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two-trumpet sound.) So I took the vocals, and in return they would let me hold my banjo.
    Thus, with my Vega in hand, I set out to be a professional jazzman. By that time I was already six foot two and weighed about 220 pounds. Six or seven months later, thanks to my devotion to jazz, I weighed 170. I didn’t have the sense God gave a duck. I had never starved before, and I had no idea of the great range of possibilities out there in the world—one of them being starvation. At first I was just sitting in occasionally with pick-up bands, and for a while a bunch of kids my own age also put together our own group. Since we thought we were a pretty clever bunch, we came up with a real thigh-slapper of a name: the Brute Force Jazz Band. We thought that was very witty; audiences thought it was very accurate. We
played where we could, at rare intervals and to no great acclaim, and then I ended up with a relatively steady organization called the Jazz Cardinals—though I was still doing pick-up work whenever I could get it. The Cardinals were led by a Dutchman named Eric Huystedt who sounded very much like Sidney Bechet, and we had a regular gig at a place called the Amber Lantern in New Jersey. Boy, did we get screwed! I remember one time we divvied up all the money we had made that evening, and it came to forty-seven cents each.
    Those were the waning days of the trad-Dixieland revival. I was “just in time to be too late,” as the song says, and the trad scene was by then dominated by a bunch of cornballs in funny hats, moonlighting insurance execs, and a smattering of dedicated musicians eking out a meager existence by gumping meals at the Automat. (Gumping is when you race the busboy to an unfinished plate of food, finish it, and repeat the procedure until you are no longer hungry or you get thrown out, whichever comes first.) It was really slim pickings. Often you would play for union scale and then have to slip the owner something back under the table. You were lucky to get two gigs in a week; more often you would get one gig in two weeks. Trying to live on that, even in the golden fifties, wasn’t easy.
    Still, I learned a lot by working with those bands. We were playing all the old chestnuts, things like “At the Jazz Band Ball” and “Fidgety Feet,” and I was picking up some relatively sophisticated chord changes, which gave me an enormous leg up a few years later when I got involved in the folk scene. The joke in the early 1960s was that I was the only folksinger in New York who knew how to play a diminished chord, and while that was not quite true, it does indicate what set me apart from a lot of the other people.
    Most of the jobs I played were outside New York City, especially over in Jersey. There was a country club in West Orange, a place in Fort Lee. One of the nice things was that I got to meet some of the old-timers. One time, I did a benefit concert out at Welfare Island with a pick-up group, and Eubie Blake showed up; I vividly remember him playing “Baltimore Rag.” I also sat in on sessions at clubs like the Stuyvesant Casino and Child’s Paramount; I recall one night when the line-up included Miff Mole, Jimmy McPartland, Coleman Hawkins, Johnny Hodges, and Ben
Webster, and there I was backing them. 5 I played with Joe Sullivan a couple of times, and once with Jimmy Rushing. I could never have worked officially in those places because I was not a member of the AF of M, the musicians’ union, but they managed to squeeze me in. If the union delegate came by, Rushing or whoever was the titular leader would take over and I would get offstage. Of course, my instrument was still up there and the delegate knew perfectly well what was going on, but he wouldn’t do anything about it.
    There is an apprenticeship system in jazz, so even if the older musicians were not personally all that accessible or friendly, they felt an obligation to help the younger musicians. That is generally true of people who are