Word: bunks
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...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...
...Play. The Museum directors had a still more ambitious idea. They decided to surround Bunk with colleagues from the New Orleans past. They found Papa Mutt Carey, famous "dirty" trumpeter, working as a Pullman porter on the Southern Pacific. They got Kid Ory, greatest of oldtime tailgate* trombonists, from Los Angeles, where he had been raising chickens. They tracked down Clarinetist Wade Whaley at the Moore shipyards on San Francisco Bay. Ringing doorbells in San Francisco's Negro section, they finally located Bertha Gonsoulin, onetime pianist for Jelly Roll Morton and King Oliver. They added local Negro talent...
...morning of the concert Clarinetist Whaley disappeared and Bunk Johnson refused to get out of bed for rehearsal. But that evening Bunk Johnson and his band were terrific. Some suggested they be put on a permanent basis. But Bunk was thinking about the soft Gulf breezes and New Iberia. Said he: "This San Francisco fog just gets me all full of cold...