The story of Ernie Fields begins, as it must, with the visit from John Hammond. This was in the late 1930s, when Hammond was prowling the country to find the kind of jazz talent he enjoyed. He’d already discovered Count Basie but was always eager for more. Tipped to the talent of the Fields organization, he traveled to Tulsa, Ernie’s home city, where he tracked down the bandleader and set up an audition.
Hammond was delighted. He set up an audition for Willard Alexander, the powerhouse band-booker for William Morris. Alexander also was impressed. Next step: Move the band to New York. Make some records, play the Apollo.
Some problems start to creep in. Some members don’t want to travel. Alexander had already told Fields that he might have to replace some of the weaker members, so Fields brought some new hires aboard. Trouble was, the guys who insisted on staying behind were the very players with whom Alexander was most impressed.
But the band did make it into the recording studio, waxing nine sides for Vocalion in August 1939, and four more a month later. They played the Apollo and some city ballrooms and took some upstate gigs as well. And then—nothing. Alexander was promising more dates, but money was running out and some of the band members wanted to go home. Soon enough, Ernie shared that feeling.
And that’s how the outfit went back to being a territory band. As it happens, a very successful territory band that stayed in business through the 1960s, which is an impressive run and a testament to Fields’s musical talent and business sense.
His daughter Carmen grew up seeing him off as he traveled to dates near and far and hearing the stories he told when he was able to spend time at home. Eventually she saw the importance in recording these stories and compiled the accounts both from her father, her brother, Ernie Jr., who eventually joined the band, and from other musicians. Her well-crafted result is the book Going Back to T-Town, and it includes this postscript to the story described above, from a letter Fields wrote to his daughter in 1971:
[Hammond] is the one that considered me one of his discoveries in 1939. If I had not run back to Tulsa because things were not going just as I wished. I expected miracles to happen in three or four months. It didn’t so I ran back home to your momma and bro. Couldn’t stand to be away from them (smiles).
Ernie was born in Nacogdoches, Texas, in 1904, and was known as Sonny Boy through his single-digit years. Teased about this in school, he “would retort that [his parents] wanted to make sure he had a name that he was satisfied with.” He named himself Ernest Lawrence Fields, but never explained what inspired this choice.
His father, Tom, a former slave, attended Roger Williams College and became a Baptist minister. He also dabbled in politics, and it was an unsuccessful run for a local office that prompted the family’s hurried relocation to Taft, several hours away in what was then known as Indian Territory but soon would be given statehood as Oklahoma, where the oldest boy already was living—although the travel time was significantly lengthened because they traveled by wagon. Tom was killed by a stray bullet in 1906, forcing his widow, by then the mother of six, to scrabble for a living, working her land by hand.
Young Ernie fulfilled his dream of attending the Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University), where he learned electrical engineering and, not incidentally, how to play the trombone, which led to a chair in the school band. Accompanying the school’s football team to a game in Montgomery, Alabama, Fields heard the Bama State Collegians. It was directed by a young trumpeter named Erskine Hawkins, who soon took that band to New York for a successful, hit-records-driven career.
Fields went to work in an electrical supplies shop in Tulsa, playing gigs on the side. In a foretaste of what would come, he was offered the chance to travel with a band called the Missourians, led by Cab Calloway, but decided that he was earning enough money at home to make staying put worth while.
Maybe he was also persuaded by the lure of being the one in charge, because Ernie had his own small group that he took on the road, at least semi-locally. They played throughout Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, and Missouri, very much the definition of a territory band.
By 1932, Ernie was leading a 12-piece outfit, playing gigs as far afield as Asbury Park, New Jersey, and Los Angeles. At first they traveled in two cars, with instruments strapped on top of them; later, as the band enjoyed more success, they bought a bus with the leader’s name featured on its sides.
An impressive amount of talent flowed through the band—or came very near. Early on, a high-school kid in Tulsa was recommended to Ernie, but Earl Bostic’s father refused to let his son pursue a career in music. Bostic didn’t join Fields’s band, but would go on to be a great influence on John Coltrane, among others. Singer and drummer Roy Milton was part of an early iteration, while reedman Yusef Lateef spent part of the mid-1940s with the band. The most notorious audition was by a young trumpet player, about whom Ernie said, “The little cat plays nice, but you can’t find him, can’t hear him back there.” So they sent Miles Davis packing.
Fields and western-swing king Bob Wills became friends, and Wills not only gave Ernie valuable advice about negotiating bookings, he also landed him a gig in Cain’s Ballroom in Tulsa, a place that hitherto hadn’t allowed Black musicians to play there. (Wills promised the Ballroom’s that, should they not hire Ernie, Wills would discourage white headliners from playing there.)
Even after leaving New York City in 1940, Ernie got more dates from Alexander even as he importuned other agencies for work. And so the touring continued, usually bringing in enough money to pay the men and keep the bus on the road, but not enough for the luxury of flying to dates. He toured with other headliners from time to time, such as Bill “Bojangles” Robinson and Helen Humes, but he was always careful to make sure his name was up there in equal billing.
By all accounts, Fields was an intelligent businessman, always on the up-and-up when it came to money and exerting the necessary discipline to keep his musicians at least somewhat in line. He also had a good ear for the styles of the day, easing into more of an R&B sound as the ’40s waned, even venturing into more rock-oriented gestures through the ’50s.
Trombonist-arranger René Hall joined the band in 1935, traveling with it for seven years, when he left to play in the Earl Hines band. By 1959, he was in Los Angeles, where he joined forces with drummer Earl Palmer and tenor saxist Plas Johnson to become the core session men for Rendezvous Records—in essence, the West Coast’s Wrecking Crew, eventually playing on hundreds of R&B and rock-roll-titles. They came up with the idea of giving “In the Mood” a livelier beat, recorded the song with Fields and some hand-picked others, and handed Ernie a hit as the record climbed the charts and became a million-seller.
Ernie Fields Jr. was considering a career in medicine even as he learned a multitude of instruments—so it was inevitable that he’d join his father’s band one day. He helped carry the organization into the 1960s, when his father finally decided to retire and settle back in Tulsa.
Carmen Fields tells this story as if it were a series of fireside chats, which makes it all the more charming. It’s not strictly chronological, concentrating instead on different aspects of leading a jazz band throughout the country. There are racist encounters, of course, although Fields seems to have suffered fewer of them than his contemporaries. There are the many musicians he worked with, and the different shows he put together, often with specialty acts like an impressive one-legged dancer from Tulsa. At her father’s urging, Carmen lists as many of the musicians as her father and brother and other band-members could remember—and it’s an impressive list.
It’s important to remember, in this age of feverish celebrity worship, that bands such as the Fields organization were the backbone of this country’s entertainment identity, in Ernie’s case bringing quality jazz to both big-time and overlooked venues. This book is a valuable tribute to that tradition.
Going Back to T-Town
The Ernie Fields Territory Big Band
by Carmen Fields
University of Oklahoma Press; 238 Pages
www.oupress.com
Hardcover: ISBN 9780806191843; $26.95
Paperback: ISBN 9780806195445; $21.95
B.A. Nilsson is a freelance writer and actor who lives in rural New York. His interest in vintage jazz long predates his marriage to a Paul Whiteman relative, and greatly helped in winning her affections.
