Word: bunk
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...venerable band that played for them consisted of long-silent musicians gathered from Louisiana rice paddies and the Pullman cars. Its leader, spare as a lath, was 63 -year-old, silver-haired Willie C. ("Bunk") Johnson, onetime teacher of Louis ("Satchelmouth") Armstrong, and the greatest jazz trumpeter of his not quite bygone day. When Bunk and his old friends rode out on the classic New Orleans stomps, the San Francisco crowd knew it was getting the fragrant, free style syncopation it had come...
...nearly 15 years Bunk Johnson had not played. His story had followed a familiar pattern among U.S. Negro musicians. In the spacious days before World War I, Bunk used to "call his people home" with his own New Orleans boys-the Original Superior Band. Louis Armstrong, who followed Bunk around, carrying his trumpet, was only one of the many Negro trumpeters and cornetists (Tommy Ladnier, King Oliver, Freddie Keppard, Buddy Petit, Punch Miller) who learned from Bunk. And Bunk, who could play any tune in any key without stopping to think ("sharps and flats they never bothered...
...Could Whistle. When the Navy closed down Storyville (New Orleans' red-light district) during World War I, Bunk Johnson left his band and toured with circuses and minstrel shows. As the years went by and the demand for New Orleans jazz died away, Bunk took other kinds of work to support his growing family. In 1933 he lost all his teeth and could not play any more even if he wanted to. "And besides," says he, "I loan my cornet to a man and he never come back." Bunk tried trucking, at $1.50 a day. He found...
About five years ago a Pittsburgh jazz enthusiast named William Russell heard from Louis Armstrong that Bunk Johnson was still alive somewhere in the Deep South. Once Bunk was found at his old home in New Iberia, La., he became a voluble correspondent. He slowly pecked out his careful letters on an old typewriter. Says he: "You can sit down with a cup of coffee and a cigaret and be sure you won't go to sleep because that little bell keeps waking you up." Bunk kept insisting in his letters that if he had a trumpet...
Last summer William Russell and some friends made a trip to New Iberia to find out whether Bunk was really as good as he said he was. They came away determined that Bunk should be heard. Finally an offer came from San Francisco, where an interior decorator named Rudolph Pickett Blesh was lecturing on hot jazz at the San Francisco Museum of Art. Blesh wanted Bunk to illustrate a lecture...