On a sultry Chicago afternoon in September 1954, a white chap, tall and balding, arrived at the home of the great gospel singer Mahalia Jackson with publicity materials for her CBS radio and TV shows. “She was in a slip and old bathrobe, rehearsing,” Bill Russell recorded in his notebook. Russell went to the kitchen and made lemonade for Jackson and her pianist, Mildred Fall. “Mahalia said I should bring my violin . . . and rehearse too,” wrote Russell in a wry coda.
I had to grin when I came across that line in the pencil script of his Chicago diary–one of 16,000 items in the William Russell archive, which The Historic New Orleans Collection acquired after his death in 1992. What an image: Bill Russell on violin, jamming with Mahalia!
Here was a man who wrote several important chapters of the ground-breaking 1939 historical anthology “Jazzmen” and who virtually launched the revival of New Orleans jazz by resurrecting the career of trumpeter Bunk Johnson in the 1940s. He showcased a legion of jazzmen, including the esteemed Crescent City clarinetist George Lewis, on his American Music label. Such activity would have been enough to satisfy most reasonably creative men. But Bill Russell was also a composer who made dramatic use of percussive rhythms in orchestral scores. In later years he played violin with a ragtime orchestra. In the mid-1950s, as friend and unofficial adviser to Jackson, he followed her to church services, rehearsals and studios, jotting notes, collecting programs, helping her without an agenda of his own before moving to New Orleans, her hometown and his adopted one.
Russell was an enigma of epic proportions. He collected a lifetime’s worth of valuable material on jazz, yet he never wrote the big book that so many people who knew his work hoped to read.
Born Russell William Wagner in 1905, into a family of German stock that settled in Canton, Mo., he landed in New York in 1927, studying at Columbia Teacher’s College, with private violin lessons under Max Pilzer, concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic. With visions of becoming a composer he changed his name to William Russell, reasoning that one Wagner was enough for the world of music. Two years later he discovered jazz and decided his time would be better spent by involvement with the new American art form.
Most of the early jazz historians were record collectors. In the 1930s, while studying for a doctoral degree in physical sciences at the University of Chicago, Russell was fascinated with the lives of artists whose recordings he bought and sold through the Hot Record Exchange, an aficionados outlet he ran with an artist friend. Through the network of collectors he met Frederic Ramsey Jr. and Charles Edward Smith, who solicited his contribution on New Orleans origins for their book-in-progress, “Jazzmen.”
Russell forged friendships with a coterie of transplanted New Orleanians, including Warren “Baby” Dodds, arguably the greatest drummer of the early sound, who recorded with Louis Armstrong during his Chicago years.
Although some of what he wrote in “Jazzmen” is dated now, Russell conveyed the importance of New Orleans as a multicultural seedbed. Subsequent writers such as Alan Lomax, Marshall Stearns and John Chilton built on that foundation. In the 1960s he did pioneering oral-history work as the first curator of the Hogan Jazz Archive at Tulane University.
By the 1980s Russell was living in a French Quarter apartment a few blocks from Preservation Hall, the venerable club that showcases traditional jazz. He kept records, books and articles in floor-to-ceiling shelves that ate up most of the rooms he inhabited. He was devoted to the musicians, and they to him. One day I followed a friend seeking information on an obscure piece of sheet music to Russell’s door. He welcomed us in, scanned a shelf and in five minutes produced the answer.
These days, by a turn of fate, I find myself in the library of The Historic New Orleans Collection, reading transcripts of Russell’s interviews and installments of his journals and wondering who he was. He was constantly helping other writers; the jazz materials he gathered on New Orleans are a trove for social and cultural historians. And yet, although he published selected articles, he never produced the major work awaited by those he helped and others who knew him by reputation.
Why? What induces a man to collect, record, gather and preserve, while his own interpretive skills slowly retreat from the stage? Why did he disappear as a writing historian? He spent decades developing his base of material on Jelly Roll Morton, tracking musicians who played with Jelly in early, little-documented periods of his life; yet he never wrote the big biography. Now the fruits of his years of labor are available in a public archive, and that part assuredly would please him.
Part of the enigma stemmed from a thirst for raw information and a sense that he could never satisfy a longing to be certain on every point. Simply put, he couldn’t stop researching, and when he finally found most of what he wanted to learn he was too old to get on with the hard business of writing. I say that with a melancholy respect for one whose labors illuminate my searchings each time I visit them.
A small specialty press, Jazzology, located a few blocks from Russell’s home and run by his friend George Buck (who bought the American Music label), published a posthumous collection of Russell’s interviews, “New Orleans Style.” With profiles of Armstrong, Kid Ory, Paul Barbarin and others, it is a superb oral history, albeit marred by typographical mistakes.
Russell was 87 when he died, alert till just about the end. The last time I saw him was a year or so before that, at a conference. A Caribbean drummer was giving a performance lecture in one of those half-rooms that are the bane of hotel gatherings. The room was packed. Russell sat on a foldout chair way out in the hall, oblivious to the wall of people, his bald head gleaming with silver hair curled behind the ears, bobbing his chin in rhythm with the drum until he lowered his chin and, with ineffable serenity, fell asleep.
