, and over again.”
“What I appreciate about the house is that it is not your run-of-the-mill historic house museum that focuses completely on architecture of the big house, or the family that lived in it,” Jones said. “Though these are important, and we explore that history as well, the 1811 Kid Ory Historic House is unique because it essentially produced two movements of American history much bigger than itself. I hope visitors will take away how one space, and the people who inhabit it, can be a genesis for something bigger than themselves. And, if done correctly, that genesis can be for the better."
