Who was Jack the Bear?

Re: Duke Ellington’s “Jack the Bear”: where did that title come from?

John S. Wright identifies Jack the Bear as a name in a ritualized Black American exchange of greetings of the 1930s and ’40s: “How are you?” “Like Jack-the-Bear: just ain’t nowhere.” “Call me Jack-the-Bear, for I am in a state of hibernation,” says the narrator of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.

Mark Tucker writes that “the real Jack the Bear was a Harlem bass player who, as reed-player Garvin Bushell recently [c. 1986] recalled, had a tailor shop at the corner of St. Nicholas and Edgecombe Avenues.” Jack the Bear has also been identified as a pianist. Perhaps he played both instruments.

The tax photographs in the NYC Municipal Archives Collections show no tailor shop at the corner of Saint Nicholas and Edgecombe, but one block over, at the corner of Edgecombe and 141st Street, a tailor was at work:

[131 Edgecombe Avenue, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

If you squint a bit, you can make out the TAILORS signage.


Steven C. Tracy identifies the musician, bassist or pianist, as one John Wilson. Tracy doesn’t identify him as a tailor. The 1940 Manhattan telephone directory lists a John W. Wilson residing at 281 Edgecombe. Ellington lived for many years at 381 Edgecombe.

Was John W. Wilson the tailor at 131 Edgecombe? Was that tailor Jack the Bear? Did Ellington ever make use of his services? I’ll never know.

Related reading
All OCA Ellington posts (Pinboard)

Sources
Stephen C. Tracy, “A Delicate Ear, a Retentive Memory, and the Power to Weld the Fragments,” in A Historical Guide to Ralph Ellison, ed. Tracy (Oxford University Press, 2004).

Mark Tucker, liner notes to Duke Ellington, The Blanton-Webster Band (RCA, 1986).

John S. Wright, “The Conscious Hero and the Rites of Man: Ellison’s War,” in Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man”: A Casebook, ed. John F. Callahan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).