Freddie Webster, 2: New Info About His Early Career & A Lost Recording, With Photos!
Last time, I presented new discoveries about Webster’s biography. Probably most important is that all the books and websites give the wrong birthdate and birthplace: I showed that Freddie Webster was born in Selma, Alabama, on September 3, 1917 and that his birth name was Morris Frederick Webster. Since then, I received a comment from a niece by marriage of Webster confirming that my information is correct. I’ll give additional proof in future essays. Also, I gave some of his family’s history and I shared two newspaper articles about his gigs in 1937.
Since that time, I have received access to the Call and Post, the historic Black newspaper of Cleveland which is still publishing once a week. This paper mentioned Webster so regularly that I could easily reconstruct his musical itinerary on an almost monthly basis. I was also able to get access to other newspapers. I now have so much information that I will only present highlights in today’s essay. But first, let me explain how and when he got to Cleveland:
As we saw last time, the Webster family came from Selma, Alabama, and moved to Kentucky, and then by 1923 to a new Black community in Twinsburg Heights, Ohio, about a half-hour’s drive from Cleveland. Freddie’s parents were divorced in 1931. His father, Fred, remarried and stayed in Twinsburg Heights, and commuted to Cleveland for work (again, see previous essay). His mother Mary moved with the children to Cleveland. I found a written record that they were in Cleveland in 1935, but they had moved there earlier, almost certainly as soon as the divorce happened in 1931. We know that because Freddie is documented in Cleveland from August 1933, and also because he graduated from Cleveland’s Central High School in January 1935. (I believe this was before the noted music director James Lee joined the faculty. More details on the high school are in Joe Mosbrook’s free book on Cleveland jazz history.) In fact, he led the dance music for the prom on January 18, 1935 for January graduates. Also, it is well known that Freddie was friends with Tadd Dameron, and they met in high school. I checked the addresses and found that they lived 1.6 miles from each other—not next door, but certainly close enough to easily visit each other outside of school. Soon, they performed together.
Here is the earliest printed reference to Freddie Webster. This was a column to which local families sent their news. Freddie performed on the radio “last Saturday,” which was August 26, 1933. He was 15 then, and in about a week he would turn 16:
By May 1934, when he was 16, one finds regular references to “Freddie Webster and his Harlem Five” performing at community events and parties, and several nights each week at Paradise Gardens (not Garden as in the clipping below) in Lakewood, a Cleveland suburb:
The home, 2366 East 67th Street in Cleveland, is where the family still lived at the time of the 1940 census. (I believe that address no longer exists.) But by then Freddie had moved to N.Y.C., as we will see.
Back to 1934, his music was regularly praised in the Call and Post. His mother was clearly supportive, and she attended some events, such as this dance and fashion show in June 1934:
He quickly earned a local following, as we can read in this passage by an anonymous reporter in March 1935:
And his reputation was spreading. In December 1935 the paper mentions a possible gig in Akron, about 40 miles south of Cleveland. In January 1936 his group was no longer the Harlem Five. It was a “ten-piece band” (including himself)—he had expanded. He used various new names: During the next few months they are referred to as Freddie Webster and His Orchestra, …His Syncopates, …His Rhythm Boys, …His Harlem Hotshots, and in 1937 as …His Swingsters.
The little info we have about his repertory shows that he played standard popular songs of the day. On April 26, 1936, he participated in a “musicale” where each person played or sang one or two numbers with piano accompaniment. He played his trumpet on two songs that were currently popular: ‘Christopher Columbus” and “Tormented.” (Reported in the Cleveland Call and Post, May 7, 1936, p.4) In an article that you’ll see below, we learn that he was also known for playing “Dinah” and “St. Louis Blues.”
His reputation continued to grow. For an event on July 24, 1936, he led a fourteen-piece band and was described in the advance press as “our coming Duke Ellington.” (Cleveland Call and Post, July 16, 1936, p.4) At that time, fourteen or fifteen musicians was considered a full-sized band. From this point onward, he sometimes used this full group, sometimes the ten-piece band, and sometimes used twelve musicians, depending on the situation and the pay. Around the same time, there was a “battle” between his band and that of another popular local artist, saxophonist Gay Crosse, with whom Coltrane performed in 1952. (The battle was reported later in the Cleveland Call and Post, Oct. 15, 1936, p.3.) The prize was a “long-term contract” and apparently Webster won, because by August 1936 he was signed on by a booking office. Probably as a condition of the contract, for most gigs during the next year or so, the band was “fronted” by dancer and singer Jess Rogers (sometimes spelled Rodgers). That is, Webster conducted the music while Rogers hosted and performed:
Elsewhere, I read that Jess, like Freddie, performed songs of the day, such as “Rosetta” by Earl Hines (who was soon to hire Webster), and something called “In His Own Quiet Way” (possibly a religious song, or something written by Rogers?).
The Bureau sent the 10-piece version of the group on a tour of Western Pennsylvania, where they were a hit with both Black and white audiences. Here is our first photo of Webster— he had just turned 19. He was very accomplished at such a young age! Freddie is called “diminutive” because he was five feet and four inches tall:
October 1936 marked the first time that his name was in a headline:
WAIT A SECOND! It says at the end of the first paragraph: “It (sic) first recording was made recently for Columbia”! That means that somewhere in early October 1936, Webster made his only recording ever as a leader. All of his known recordings, which began in March 1938, are as a sideperson in other people’s bands. In those days “a recording” meant two tunes, two sides of a 78 rpm disc. And usually two 78s—four songs—were made in one session. I wish I could give you some hope that these will be found, but the Columbia archives have been searched many times. Besides, once they decided not to release them, for whatever reasons, they might have destroyed them. What a shame!
Freddie’s big break came a year later, in September 1937, when Earl Hines hired him. (According to Mosbrook’s book linked above, Freddie was recommended by another Cleveland trumpeter who was already in the band, Harry “Pee Wee” Jackson.) They performed in Cleveland on Monday, September 27, so Freddie had joined shortly before that. This gives us an earlier and more specific date than what is usually written—that he was with Hines “during the year 1938.” Below is the newspaper announcement. (It says “Edited” because I combined two copies—one had the clearest text and the other had a far better photo.) This is our best photo of Freddie yet:
Notice that Dameron is listed as a former band member. Eddie Harris, mentioned there, was a trumpeter, not the saxophonist from Chicago. After Freddie left, Harris was the leader on some gigs with former members of Webster’s band. During November 1937, Webster is specifically mentioned in three articles as a member of the Hines band, so there is no doubt that he had already joined. He was living in Chicago, and during a break in touring he made a social visit to Cleveland on February 10 and 11, 1938:
In September 1938 his oldest sister Vivian, a beautician, visited him while she was in Chicago for a convention:
Webster first recorded in N.Y.C. in March 1938 and again in August in Chicago, as a member of the Hines band, with whom he was touring. Later that year, he left Hines and worked with Erskine Tate, a respected Chicago bandleader with whom Louis Armstrong had recorded in 1926. He is usually listed with Tate only in late 1938, but this newspaper clipping shows that he was still there in January 1939:
(This was a Black newspaper but as I’ve shown elsewhere musicians were called “boy” and “girl” by both Black and white journalists and musicians in those days.)
Webster moved to Harlem in late 1939 and was soon working with the Lucky Millinder band. He was in the band when they appeared in their first, and his only, film. I’ll show you the relevant moments next time, in my third essay on Webster.
All the best,
Lewis
An amazing piece of research!
"Mr. Porter: Tracer Of Lost Jazzmen."