To those who didn’t know better, William Russell was simply the quiet, white-haired fellow who collected tickets at Preservation Hall and ran a tiny used-instruments store in the French Quarter.
But researchers poring over the trove of memorabilia that Russell left after his death in 1992, at 87, are beginning to realize that the man appears to have rewritten the history of jazz.
The enormous William Russell archive now locked in the vaults of the Historic New Orleans Collection shows that the man spent most of his lifetime documenting a music that contemporary scholars had overlooked. Though Russell once said he never made more than $1.50 per hour in his life, he managed to amass a jazz trove that now must be considered priceless (the Historic New Orleans Collection declines to specify the amount it paid for the archive, though its value surely stands at least in the high six figures).
It will take years before scholars fully understand the impact of the million-plus pages of information, hundreds of hours of interviews and thousands of recordings and photos in the William Russell Jazz Collection, though already it’s obvious that the material gives new stature to Jelly Roll Morton as a jazz creator and chronicles the emergence of jazz in unprecedented detail.
But how did a man who was educated as a chemist, aspired to be a composer and worked haphazardly as violin repairman, small-time record producer and occasional ticket-taker at Preservation Hall (where he whiled away his hours listening to the early masters of jazz) come to create “the best private jazz collection in the world,” in the words of British musical scholar Mike Hazeldine? And how did Russell know to focus on information surrounding such figures as Morton, cornetist Bunk Johnson and others, at a time when the world had all but forgotten them?
“What was unique about Mr. Russell was that he had a thorough understanding of what 19th Century New Orleans music was all about,” says Alfred E. Lemmon, curator of manuscripts at the Historic New Orleans Collection.
“In other words, he realized — as few people did — that to understand and value jazz, you had to understand the rich musical environment of New Orleans in the 19th Century. So Mr. Russell went about collecting programs from the (long gone) French Opera House, sheet music associated with turn-of-the-century New Orleans, everything that laid the groundwork for jazz.”
Indeed, though popular mythology still holds that jazz evolved from marching bands, funeral processions and parade music of the 1890s and shortly thereafter, the New Orleans roots of the music run much deeper than that. Listen to the 1850s piano works of New Orleans composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk, for instance, and you’ll hear the fiercely syncopated rhythms and blue-note melodies that would flower several generations later in nascent jazz (even though Gottschalk wasn’t fortunate enough to have made it into Russell’s collection).
Russell not only knew where the roots of the music were buried, but he deduced who could tell the story of its earliest chapters. To this day, Crescent City musicians such as Fess Manetta and Wooden Joe Nicholas remain virtually unknown even to jazz aficionados. But because these, and dozens more, knew Morton and performed in the notorious Storyville vice district in which early jazz flourished, Russell recorded their recollections about instrumentation, repertoire, technique and other facets of emergent jazz.
“He started collecting ragtime music, for example, 10 years before anyone else thought to,” says Hazeldine, “and when other people began collecting, all that remained were his leftovers.”
What’s more, “No one seems to have collected as consistently or as comprehensively on early jazz as Russell did,” says George Reinecke, a New Orleans folklorist who has been cataloging the collection in New Orleans.
For Russell, the journey began unremarkably in Canton, Mo., where he was born Russell William Wagner on Feb. 26, 1905. By age 10, he was traveling to the Quincy (Ill.) Conservatory of Music for violin lessons, his musical studies eventually leading him to study violin with Chicago Symphony Orchestra concertmaster Ludwig Becker and composition with musical iconoclast Arnold Schoenberg in California.
Deciding that the name “Wagner” already was well represented in music, he reanointed himself William Russell and wrote some noted percussion works in the 1930s.
Eventually, though, Russell despaired that his music wasn’t worthy, particularly once he discovered jazz. Having heard his first Jelly Roll Morton recording in 1929, he became consumed with collecting the man’s music, thereafter tossing aside his own.
“He searched the record stores and thrift shops . . . and went door to door in the residential section of (Chicago’s) South Side to purchase records,” writes his brother, William Frederick Wagner, in a scholarly article to be published next year.
“At that time during the Depression, we paid 5 to 25 cents per record, and the residents were happy to sell them at that rate.”
The material that Russell was collecting, in other words, was cheap and well within his limited means. By living extremely frugally (Russell never had a telephone or any modern convenience in his apartment), he was able to gather sheet music, records and other jazz ephemera that most everyone else considered nearly worthless.
By 1940, Russell had started a tiny independent record label (American Music) in Pittsburgh, and proceeded to record Louisiana musicians that the jazz industry had discarded. He found cornetist Bunk Johnson, for instance, working in a rice field in New Iberia, La. Johnson helped the great artist procure a set of dentures and a used horn, then proceeded to document the rejuvenated playing of a musician Louis Armstrong had considered a major inspiration.
“It was hard for Mr. Russell to find places to record where black musicians would be admitted,” says Lemmon.
“So he would record them in friends’ houses, or in the backrooms of music stores,” adds Nancy Ruck, who has been cataloging the Russell Collection at the Historic New Orleans Collection.
“Mr. Russell knew the value of the music that these players could make, and he knew their worth as human beings, even if the rest of the world didn’t.”
When Russell moved from Pittsburgh and then Canton to Chicago, where he lived from 1950 to ’56, he set about documenting the music and reminiscences of singer Mahalia Jackson and gospel pioneer Thomas A. Dorsey, among others. After returning to New Orleans, he spent the rest of his days gathering as much information as possible on Morton, jazz and related black musical culture.
Why did he do it? What drove him?
“I’m sorry to keep `harping’ on Mahalia and music when you no doubt have many other interests and activities and I’ll admit I have a one track mind,” wrote Russell in a 1951 letter, “but Bunk (Johnson) taught me that music can be the most important thing in the world — that if a person really has the right kind of music in their mind, heart and body they are likely to think and act right, will move and dance and walk right, and will be happy, love everyone and hate no one.
“Music could even prevent wars if it helped everyone get together and be happy. If all this sounds like a religion I’m sorry, but until these ideas can be proven wrong I’ll go on believing Bunk was right. . . .”
By the 1980s, Russell — who never married and spent his last decades living with a ceiling-high mountain of memorabilia in a cramped French Quarter apartment — began investigating the possibility of leaving his archive with the Historic New Orleans Collection. His will specified that the material be sold — rather than donated — so that it would be properly appreciated and
cared for.
The remarkable collector died in August 1992, after slipping and breaking his hip, but the fate of the precious collection was hardly assured. Though Russell’s brother, heir to the archive, had chosen the Historic New Orleans Collection as its home, there was stormy weather ahead.
“At the time we were finalizing arrangements to purchase the Russell Collection, Hurricane Andrew was headed to New Orleans,” remembers Historic New Orleans Collection director Jon Kukla, referring to the 140 m.p.h. winds that raked the Louisiana coastline in the summer of ’92.
“We were extremely nervous for a couple days there, wondering, `What if, at this late date, the whole, glorious collection is destroyed by the hurricane?’ “
The gods cooperated, however, and the French Quarter was spared. So on Sept. 8, a moving van hauled 86 tons of material out of Russell’s apartment to be fumigated. The museum hired off-duty policeman to guard the material until it was moved to the locked vaults of the Historic New Orleans Collection.
Once the museum’s staff began opening the used shirt boxes and A&P plastic shopping bags, they realized that an estimated 16,000 items were actually 36,000 — approximately 1 million pages of material, plus tapes, records and miscellany.
“I don’t think I realized the exceptional talent Bill possessed until 1938-40, when I attended the University of Chicago,” writes his brother, reflecting the world’s general underappreciation of an extremely important figure in jazz.
“It was my contact with him during his visits that brought my attention to his genius. . . .
“Most impressive was his phenomenal memory and knowledge, especially in jazz. I still regret that so much unique information in his brain was lost with his death.”
The saving grace, though, is that so much was saved.
AN INVENTORY OF A VAST JAZZ ARCHIVE
Following is a look at highlights from the William Russell Jazz Collection:
Jelly Roll Morton — 46 manuscripts, 225 pieces of correspondence, 211 folders filled with interviews of musicians about Morton, 7 piano rolls, 75-100 photographs, complete recordings.
Bunk Johnson — 1,417 folders of material, including 112 with promotional material, 226 with research for an unwritten book.
Fess Manetta — 299 reels of taped interviews.
Mahalia Jackson — 858 folders of information, plus interview and rehearsal tapes.
Jazz records — Approximately 1,000 78 r.p.m. records.
Ragtime — 174 folders of information, including 75 folders of orchestrations and brass band music, 56 folders of correspondence with Brun Campbell, and band cards used by the John Robichaux Band.
Sheet music — 2,200 items, including the complete Scott Joplin and songs by Tony Jackson.
Historical letters — 758 folders.
General correspondence and working files — 4,440 folders.
Photographs — 5,683.
Jazz magazines — Over 1,800 items
Movies — 5, including films of Baby Dodds and Bunk Johnson.
Historical items — 2 clarinets (of Alphonse Picou and Bacquet-Manetta); mirror from Mahogany Hall.
Source: Historic New Orleans Collection.
