Eddie Durham was born in 1906 in San Marcos, a small, rural horse and buggy town formed in 1808 and located in Hays County, Texas, in the segregated southwest of the USA. It was founded by, among others, Colonel John L. Durham. One of a many known gun slinging Berry Durhams that followed, was Eddie’s paternal grandfather. Berry Durham, Sr., was born in 1810. He co-founded a seminal Negro School in Texas.
What developments have occurred in San Marcos since? A jail built in the 1800s was converted into the prominent Calaboose African American History Museum in 1997, founded by Mrs. Johnnie Armstead. As a result, a Proclamation was made in 2003 for Eddie Durham Day, which commenced the first annual Eddie Durham Festival. In 2006 a Centennial Festival was held on the San Marcos River Stage, where Sam Ash Music Stores (courtesy of Mr. Paul Ash) displayed Eddie Durham Centennial Guitars. In 2020, San Marcos’ census population was 67,553, including 37,800 students attending its own university.
The ribbon cutting ceremony for the Eddie Durham Park and Pavilion was on August 13, 2013. The walking-path of the Eddie Durham Park mimics a guitar shape, with playable stationary instruments along the path. The Park is located across the street from the Calaboose Museum and next to the Ulysses Cephas House, both offer much memorabilia, in air-conditioned indoor relief from the outdoor October heat at the festival in the park.
The San Marcos Convention and Visitor Bureau proudly boasts about their native son: “The Calaboose African American Museum is dedicated to African American history and culture within San Marcos and Hays County… Durham is considered one of the pioneers of the electric guitar in jazz…”
I am Topsy M. Durham, the President of Eddie Durham Swing Music Publishing, Author of the “Swingin’ the Blues” series of Eddie Durham biographies, and the co-founder of the annual Eddie Durham Music Festival. I am delighted to write this article for The Syncopated Times. Their efforts are priceless in that they champion many forgotten heroes of Jazz who are otherwise unsung. This article serves as only a tiny glimpse into my detailed books, where there are many more pictures and stories.
Key influencers, such as Stanley Dance, Paul Ash, Johnnie Armstead, Linda Kelsey-Jones; and others who were directly mentored by Eddie such as Sarah McLawler, Phil Schaap, Loren Schoenberg, Dan Morgenstern and my family, determined that Eddie Durham would not be omitted from music history, as it was seemingly on a deliberate, scandalous level.
Attempting to put calm to my soul, I purposed to write a book to rectify my dad’s historical omissions. I quickly found it impossible to chronicle in one book the many facets of his astonishing contributions, which were substantially diverse for one human being. In addition, the internet and YouTube were in infancy but blooming dramatically since 2010. When the deadly COVID-19 crippled the world, one unexpected outturn was plenty of time to utilize unlocked resources by libraries and institutions online.
As Eddie’s daughter, I (along with my four siblings) shared the wisdom of an older parent with the strict discipline of a younger parent. Our mom, Lillian, was 25 years younger than our dad. Due to her mother’s death during childbirth, she was adopted, and her upbringing was a nightmare. Perhaps that is why she married a much older man who, based on his fame at the time, would be able to provide for her. They met in Harlem.
Why is the Eddie Durham story special? He was an early and a late bloomer. His dad, Joseph Durham, Sr., born in 1872, was of African-American, Cherokee, and Irish descent—hence the surname Durham. He became a sharecropper, a broncobuster, a jockey (trotters/pacers), and notably, he was the town fiddler. He made his own fiddle with horse hair and a cigar box. Eddie and his brothers accompanied their dad to his shows and participated in some form of trying to amplify his fiddle with rattlesnake rattles. From infancy, Eddie was exposed to making or customizing your own instrument, and amplifying it. Eddie’s mother, Luella, was of Mohawk descent.
The Durham Brothers Orchestra (DBO) consisted of four brothers: Joe, Jr., (tuba, trumpet, fiddle/violin, piano), Earl (tenor/baritone sax and clarinet), Eddie (banjo, guitar, valve and slide trombone), Roosevelt (fiddle/violin, piano, vocals); Three cousins: Allen (trombone) and Clyde (bass horn/tuba), and Herschel Evans (tenor/alto sax). Family friend Edgar Battle (trumpet) soon joined as well. They traveled together as The Durham Brothers (Jazzy) Orchestra and later as Edgar Battle’s Dixie Ramblers from 1916-1929. They performed in school, but during school breaks they backed up the traveling territory and national shows such as Mitchell’s Joy, J. Doug Morgan’s Traveling Dramatic Show, The 101 Wild Ranch Circus’ Negro Brass Band and Minstrel Show, The Mamie Smith 7-11 Show, Elmer Payne’s 10 Royal Americans, and [drummer] Eugene Coy and his 12 Black Aces.
Eddie dominated the titles of musician, composer, arranger, brass choreographer, musical director, and mentor; first to record hits on both acoustic and electric guitar, first to lead all-girl orchestras, he built his own whammy bar and amplifier, was a trombonist (slide and valve), and the most surprising finding him as a pianist with The Four Debs singing quartet. Even 1000 pages in one book could not cover Eddie Durham’s story. His talents directly influenced the success of perhaps every 1930s and ’40s orchestra, except perhaps five.
Eddie recalled: “The girls played The Apollo and The Buchanan—I wasn’t with them. But I met them in D.C. and rehearsed them for ten days on “St. Louis Blues.” Willie Bryant came and helped the band in dance and sometimes emcee’d the show. I traveled the country with Ina Ray for a year… They had a ten-week run on the radio called The Choice Hour, coast to coast. Their competition was Bing Crosby. So I went out to write music strictly for that broadcast and [my brother] Earl [Durham] was there. …I scored regularly for The International Sweethearts of Rhythm.
“I bought a backer to meet [Moe] Gale, from D.C., who owned the Arlington Cemetery. He made two All-American sleeper buses. We got Moms Mabley, Ella Fitzgerald and acts like Butter Beans and Susie on the same programs…Ina sang, but her clarinet playing wasn’t fast enough. I’d rehearse them, pick the openings most times, just like a manager with the Giants, pick songs according to the audience because Ina couldn’t do that. I took the Chinese girl off alto and put her on baritone. I had to handpick the musicians. I sent to the Conservatory in London, for the first trumpet player because none of them could reach a high C or a good F with volume. They sent a pianist from Ohio. We used five saxes, four trumpets, three trombones. We were on, at Madison Square Garden right in front of Basie. I gave the girls ‘One O’Clock Jump,’ note for note. They could read what they see.
“Ina wanted to swing like Basie… Alice Wills on trombone could play 26 instruments perfectly! At the Aragon Ballroom, Dick Jergen wanted a battle with Ina’s band. So I wrote Ina’s few arrangements. I said, ‘I want the reed section to sit like this, boy, girl, but the boys sit back a little. Let’s use Dick’s drummer but a girl on bass drum’—called a double band. I had them fanning hats and I’d teach them to really swing like the boy bands. Nora Lane was on the program, MGM was there and after opening for two days, when they closed that theatre, they come out with the second band and opened in the Paramount Theatre in Newark, N.J. There ain’t NO bands can go open out of rehearsal with a new band and go to the Paramount! Basie hadn’t.
“I remember Ina asking me one day, ‘Eddie, why do the two tenor saxophones have to be separated like that?’ It was a good question because all the bands used to put the two tenors and altos together, but all of a sudden they began putting one tenor on each end of the saxes.” (From The World of Count Basie by Stanley Dance, 1980, p. 68; 1971 interview)
“Ina had tenors split up only because she saw Basie do that. I explained to her … it was because Lester and Herschel didn’t like each others vibrato. ‘Jumpin at the Woodside’ with Ben Webster (three tenors) wouldn’t work because the vibrato was in between. Basie couldn’t record Ben Webster, the wall was shaking.” (From Phil Schaap’s interview with Eddie Durham, live Birthday Broadcast, August 1986, on WKCR-FM 89.9 Columbia University Radio NYC)
Eddie Durham also performed in Count Basie’s Orchestra at the first outdoor Jazz Fest on May 29, 1938, where 23,400 fans saw twenty-five swing bands at New York Municipal Stadium Randall’s Island for the Carnival of Swing benefit concert. Eddie is seen twice on trombone in the rare four minutes of newsreel footage. This integrated festival predated The Cavalcade of Dixieland Jazz Fest (1951); the Newport Jazz (1954) Newport Folk (1959) and Woodstock (1969) festivals. (Eddie was Musical Director and trombonist in various 1950s Jimmy Evans Cavalcade of Jazz tours.)
When you watch the YouTube video, one has to wonder, without Amplifiers not yet invented in 1938, how did these 23,400 fans hear the orchestras?
“Before World War II, I did arrangements for Glenn Miller, Jan Savitt, Ina Ray Hutton, and Artie Shaw [with Billie Holiday]. I had my own big band that featured Buster Smith on saxophone. It’s hard for me to remember all of the bands and arrangements I wrote. I was in the Harlem Blues and Jazz Band, and played I all sorts of combinations with Sammy Price, Kelly Owens, Hal Austin, Jerry Potter, Frank Foster, and more musicians than I can count.” (From Meeting The Blues: The Rise of the Texas Sound by Alan Govenar, 1988, p. 35-36)
“I [also] made the arrangements on ‘Saint Louis Blues,’ ‘Tuxedo Junction,’ ‘In The Mood,’ and a few other things… well for Marion Hutton ‘Wham (ReBopBoomBam)’ and ‘I Want To Be Happy’”…
Eddie recalled: “In Hartford, Connecticut and they had me up there a day before the concert. They interviewed me on the Radio that day, said: ‘We got the man here that was with Basie three years ago, been with Lunceford, and he’s going back to Basie, and he’s going to tell you what he thinks about how this battle is going to come out’.. The battle of the bands was between Basie and Lunceford! So I made both bands the greatest bands in the world on each style. Place was packed!”
Jimmie Lunceford And His Harlem Express Orchestra (L-R) Sy Oliver, Paul Webster, Russell Bowles, Eddie Tompkins, Eddie Durham, Elmer Crumbley, Eddie Wilcox (piano), Jimmie Lunceford, Jimmy Crawford (drums), Willie Smith, Laforest Dent, Al Norris, Joe Thomas, Moses Allen (bass fiddle), and Earl Caruthers.
The Frederick Brothers Music Corporation produced a recording of “I Don’t Want To Set The World On Fire” for Bon Bon and His Buddies (NY, July 23, 1941. This is the only version the co-composer Durham performs on (guitar).
“The first item listed in [the single artist compilations by Bo Raftegard and Claude] Schlouch’s discography is a Fall 1945 recording session with Frank Humphries Orchestra, and I found Eddie Durham listed on trombone along with Kenny Dorham on trumpet… I discovered that this was Kenny Dorham’s very first recording…as a result of E. Durham, the veteran of many a swing-era historic recording session, having joined on this occasion with K. Dorham, one of the soon-to-be stars of the bebop revolution, this recording represented a meeting of two generations of Texans and of two vital jazz movements.” (From Jazz Mavericks of the Lone Star State by Dave Oliphant, 2007, p. 177)
Durham played both valve and slide trombone, sometimes with a plunger mute, ranging from the pedal register, as far up to a high F—and played this range until he died at 80 years old. His range was never limited because of a non-pressure technique which sustained and preserved his lips unscarred. Scarring results in a blister inhibiting hitting high notes due to the pain of applying pressure. Eddie’s trombone performances were exciting as he completely focused on trombone choreography and humor. Eddie plays slide trombone on ‘One O’Clock Jump’ (Basie).
“On most releases of The Kansas City Five recordings, they don’t list Durham on trombone. He plays in such a subtle way … But if you listen carefully, you can hear that he plays the trombone like he’s in another room. Mysterious, genius!” Loren Schoenberg
Eddie recalled: “I taught a lot of tricks to the other trombones in the [Lunceford] band, Russell [Bowles] and Elmer [Crumbley]. …Russell and I would jump out of our chairs and get in a sword fight with our trombones… We were a regular clown outfit, but then the band could go back and blow you away.”(From The Ghosts of Harlem-Sessions with Jazz Legends by Hank O’Neal, 2009, p. 14)
“I always liked the trombone sound in the circus band… because a guy could make it sound like he was crying. I liked … Big Green, Jimmy Harrison, J.C. Higginbotham, Joe Nanton with Duke, and later on because he was sweeter, Lawrence Brown. I got crazy about Tommy Dorsey …Trummy Young …Dicky Wells. But I didn’t copy any of them. (From The World of Count Basie by Stanley Dance, 1980, p. 66; ED interviewed 1971)
“They always held the trombone back by trying to make an obbligato instrument out of it… But trombone players are fast. I can just about play anything on trombone you can play on an alto. When they write, they don’t write for trombone where they gotta stretch out… cause it’s a hard instrument. Don Redman started into that and then I started with that “Sliphorn Jive” trick stuff…
“I know there are 14 positions on it—officially seven at three inches apart. I play at one and a half inches apart, perfectly, solo work and you can execute. But you gotta have pretty good range. With guys with a good range, you can do anything,… there’s a lot of effects. The big round one is a wah wah mute. There’s also a solo-tone… Jack Teagarden, he used the plunger sometimes, but he was an open horn man. I used all types of mutes and plungers.
“Benny Morton was an open horn stylist. Tricky Sam was definitely an innovator with the plunger. …Tommy Dorsey set that style for sweet music… he had a tone, he play like a fiddle. But he didn’t play much Jazz cause it would’ve spoil his lip, he couldn’t do ’em both. Jesse Higgenbotham had a good style. Trummy Young was a flash man executor, play like alto saxes, he had another style altogether, top of the horn. He’s not given enough credit.”
According to A Portrait of Glenn Miller produced by Dennis M. Spragg for the Glenn Miller Archive, University of Colorado (Boulder), “Eddie arranged a mundane tune which until then was never famous, ‘In The Mood,’ recorded for RCA Bluebird, August 1, 1939. Durham was employed by the famous and powerful black bandleader, Jimmie Lunceford, who agreed to loan Eddie to Glenn. The working relationship and friendship between Miller and Lunceford has been somewhat unappreciated by the jazz and popular music experts. Most have commented that Miller’s band played and performed in a style that sometimes resembled Lunceford. Durham may have been the reason! Miller (RCA Victor-Bluebird) and Lunceford (Decca-Columbia) did duplicate some of the same tunes for their respective record labels to an interesting degree.”
Eddie said, “For amplification, I used an acoustic but rigged up my own homemade guitar. In the dance hall we used a mic, leaned it over. Finally, I got an old amplifier with a mic. This is what I played on ‘Honey Keep Your Mind On Me,’ only downstrokes. I made a resonator with a tin pan back in the early 1930s. I’d carve out the inside of an acoustic guitar and put the resonator inside there, the size of a breakfast plate, with something around the guitar to hold it. When I hit the strings, the pie pan would ring and shoot out the sound. Before long, I ran up on a National, with a resonator in it. It was used as a steel guitar with a bar. I removed the bridge and put an acoustic type bridge on it because the other bridge held the strings up too high. When I was with Lunceford there was one microphone for the singer, but when I played my solo, Lunceford would bring that microphone up to my guitar’s F-Hole. He was crazy about the resonator.
“…I tried converting radio and phonograph amplifiers and even drilled into the body of the guitar. With that rig, I used to blow out the lights in places. They weren’t up on electricity like now, no fuses. Later after D’Armand came out with a pickup, I was one of the first people to use it. I made an attachment where I could play into the sound system… I could not play rhythm because it was too loud, just solos. I played with every guitar I could get my hands on, Nationals, Epiphones, Gibsons, Danelectros, and others.”
Vibrato
“I even rigged up my own vibrato arm before they made them on guitars, I took a clothes hanger and bent it and hooked it on my finger. The bridges were swinging bridges, not stationary in those days, with an apron-like tailpiece. The strings kept the apron in place and I hooked the other end of the wire to the apron. When you shook the wire, the bridge would move and you had a vibrato. I used it with chords. …I used to blow the lights out… They called it my ‘starvation box,’
“I also used 12-inch megaphones for trumpet and 16-inch for trombones. The band would come out first with a big introduction. All the guitar players in town come over to that club, for free to hear me play that get up. I played two numbers. [Charlie] Christian went out with Goodman that year. [Hear C. Christian’s Dec. 1938 recording of “Swing to Bop” and Durham’s “Topsy.”] I’ve always been fooling around with electric string on top of the reeds. I got that 12-string guitar, special made and I had Les Paul come down look at it, check the neck and he said the neck is true.”
Dobro Resonator
“On the resonator guitar, I took a stiff clothes hanger and hook on back and over to the swinging bridge, or the top, hook it in my finger so I could shake it when I play. I wore out my resonator so by the time I was ready to get another, they were all out of business and the neck was too thick for later stuff. That guitar has a piece of tin built in it, with little holes, but once I mic it, it sounded electric and loud. That’s what you hear on ‘Hittin’ The Bottle’ (Lunceford Orchestra 1935: metal-bodied Dobro resophonic, non-electric guitar).
“A couple years later they came out with something already made like that in the electrically amplified guitar. I got one and took it on the road. The Ballroom owners were always scared I’d blow out all the lights, but the problem was that it worked on AC current and there was still mostly DC all over the country. I thought about that later, I should have patented my idea before they did. I think Epiphone was the first to make an amplified guitar. The Stellar guitar, I used with Lunceford on “Honey”. National made the metal resonator.”
Danelectro Bass Guitar
Eddie recalled: “I used a Dan Electric which had a peculiar sound but I could very near take anybody else’s guitar and get that sound. It’s the way you grip and hit, and I only played downstrokes. Nobody else did that.”
Frets
“See, the only thing changes the tone of a guitar is the frets at the end. I think if you take a note and push down and hold it, you’d change it, but once you strike it, that’s it. Electric guitar sure took off, changed history, brought in Rock ’n’ Roll. Now they build it in the foot pedal, just touch it and go. I used a real electric guitar on The Kansas City Six in “I Want A Little Girl”.9
The Swingin’ the Blues biography book series documents Eddie’s known travels and tenures in detailed segments by decade. Eddie’s Manager in his last decade of life kept a diary and pictorial collection of The Harlem Blues and Jazz Band’s travels.
Decades after his death, Eddie is acknowledged as the person who created an idiom by penning the seminal Swing-music charts, pioneered acoustic and electric guitar and single-line solos, and introduced a non-pressure technique on trombone. He was also one of the first to tour with all-girl orchestras as a musical director, and sponsored many women into Unions so they could continue with a music career after the war. His support for women in the music industry is a testament to his progressive and inclusive approach, and is deeply appreciated by music enthusiasts and historians.
A first-ever Durham-family Discography (25 pages) debuted at the end of the first volume, The Virtuosity of Eddie Durham, which was nominated for the Association for Recorded Sound Collection Award.
This article Copyright 2024 by Topsy M. Durham. All rights reserved.
