The Word "Jazz," 6 of 7: Bert Kelly's Claim, and Bad Sources

(For the previous essays in this series, see the Index.)

In Essay 5 we learned that white New Orleans trombonist Tom Brown, performing in Chicago starting in May 1915, claimed to be the first to call his group a “jazz band.” But we can’t find proof of that. Meanwhile, as lexicographer Ben Zimmer has noted, white banjoist Bert Kelly (1882-1968) countered Brown’s claim with his own. He consistently maintained that Brown’s was the first jazz band he ever heard, but that they never used the word “jazz” to describe their music. (As we just saw, that could be true.) Kelly said that he learned the word “jazz” while playing with Art Hickman at Boyes Springs in the 1914 baseball season, and then in San Francisco, and that he brought it from California to Chicago, and there he led the first group to be called a “jazz band.” He added that he eventually had a business of as many as twenty groups, each called Bert Kelly’s Jazz Band, and that the Original Dixieland Jazz Band got the idea for their name from him.

But there is no source for Kelly’s claims other than his words — and he was a braggart who titled his unpublished memoir I Created Jazz. (He had planned to publish it through Vantage Press, a “vanity publisher,” but for some reason it never came out.) Besides, as I showed in the third essay, the Chicago White Sox learned the word “jazz” on their visit to Boyes Springs in March 1913. So that part of his claim is wrong, even though he may have sincerely thought that he was the first to bring the word to Chicago.

There is not even any proof that Kelly played with Hickman, although I believe him—why make up such a random detail? And we know that Hickman did employ a banjoist in 1913, so he probably did in 1914 as well. Besides, word researcher Peter Tamony tells us that Kelly wrote him a letter in 1958 that even named the musicians: “I played the Tea Dansants [Dances] at the St. Francis [Hotel] in a dance group consisting of George Gould, piano, Artie Hickman, drums, and myself on ragtime banjo; [then] tried out with Leon Carroll, piano, Artie and myself for the Cliff House.” And my research for Part 3 confirmed that Carroll was a member of Hickman’s circle.

But unfortunately, there is almost no paper trail for Kelly before Chicago. Born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in 1882, his family ended up in Seattle, Washington from around 1889 until about 1903. There, in the late 1890s, he started on mandolin, inspired by virtuoso Samuel Siegel (who, as you can hear at that link, made recordings from 1900 on), from whom he took two lessons. Soon Bert was leading a mandolin club, which included bowed instruments. In fact the only evidence I found of Kelly’s early career is a report of one of the club’s performances in 1902:

Seattle Post-Intelligencer, December 7, 1902, p.23

By 1903, the family moved to a farm in Fresno, California, but Kelly was soon living on his own in San Francisco, roughly 200 miles away. However, for the next ten years or so, he was mostly back in the general area of Fresno, including Reedley and Selma. But by 1914 he was married and settled in S.F. (I found the news clipping, but the rest of the preceding paragraph is adapted from an anonymous well-researched paper on Kelly’s life that saxophonist-composer-historian Allen Lowe received from the late Lawrence Gushee, and kindly shared with me.)

It’s particularly difficult to find more about him because his name is fairly common—even a race horse at that time was named “Bert Kelly”! Still, let’s accept that Kelly worked with Hickman in 1914 and learned the word “jazz.” What about his main claim, that he was the first to call his group a “jazz band”? Well, the first article where this claim was printed appeared in 1919. (Kelly had placed a notice and a letter to the editor in Variety in November 1917, but both were to assert his leadership of the College Inn Jass Orchestra in Chicago, not for the word “jazz” itself.) Because various people claimed to be the first to lead a “jazz band,” the author, Walter Kingsley, spoke with Kelly to get his side of the story:

(Walter J. Kingsley, “Jazz Has Remarkable History as a Fad,” The Sun (New York), February 9, 1919, section 6, p.6. In digital archives this is sometimes listed as the New York Herald, but it was The Sun, which merged with the Herald in 1920.)

Wait—he said that Brown’s band arrived in March 1916. We know it was May 1915, and we saw newspaper ads and a telegram to prove it. Is this a simple error, or was Kelly changing the dates around to strengthen his case? Let’s dig deeper.

Another article from 1919, published anonymously, gives the exact same statement from Kelly, and is quite similar in other ways to the article above.. (Anonymous, “‘Stale Bread’s’ Sadness Gave ‘Jazz’ to the World,” Literary Digest, April 26, 1919, pp. 47-8; sometimes wrongly listed as 1916). And Chicago historian Robert Loerzel kindly shared another anonymous article with me from a New Orleans paper (“Orleans’ Product: ‘Stale Bread’s’ Fiddle Gave ‘Jazz’ to the World,” New Orleans Item, March 9, 1919, magazine section, p. 5). This one is exactly the same as the Literary Digest article except that the first paragraph, which is somewhat redundant with what follows, is omitted. Also, a few words are omitted, but clearly by mistake.

And this article appeared in various versions, often in abridged or edited form, sometimes anonymous, sometimes summarized (as in “Mr. Kingsley says…”), in Bangor Maine (February 15, 1919), Melody magazine (published in Boston, April 1919), Spokane, Washington (June 3, 1919), Toronto, Canada (June 21, 1919), Santa Ana, California (July 7, 1919), Atlantic City, New Jersey (September 18, 1919; and elsewhere. And it was mentioned briefly in Brantford, Ontario, Canada (May 3, 1919), Topeka, Kansas (June 28, 1919), and beyond. (Full citations available on request.)

So what’s going on here? Why do we find so many versions of the same article, in many different publications, either under Walter Kingsley’s name or anonymously? First of all, it’s clear that all of them are based on Kingsley’s original article in The Sun. And I already noted, in my Essay 2 of this series, that Kingsley’s articles were intended to be entertainment, not scholarship. In The Sun, he identifies himself as “head of the bureau of research” of the Keith Vaudeville Circuit, a major chain of about 30 theaters across the country, which also booked its own artists through its United Booking Office. But that’s a bit of a joke—of course it had no “bureau of research.” Kingsley was in reality the well-known press agent of the Keith organization from 1914 through 1928. In his N.Y. Times obituary, Walter J. Kingsley (1876-1929) is called “one of the best known and most popular press representatives in the theatre.”

At the top of the Sun article, it says that Kingsley is “the most profound authority on jazz,” which was certainly not true. It goes on to say:

Hmm—so he only did his research among artists booked by Keith, and brought the information back to the Palace Theatre in Manhattan, the flagship theater of the Keith circuit. In other words, part of Kingsley’s job was to generate press, by “placing” articles into as many publications as he could. The articles posed as “news” or “educational/topical interest,” but in fact they used a catchy headline as an excuse to bring attention to some Keith artists and promoters, or to the jazz music they’d be presenting. (Joseph Gorham, mentioned in the last two articles, appears to have been a promoter or producer affiliated with the Keith circuit.)

In fact, Kingsley had been planting his articles about jazz in papers all over the U.S.A. and Canada since at least 1917. That year his article, “Whence Goes Jazz?: Facts from the Great Authority on the Subject,” appeared in The Sun (New York, August 5, 1917, p.23). It’s a complete spoof, but for many years it was cited as though it were a serious source on the African origins of the word “jazz”—even though the word was imposed on the music by white people in Chicago, as we’ve seen—and on the music, which Kingsley correctly attributes to Black culture but condescendingly describes as being based on the “wonderful gift” of Africa’s “savage musicians.” (Even though the word “jazz” came out of white culture, it was widely understood from early on that the music came from Black culture.) Kingsley repeats the quotes attributed to Lafcadio Hearn, which we showed in Essay Two to be phony. And he cites, as his primary “expert,” “Prof. William Morrison Patterson, Ph.D., of Columbia University.” Patterson taught at Columbia in English, not music, and he was an “instructor”—Kingsley inflated his rank to “professor” to impress his readers. In 1915, Patterson wrote a monograph called The Rhythm of Prose—it appears to be his doctoral dissertation—which does include some discussion of musical rhythm as well. But he was no authority on African music or jazz. Only towards the end of the article do we learn what Kingsley was advertising—Flo Ziegfeld’s show in Manhattan, “Midnight Frolic.”

In fact, Kingsley was not above making things up to generate publicity, including a famous hoax in 1901 about supposed British influence on American yacht racing. Nevertheless, over the next year and more, Kingsley’s piece “Whence Goes Jazz?,” like the 1919 piece on Bert Kelly that we just discussed, was reprinted, often in abridged or edited form, sometimes anonymous, sometimes summarized (as in “Mr. Kingsley says…”), in Atlantic City, New Jersey (April 11, 1918), St. Louis, Missouri (April 14, 1918), Sacramento, California (May 26, 1918), the magazine Current Opinion (September 1918; here Kingsley falsely describes himself as an “ethnologist”), Edmonton, Alberta, Canada (December 7, 1918), Olean, New York (January 11, 1919), and other locations. (Full citations available on request.)

Still, even though Kingsley was not a serious source on jazz, he did apparently get a statement from Kelly for his 1919 piece, possibly written out, because that is reproduced in almost the same words in each version. So, what exactly was Kelly’s claim about being the first to be called a “jazz band”? He says it was an idea that he gave to the Chicago promoter Harry James (no relation to the famous trumpeter of the next generation):

(“White City” is a nickname for Chicago.) The other two articles do not specify that this was Kelly’s idea. But in any case, there is no written evidence—none of these cards has ever been found. And more to the point, we saw in the previous essay that “jazz” was referred to in print as a type of music on July 11, 1915, so the idea of “jazz bands” was surely also spreading then. Therefore Kelly’s dates would not make him the first. First, in the excerpt near the top of this page, he says he used the phrase “jazz band” in the Fall of 1915, but he gives no details at all. Then he tells this story from the Fall of 1916, which must be more than a year too late to be the first. Besides, I ask, do cards on the tables inside a club, which can only be seen by those who are already patrons, really count as “advertising”? Not to me. Most definitions of “advertising” state that it is a way of informing the public of a service or product or event—not something intended only for people who have already, so to speak, “bought” the product.

Kelly made other claims over the years. On October 2, 1957, Variety printed a letter from Kelly stating that at the College Inn of Chicago, he “originated the jazz band in 1914 ” (p.64). Why does he now say 1914? Clearly, he’s “backdating” it, making it earlier to be sure that nobody can say they used “jazz band” before he did. (Tom Brown had already done the same thing in Downbeat, August 1936, saying that he performed in Chicago in 1914.) Kelly goes on to say that the music itself was from Chicago, and that the New Orleans players, Black and white, can only “blast or squeal loudly.” Is Kelly a trustworthy, unbiased source? Clearly not.

And unfortunately for Kelly, regarding his 1914 claim, there is, in fact, some evidence, and it’s not in his favor. The late jazz historian Lawrence Gushee was perhaps the world’s expert on early jazz. In his book Pioneers of Jazz (p. 301), he notes that Kelly’s story “is undermined by an item in the ‘Hotel Notes’ of the Chicago Examiner for Feb 3, 1915,” because the music is described as ragtime and fox trot music, not jazz. Although Kelly is not named, Gushee states that “This must, in my opinion, refer to Kelly’s band.” After all, Kelly had begun performing at the College Inn in January, the group used a San Francisco name, and it featured a banjo:

Besides, Kelly always said that he got the idea to hire jazz players after hearing Brown’s band, so that had to be after May of 1915.

In his bid to be the first, Kelly also said that somebody took a silent film of his group at a big party in 1915 and labeled it as “Jazz.” (Details of that party are here from Robert Loerzel.) He also told that story to my late friend James “Jim” Maher, a freelance author and knowledgeable jazz advocate, who repeated it to me. But, since the film has never been found and there’s not even any evidence that Kelly was at that party, that’s a moot point.

The earliest ads that actually mention Kelly’s name are later, and definitely not the first for a jazz band or “orchestra.” For example here is one from Variety magazine in November 1916, and another from a Polish newspaper in January 1917—Kelly's name is near the bottom of the Polish one:

(Variety, November 10, 1916, p.37; and Dziennik Chicagoski, January 19, 1917, p.2)

Kelly never recorded but became widely known when he founded the nightclub Bert Kelly’s Jazz Stables, aka Kelly’s Stables, first in Chicago during most of the 1920s and then in Manhattan from May 1940 onward.

The article that we discussed last time from July 11, 1915 said that “in a few months,” “blue music,” which the author says is the same as jazz, had become “the predominant motif in cabaret offerings,” at least around Chicago. So that means that the demand for “blues” aka “jazz” bands had begun earlier in 1915. And Fred Shapiro, editor of the New Yale Book of Quotations and the leading contributor to the Oxford English Dictionary, recently shared with me an item from April 9, 1915 (p.4), in the Daily Californian student newspaper of the U. of California Berkeley campus, that connects the word “jazz” with music. A letter to the editor says that campus parties should have “good 'jazz-time' music.” This phrase is most likely a “hipper,” more up-to-date version of “‘rag-time’ music,” which was already starting to be viewed as old-fashioned. It also might come from "good-time," as in "good-time jazz music,” or “jazz music to have a good time to." (The only use of "good time" as a phrase that is documented before 1915 is "good time girl," but I suppose this could come from that.) Although the letter does not explicitly say “‘jazz’ is a type of music,” or “I like ‘jazz’ bands,” it shows that ideas close to that were forming in California at the same time as in Chicago.

By December 1916, the phrase “jazz band,” or sometimes “jazz orchestra” (George A. Thompson found that in August 1916 in S.F.) can easily be found in newspapers, big and small, all over the U.S.A. And as we saw, the claims of Brown and Kelly are both suspect. So, maybe the best we can do is to say that a few months before July 1915, “jazz” was recognized as a type of music in Chicago and possibly elsewhere, and that bands started using “jazz” in their names soon after, and that by December 1916 it was common to see bands with “jazz” in their names across the U.S.A.

Next time we’ll wrap things up by summarizing what we have found, and explaining in more detail why all of the other theories about the word “jazz” are certainly false.

All the best,
Lewis