CHAPTER 1 ALONE IN THIS CITY

It was at around five o’clock on a brisk March morning back in 1948 that a grimy transcontinental Trailways bus coughed its way into Seattle’s bleak, old downtown depot at 308 Virginia Street. Among the road-weary folks disembarking there was a skinny Black teenager from the Deep South who’d been stuck riding in that bus’s back seats all the way across America. He arrived with only a chipboard suitcase and his dreams of starting a better life.

Ray Charles Robinson was a blind, seventeen-year-old music prodigy from Florida who had zero connections in this strange new town. But the kid harbored a burning desire to make his mark in the wide world of music. Back home, he’d already been a gigging member of Jacksonville’s musicians’ union but felt stifled there and chose to get far, far away by relocating to the opposite corner of the country. Stepping off that bus with no plans, the shy guy began asking strangers where he might get a room. Checking into one nearby and crashing for nearly twenty-four hours straight, he then asked the hotelkeeper where he could grab some grub.

She informed him that just about every restaurant was already closed—except for an after-hours nightclub called the Old Rocking Chair at 1301 East Yesler Way over in the Central District, where Seattle’s Black community mainly lived. And thusly did this hungry musician (who called himself “R.C.” but would soon start working simply as “Ray Charles”) bravely took the next steps on an unknowable path to his future.

“I thought that I had gone as far as I could go in Florida,” Charles would recall decades later while gigging in Seattle. “This is the real truth of the matter: I was too scared. Not afraid, scared. You have to understand there’s a big difference. See, I didn’t want to go to Chicago or New York, or places like that, that I’d heard about. ’Cause I just thought that I would be smothered. Plus, I guess I didn’t have the self-confidence one needs. But, on the other hand, I thought if I could go to a medium-sized town and start to do my own little thing, maybe I could make it. And so, I selected Seattle.”

Charles was far from the only southern newcomer to discover that the Northwest could make for an attractive home base. And what they also discovered was that it was already home to vibrant underground jazz scenes that had fermented in a few specific areas: Seattle’s notorious red-light district around South Jackson Street and the Black-oriented business strip along East Madison Street; downtown Tacoma’s Broadway Street; and the “Little Harlem” section along Williams Avenue in Northeast Portland’s Albina neighborhood.

All this setting-the-scene is directly relevant to a recounting of the rise of R&B and rock ’n’ roll music in the Northwest, because the particular musical vocabulary that would mark this region’s early rockin’ R&B traditions was inherited via the lingering local nightlife culture dating back to the Prohibition era (1916–33). Even though liquor sales had been made legal again via Repeal in late 1933, there remained an “underground” speakeasy world of illicit booze sales at various after-hours dance halls, reefer dens, and gambling joints. Partying hardy ’til the wee small hours while dancing to honking saxophones and bluesy keyboards—that’s a formula for fun that worked well way back when, and continued to fuel the action right up into the rock ’n’ roll age.

Seattle’s early jazz scene was energized by a few key players who are particularly relevant to this story—Black musicians like Oscar Holden, Frank Waldron, Robert Alexander “Bumps” Blackwell, Alexander “Frank” Roberts, and Billy Tolles—each of whom were active back in the day when working musicians all across America were artificially divided into racially segregated musicians’ unions. In Seattle those were the American Federation of Musicians Local 76 (for white folk) and Local 493 (for most everyone else).

This arrangement mainly benefitted the white players (who’d formed their union back in 1890) because it effectively divvied up the town into turf zones—and they got to dominate all the lucrative downtown gigs at the major theaters, hotel ballrooms, restaurant lounges, fancy nightclubs, and radio stations.

Overlapping with these circumstances were other factors—including the passing of laws intended to restrict both public dancing and alcohol consumption. As far back as 1881 Washington Territory legislators had—with obvious deference to the religious preferences of some citizens—passed a law intended to prohibit fighting, horse-racing and dancing on Sundays. More social-control measures would be introduced over time. In 1902, the Seattle City Council passed another anti-dance ordinance that forbade youths under the age of eighteen from attending a public dance unless accompanied by a parental chaperone. Then, 1909 brought the “Sabbath breaking” law, which expanded the 1881 ban to many other business activities as well.

In 1923, the council passed a new ordinance that defined offences and penalties related to public dancing, and established that the chief of police would appoint a “Supervisor of Dances” who would “investigate all complaints of public dance halls and dances” and see to it “that standards of decency and good taste are maintained, and that disorderly, familiar or objectionable conduct is not tolerated.” That same ordinance had also—quite conveniently for certain mainstream organizations—provided some slack for a select few. Example: while dance promoters would generally be required to hire a “matron” who would monitor their dance floor’s action and report directly to the new supervisor, an explicit exception was carved out for “dances given by responsible fraternal or labor organizations, charitable or philanthropic agencies, schools, churches, bona fide community or patriotic societies” who would, instead, just need a chaperone on site.

Even after the repeal of Prohibition in late 1933, new regulations—commonly called blue laws—still prohibited the sale of alcohol on Sundays. Further ordinances also outlawed businesses from selling mixed cocktails; forbade single women from even sitting at a bar; and restricted any customer from moving around a bar with drink in hand. In later years, additional laws would be passed in an effort to control nightlife activities—especially those of youths.

By the late 1930s, big band dance orchestras were a popular attraction, and there were numerous ballrooms where adults could attend weekly events. For the high school crowd, the options were far more limited, yet eventually “all-city” dances sponsored by various youth-oriented organizations (like the Ambassadors, Mutineers, or Phi Chi) came along featuring the sounds of white bands led by Archie Kyle, Gay Jones, Charles Center Case, Archie Nutt, and Homer Sweetman.

Meanwhile, the members of the so-called Negro’s Musicians’ Union, AFM Local 493, made do with the leftovers. Those dive taverns, restaurants, and community halls were mainly strung along two particular streets—South Jackson and East Madison—which marked the southern and northern borders of Seattle’s Central District (known locally as the CD) and had developed business strips that served the African American community.

It was along Jackson Street that a vibrant jazz scene had been fermenting since the earliest years of the twentieth century. By 1919, the jazz scene was already robust enough to attract traveling professional musicians—in particular, a band led by a Black clarinetist, Oscar Holden, who had grown up in the South playing on Nashville-based Mississippi paddle wheel riverboats with his lifelong trumpeter buddy Louis Armstrong. Backed on piano by the fabled New Orleans Creole ragtime legend Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” Morton, the combo took on a gig at the Entertainers Cabaret. Legend holds that Morton—a genuine diamond-toothed, pistol-packin’ pimp—sunk into some serious gambling debt in one of Seattle’s illicit speakeasies and hightailed it out of town. Morton wrote a jaunty rag—“Seattle Hunch”—that marked his correct instinct to flee the area, which he later recorded for Victor Records.

Oscar Holden, on the other hand, settled here and eventually joined AFM Local 493, formed his own band, and made a good living gigging at numerous venues, including Russell “Noodles” Smith’s Black and Tan club and the nearby Old Rocking Chair. In 1929, Holden, who also played piano, married a piano-playing Yakima girl, Leala Carr, and they founded a musical dynasty by bearing five children (Oscar Jr., Grace, Dave, Ron, and Jimmy)—who would each go on to contribute to Seattle’s jazz and rockin’ R&B scenes.

Initially the Holden family lived at Twenty-Sixth Avenue and East Madison Street, then at Twenty-Fourth and East Madison, and finally in a large house at 1409 East Fir Street, which over the decades would become a genuine center of musical activity in the ’hood. It was also conveniently located directly across the street from the Washington Hall, a hub of Seattle’s growing Black community, where the Oscar Holden Quintet opened shows for the likes of Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway, Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne, and Duke Ellington.

By the 1930s and ’40s, South Jackson Street was the home to dozens of jazzy taverns and nightclubs, while up on East Madison Street additional taverns, pool halls, and dance halls also became particularly important to Seattle’s nightlife scene. One of the key characters on East Madison was an ambitious and winsome Black businessman named Robert “Bumps” Blackwell, a Seattle-born, Garfield High School grad who also studied at both the University of Washington and Cornish School of the Arts.

Blackwell first gained local notoriety while leading Bumps’ Rhythm Maniacs back in 1935. Blackwell—who played a bit of piano, trumpet, and vibraphone—later led his own popular society dance “orchestra,” an ensemble that sometimes included Oscar or Leala Holden or both—and that got so popular they became the first Black band to start getting hired to play for various white, elite organizations like the Seattle Yacht Club and the Seattle Tennis Club.

Blackwell also always had endless side hustles: in addition to working as a draftsman at the Boeing Company on his off nights, he also ran, at various times, a taxicab company, a jewelry business, plus, with his brother Charlie Blackwell, a butcher shop at 2302 East Madison Street. Directly upstairs from the butcher shop was the Washington Social and Educational Club and across the street were the Mardi Gras Grill at 2047 East Madison—a restaurant-lounge that had been in business since the 1930s—and the legendary Savoy Ballroom. ⋆