IMM Article

We include several articles here that nicely sum up the life of Jack Teagarden.

First is a delightful biographic sketch of Jack Teagarden written for the January, 1960 issue of International Musician Magazine. We follow it with an insightful article written September, 1960 for Connchord Magazine. Next, a poignant obituary written by columnist Tony Weitzel for the Chicago Daily News, January 17, 1964. Finally, a straight forward look at Jack’s life as seen by The Handbook of Texas Online.

FROM INTERNATIONAL MUSICIAN MAGAZINE

January, 1960 

Among the many landmarks of the jazz scene is one that seems destined to last forever.

It’s the trombone artistry of Jack Teagarden. An honest kind of artistry, Teagardens tromboning is generally credited with having advanced the instrument to the high level of technical achievement it enjoys among today’s modern musicians, and, at the same time, has stated a case for the lyrical quality in jazz for the nearly forty years he has been playing professionally.

Although he once sang a blues line that testified he was born in Texas and raised in Tennessee. Weldon Leo Teagarden was born in Texas and raised in Oklahoma. His birthplace was Vernon, Texas, and the date was August 20, 1905. While still in his childhood he moved to Oklahoma. His mother gave him early piano lessons, and his father, a bit of a musician himself, presented Jack with a trombone on his seventh Christmas.

His brothers, Trumpeter Charlie and drummer Clois, have played on stand with him, off and on during the decades Jack has been blowing jazz. Jack spent considerable time as a youth listening to the music and the hymn singing at Negro religious meetings. Out of this, it’s surmised, he drew his earliest feeling for the blues.

He joined the Peck Kelly band in 1921, when he was sixteen years old, and hasn’t been off the scene since. He has played with Paul Whiteman’s big band, Benny Goodman’s recording groups, Louis Armstrong’s All Stars, Ben Pollock’s band, countless groups and orchestras, many of them under his own leadership. These days, he leads his own combo, one he has traveled successfully with to the Far East for the U.S. State Department.

Of this venture, nothing but praise—-both musical and personal—-rang from every port of the band’s call. The trip covered a grueling eighteen weeks and as many countries. It was studded with many highlights. For instance, Jack and crew jammed with the King of Cambodia who as clarinetist had jammed with his idol, Benny Goodman, when Benny had toured that area few years earlier.

Also Teagarden tuned the two available pianos in the remote city of Kabul, Afghanistan, where most of the populace had never seen brass musical instruments before.

Playing under adverse conditions of weather and health. Teagarden became ill in Japan, and returned after the tour a very weak and very sick man. He played the last six weeks of the tour with a serious hernia, but refused to undergo surgery until the commitments had been filled and all his dates had been played. He went, it appears, to superhuman lengths to live up to what he has stated to nearly interviewer: “I try to play what people like.” Generally, what people seem to like is Teagarden.

He has a disposition as easy-going as the languid phrases he blows so often, and as sunny as the warm grin which cracks his face into scores of merry wrinkles. His is an open face, with character, rather than age or weariness or boredom etched into it. His voice is midway between a heavy drawl and an outright yawn. His singing is wry and gutty, and, again, has a naturally lazy sound.

But throughout his long career Jack has been anything but lazy. It is well known, that he was rarely content to let his night’s work end when the band trouped off the stand, but would always be ready for some after-hour sessions. During the recent Playboy Jazz Festival in Chicago, Teagarden and his gang came into town a couple of days early to help out on promotion for the event (by appearing on TV shows, radio interviews, and even a race track where he blew the call to the post), and to spend some time with many of his old friends who were playing in Chicago’s jazz spots, music his element.

Needless to add, the time Jack and his friends spent together was quite often on stand. Teagarden seems strangely uncomfortable without his trombone in hand and at least a rhythm section nearby to back him up.

There have been times when Teagarden didn’t need a rhythm section. One such occasion was recounted by Jimmy McPartland in Hear Me Talkin’ to Ya, a book telling the story of jazz in the words of the musicians who live it.

“I was having a couple of drinks With Bud Freeman and Pee Wee Russell one evening Pee Wee began talking about a trombone player, the greatest thing he had heard in this life.
“We said we would like to hear the guy, and Pee Wee said, right, let’s just pop over and get him. Two drinks later, Pee Wee was back with the guy, who was wearing a horrible looking cap and overcoat and carrying a trombone case under his arm.

“Pee Wee introduced us. He was Jack Teagarden, from Texas, and looked it. “Fine,’ we said. ‘We’ve been hearing a lot about you. Would sure like to hear you play.’Solo Stuff“The guy says, ‘All right,” gets his horn out, puts it together and blows couple of warm-up notes and starts to play Diane. No accompanist, just neat. He played it solo, and I’m telling you he knocked us out. He really blew it. And when he’d done with that, he started on the blues, still by himself. We had to agree with Pee Wee, we’d never heard anyone play trombone like that. We were flabbergasted.”

Jack’s fluency on the trombone has continued to amaze everyone. Jazz critic Martin Williams recently flipped in print over a solo passage Teagarden played on a concert recording made well over ten years ago. While shaking his head in amazement at the creative prowess of the trombonist, Williams also delineated some of the man’s superb talent. It’s the closest thing in print to hearing Teagarden play.

“But perhaps the best introduction to Teagarden at his most brilliantly melodic, “ Williams wrote, “Is a solo on Pennies from Heaven that he played with Louis Armstrong at a concert at New York’s Town Hall (RCA Victor, LPM 1443). The tune is one that we all know well (which is a help, of course, and one that Teagarden assumes), and, for his part of the performance, Jack gets just the first half of the length of tune, right after Armstrong’s vocal course. Therefore he has to take something shorter than the original, and make it complete in itself — yet not so final that what follows his solo will sound like padding. On the spot, Teagarden invents a beautiful, original melody, with some brief references to the familiar tune, but one that is very superior to it in almost every way. It is also unlike the original since it is complete in itself and not an uncompleted ‘half’ of something. It is a beautiful thing, and I think that anyone who responds to melody can listen to it and understand its beauty and its orginality.

“It is for that kind of lyric and melodic beauty that we should listen to Jack Teagarden, because such are the standards he has set for himself.”
It is difficult to realize that Teagarden is, after all, largely a self-taught musician. His formal train- ing has been acquired on the job. His creative instinct is unerring, rhythmically and harmonic- ally, and is creatively superb.

The author’s favorite Teagarden chorus (and everyone who professes a liking for jazz must have at least one favorite Teagarden chorus) is the one Jack plays on Jack Hits the Road, recorded for Columbia some twenty years ago, In it, Teagarden neatly demonstrates the things to come on his instrument. It’s a relatively simple blues chorus, but is constructed nimbly and, for the time, is pretty far out. The ease with which Jack pumps out the smooth overall line of the chorus as well as the occasional disagreeing spurts of melody, is still a revelation in the art trombone playing.

Although playing his horn and leading his group occupy most of Teagarden’s waking hours, he manages to find time for his family — wife Addie and his son Joe — and for his puttering and tinkering. He has a natural way with anything mechanical and spends a lot of time plying his tools in his home workshop. It’s a rare day when he opens his trombone case and hauls out his horn without moving a book or two on electronics or some phase of mechanics out of the way first.

Teagarden has appeared in movies, has sung on the air and on TV, and has recorded actually thousands of sides. Among the many tunes which are his are Basin Street Blues (he and Glenn Miller combines on the lyrics of the now-famous blues, although neither is credited on the sheet music), Stars Fell on Alabama, Pennies From Heaven, Rockin’ Chair, and I’ve Got a Right to Sing the Blues. They belong to him not because he had a hand in writing them (he didn’t) but because he pops in mind as the singer whenever these tunes are brought to mind.

When Jack was in Cambodia, the jazz-loving, clarinet-playing king of that country presented the trombonist with a medal for meritorious service to the arts.

Although has received no medals in this country yet; he has achieved a place of distinction in jazz shared by very few other musicians. It is in the favor of jazz fans of all schools. Jazz fans are noted for their fanatical devotion to one jazz movement to the exclusion of all others. Only the very rare exceptions are universal favorites among fans of all schools. Teagarden is one of them. That alone is well worth a chest full of medals.

In addition, he has won legions of musicians as fans, not only because of his playing but also because of his untiring battle against the percent tax, which has kept him from singing at many club engagements in the last decade. He places placards, printed at his own expense, on tables wherever he appears as a player but not a singer. The placards urge patrons to write their con gressman protesting the tax which has hurt the means of livelihood of many musicians and entertainers.

“The tax is murder,” he says. “It isn’t only that I like to sing, but people come to the stand, wanting me to sing, but people come to the stand, wanting me to sing particular tunes. It keeps me busy explaining why I can’t.”

There’s a sentimental streak in Teagarden that immediately warms an audience, whether it is made apparent in a song or a gracious act onstage, or even an introduction.

At the Playboy Jazz Festival, Jack introduced the trumpet player in his group, a fine young musician, Don Goldie, and recalled to the huge audience that Goldie’s father had played in a Teagarden band many years ago. As he spoke about the elder Goldie, there was a genuine catch in his throat. And when he placed his arm around the younger Goldie’s shoulder, there was genuine affection in the embrace.

He’s that kind of person … genuine—-and unashamedly sentimental. It comes through in his playing and his singing and the way he lives.

He wouldn’t be Jack Teagarden if it came out any other way.

A Connchord Profil

The world of jazz, like any part of show business, suffers as much from public fickleness as does, say, the bumbling lyrics of a Presley or Fabian (although one approaches art, the other embraces the soul of rock’n roll). The fact that jazz personalities share with Broadway, Hollywood, etc., a dependence upon the momentary enchantment of mass-minded America is an irony in itself, although perhaps one of the lesser ironies. It is too often for the jazz musician a case of a quick fling before the footlights, then oblivion.

There is a select inner circle whose musicianship has defied the censorship of shifting fashions, and through a spe­cial sort of genius created for themselves a vast, impressive symbol synonymous with their name and art.
Such a man is Jack Teagarden, in the New Orleans vanguard when Dixieland was in its heyday, and after thirty years still its most enthusiastic and gifted exponent.

The fact that the 56-year-old singer-musician has survived the chameleon-like disposition of the public is largely due to the tremendous impact of his personality—strong-jawed, smiling, and graciously charming. Yet much as people like the easy-going “Big T,” they like even more the music that, hour after hour, pours languid, unaffected, strangely absorbed, and—sometimes—lonesome and full of plain earthy sadness, into a thousand city nights.. . tunes that jubilant or oppressive come straight out of the hot, sullen blues country and have their source in the earliest days of Teagarden’s youth.

Blues-flavored Youth

Although gifted with an amazing technical virtuosity, the curiously mixed scale of feeling Teagarden draws from his horn has its origin in this childhood heritage. Born in Texas, raised in Oklahoma, Teagarden grew up in a world richly colored with Negro folk songs and hymns. Later, searching for style and a kind of watering spa for his ideas, he drew from the blues a source of depth that makes his brand of Dixieland distinctive…and clearly divided from any other.

He had been playing baritone and trombone for nine years in his school band when at age 16 he walked into the club where Peck Kelley, the pianist, was rehearsing his band. The musicians thought he was some kind of gag. Tall, gangling, his horn wrapped in newspaper, Teagarden asked for an audition. What he did that day with a trombone became part of the living legend of Teagarden, a feat that replaced the amused smiles with a deep respect that has been felt since by nearly every jazz buff who ever heard Teagarden jamming his special kind of music.

Joins Satchmo

Yet, despite his technical facility and a near phenomenal originality that marks his improvisations, Jack Teagarden’s life was, up until 1947 when he joined Louis Armstrong, a great deal short of ideal. Like many jazzmen of the last era, his ups and downs were of the extreme kind, and success, both financial and popular, was all too often the unwilling bedfellow of failure. After Kelley, with whom he played from 1921 to 1922, others followed, among them Red Nichols, Paul Whiteman, and finally in mid-’47 Louis Armstrong when together the two traded choruses and vocals for four years across the mikes of countless American nightclubs from Frisco to The Big Apple.

Many critics believe that Teagarden’s best years were over when he left Armstrong in 1951 to form his own group.

The siege of troubled years—the mid-thirties through the late forties—Teagarden spent as an itinerant jazzman, reckless, unsettled, always on the look­out for a place to blow his horn. Then in ‘47 when he joined Armstrong, Teagarden stepped up as top-ranking sideman, second only to the fabled Satchmo…and more important able for the first time in his haphazard career to play the music that has made his name legendary in jazz annals. When in 1951 he left Armstrong and with his wife Addie, who became business manager, formed the sextet, he had settled into the life of a responsible jazz musician and family man with Addie and Joe Teagarden, his newborn son.

One of the surest signs of this newfound responsibility (or perhaps only a reinstated dignity) was Teagarden’s tour of the Orient, under the auspices of the U. S. State Department. With his sextet, he covered a circuit extending from Hong Kong to Okinawa with concerts in Bombay, Colombo (Ceylon), Tokyo, and Karachi (Pakistan). As one columnist put it, his visit “was worth ten diplomats.” From a down-on-his-luck jazzman to senior statesman and musician extraordinary, Teagarden has come up the hard way to stand as one of the truly permanent figures in American jazz.

Obituary

Tony Weitzel, Chicago Daily News, January 17, 1964

First time I ever heard Jack Teagarden blow that big sliphorn was like maybe
1936. The world was full of sitdown strikes and big depression and govern- ment alphabet soup. And Jack was blowing his big horn around a shattered segment of the old Keith vaudeville circuit.

He had 14 side men in his band and the band fronted a stage show you could get in to see for 85 cents if you had 85 cents, which not many people did.

As I said, the big depression was on, and I had just wangled a cozy WPA job for the best cymbalom player I ever heard. I tried to get him on the WPA symphony where he deserved to be but the stinking little bureaucrat who directed the symphony refused to recognize the cymbalom as a civilized instrument.

So my Hungarian friend went on the book-binding project but he toted his cymbalom along and the book bindery became the most melodious WPA project that never got off the ground.

My cymbalom player was truly a fine artist but he did not protest his ignoble reduction to book binding. His former wife had taken all the spirit out of him when she sued for divorce and got custody of the restaurant which supported him and his cymbalom.

But the cymbalom chap did manage to pick the books he wanted to bind, and the first tome he put back into reading condition was a treatise on the sliphorn. He stole this from the WPA and presented it to me as a token of fealty and I took it backstage at the Palace and gave it to Jack Teagarden.

Jack said,” Meet me after the last show in the cafe next door and we will go see the town.” So I sat around until Jack and the boys earned their money and along about 11:15p.m. the tootler from Texas strode in.

We had one drink and Jack dumped that one down his throat before the bartender could reach for the soda. Jack said,” Let’s get out of here. I gotta keep moving.”

So we grabbed a taxi and rode over to a shoddy little cabaret. And Jack had another drink which he poured down pronto. Let’s go,” he urged. “I got to keep moving.”

Finally, in the sixth successive joint, I demurred. “What’s the big rush? The Scotch is the same in all these places.”

Jack sighed, “You don’t understand. I promised my wife a mink coat six months ago, before I hit the road. Tonight she blew into town and she is gonna haunt me until I come up with a mink!”

I said,” Jack, nobody could catch up to us now. We have been all over this silly town. Relax.”

So Jack sat back and ordered a second drink. And what do you know? He was just downing the dregs of it when the door of the dive opened and in burst a very cute little blond. Jack took one look and busted out the back door. The little blond trudged wearily over to the table and sat down.

I said, “Mrs. Teagarden?” She nodded. I asked, “Do your really want a fur coat that much?”

She stared and then she laughed bitterly. “I don’t want a coat,” she wailed. “I love that big lug and I just want him to save some of his money!”

Well, I took her back to Jack’s hotel and I have never, come to think of it, seen the lady since. I have run into Jack from time to time, because he never did stop blowing that big sliphorn and he never did stop going to night clubs.

Being a friend and not a snoop I never dug into Jack’s personal affairs so I do not know whether he stayed married very long to that cute little blond girl or not.

What mattered was that Hack was a guy dedicated to the sound a hard-lipped genius can get out of a sliphorn. To a guy like Jack, I suspect that was more important than almost anything else in the world.

And beyond that, Jack had been a loner ever since he blew the scene down Texas way at 15 and went out to try the taste of the world.

He was a nervous guy, never quite comfortable sitting down or standing still. I asked him a couple of years ago when he was playing in Chicago if he ever felt really peaceful.

Jack said, “When I blow a big noise out of that old horn, then I feel peaceful. I guess that’s the only time.”

Wednesday they found Jack in a New Orleans hotel room, cold and dead. He was 58, the wire story said, and he had run up a lot of mileage since the year he left Texas at 15.

Eddie Shields, the circulation driver who writes songs, phoned the minute he read about Jack. He said back in May of 1939 he was driving home from NBC after plugging a song he wrote, “You Know, Just As Well As I Know.”

And as he drove along another car hit him from the rear. Eddie got out, mad as a hornet, and the other driver said he was Jack Teagarden and he was sorry and how could he make things okay?

Eddie said, “Why don’t you record my song?” And that’s what Teagarden did. The song earned $22,000, Eddie swears, and Jack wouldn’t take a dime.

Come to think of it, that sounds like Jack. I’m sorry He’s gone. And wherever he is now, I hope the guy from Texas has a big sliphorn to make that noise that brings him peace.

Handbook of Texas Onlin

TEAGARDEN, WELDON LEO (1905-1964).

Weldon Leo (Jack) Teagarden, jazz musician, known also as Jackson T., Mr. T, and Big Gate, was born in Vernon, Texas, on August 20, 1905, to Charles and Helen (Geinger) Teagarden. His father, an amateur comet player, worked in the oilfields, and his mother was a local piano instructor and church organist. All four Teagarden children became prominent musicians.

Jack was given piano lessons when he reached the age of five. He took up the baritone horn for a time but switched to trombone when he was seven. He and his mother played duets (trombone and piano) as background to the silent films at a Vemon theater. In 1918, after his father’s death, the family moved to Chappell, Nebraska, where he and his mother again worked in the local theater. The following year the family moved to Oklahoma City.

At sixteen Teagarden first played the trombone professionally, at a concert near San Antonio as a member of Cotton Bailey’s dance and jazz band. Later the same year (1921) Teagarden joined Peck Kelley’s Bad Boys in Houston. Visiting band leader Paul Whiteman heard the group there and offered Teagarden a position in his New York orchestra. For several years, however, Jack continued to play with local groups.

About 1923 he briefly attempted to enter the oilfield business in Wichita Falls but soon gave up the venture and returned to music. Teagarden made his first trip to New York in 1926 as a performer on the eastern tour of Doc Ross’s Jazz Bandits. The next year he went to New York on his own. He originally planned to join Whiteman’s ensemble but happened to hear Ben Pollack’s band first. After two months with the Tommy Gott Orchestra Teagarden secured a position in Pollack’s organization, where he beat Glenn Miller for the seat of first trombone. He made his first recording in 1927 as a member of the Kentucky Grasshoppers, an offshoot of Pollack’s group. Teagarden later recorded with many of America’s jazz greats including Red Nichols, Benny Goodman, and Louis Armstrong. He performed with Eddie Condon, Bix BeideIbecke, Paul Whiteman, the Dorsey brothers, Bob Crosby, Eddie Lang, Peck Kelley, and others.

He was considered by many to be the greatest jazz trombonist of his era, but his style was so unusual that others did not follow his example. In 1933, after a brief stint in Mal Hallett’s band, he signed on with Paul Whiteman’s orchestra for five years. In 1939 Teagarden formed his own band; it was musically innovative but not financially successful and was disbanded in 1947. He teamed up with Louis Armstrong’s All-Stars for some classic recordings in the late 1940s and formed the Jack Teagarden All Stars Dixieland band in 1951. The All Stars toured Europe and Asia in 1957-59 as part of a government-sponsored goodwill tour.

Jack Teagarden’s playing style was lyrical and seemingly effortless. He did not follow the traditional Dixieland “tailgate” treatment of his instrument. Upper register solos, the lack of a strict solo beat, and the use of lip trills were some of his characteristics. Having grown up in an area with a large black population, Teagarden developed an early appreciation of black music, especially the blues and gospel He was one of the first jazz musicians to incorporate “blue notes” into his playing. He was also among the first white jazz musicians to record with black players.

Teagarden was also an excellent singer and developed a respected blues vocal style. In addition, he was an inventor, redesigning mouthpieces, mutes, and watervalves and inventing a new musical slide rule. He also started using Pond’s Cold Cream and Pam Cooking lubricant on his trombone. something many trombonists emulated.

Teagarden appeared in the movies Birth of the Blues (1941), The Glass Wall (1953), and Jazz on a Summer’s Day (1959). He was an admired recording artist, featured on RCA Victor, Columbia, Decca, Capitol, and MGM discs. As a jazz artist he won the 1944 Esquire magazine Gold Award, was highly rated in the Metronome polls of 1937-42 and 1945, and was selected for the Playboy magazine All Star Band, 1957-60.

Teagarden was the featured perfomer at the Newport Jazz Festival of 1957. Saturday Review wrote in 1964 that he “walked with artistic dignity all his life,” and the same year Newsweek praised his “mature approach to trombone jazz.”

Teagarden was married first to Ora Binyon in San Angelo, Texas, in 1923; they had two sons before they were divorced. In the 1930s he was married to and divorced from, successively, Clare Manzi of New York City and Edna “Billie” Coats. Teagarden married Adeline Barriere Gault in September 1942; they had three children of their own and one foster child.

Early in 1964 Teagarden cut short a performance in New Orleans because of ill health. He briefly visited a hospital then was found dead in his room at the Prince Monti Motel in New Orleans on January 15. The cause of death was bronchial pneumonia, which had followed a liver ailment. He was buried in Los Angeles.

Her Cup of Tea

Courtesy of the Miami Herald

by Sue Reisinger

The Fort Lauderdale daughter of jazz trombonist Jack Teagarden recreates the glory days of jazz in the life story or her legendary father.

BEEN THERE

Fort Lauderdale civic activist Vernajean Atwell, stepdaughter of noted trombonist Jack Teagarden plays with her adopted dogs.  Atwell participated in a documentary of Teagarden’s life and plans to create a Web site and write a book about him.

The film clip is all too brief: Louis Armstrong on trumpet and Jack Teagarden on trombone, in a dueling-banjos-style duet. Only this is no duel. With their eyes, their movements, their notes, each inspires the other to sound new depths, to scale new heights.

The two musical geniuses, whose mutual admiration knew no bounds, play those horns united in soul and sound. The listener knows she is in the presence of something rare and wondrous and magical – two spirits soaring to the beat of one drummer, a drummer no one else can hear.

Such memories are the stuff that Jack Teagarden’s daughter dreams of saving. Fort Lauderdale civic activist Vernajean Atwell already took part in making this documentary of her father’s life.  Now she wants to create a Web site and write a book about him, before all those who knew him and heard him play are gone.

Teagarden’s life story frames the history of the jazz movement in America, rising through the ’20s and ’30s, struggling through World War II, and nearly drowned out by the screaming birth of rock and roll in the ’50s.

His story also epitomizes how music drilled through the racial barriers of the ’40s and ’50s, setting the tone for America’s integration movement.

In what the documentary calls “one of the most important jazz recordings ever made,” Teagarden and Armstrong ignored the advice of friends in 1929 and joined together to make Knockin’ A Jug. It is believed to be the first recording of a racially mixed band in U.S. history.

SWING SESSION

Trombonist Jack Teagarden, right, records with Louis Armstrong, left, in 1948.

In segregated America, their friends feared it would damage the two men’s careers. But their music, and their lifelong friendship, rose above the bigotry.

Few people realize that Teagarden, known as “Tea” or simply “T,” lived his last years in South Florida. His widow, Addie, a pioneer woman aviator and big band manager, eventually moved from Broward to South Dade, and then back to Fort Lauderdale, where she lived with Atwell until she died penniless in 1997.

Atwell and her younger brother, Joe, have hired an attorney to try to claim the rights to, and royalties from, all the “dozens and dozens of recordings” of their father, plus recorded radio broadcasts and six films he made. Among his most famous recordings are The Sheik of Araby, Stars Fell on Alabama and Basin Street Blues.

While the legal issues are being sorted, the documentary, called Time for T, has been shown only at jazz festivals and has not been released to the public.

T FOR TOP TROMBONIST

He was born Weldon Leo Teagarden in 1905 in the small town of Vernon, Texas. He is generally considered the greatest jazz trombonist ever. The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, for one, calls him “the finest of all jazz trombonists.”

According to various biographies, as a boy he spent hours engrossed in the black spirituals sung at a neighborhood church, and his music would he greatly influenced by them.

His mother was a piano teacher, and Teagarden began playing piano by the age of 5, the baritone horn by 7, and the trombone by 10.  His father played trumpet, as did brother Charlie, while brother Clois played drums, and sister Norma played piano.  At various times in teagarden’s career, his siblings played in the same band.

By 14, Teagarden was playing professionally.  Drummer Cotton Bailey gave him the nickname “Jack” when he was 15 or 16 because Bailey didn’t think “Weldon” was suitable to a musician, and it stuck.  In the early ’20s, Teagarden joined the legendary Peck Kelly Band, Peck’s Bad Boys, in Texas.

Teagarden, quite a ladies man, married the first of four wives, and wrote to her prophetically from the road:  “I have been drinking a terrible lot but I am going to quit.”

Two sons from his marriage, Jack Jr. and Gilbert became musicians.  Both have since died.

Teagarden also had a remarkable voice. He sang like he played, one observer said, in a smooth, sleepy Texas drawl.

By the time Teagarden landed jobs in New York, in the mid ’20s, his reputation had preceded him. Ben Pollack invited him to join his orchestra in 1928, and that year Teagarden recorded the first of what would be scores of records, Just Roll Along. Always an innovator, Teagarden made history by removing the body of his horn and, using only his slide and mouthpiece, “played” an empty water glass stuck on the end of the tubing.

In New York, Teagarden became enthralled by Harlem’s black nightclubs, where he was often invited to join late-night jam sessions.

In a voice segment spliced into the documentary, Teagarden says black bandleader Fletcher Henderson and musician Fats Waller befriended him in New York, and “took me places I don’t think any other white boy had ever been.”

WINDFALL FROM MUSIC

From there his career soared. While America struggled through the depression, Teagarden gained financial success by joining the Paul Whiteman band in 1933. The band featured Teagarden on trombone, brother Charlie on trumpet and Frank Trumbauer on sax as “The Three T’s.”

Teagarden divorced and married his second wife, and this marriage lasted three years before he divorced and married his third, a hotel phone operator.

In 1938 he left Whiteman’s band to form his own. He led one of the longest-lasting big bands, from 1939 to 1946, but his generosity, poor business judgment and the war combined to close it down.

In 1941, while at the St. Louis airport, he met and fell in love with a pioneer woman pilot. He and Adeline or “Addie,” became engaged before he was divorced, and she would eventually become his forth and final wife.

Though Vernajean Atwell was a toddler at the time and Teagarden is actually her stepfather, “my earliest memories are of him taking care of me. He is the only father I ever knew, I adored him.”

Her favorite times were early morning coffees when only she and her dad were up. Though he was extremely shy, he talked freely with her. Musician Barney Bigard once told her, “You were the only  person he could ever talk to.”

Bigard, from his book on Teagarden: “He drank a lot, practically all the time in fact, but he always could play and never showed that liquor … He was a quite man.   A real wonderful guy to be around, but when he played his horn, he really played it.”

Traveling with Teagarden’s band, with her mother as band manager, Atwell remembers 21 straight days of one-night stands, playing in three states in one week, driving as much as 300 miles to play the next night’s engagement.

After Teagarden’s band failed, Bing Crosby brought him back to New York, and he eventually joined Louis Armstrong’s All-Stars in 1946-47 as a featured soloist. In 1949, the All-Stars traveled to Europe, where they did 65 concerts in 35 days.

Teagarden became the first white musician to travel on the road with an all-black band. Trains, hotels and restaurants often refused them service unless they split up.

Atwell was only a child then, traveling with the band when she could. “It was the first time I became aware of segregation,” she says. “Louis Armstrong and his band were my second family. And they had a rule: if one side couldn’t eat, then the other side didn’t eat.”

She remembers one incident “It must have been around 1949 or ’50 and the band was playing in Las Vegas. Mom and I sat down at a table, and when the hand was finished with their set, Dad came down and sat with us. But my friends in the band didn’t come over and say hello. They walked offstage and into the kitchen.

“Well, I was hurt. And Mom had to explain to me that they weren’t allowed in the room because they were black.  I was outraged. I went to the kitchen to say hello. I wanted to know how all those people could come to see this wonderful talent and then not want to sit in the same room with them.”

Atwell wishes she had paid closer attention to those around her. “All these guys were just my father’s friends,” she says now. “All these guys” include legendary musicians like Bigard, Earl Hines, Bing and Bob Crosby, the Dorsey brothers, and even Walt Disney, who shared Teagarden’s lifelong love of steam engines and model railroads.

CONTINUING SAGA

During the ’50s, Teagarden tried to stop drinking, and he left Armstrong’s band to save his health and his marriage. He and Addie settled in California, and he formed a small band again.

In 1961 he and Addie bought a house on the Intracoastal Waterway in Pompano Beach, where they lived with son, Joe.  Atwell, divorced and mother of four children, moved from California to join them.

She became a fighter for integration in Broward in the ’60s, and active in civic affairs. She also worked with disadvantaged youth.

More recently, she founded the Progressive International Civic Association, which lowered the crime rate in her inner-city neighborhood by 40 percent in two years. The secret, she says, was “a lot of yelling and marching” and to get the neighborhood’s youth involved.  “Sometimes there would be more teens at the meetings than older people.”

An insurance agent and former Doberman breeder for 30 years, Atwell now trains abused dogs.

Her latest rescue efforts are Troy, a Rottweiler, and Laroux, a red Dobie.

Recalling the ’60s, she says her father eventually began drinking again. His health grew worse and he suffered recurring bouts of flu and pneumonia. He tried to avoid long road trips, mostly playing clubs in Miami Beach and Fort Lauderdale.

In 1964, while playing the Dream Room in New Orleans, he succumbed to pneumonia, brought on by a lifetime of too much booze, too many cigarettes and too many one-night stands.  He died in a motel room only hours after playing his last set from a chair because he was too weak to stand.

Atwell says she learned of her father’s death over her car radio; her mother heard it from a reporter.  Atwell has never forgiven the media for that.

Louis Armstrong, himself in poor health, was so grief-stricken at Teagarden’s death, Atwell says, that his doctors forced him to bed and wouldn’t allow him to attend the funeral.

Teagarden was buried in California.  Four trombones wailed their lament at the funeral.

His tombstone reads simply,  “Where there is hatred, let me sow love”

Courtesy of the Miami Herald, e-mail: sreisinger@herald.com
Photo by Emily Michot / Herald Staff