His band starting playing around 1895, in New Orleans parades and dances, and eventually rose to become one of the most popular bands in the city. In 1907 his health deteriorated and he was committed to a mental institution where he spent the remainder of his life.
Trombonist Frankie Dusen took over the Bolden Band and renamed it the Eagle Band and they continued to be very popular in New Orleans until around 1917. Bolden made no recordings, but was immortalized in the Jazz standard “Buddy Bolden’s Blues” (I Thought I Heard Buddy Bolden Say) which is based on Bolden’s theme song “Funky Butt”. Several early Jazz musicians, like Sidney Bechet (as a child musician) and Bunk Johnson, apparently played in Bolden’s bands occasionally.
| Read: Three Books About Buddy Bolden |
| In Search of Buddy Bolden by Donald M. Marquis, Louisiana State University Press, 1978 |
| Buddy Bolden And The Last Days Of Storyville by Danny Barker, Continuum, 1998 |
| Buddy Bolden Says by E.W. Russell, Candence Jazz Books, 2000 |
| The Loudest Trumpet by Daniel Hardie, iUniverse Books, 2000 |
The Syncopated Times prepared a full issues worth of coverage of Buddy Bolden to coincide with the release of a movie about him in 2019. See all of it at The Real Buddy Bolden
Redhotjazz.com was a pioneering website during the "Information wants to be Free" era of the 1990s. In that spirit we are recovering the lost data from the now defunct site and sharing it with you.
Most of the music in the archive is in the form of MP3s hosted on Archive.org or the French servers of Jazz-on-line.com where this music is all in the public domain.
Files unavailable from those sources we host ourselves. They were made from original 78 RPM records in the hands of private collectors in the 1990s who contributed to the original redhotjazz.com. They were hosted as .ra files originally and we have converted them into the more modern MP3 format. They are of inferior quality to what is available commercially and are intended for reference purposes only. In some cases a Real Audio (.ra) file from Archive.org will download. Don't be scared! Those files will play in many music programs, but not Windows Media Player.
