Jimmy Lunceford Plays a ‘Colored Dance’: Summer 1941

Summer of ’41, before senior year in high school, I worked as bellboy at a resort hotel in Lake Junaluska, NC, a Methodist Chatauqua some 30 miles west of Asheville. One amusement was to size up the impoverished preachers and dignitaries arriving at the churchly seminars and estimate our tips as we carried up their heavy bags. Bob Barnes, as I, the son of a Florida Methodist preacher, was my bellhop partner as well as companion in our extra-curricular pursuits of that summer. I had begun to play tenor sax while he played a fine trumpet lead and we had found some stock “Dixieland” arrangements. We put together a little combo among colleagues and somehow got a gig in a dinky roadside tavern in the nearby Carolina hills. An advertisement in the Asheville paper for the appearance of the Jimmy Lunceford orchestra caught my eye one morning. (I’ve kept the clipping now more than eight decades). We could hardly believe our good fortune—only 30 miles away, possibly the greatest swing band ever assembled was to play for an advertised “Colored Dance” in a cotton warehouse in the countryside. But, the public was invited, including “white spectators”!! Bob and I and crew of our summer band were choked with excitement to go and hear this band, then at its pinnacle. Somehow we found the monstrous old warehouse, its grounds lighted with turpentine flares, deep in the backwoods an