A Very OK Podcast
Episode 33: “Jazz in Oklahoma”
February 20, 2024
Episode Transcript
(upbeat music playing)
Trait Thompson: Hello, and welcome to A Very OK Podcast. My name is Trait Thompson. I’m the executive director of the Oklahoma Historical Society. And with me, as always, is Dr. Bob Blackburn. Bob, it’s great to be with you again to record another podcast.
Dr. Bob Blackburn: Trait, it is good to be here, especially this theme today of jazz and talking to Carmen Fields, a friend of mine, and look forward to hearing more about her dad and brother and people coming out of Oklahoma and making it in the music industry.
Thompson: Oh, I’m really excited about this topic, and this is something that I love. You know, I love a lot of different kinds of musical genres. And being Black History Month, I thought it would be a great time to talk about the influence of jazz, and especially, I think a lot of people might not realize how many great jazz musicians we’ve had come out of Oklahoma. And I’m particularly excited to talk to Carmen because her father was Ernie Fields, and we’ll get into the whole discussion about who Ernie was and his mark on the music industry, but we’ve got a lot of great things to get into today. So, Bob, do you like jazz?
Blackburn: Well, I have grown into jazz. Of course, as a child of the 1950s, I was born in 1951, the earliest jazz that I remember as a child was my dad’s favorite music was western swing, Johnnie Lee Wills. I once asked him, dad, “What was your favorite music of all time?” He said, oh, Johnnie Lee Wills, noon, KVOO. Okay, well that’s jazz. A lot of people don’t realize western swing was really a form of jazz, just a variation. There’s so many variations. So I grew up around Bob Wills and Johnnie Lee Wills’ music somewhat. And of course, that’s upbeat, and you just want to get up and dance when you hear that music. So that was my first exposure. Really, I would say the first though, going more to mainstream jazz, especially out of the African American community, would have been through the power of television. Of course, 1950s was the golden age of television in my mind. That, of course, has grown. But Louis Armstrong was, by that time not just, probably the top recording artist in the field of jazz music, but he was also an actor. So he’s in movies at the time, and he was on television quite a bit. So I became a Louis Armstrong. And I’d sit we’d sit around and, you know, as kids would imitate him, would have a handkerchief and a hand and wipe our tails down and play like we were playing the trumpet, and he was so animated, and the music was so inspiring, and it fit television very well. It was an intimate kind of music. I think if you’re a jazz aficionado, the best place to hear that would be in a small, dimly lit place where you’re very close to the artists and you can see their emotion, you can see their expressions. And with Louis, I could see that on television as a kid.
And then, of course, as life went on, ironically, my son kind of exposed me to more jazz. Beau was born 1982. I raised him on classic rock ’n roll. I wanted him to agree with me, The Beatles as the greatest band of all time. He doesn’t quite buy into that now, but I tried my best with him, The Beatles and other bands of that era. But eventually, he graduated beyond classic rock and other things and turned me on to Miles Davis. I really had heard of Miles Davis, of course, but never really got serious about it. But I started listening, and of course, venues like Spotify and Sirius Radio allows you to turn to a jazz station or to go to Spotify. Give me some Miles Davis, and I’m a cook, and I like to listen to music when I cook. And Miles Davis is great music to cook by. If you get something much more up-tempo, you tend to go too fast. Miles kind of relaxes you. It’s a mood, and Kind of Blues is still one of my favorite albums of all time. And Beau would go on with other jazz acts. I even think a little bit, Grateful Dead, Umphrey’s McGee are rock and roll bands that took a real jazz approach to their music, and my son still goes to concerts in that venue. But, over the years, I really enjoyed that. It’s added to me, of course, as a historian, as I was working on my first books on Oklahoma City in the early days. I have a section of my first big book published in LA in 1982, on bands in Oklahoma City: Charlie Christian, The Blue Devils. In fact, I have a photograph of the Blue Devils in that first book in ’82. Learn more about Charlie Christian, and we’ll talk a little bit more about it. But Deep Deuce and the impact of Zelia Breaux and and other mentors like that. And then learning about Ernie Fields and getting to meet and know Ernie Jr. I started to study a little bit more about Ernie Fields’ music and the big band sound there. So, yeah, it’s been part of my life.
Thompson: Yeah. I have to say, I grew up on mostly country music down where I was at. You know, when I was plowing on the tractor in the summertime on the farm, and we had a radio in the tractor. And so you pick up radio stations, and most of what we could pick up was country music. But as I’ve gotten older and I’ve expanded my horizons in music, I started looking at jazz. And one of the things that I love about jazz is I just love, to me, it’s a very soothing and relaxing kind of music, and it’s also a music where the musicianship is important. In other words, even if there’s vocals, the vocals aren’t getting in the way of the musicians, and usually in every kind of, in every kind of composition or any kind of performance, everybody gets their own little part. So you’ll hear the clarinet kind of be featured, and then you’ll hear the trumpet, and then you’ll hear the drums and maybe, you know, maybe the bass, and you you know, it’s all kind of, jazz is a stew, you know, and then you got the potatoes and the celery and you got the carrots and you’ve got the meat and taken individually, they’re okay. But boy, when you throw them in the stew together, and then when the whole band is vibing together, and they’re just in sync and hitting it, boy, to me, there’s nothing better. And for me, when I’m trying to concentrate, I go, I’m doing work, but I want some music on in the background, jazz is what I go to because it almost feels like it feeds my creative energy. I can’t work with music that has lyrics because I start concentrating on the lyrics, and I forget what I’m working on, but, you know, Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue album, oh, boy. I love that one.
One of the things that I do is when I’m out kayaking, usually I don’t listen to music, but sometimes if the mood is just right and the sun’s going down and you can see the geese or the ducks flying over the water, I want to play that Miles Davis in that, that blue, his “Blue in Green” song. And that’s just, there’s nothing better. I love John Coltrane. I love Duke Ellington. You know, all have a little bit different style, of course, there. You know, Duke Ellington was pianist, Coltrane, saxophone. But it’s been a pleasure to discover jazz, and I keep, we have the UCO Jazz Lab in Edmond, and I keep, I haven’t been there to it yet. And I keep saying I need to go hear some jazz at the Jazz Lab in Edmond. But, did you know I almost could have been a jazz musician?
Blackburn: I did not know that.
Thompson: Yeah. So, sixth grade and seventh grade, I played the trumpet in the Brady Independent School District, and I want to say, I was terrible at it.
Blackburn: But you came that close.
Thompson: But I was that close to almost being a great jazz musician. My downfall in the trumpet was, not only was I, like, you know, they have first chair, second chair, all of that. Well, I was like, eighth chair or whatever the farthest to the back is. That’s usually where I was at. But then, on top of that, when they decided that we had to march and play music at the same time, I was out. That’s too many things to do at once. So my jazz career never got off the ground, Bob, and I lament that today.
Blackburn: Yeah, well, my almost, almost, in the ’50s, and some of our baby boomer friends out there listening will relate to this. In the mid and late 1950s, it became really popular to play the accordion of all instruments, and I had friends who would have to go do their one-hour lesson on accordion. And I was tempted a little bit, but I could not stand the music, so I didn’t pursue that. I did try the violin, but I soon found that I did not have the patience to learn. I wanted to go play ball and get outside and do all those things and not study the violin. So I gave up pretty quick.
Thompson: Well, I want to talk a little bit about what jazz is. And, you know, because jazz can be classified as a lot of really different, you talked about western swing just a few minutes ago. I think certainly elements of western swing can be jazzy. There’s a lot of different elements of different types of music that can be jazz. But I went to the Encyclopedia Britannica and looked for their definition of what jazz is, and it says, “It’s a musical form that’s often improvisational that was developed by African Americans and influenced by both European harmonic structure and African rhythms. It was developed partially from ragtime and blues and is often characterized by syncopated rhythms, polyphonic ensemble playing, varying degrees of improvisation, often deliberate deviations of pitch, and the use of original timbres.” Now, that’s basically a lot of things to say that it’s just good music, and it’s music that comes from a lot of different influences, and it’s not any one thing, although I think we can safely say that jazz is uniquely American. It came together as a confluence of all these different influences. And you think about Oklahoma and what better place, Bob, for jazz to be developed here in Oklahoma.
Not only do we have these great enclaves of the All-Black towns, we have places like Greenwood and Deep Deuce. But on top of that, we have people came from everywhere. They came from the Deep South. They came from the northeast and the northwest. Some of them, people came from European countries and brought those traditions, and you talk about making that stew. I think Oklahoma was a great place to make that stew.
Blackburn: It was. And of course, we have such a rich history of African American people in the state. Of course, the first coming as slaves were the Five Tribes. But then freedom in 1866, the All-Black towns, and I include in All-Black towns, both Deep Deuce in Oklahoma City and Greenwood in Tulsa because they were cities within a city. But that culture coming out of that, and almost, I think, partly because of that isolation through both de facto and legal segregation, it provided a market, because to be a musician and to become a professional and to develop those skills, to perform on stage, you have to have people willing to pay for it. And so for someone to get to that 10,000 hours, you know, that mythical plateau you get to when you’re really mastering something, you had to have someone paying you to do it.
And in those All-Black towns and in Oklahoma City and Tulsa, you had the venues for them to play. So that encouraged these young people to take the guitar lesson that they were getting at school, and then going on and playing with a band where they could make a few bucks, and you see it across the state, especially communities like Taft, that we’ll talk about in a little bit, but especially Boley. And coming out of Tulsa and Oklahoma City. But I think in addition to that rich African American heritage in Oklahoma, that’s a blend. You get both the influence of the former slaves of the American Indians, which they have adopted some of the culture of American Indians, and then you get the migration out of the Old South in the late 1890s, and especially in the first two decades of the 20th century. Almost every All-Black town is a combination of what they would have called the Territorial Negroes and the State Negroes, those coming in from the Old South, as they would have said at the time. And so you get this combination, so you get a bit of the New Orleans impact, you get the Delta sound, you get all this. And then families are moving to places like Chicago and Kansas City and St. Louis, and you get this interchange of ideas at the very time that you get music recordings. So instead of just sheet music being the way that music has spread from person to person, you have recordings so people can actually listen to music, and that’s influencing. So you get this, this amalgam, this mixture of cultures. And it’s not surprising that the golden age of jazz, in my opinion, starts really in the ’20s.
Thompson: Yeah.
Blackburn: With radio spreading these different types. But also you get a place for these musicians to make a living. It’s no surprise that most of the jazz musicians in Oklahoma did not stay here. The real good ones. And once they had the opportunity, like the Blue Devils, they went to Kansas City, where it largely became the Count Basie band. But Kansas City was a market known as a market for music, for lots of clubs. The mob was involved there, so a lot of money was coming in and entertainment. And so there was a way to make a living there in St. Louis, especially with Dixieland jazz, not so much New Orleans at the time. New Orleans was exporting just like the rest of the South. But going to Chicago, New York, was a dream of many of these jazz musicians, and all the way up through Barney Kessel, a white man raised in Muskogee goes to LA to make it as a jazz guitarist. Charlie Christian goes off New York, and that’s very typical. But without the big urban centers, without a place to play, a way to make money, who knows what jazz might have become, but it is what it is. Because of these, this combination and Oklahoma’s role in that cannot be separated from that history of slavery, of the Freedmen, of the All-Black towns, of migration from the Old South, the development of these segregated communities and the culture coming out of it. So, it’s a fascinating story, and it’s something that we really need to understand as an expression of what is uniquely Oklahoma. That’s just another way to study Oklahoma history is to look back at the stories of some of these artists and what they’ve done.
There’s a new biography out on Leon Russell is a good example. Yeah, I learned so much about Leon Russell in that book, more than I thought. I knew a lot, but I learned how little I really knew from that book. But it’s like Barney Kessel. They would have been playing together in session, music in LA in the 1950s, and learning about these people and how they made a living and what they accomplished. It’s a fascinating way to have this new lens into our history.
Thompson: I like this, from The WPA Guide to 1930s Oklahoma, it says “Each successive immigrant to the state brought the dust of another locale on his feet and the lilt of another peoples’ song on his lips.” And I thought that perfectly describe how this form of music called jazz got to Oklahoma and everybody bringing their own experience with it. And then you have these, you know, I wish that I could have experienced some of that big band era, some of that big jazz era, because I think that some of these places where you would have experienced this, where it’s the Ritz Ballroom in Oklahoma City or whether it’s, you know, you’re playing in these little theaters in the Deep Deuce District or down in Greenwood. I mean, I can only imagine that it just, everywhere you turn was probably a very, very accomplished musician or a band that you wanted to hear.
Blackburn: And a lot of was tied to dancing. Guy Logsdon, one of my mentors and good friends over the years, is a musician, but he was also a student of music and wrote quite a bit about music. But, he once told me, he said, “Bob, music would have been so different in the 1940s and ’50s if it had not had dance.” Dance was driving a lot of this. People wanted to dance. They wanted to get physical and get out and socialize, especially that greatest generation that won World War II for us.
They liked getting out and socializing, and the privations of the Great Depression and the sacrifices of World War II to kind of just burst into a cultural flowering after the war, and people wanted to dance. They wanted to bowl, they wanted to go to Kiwanis, they wanted to get involved with things, and dance was driving a lot of it. And of course, these big bands that were based on jazz music were very popular. Charlie Christian and his connection with Benny Goodman and being one of the first Black artists to be drawn into one of these big dance bands that was making it nationally with recordings and performances was significant, and that was an Oklahoma kid raised here in Oklahoma City who is one of the the godfathers of amplified guitar music that could hold its own with the big band sound. But people wanted to dance to it, and so jazz/dance kind of go together.
Thompson: Yeah, let’s talk about Charlie a little bit because he is one of those pioneering musicians, especially in terms of guitar. He was born in 1916, in Bonham, Texas, and then moved in 1918 with his family to Oklahoma City. He learned to play the trumpet before he was ten years old, and by age 12, he had switched to the guitar, and he made his own little rudimentary guitar from cigar boxes. And I don’t know if you’ve seen them around, those old cigar box guitars. But, you know, in some cases, I read stories like that and I just, I think to myself, you can’t stop genius. You know, having the limitations of not having enough money of not, you know, he found enough things to put together a guitar that genius was going to come out and that talent was going to come out no matter what. But he honed his craft playing music down in the Deep Deuce District in Oklahoma City. And by the 1930s, he’s playing with the Alphonso Trent Band in 1937. That’s when he discovers the electric guitar, and that’s when he takes off as a musician really.
Blackburn: Well, and too, that story tells me something about education and how it’s changed over the years. In the 1930s, a high school like Douglass, it was the segregated high school in Oklahoma City. Zelia Breaux would have been the director of the music program, and these kids had an opportunity to play not just individuals, but in ensembles, in big bands, marching bands, and educators at the time understood the importance of the arts. It wasn’t just STEM curriculum. “Let’s teach people how to be good employees,” was not the kind of the mindset at the time. Yeah, they need those skill sets to grow the workforce, but they have also got to enjoy the life. They’ve got to understand literature, music, the arts, the visual arts. And I just had a conversation last week with Cameron Eagle, someone that works with both of us. Cameron, I met one of his art teachers playing pickleball one day, and she was saying, oh, well, he was one of my best students at Northwest Classen. And so I told Cam about it. And he says there were four art teachers at Northwest Classen in the 1960s and early 1970s.
Thompson: Isn’t that something?
Blackburn: Now, you probably have one art teacher moving around from district to district. When I was a kid, I had art every year, and so music was accessible because of we, the public, said that is important for our young people to learn. And then when you get mentors like Zelia Breaux, who helped so many kids, and she probably saw his genius and said, here, here’s an instrument, or we’ll find you an instrument or find a way to find someone to buy it for him. She was doing that with an entire generation of young people. A lot of people look back on those days, at Douglass as kind of this golden era of education performance, and then the young people finding a way to make a living.
Thompson: Yeah. And Charlie Christian was ultimately discovered in 1939 by John Hammond, who was a music promoter. And, when we talk to Carmen, we’ll talk about this a little bit, too. But John Hammond helped with Ernie Fields and get him on the map too, because John brought Ernie to New York City, and that was where he recorded his first hit, “T-Town Blues.” And so, John Hammond was kind of going all around the music scene, not only in Oklahoma, but in other states. And he loved discovering this undeveloped talent or and so, Benny Goodman, you mentioned him just a minute ago. So he starts playing with Benny Goodman and the Goodman Sextet and the full orchestra, and, unfortunately, he was, he died in his prime because he contacted tuberculosis and ended up dying in New York at a sanatorium in 1942 at the age of 25. But you wonder what he would have done had he been able to live a long and full life, and what influence he would have had on many, many other musicians as well.
Blackburn: Yeah. And I think one reason he succeeded, and it’s something that comes out of the Oklahoma experience. Two things. One, mobility and hard work. Arrell Gibson once wrote an essay for me when I was editor of The Chronicles about he thought the defining characteristic of Oklahoma was mobility. People had been ripped out of their homelands as the Indians especially, and brought into Oklahoma, then others left. Probably not willingly, but they had to, you know, hard times, drought, depression, bankruptcies. And here they come to Oklahoma for another chance, and that mobility of moving to where the jobs are, moving to where there is an opportunity, I think was inherited by the people, like Charlie Christian and others. And then you combine that with the hard work of Oklahomans because we live in a fairly hostile environment. Economic environment is, was especially early on before oil, there was not much going on here. We were an island away from the big urban centers in terms of commerce, and finally connected by railroads, and then along comes minerals. But people have had to work hard in their lives, and then you throw hard work in with a willingness to move to Kansas City, or to go to Chicago, or LA, or to wherever it might be. You hear, but these people just go in it. Well, that’s part of our culture that we say, hey, yeah, well, let’s move from Rush Springs to the big town of Chickasha, or let’s move to the big town of Oklahoma City, or the bigger town of Kansas City, or Chicago or Denver, wherever we might be. That’s just part of our culture in the state that you see it in this almost odyssey of many of these jazz musicians going around the world.
Thompson: Well, when you think about it, too, and back in those days, you had to make your own success. So, other words, there wasn’t the ability. You couldn’t just go get a bank loan; you couldn’t rely on your parents to help you out because they were probably as poor as you were, too, and so if you were going to make it, you had to make it yourself. So that means you have to find your own opportunity, and you have to go out there and capitalize on that. So that means if you have to move somewhere else, you know, like a lot of these bands, if you got to go to Kansas City, if you’ve got to go to Chicago, if you’ve got to go to Los Angeles, well that’s what you do to make a living. That’s what you do to survive.
Because there’s almost no safety net at that particular period of time. You’re talking about ’20s, ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s in the United States. And so if you’re going to make it, you’re going to have to make it on your own terms. You’re going to have to get out there, you’re going to have to tour. And that’s one thing that just impressed me so much is how hard these bands had to work. You know, every single night going, it didn’t matter if it was a huge club in a beautiful ballroom or the next night you might be playing in some little podunk place, you know, not, you know, with 15 people there, but that’s what you got to do to make a living and to pay the band and to keep the show on the road.
Blackburn: You know, that gets back to the context of history in general. Without the development of roads, especially after 1919, federal aid to roads and Oklahoma’s transportation, our Department of Transportation being created in 1923, and then building things like Route 66. That starts in 1926. These bands did not have the means to get from one town to another without roads and cars. They couldn’t afford railroads, which was the only way to get long distances at the time. But the development of the highway systems and the development of the automobile industry with cars. Bob Wills’ early movement up and down Route 66 would have been in a bunch of cars pulling a trailer. Eventually, you have buses and then, you know, you get bigger until Leon Russell’s and this huge, you know, mobile home that he’s living in. But transportation is a part of all of this. And giving these people an opportunity to go make 50 bucks, playing 100 miles away and then going to the next town, making another 50 bucks. And they could afford to do that because of transportation.
Thompson: Yeah. Well, you mentioned the Oklahoma City Blue Devils, so I want to talk about them for just a little bit because they were a very influential band. They started out in 1923 in Kansas City as Billy King’s Road Show, which was a traveling vaudeville troupe. And then that road show disbanded in 1925 in Oklahoma City, and they were reformed as the Blue Devils. And that’s when they get their start. From 1925 to 1933, it’s roundly considered that they were one of the finest jazz bands in the region, and they worked in the Ritz Ballroom in the winter months, but then they would tour also, and they went to Omaha and Houston and El Paso, and Little Rock, like we’re talking about, just making that circuit. But there were four native Oklahomans at one time or other who sat in with the Blue Devils. That was Abe Bolar, who played bass. Lemuel C. Johnson, who was clarinet and tenor saxophone. Jimmy Rushing on vocals, and Don Byas, who was tenor and alto saxophone from Muskogee. They had, they also, like you said, they later went on and were really involved with Count Basie, and they were inducted into the Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame in 2000. So they were they were an influential touring jazz band of that era, and anybody in the ’20s and ’30s would have known who the Oklahoma City Blue Devils were for sure.
Blackburn: Trait, a good story, and a little plug for a friend’s book. Hugh Foley, who is a professor at Rogers State University, has written The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma Music, and if people want to know more about these individual artists, that is a good source to go to. Buy it. Support scholarship into music. And Hugh has dedicated his life, he’s a musician himself, has played for us at different OHS events. But Hugh’s book is kind of where the beginning and the end of a lot of these stories, all these biographies would be there. And of course, in a minute, when we talk to Carmen, we have another source for people to learn more about some of these musicians through her book.
Thompson: Well, I want to encourage people to, you know, it’s one thing to talk about jazz, but it’s a whole other thing to go listen to jazz. And I will encourage people and, you know, now with things like Amazon Music and Spotify and all of the outlets we have to be able to listen to music today, go pull up some of this music and go listen to it. These, for the ones who are able to record, a lot of their music is still out there and available. And so some of these people that we’re talking about, go give them a listen because this really is great music, and it really will, it really will... it’s transcendent to just kind of set your mood. It’ll set you in a different place in mind. And the best thing about music isn’t talking about it, it’s actually listening to it. So. Well, Bob, this has been a great conversation, but I certainly want to get into our conversation with Carmen. So let’s talk to her for a little bit.
Blackburn: Great.
Thompson: Well, Bob, I am thrilled to welcome Carmen Fields into our podcast. Carmen Fields is an Emmy Award-winning broadcast news journalist who currently produces and hosts the public affairs program Higher Ground on WHDH-TV in Boston. She co-anchored WGBH’s 10 o’clock news from 1987 to 1991 and wrote the script for the American Experience documentary Going Back to T-Town. She is the author of Going Back to T-Town: The Ernie Fields Territory Big Band, a book about her father’s experience as a pioneering jazz musician and bandleader from Tulsa, and the book was released in 2023. Carmen, thank you so much for being with you. It’s such a pleasure to have you with us today.
Carmen Fields: I’m honored indeed. Thank you for inviting me.
Thompson: Well, I think just to start out with, you know, your father was Ernie Fields, and it would be great if you could just talk a little bit about your father as a musician and what you think you know is important to know about his music.
Fields: Well, that’s an interesting question. As a musician, I think his importance is that he traveled through different genres of music, starting with the earliest days of jazz in the late 1920s and swing music, and then blues was very much a staple of his performances and shows. And then transitioned into rock and roll and was able to successfully record in just about all of those genres. And that’s not the typical story for many other big bands, and not the typical story for even musicians with a bigger literature like Count Basie and Duke Ellington. They pretty much kept in one particular lane, if you will. But Ernie Fields was particularly entrepreneurial and adjusted to all of the different genres. And as he said, and I point out in the book, he wanted to play what the people wanted to hear, not necessarily what he wanted to play all the time.
Thompson: Right.
Blackburn: You know, Carmen, too, and in our earlier commentary, we talked about, you know, at the root of this is that these musicians had talent, but then they had to have encouragement and a way to make a living as a musician. It was a day when they could travel town to town is when they were these big urban centers with enough people with enough money to go to a club to pay for a band. And your dad learned how to tap in to the market. There was supply and demand. There was a demand for his kind of music, and he was providing the supply, and then the different band members who had come through his band, and they would they would riff off of each other, and they would find these different influences and all these experiences. But I would like for you to mention too here as we start this conversation. Ernie, as a dad, your early memories, life around the house when he was not on the road, which I’m sure it was much at the time. But when he was around, tell us about your experience with him.
Fields: Well, as you know, my mother, Bernice Copeland Fields, kept the home fires burning. She was a schoolteacher. And so when he was away, we had our routine of going to school and coming home and doing homework, and she’d prepare meals every day, and so on and so forth. When daddy was in town and at home, all of that was different. He often acted (laughing) as his own booking agent. And so he was always trying to get more engagements or meet people via telephone or in person, and setting up these arrangements. And I remember being frustrated because back in those days, there were no cell phones. There was just this one house phone, which was also his business phone. So I was often annoyed when he would pick up the extension and say, I’m, you know, I’m expecting a call, so can you wrap this up?
(laughter)
Fields: Or things of that nature, so that that was an imposition. We often had musicians coming in and out of the house. There were, from time to time, they couldn’t, didn’t have a rehearsal hall that was available. So our living room would become the rehearsal hall. And the musicians, we had a piano in our living room, and the musicians would gather around and rehearse. And I can remember as a young kid being embarrassed of the sounds that were probably coming from my house. And, you know, what would the neighbors think? And at one point, one of my next-door neighbors that we went to the same church commented, oh, we heard the music coming out last night. Oh, it was really sounding good. Well, that was a little reassuring, but still, as they say, youth is wasted on the young. As far as I could tell, the easygoing schedule that my parents, my mother and I had worked out, was always in disarray when my father was around. But I do remember him as being tenderhearted. My mother was the disciplinarian, not my father. And I could ask him for permission for something or another, and he would say yes right away, but then would quickly add, if it’s all right with your mother.
(laughter)
Fields: So I didn’t always appreciate that at all. But, those were the days.
Thompson: Well I loved some of the stories you had in the book. By the way, I read the book this weekend, and I just picked it up because I thought, oh, I’m going to skim through this book and get some interesting things to talk about. Next thing you know, I’d read the whole darn thing, and you did such a good job with the book. It is so compelling. And after reading the book, I was a little sad because I just wish I could have met your dad, and you did such a wonderful job with it. But your mother, you had great stories about your mother, and some of the stories about her, just how frugal she was. And she was able to, you know, save the money and run the house and, you know, put you and your brother through school and, but one thing I loved about your mother is when your father got an opportunity to go to New York City in 1939, and you had a quote in there that she said to him, said, “If there’s one thing I still love your mother for is that she encouraged me to go without reservation. She said, you had that horn when I met you. You will never have to say that I told you to put it down. I’m wishing you luck.” I just thought that was so wonderful that she understood who he was and what his mission and purpose was in life, and she gave him her blessing.
Fields: And as I tried to portray also, that wasn’t the case for many of the musicians at that time that when the opportunity came, he discussed it with different members of the band, and some said, well, I can’t be away from home that long or that’s awful far away, or had all of these variety of excuses for why they didn’t think it was a good idea to head to New York City, but my mother had no reservations and said, go, stay as long as you need to go. And he always gave her that credit and recognition and recalled that several times throughout his life.
Thompson: And they were married 67 years.
Fields: They were married 67 years when he passed away. And, you know, I can remember him, when I got him to start talking on audiotape, some of the time I wasn’t there to interview him. He was just giving memories to the recorder. And he would say, sometimes the wives would call and say, don’t give so-and-so his pay. Send it to me. And my father would say, well, you didn’t play trombone for me last night.
(laughter)
Fields: Oh, but, you know, that was, that’s how he navigated all of these different personalities and home situations. It’s a wonder, as far as I’m concerned.
Thompson: Well, what really, what really drove that home is your brother had a quote in the book that said, you know, why he didn’t want to be a bandleader. He said because Ernie had to be a dad to all of those people in the band.
Fields: H was like a father, yes.
Thompson: Yeah. He said, I don’t want any part of that. But it was all, but, you know, reading these stories, it was, you know, these musicians and it’s people that were gambling in the back of the bus and people who would get lost. And I wonder sometimes how he managed to keep all of that together.
Fields: Isn’t that a wonder? He would probably say, by the grace of God, he was a deeply spiritual person and a prayerful person. And while there were some brushes with violence, there was never anything just horrific that occurred. But he was a deeply religious and prayerful person, and he believed that all of his good fortune, in addition to hard work, was due in large part to the grace of God.
Blackburn: Carmen, tell us a little bit about, you know, beyond him just being a dad and a musician, and a businessman. Tell us about your family. Where did your dad’s family come from? When did they, move to Tulsa?
Fields: My father’s family was based in Nacogdoches, Texas, and my father was born in Nacogdoches in 1904. They came to Oklahoma and settled in Taft, Oklahoma, which is one of the several All-black townships that dotted across the state at the time. And when he finished primary school, went to Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, following in the footsteps of his older brother, Clarence Fields, who later became an acclaimed teacher, music teacher in the Tulsa and Sand Springs public schools. But he finished Tuskegee in 1924 and came to Tulsa because by that time, Clarence had moved from Sand Springs to Tulsa and had moved their mother, was also in Tulsa, and he got a job on the famed Greenwood, which was less than a decade after the race massacre of 1921, but got a job as an electrician, at an electric shop, based on Greenwood. He was the youngest of six, all of them, or most of them, all of them except the oldest, Tom Fields. Tom Fields was a farmer and also an official at one of the state institutions that was based in Taft. But his other brothers and sisters were all college-trained and became teachers in their own right. A brother and the two sisters met untimely death that died young. And so I never knew any of them. But for the longest time, it was Tom, the eldest, my uncle Clarence, and daddy was the baby. And he feels that he wasn’t spoiled, as he said in his own words, but they all looked out after him, and the family was musically inclined, and I think would follow their minister father on the different barnstorming in the state for preaching. And the family would often present musical programs at those events. So that’s where the music came in.
Thompson: And he started out as a trombone player.
Fields: He started out as a trombone player, and that was pretty happenstance. He was at Tuskegee and saw that the band members were getting as much, if not more attention than the athletes, and the band members got to travel with the football team to the different schools, but he didn’t have a horn. And the director, who had also taught Clarence Fields, couldn’t believe he came to Tuskegee without a horn. And long story short, he found someone who was selling a horn, for $6, a trombone. And that was the happenstance. It was available. He took it, made a $3 down payment, paid the rest out over time, and started taking lessons from a fellow electric student, electrician student, and worked his way up from the junior band, or the second band, into the major band. And the rest, shall we say, is history. So he fell in love with music, but still, in the Booker T. Washington concept, was to learn a trade. He never dreamed that music would become his livelihood. He always thought of himself as an electrician, but fate had other plans.
Thompson: And he started playing and put together his band, and he got discovered by John Hammond, who was a music promoter who discovered a lot of others. Bob and I just talked a few minutes ago about him discovering Charlie Christian, and John wanted to take him to New York City, and that’s where he recorded “T-Town Blues.” Can you, can you talk a little bit more about that song and the impact on his career?
Fields: Well, excuse me, the opportunity to record, I think, was the main thing that helped keep his name alive, because there were countless other musicians, and many of them based in Oklahoma, and some that I detail their stories that were excellent, probably even more illustrious musicians and bandleaders than Ernie Fields, but they never had the opportunity to record, and the opportunity to record meant that you had access to radio stations around the country. You had perhaps opportunities at radio broadcasts for your organizations. That made the critical difference in the success or failure of many organizations.
John Hammond had been in Kansas City and heard about the Ernie Fields Orchestra. And so he came to Tulsa looking for him, found him, and asked if dad could get the musicians together so he could hear them, and he did. And he liked what he heard and said, well, he wanted to bring Willard Alexander, who was the manager or promotion person for John Hammond’s organization. And so Willard Alexander went to Wichita, I think it was, and heard them, and they offered him a contract to come to New York. And the thing that was tricky about New York, it wasn’t as an assurance of instant success. Willard Alexander had promised a number of engagements up the Eastern Seaboard, but they, you know, there wasn’t continuous weeks of being booked. There were engagements here and there, and of course the Apollo Theater, which was a big deal. But after that it, you know, was sketchy. But to have something in upstate New York and maybe down in Connecticut, but it wasn’t steady work until, quote unquote, they caught on, and they did do those recordings, and that was helpful. But, at some point, my father became impatient. And he said many, many years later, he was expecting results in two or three or four months, instead of years. And so jointly, in consultation with the members of the orchestra, they decided to return to Oklahoma. Some of the members said, well, we have more than we came here with. So let’s go back, and so they did.
Thompson: You know, one of the stories that I love about that time leading up to New York is, about the trumpet player, Amos Woodruff, and how everybody he agreed he was a great musician, but it took him a while to learn the new music. It took him, he didn’t sight-read all that well. And so Ernie’s trying to get the band together, and I think the piano player at the time was one of those who didn’t want to go to New York City, so they had to replace the piano player. But Ernie went ahead and made the decision to replace Amos on his own. And when he told Willard Alexander about it, Willard said, you let me down because he considered Amos Woodruff to be a really, really great trumpet player. And your father went back and rehired Amos and brought him back into the band. And I thought that just spoke so well to his temperament and his willingness to admit a mistake and to say, you know, go back and to fix things again. I just really love that story.
Fields: And I said the part of the story that always gave me a chuckle in reviewing it. He said when he fired Amos, Amos was walking around like he’d lost his mother.
(laughter)
Fields: So it really hit him hard, I took it.
Thompson: Oh, poor Amos, I’m glad he got to go back with the band.
Fields: He got to go back with the band, indeed.
Thompson: I think, I read a comment by a music scholar, Gunther Schuller, in your book that said that the band in 1939, it said, “In terms of its medium tempo, relaxed swing, and in general, a wonderful sense of rhythmic well-being, the band was hard to match, let alone beat.”
Fields: Mmmhmm. Indeed. And that was the foundation, I think, that allowed him to traverse the various genres, because when he would hire various vocalists, it was one thing if they could do suite numbers or scat, do jazz improvisations, but he also counted on them to be able to do the blues, because that was becoming ever more popular during the war years in the ’40s and into the ’50s. So it was very important to him, as I said, to please his audience and to have versatility and nimbleness in his organization. He also loved, in part, because of his friendship with Bob Wills and the emerging popularity of country and western. He loved to keep a fiddler in the group so that, you know, jazz violin was emerging in popularity. But he liked to throw a country and western tune in there, if the audience required that. So he was always thinking ahead and keeping in his mind, pleasing the audience was the ultimate.
Blackburn: And Carmen, we talked about this a little earlier, the connection between music of the ’20s, ’30s, ’40s, and even into the ’50s and dance. Your dad’s music was always tailored really for a dance crowd to get people up on their feet, socializing, and having a good time.
Fields: And that was one thing he pointed out. I think, during the days, the late ’30s and ’40s when, John Hammond was a presence and heard the group, he said it wasn’t like things are now. People came to dance. There weren’t tables and chairs. It was a wide open dance floor and a few chairs around the back of the room, where people went during breaks. But people came to hear his music and dance, and there were dance halls, and then there were theaters also, and the theaters were for listening, and the dance halls were for dancing, and he was a hit in both of those settings.
Thompson: Yeah. I love the story about Bob Wills. And it appears that Bob Wills and your dad were good friends, and he told Ernie, he said, “Make sure you get paid up front, and then get a percentage of the gate.” So he gave him business advice about how to how to make sure that he was getting what he should be getting as a bandleader.
Fields: Gave him business advice and also gave him tips on venues that he thought he should pursue, and said you can make some money in those places. And he’d often drop his name to people who call Bob Wills wanting to engage them. And if he was not available, he would send them to Ernie Fields. And people would call and say, well, Bob Wills told me to call you and said I’m sure to be satisfied. So the endorsement by Bob Wills and someone of his stature, both musically and popular-wise, meant a great deal to my father. And Bob Wills made sure that Ernie Fields Orchestra was the first Black musical act to play Cain’s Ballroom.
Fields: without a question, and Cain’s is coming up on its centennial, I believe.
Thompson: Yes. 100 years this year.
Fields: This year, indeed.
Blackburn: There’s a new book out, a history by John Wooley. It’s really a good read as well. Carmen, can you tell us a little bit about your brother, Ernie Jr., who I’ve met many times and worked with him on exhibits about your dad as well as his career, kind of let our audience hear the kind of trajectory of Junior’s career.
Fields: Well, he followed along in the family business, if you will. Our father had hoped he would be a doctor or lawyer or something other than a musician. But he was, from his youngest age, he was very talented. Everything he touched, he could play just about. And completed his education at Howard University in Washington, DC, and shortly after that, that was at the height of “In the Mood,” the late ’50s, early ’60s. And he joined dad’s orchestra. At the time, he had offers of jobs. At the time of his graduation, he had offers to teach at two or three universities. And so he was talking to dad about which one should he take off? And dad asked, well, how much are they paying? And one of them was paying something like $350 a month, plus housing. And daddy said, hell, I can pay you that.
(laughter) And so, the decision was that easy to go on the road with his dad, and also the value of friendship comes to play with Ernie’s career. One of the musicians and arrangers in dad’s orchestra in its earliest days, René Hall, became a noted studio musician and arranger in Hollywood. And Ernie had been with that organization a few years and then took over management of the musicians for the Bobby “Blue” Bland organization. And it was a Bobby “Blue” Bland featuring Ernie Fields Jr. and was dissatisfied. He knew he didn’t want his name necessarily to be up in lights, if you will.
But he knew he wanted to be a musician, and so he traveled around in New York City and on the East Coast, and he traveled to California, where René Hall was based and decided that the sunshine and René Hall’s tutelage, he decided to make that his home and has been there ever since. And with René Hall, he taught him the basics of copying, which all of that is done by computers nowadays, introduced him to contracting and organizing groups for recordings in recording studios and even the movies for movie soundtracks, and with his encouragement, endorsement, and tutelage, became a contractor and studio musician in his own right. And at the time he became licensed, he was one of the few licensed contractors in Los Angeles, and he’s been involved with all manner of productions from the Grammys to performances at the White House, to currently American Idol. He’s the contractor, and the contractor is the one who hires the musicians that support the performers on these various shows. So he has carried on the name and the legacy with pride. And my father took great joy in the fact that in all of his travels, sometimes Ernie Jr. would run into someone who said, oh, your dad worked for me, and that Ernie Jr. never had to be ashamed of his father or who his father was because of the way he had conducted himself with integrity in dealings with people, and that was a source of great joy to my father.
Blackburn: Well, like I could tell, too, that Ernie Jr. probably shared a lot of the same personality characteristics of your dad, that people liked him. I’ve been with Ernie Jr. four or five times, went to LA once, and we had a bunch of Oklahoma movie stars and musicians there. Well, I ended up sitting by Ernie for like two hours listening to stories, and just had a great time. And then when we asked him to bring a band to Oklahoma to play for one of our annual meetings, he had some of the best musicians a lot of us had ever heard live, and I could, to me, that was a reflection that what your brother had done for other musicians, giving them opportunities to make a living, to play. And they said, yeah, Ernie, if you want us to do it, we’ll do it. And I could just kind of extend that back to your dad. He probably had that same feeling among the musical community. Ernie, you help me out here? Yeah. What do you need? And he was always kind of this force within the community that people looked up to him. And your dad and brother, I think, shared that.
Fields: Well, I like to think so, too. And it’s been a joy to recount and do the story of their musical journeys. And people often ask, “Well, what do you play, Carmen?” Well, not a thing.
(laughter)
Fields: And growing up, I was a little intimidated and annoyed at the fact that people often expected me to be able to play because of who my father was, who my brother was, and because they gave me, afforded me every lesson that you could think of. But I think subconsciously, if I can be an amateur psychologist, that I deliberately sought out something that I wouldn’t be compared with my brother and have that sibling rivalry, and that’s when I discovered reading and writing and got my early training thanks to the help of The Oklahoma Eagle there in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and some very encouraging teachers. And so I have carved out my niche as a journalist and taken great pleasure in doing the research that resulted in the book about my father and my brother.
Blackburn: Well, and I want to thank you for writing the book. You and I talked before you started trying to put it all together, and I remember that conversation so distinctly. And then OU Press stepped up, and I was on one committee. They were trying to publish more books on music and culture, and OU Press, I think, stepped up and says, yes, we want to work with you on that. Tell us a little bit about the book’s genesis there.
Fields: Well, I started working on the book or the idea of the book I shared when my father was still alive. And so I would go back and forth. I’m based in Boston, and I would go back and forth to visit and would interview him and take notes, and think about other things that I want to ask him the next time I was there, and I encouraged him to look at all of the mounds of photographs and identify the musicians on the various photographs. And as we went along, my dad would say, mention as many musicians as you can, because as many as I’ve named here, I’m sure I’ve forgotten that many, many more. So that is one aspect that I wanted to honor, not just him, but the lives of the people who went through, journeyed through his organization, some going on to fame and fortune, some doing other things. But he said they must have been worth something, or I would not have had them in my organization.
In the ensuing years, from the mid ’80s to the 2000s, when I really started writing, I had various waves of indecision. Oh, Carmen, you can’t write a book. What makes you think you could write a book? Then I would change jobs and get busy and got married and got busy. So I was picking it up and putting it down through the years. And finally, the pandemic, I think in some respects, as awful as it was, that gave me the time where I didn’t have any excuse that I didn’t have time to write. And that’s when I got very serious about putting paper to pen and filling in some of the blanks. By this time, my father had passed away, and if it happened once, it happened a hundred times that I wish I could pick up the phone and ask for some clarity on something I didn’t understand from the audiotape or ask him about a musician that I had forgotten about. And in addition to doing the writing, got serious about trying to shop it and find a publisher, and I’m grateful other academic presses expressed some interest, but I thought OU Press made the most sense since my father was based in Oklahoma and spent most of his life in Oklahoma. I thought that was the perfect pairing.
Thompson: You mentioned before about René Hall, who was a lifelong friend of your dad’s and was in the band from 1935 to 1942. But I wonder if you could talk little bit about Melvin Moore, who was a vocalist in the band through the late ’40s and was from Oklahoma City. But he seemed to be you and your, sorry, I’ll say that again. He and your father seemed to be very, very close as well.
Fields: They were very close. My father thought the world of him and thought he was probably more talented than many of the vocalists of that generation that day, whose names you would recognize. He had the highest regard for Melvin Moore and thinks that Melvin probably stayed with his orchestra longer than he should have, that he would have done better if they hadn’t been so loyal to one another and went on, and I guess the lineage. It’s interesting, Melvin Moore lineage, his daughter, Melba Joyce, is a vocalist and traveled with USO shows and what have you and is still living in, I believe it’s in Pasadena, anyway, in California. And her daughter, Carmen Bradford, is a very noted jazz vocalist with most times with the Count Basie organization, and they just won a Grammy. Count Basie does the blues. I forget who is conducting the Count Basie Orchestra now, but from Melvin Moore to his daughter to his granddaughter, now that’s a lot of good singing.
Thompson: Oh, absolutely. And I loved one of the stories that you told in the book about when the bus would break down and someone would ask Melvin to help out with it, and he’d say, “I’m a vocalist. I’m not a mechanic.”
Fields: Yes, indeed, and a principal vocalist at that.
(laughter)
Fields: That’s what they pay you to do.
Thompson: Well, I want to conclude our conversation. We could talk, boy, for another hour easy about this, but I want to conclude our conversation talking about about in “In the Mood,” which your father recorded and released in 1959 and became a gold record for him, and talk a little bit about the impact of that song on your father’s career.
Fields: Well, it’s interesting, when that was recorded in ’59, my father was in his 50s, but he was treated as a new discovery, an overnight sensation, which always gave him a chuckle. And the fact that “In the Mood” was a success among teenagers and was danceable for that era, and it was a tune that had been popular in the ’40s with the Glenn Miller Orchestra. But again, René Hall and his arranging genius pepped it up, gave it a different rhythm and beat, and it became it became a hit and was the template that they used for several other subsequent recordings of popular ’40s tunes to, reimagine, if you will, in a new teen sensibility, but “In the Mood,” in addition to the gold record, it led to nationally televised appearances, most notably on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand, where he was on there twice with the likes of Annette Funicello and Paul Anka, these teen idols of the day. And his second appearance was with recently rediscovered vocalist Brenda Lee, who was on Dick Clark’s show at the same time as my dad. But it just re-energized his career. He traveled more, had more engagements.
One story in the book, I don’t know if you remember the DJ Howlin’ Wolf. Jack, I forget his last name, Howlin’ Wolf. But anyway, they’re traveling and have the radio on, and “In the Mood” comes on the radio. And Howlin’ Wolf had a trademark of when he was pleased with something, he would make the sound of a wolf. Well, in the middle of “In the Mood,” he starts howling like a wolf, and my father was so incensed. Well, why does he have to make that sound?
(laughter) But he, that became his moniker. He got a license plate that had Mr. In the Mood, a vanity plate, and that was included on much of the publicity that he had and promotional materials that he had after that, and he was, to the end of his life, known as Mr. In the Mood.
Thompson: Well, Carmen, it’s just been so great to hear these stories and for you to talk about your dad and your brother and your mother and, I just have to say it one more time. You’ve done a marvelous job on the book, and I hope everyone will go out there and get a copy of it. You can buy it here at the Oklahoma History Center in our gift shop. Are you going to be doing any, I know it came out last year, but are you going to be doing any promotion in Oklahoma over the next few months for the book, any book signings or anything?
Fields: I don’t have anything planned at the moment, but I am, building a schedule around June, which is Black Music Month. And I’m hoping that there will be some possibilities in Oklahoma. Right now, in February, with this being Black History Month, I have had several signings at Barnes & Noble stores in this region, and have a couple of Zoom book club engagements set and then a health center. Whittier Street Health Center in Roxbury, Massachusetts, has engaged me as their annual meeting speaker to talk about the Ernie Fields legacy for Black History Month. And they have purchased, I believe it’s 100 copies of the book to distribute to those who attend the annual meeting, and I’ll be available to sign those. So all of these opportunities are just very gratifying to share the Ernie Fields story.
Thompson: Well, thank you so much for your time today, and we have so enjoyed the conversation, and we wish you all the best with the continued success of the book.
Blackburn: Carmen, you take care and say hi to your brother for me, and I look forward to seeing you in Oklahoma soon.
Fields: Thank you. Thank you. God bless you both.
Thompson: Well, Bob, I said it in the interview, but I really could have listened to her talk about her father for so long, and there are so many things we didn’t even get to. We didn’t get to the fact that he was the first one to start a union for Black musicians in Tulsa. We didn’t get to the fact that he was one of the first people to integrate white artists into his band, into a Black band, so he was such a trailblazer in so many ways. And I just want to encourage everybody out there, this music that we’ve talked about, go listen to it, that here’s cut of “In the Mood” in 1959, is unlike any version of “In the Mood” you’ve ever heard, I promise.
Blackburn: Well, and too, the book, Going Back to T-Town, we want people to go out and buy that and to share in the story, and it’s not surprising to me that Carmen is a good writer as well. Of course, in her interview, she talked about her decision to go into writing rather than music, but it’s very common that musicians are also good writers. Many of the best singer-songwriters that we think of excel as writers, you know, usually in poetry form. But those skills for music and writing kind of are shared by a lot of people. And Carmen comes from a musical family, but she expressed herself very well, in the written word, and I want to thank her for taking the time to finally get this book out.
Thompson: Absolutely. And I have to say too, she talked about wanting to note all the musicians that played with her father, and one of the best contributions she’s made is in the back, a full glossary of all the musicians, and she’s put all the information she could find about them. Some, of course, she knew a lot; others she just knew a little bit, but she made sure to list them. So this is a great resource for anybody that’s doing research on the jazz or big band genre in Oklahoma.
Blackburn: And I’m proud of OU Press for publishing this. They want to build our knowledge base on Oklahoma and Oklahomans, and I think this book fits that very well.
Thompson: I agree. Well, Bob, it’s been great as always, and I look forward to talking to you again soon.
Blackburn: Thank you, Trait.
Thompson: You’ve been listening to A Very OK Podcast, hosted by Trait Thompson and Dr. Bob Blackburn. The podcast is produced by the Oklahoma Historical Society. Visit us at okhistory.org, and find us on social media by searching for @okhistory. I encourage you to purchase a membership to OHS to help us continue our mission to collect, preserve, and share Oklahoma’s unique and fascinating history.
(upbeat music playing)
