At the turn of the 20th century, the phenomenon of the Pullman Porter caught the public’s imagination. A journey on a Pullman car summoned up images of romance and adventure. In a rigidly segregated society, Pullman Porters were probably the only African-Americans that most of white society ever truly interacted with. But there is an often-overlooked contribution to 20th century jazz by these men who were neither performers, critics or promoters of the music.
For a hundred years, from the end of the Civil War until the late 1960s, the Pullman Company, which built sleeping cars for passenger railways, hired black porters to serve its overnight travelers. Those sleepy passengers were invariably well-heeled whites.
The Pullman Porters pioneered Negro labor unionizing and helped forge a black middle class. Moreover, the fight for union recognition was the basis for progress for blacks during the pre-civil rights era. The porters’ labor dispute and efforts to include blacks in more favorable positions in the war industry led to the first march on Washington.” Along the way, railroad porters played a crucial role in the spread of jazz across the continent in the 1920s and ’30s.
In his book, Rising from the Rails, longtime Boston Globe reporter Larry Tye writes: “To whites who watched him on the train or film screen, [the porter] epitomized servility. To black neighbors and friends, he personified sophistication and urbanity. He was a man of worlds they would never see or experience. And the porter did more than pass through those worlds. He helped disseminate the culture he saw and tasted to black Americans and whites in ways that writers and moviemakers seldom appreciated or reflected.
“He picked up, read and passed on newspapers and magazines that passengers left behind. He did something similar with music. In cities like Chicago and New York, the porter would buy dozens of the latest [recordings] of the sultry Bessie Smith and Mother of the Blues Ma Rainey. He resold them, often for twice the price, in communities across the South where the local department store did not stock black artists. Buyers got not just the records but their first look at revolutionary music forms like jazz.”
Porters and dining car men also got to mingle with musicians like Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, and Louis Armstrong.” Tye writes “They traveled the country on Pullman sleepers and played their pianos, clarinets, and trumpets late into the night in the club car where porters listened, learned, and passed on what they picked up. It worked in the reverse too: porters spent time in the hamlets and villages of rural America where the blues and bluegrass were born, and they recounted what they had heard when they got home to the city or talked to troubadours on the train.”
Music: From 1921, Clarence Williams with “Pullman Porter Blues.”
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