The old jazz tune, “I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead, You Rascal, You” is intended to be a funny song about marital infidelity. The cuckold, a comic figure found in literature going back to before Chaucer, is intended to be ridiculed, not murdered. But on November 21, 1931, in Rayne, Louisiana, John Guillory requested the song and meant every word of it.
Unfortunately, musicians get murdered all the time (Pinetop Smith, Lee Morgan, Sam Cooke, Selena, John Lennon, Jaco Pastorius, Tupac). But perhaps none have been more dramatic than the murder of jazz trumpeter Evan Thomas at a Holt Avenue dancehall in Rayne’s “Promised Land” neighborhood.
Jazz in Rayne? When we think of jazz we think of New Orleans, Chicago, New York—Rayne ain’t exactly a hotbed of jazz. What was Thomas doing there anyway?
When Buddy “King” Bolden, the “first man of jazz,” started playing his trumpet a certain kind of way on the streets of New Orleans around 1895, the club owners, the “ratty” people, the pimps, prostitutes, and the so-called “gentlemen” who frequented Storyville knew the King’s style was different. That difference was jazz. Bolden set the stage for Louis Armstrong, the greatest jazz musician ever, who was born and raised in “back ’o town” New Orleans. But many early jazz greats migrated from the rural Mississippi River towns and bayou communities to “La Vill
