Murder on the Bandstand: The Tragedy of Evan Thomas

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 Ville.” They couldn’t wait to leave the farm. Bassman great Pops Foster cited his compelling reason for leaving McCall— “On the plantation you didn’t see anything but sugarcane and corn.”

Other notable early jazz greats from the “country”: Trumpeter Joe “King” Oliver was from Aben; Reed man Joe Darensbourg played clarinet on Armstrong’s 1964 number one hit “Hello, Dolly”— he came from Baton Rouge. Edward “Kid” Ory invented the jazz trombone sound in LaPlace. “Papa” John Joseph, of St. James Parish, famously died on the Preservation Hall bandstand in 1965 after playing numerous verses of “When the Saints Go Marching In.” “That piece just about did me in,” he said to pianist Dolly Adams as he died.

So why do so few of today’s jazz lovers know nothing about Evan Thomas? In a word: Geography. Born in 1896 in Acadia Parish, Thomas—unlike so many better-known musicians who hightailed to the Crescent City—was one of the ones who stayed.

The historians of jazz in sincerity only glanced at rural Louisiana once, it seems, for the occasion of Bunk Johnson—the internationally acclaimed trumpet player born in New Orleans who was rediscovered in New Iberia and let jazz historians believe he was part of Buddy Bolden’s band. Johnson didn’t necessarily reveal to jazz chronicler William “Bill” Russell that he only played with Frankie Duson’s Eagle Band, the band that followed Bolden. And if Russell wanted to believe Johnson taught Louis Armstrong to play trumpet, that was fine with Johnson.

The record seems to indicate that Johnson’s drinking and condescending attitude towards his fellow musicians is how he ended up toothless and hornless in New Iberia toiling away in rice mills and driving sugarcane wagons, or teaching music to Black children for a WPA gig. The important thing for jazz lovers, and especially Johnson, is that Russell believed he was a link to the “pure” sound of Bolden-era jazz. Russell arranged for false teeth (fitted by saxophonist Sidney Bechet’s dentist brother), got Johnson a trumpet, recorded him, and sent him up North on swank gigs where he became, according to Matt Vernon’s “Talk of the Teche” September 7, 1946, column in the Daily Iberian, “the most famous Negro trumpet player in America save Louis ‘Satchmo’ Armstrong.”

If Russell had kept on looking during his time in Bayou Teche country, he would have found that jazz was thriving in rural Acadiana communities. Author Austin Sonnier Jr., in his slim volume Second Linin’: Jazzmen of Southwest Louisiana, 1900-1950, noted that no jazz historians, writers, record producers, or promoters took much interest in going off to “discover” anyone after Johnson’s musical rebirth.

“The best years of some of Louisiana’s finest musicians just went up in sound,” Sonnier lamented.

As a result, no one beyond Acadiana audiences ever heard the genius of Thomas and his Black Eagle Band, Gus Fontenette’s Banner Band of New Iberia, the Hypolite Charles Band of Parks, the Yelpin’ Hounds of Crowley, or the Martel Family Band of Opelousas.

For his book, Sonnier interviewed trained musicians who played alongside Thomas—who himself had been trained by Joseph Oger, who studied at the Mozart Conservatory in Paris—and learned that he was a trumpet player of high voltage.

“He was a blues king,” said saxophonist Morris Dauphine of Parks. “He could play you a blues like nobody else.” Dauphine studied under Lorenzo Tio Jr and played in Papa Celestin’s Tuxedo Brass Band.

“Talk about a sound,” said Mercedes Potier, a jazz pianist who graduated in music from Xavier University. She played in her father’s Banner Band for forty years. “Boy, could he play. You could hear him for blocks around. My father used him to advertise the band. The second floor of the True Friends Hall in Lafayette had all these windows and Evan would go up there on the day of the dance and sit down and play his trumpet out the windows on every side of the place. By the time the dance would start, the hall would be packed with people.”

Master clarinetist Lawrence Duhé, who hired King Oliver and Sidney Bechet to play in his Chicago band, told William Russell that he “never heard no one no better than E. T. Thomas. For high work, high register. He was as good as Louis Armstrong in those days.”

Thomas’s talent and twenty years of experience as a band leader allowed him to attract top musicians, and he assembled a veteran band of local and established New Orleans names to embark on a tour of the southwest in 1931. Included in the Black Eagle Band were established pros like clarinetist George Lewis, drummer/vocalist Abbey “Chinee” Foster, and trumpeter Bunk Johnson. A piano player named Louis Robertson, Thomas’s brother Walter, and a tenor saxophone player only identified as “Al” were also onstage for the practice gig in the “Promised Land” that fateful night.

Gene Tomko, author of the Encyclopedia of Louisiana Musicians, located the Holt Avenue site where Thomas met his bloody end. Fittingly, the “little country hall” was across from a cemetery. Tomko has driven through the majority Black neighborhood many times, looking for clues as to what happened. An empty lot is all that remains of the club where Thomas was murdered. A neighbor Tomko spoke with pronounced Evan’s name French-style—Ee-vann.

“Across the street was a shed where Guillory was selling his whiskey,” Tomko said. “There was a chicken farm here. Prohibition was still in effect.”

In those days, fortune favored Evan Thomas as much as fortune could favor a Black man in Louisiana during Jim Crow. But calamity seemed to follow his assassin, a white-passing Creole named John Guillory. While Thomas was a professionally-trained musician performing with Acadiana’s top bands, Guillory was a farmhand and a convicted felon, who served eighteen months at Angola for stealing chickens. But the two men did have two things in common: whiskey, and Guillory’s wife Mabel.

Before the show on that night in November 1931, members of Thomas’s Black Eagle Band spent all their ready money on liquor, and asked Guillory for credit.

“Hell, no,” Guillory may have said. “Get out of here, you goddamn drunks.”

Maybe a musician retorted—liquor makes you say things—“Oh, yeah? Your old lady Mabel has been diddling Evan while you was in Angola!”

Was it Johnson, or maybe Foster—both notorious alcoholics according to the account of their bandmate George Lewis? Maybe it was Al, the tenor player, who Lewis said was “hogged.”

The written record is incomplete. Lewis was divulgent with his biographer Tom Bethell, but the tape ran out for this particular conversation. Bethell was an English journalist who came to New Orleans to study jazz while working for New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison as a researcher on the John F. Kennedy assassination conspiracy probe. Because he wasn’t local, he may have had a difficult time understanding Lewis’s dialect. Lewis also may have jumbled his facts. There are some discrepancies.

What’s undeniable is that Guillory was “burned up” by the idea of Evan Thomas “going with his wife.”

The record shows that Guillory came into the club and requested Sam Theard’s new song, “I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead, You Rascal, You.” Guillory wanted Thomas to be dead so bad, that night he armed himself with a blade with a custom deer hoof handle. The knives were popular with German soldiers in World War I.

“There was a good crowd that night,” Lewis recalled. The band had “ballyhooed” throughout the day from the back of a truck to advertise the evening show.

“Someone came back and told Evan what was said (to Guillory),” Lewis said. “(Guillory) walked up to the front of the stage. Evan knew what was coming up, sat down, and said, ‘John, what’s that tale you’ve heard?’”

Guillory didn’t want to hear it. He slapped the trumpeter and started slashing at him. Thomas ran for the door, but Guillory drove the blade so deep and with such force into the musician’s back that it severed a rib. “Oh, my,” was all Thomas could utter.

“I just stood there frozen, my shirt all full of blood,” Lewis said. “Chinee was drunk…he had been drinking all day… and….and…”—and that’s when Bethell’s tape runs out.

The old musician talked for another ten minutes. Bethell’s transcript relays that Guillory left the club after killing Thomas but returned to destroy the band’s instruments with a gun.

“I got the impression that he was trying to tell me who ‘told’ on Evan without being explicit about it,” Bethell wrote. Most of the conversation was about Chinee Foster and the sax player, so it seems likely one of those musicians was the one who accused Evan Thomas and Mabel Guillory of adultery. The cantankerous Johnson is not completely off the hook, however. He had a reputation for being mouthy.

Guillory was sent back to Angola for the crime. Within five years, he had escaped and was shot dead by a Rayne police officer who tried to apprehend the convict. Sadly, the police officer was wounded by knife during the arrest and died a few days later.

Legend has it that Thomas, a good Catholic, ran from the club and died on the steps of a church. The Shrine of Our Lady of Mercy is three blocks away from the crime scene. Evan Thomas found his way to the “Promised Land,” but his music was gone forever.