An Industrial Education
Birmingham’s jazz tradition was born out of its segregated Black schools, where a community of innovative and exacting educators created from the restrictions of Jim Crow a distinctive, flourishing musical culture. At the heart of it all was John T. “Fess” (for “professor”) Whatley, a teacher, trumpeter, and bandleader known as Birmingham’s “Maker of Musicians.” Born in rural Tuscaloosa County in 1894, Whatley enrolled for his schooling at Birmingham’s Tuggle Institute, a boarding school for poor and orphaned African American youth. Whatley’s mother belonged to Tuggle’s board of trustees and was friends with the school’s founder; those connections offered a better education than any options the Whatleys could find close to home, so the family sent him some fifty miles east to Birmingham. At Tuggle, Whatley fell under the spell of cornet player and bandmaster Sam “High C” Foster, the first instrumental music teacher at any Black school in Birmingham. Another family friend, the multi-instrumentalist Ivory “Pops” Williams, had assured the Whatleys he’d look out for their son, and in unexpected ways he made good on that promise: Williams played music in local late-night taverns and, hoping to introduce Whatley to the music business, he helped him slip in and out of his dormitory window, bringing him along for the gigs.3
In 1917, Whatley joined the faculty of Industrial High School (later renamed A. H. Parker High, after its first principal), where he served as printing instructor and—unofficially—bandmaster for nearly half a century, until his retirement in 1964. Birmingham’s first public high school for Black students was rooted in Booker T. Washington’s philosophy of industrial education, preparing its students for what school leaders called “the work of life.” Principal Parker insisted that “our boys and girls should be taught in the schools how to do thoroughly and well the everyday duties that they find right around them”—casting down their buckets, as Washington so famously put it, exactly where they were. Each student specialized in one manual discipline or another: carpentry, tailoring, shoe repair, printing, millinery, automotive repair. “They know that [they’re] going to have to work with brooms as well as books,” Parker explained.4
Whatley’s arrival constituted a quiet revolution. Right away he advocated for the introduction of band, not as an extracurricular “add-on” but as an industrial discipline in itself. Music, Whatley said, was a trade just like any other, to be plied with one’s hands; a practical, technical skill that with the proper training could ensure a livelihood after graduation. Indeed, Whatley’s training meant more than just livelihood: it was a pathway to dignity and to middle-class dreams, even sometimes to celebrity. It was a means of surviving, even thriving, in a world that seemed bent on holding African Americans back.5
With so much at stake, Whatley led his band with a fierce rigidity that became legendary, holding students to the highest musical and personal standards. He demanded precision, not only in performance but in dress and demeanor. His students memorized his “Golden Dozen Traits of Character” and adhered to his standards of unbending professionalism, punctuality, and sobriety—an all-encompassing lifestyle that Whatley reinforced with punitive fines and swift whacks across the knuckles or bottom anytime his students stepped out of line.6
Along the way, Whatley built a brand that became recognizable to bandleaders across the country. If you were trained by Whatley, Birmingham musicians bragged, you didn’t even have to audition: the Whatley stamp was all you needed to ensure the job. Through the swing years, Whatley musicians populated the sidelines of all the major Black bands—Duke Ellington’s, Louis Armstrong’s, Cab Calloway’s, and others—as a diaspora of Birmingham musicians scattered across the country to shape the sound of jazz. By 1934, the Chicago Defender could report that “In the East, West and South, wherever you go, you can find musicians who are musicians because of Fess Whatley.” Thirty years later, a writer for the British magazine Jazz Monthly wondered why Whatley’s name wasn’t better known to jazz fans and historians. “It is difficult to think of any major band,” jazz historian Bertrand Demeusy insisted, “that at one time or another has not had a former pupil of Mr. Whatley among its members.” Certainly the musicians—Black musicians, that is—knew Whatley’s name: “Everybody was talking about him,” Dizzy Gillespie recalled.7
The first hallmark of the Whatley training was its firm foundation in sight-reading, an essential skill for the rising swing era with its big bands and complex orchestrations. Reading wasn’t merely a technical skill: mastery of the printed score indicated literacy, discipline, and class. Whatley’s students were expected also to double on a second instrument, further enhancing their employability, and many of them distinguished themselves as composers and arrangers. Finally, Whatley’s strict character training ensured that any product of his classroom would prove motivated, respectable, and responsible in the workplace.
Even as he sent his musicians all over the country, Whatley proved tirelessly devoted to nurturing Birmingham’s own music scene. Soon after his arrival at Industrial, he formed the city’s first jazz band, the ten-piece Jazz Demons. Band members were all Whatley’s own former students, freshly graduated and working now as teachers themselves in Birmingham’s Black schools. Across the country, the Black press made much of this novelty: “Whatley’s band is in its make-up probably the most unusual band in the country,” the Chicago Defender announced. “Every man in the band is an artist, and something more, each man is an instructor in some particular branch of learning in high schools in Birmingham.” Other local groups—the Midnight Serenaders, the Black and Tan Syncopators, the Society Troubadours—sprouted up, built on the Whatley mold. With his own mentor, “Pops” Williams, Fess formalized the growing culture of professionalism, organizing Local 733, the city’s first Black musicians’ union. Rejected by the existing white local, Whatley and Williams created for musicians of color their own institutional network and infrastructure, and for decades to come union membership would be an essential prerequisite for Birmingham’s jazz players. Whatley served as delegate to the national conventions, where he addressed the mostly white body of attendees, outlining the vital contributions of African Americans to the whole of American music.8
In the 1930s Whatley’s Jazz Demons gave way to the fifteen-piece Vibra–Cathedral Orchestra, rebranded in the forties as the Sax-O-Society Orchestra, both later iterations reflecting the popular big band sound. Whatley’s band prided itself on both its stylistic diversity and its polished, genteel professionalism; an advertisement for the Sax-O-Society Orchestra declared the group “A REAL JAZZ ORCHESTRA—BUT NOT THAT ‘EAR-SPLITTING,’ ‘NERVE-WRACKING’ KIND.” Catering to the upper crust of Black and white Birmingham, Whatley’s repertoire tended toward sweet, poppy sounds, but Whatley and his men could “get hot,” too, when the situation demanded. In staged “jazz battles” with other Black bands across the state, Whatley reigned as unshakable champion.9
In Birmingham as elsewhere, the jazz scene was overwhelmingly male, the product of strict gender conventions and restrictions. Whatley refused to allow girls into the school band, saying they’d be a distraction to the boys. In Birmingham’s Black middle-class community, parents and teachers steered girls toward voice and piano lessons, and several private music schools equipped generations of Birmingham girls with a rigorous classical training. (Many boys, meanwhile, gave up the piano—thought to be a “girl’s instrument.”) Very few women proved exceptions to the rule. Mary Alice Clarke, longtime organist at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, was the only woman ever to play in Whatley’s professional band, where for years she did triple duty on piano, vibraphone, and accordion. Singer Ethel Harper, an Industrial High teacher, fronted her own band of students, Ethel Harper’s Rhythm Boys—but the image of a glamorous, unmarried teacher appearing onstage in an evening gown with a group of teenaged boys proved more than school leaders could bear. Harper was asked to quit teaching or quit the band. She went to Harlem, appeared at the Apollo Theater and on Broadway, and enjoyed success with the Ginger Snaps vocal group.10
Meanwhile, from all over the country—even across the globe—Birmingham musicians sent home to Fess Whatley postcards and letters, their latest glossy headshots, and an annual flood of birthday greetings, which Whatley proudly showed off to his latest batch of students. Saxophonist Cass McCord toured the world with Louis Armstrong and other bandleaders, led his own band in Paris, and wrote to Birmingham from the pyramids—”Hello Fess, I am still going strong. Am here in Egypt”—asking his teacher to write him in Bombay: “I’ll be there next week for six months, and then to China, Java, etc. Regards to the boys.”11
“The boys” in Whatley’s classroom listened enraptured as Fess recounted his old pupils’ adventures. Sammy Lowe, whose own horn would also take him all over the world, recalled, “We would dream of the time people would be talking about us playing some place.”12