Because of his uncle, Danny was often found cutting school and following many bands around town witnessing some of the finest New Orleans had to offer including bands led by Buddy Bolden and Bunk Johnson, the Imperial, the Eagle Band and the Superior. This led to his first gig playing banjo subbing for an intoxicated Babe Son in Kid Rena’s band. After this surprising debut, Barker began taking banjo lessons from George Augustin of the Imperial band, and came under the direct influence of Lorenzo Stall, Buddy Bolden’s banjoist. It was not long before he dubbed “Banjo King of New Orleans”. In 1930 Barker moved north to New York City where he switched from banjo to guitar and in 1938 joined Benny Carter’s Big Band and from 1939 to 1949 was the rhythm guitarist for Cab Calloway.  In 1947 he took a job as guitarist for the “Jazz on the River” weekend cruises up and down the Hudson river where he played with fellow New Orleanians Albert Nicholas, Pops Foster, Baby Dodds, pianist James P. Johnson and cornetist Wild Bill Davison. Barker then worked as a freelance rhythm man around New York playing and recording with Sidney Bechet and Mezz Mezzrow, Bunk Johnson, Edmond Hall and Henry “Red” Allen. By 1965, Barker, back in New Orleans, had married singer Blue Lu Barker. He split his time between performing with his wife and the Fairview Baptist Church Christian Band which he founded, lecturing on traditional jazz and working as Assistant to the Curator of the New Orleans Jazz museum up until his death in 1994. -by Ted Gottsegen |
Guitarist and banjoist
| A Life In Jazz, by Danny Barker, Oxford University Press, 1986 |
| Buddy Bolden And The Last Days Of Storyville by Danny Barker, 1998 |
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.
