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).

On Duke Ellington’s birthday

Edward Kennedy Ellington was born on April 29, 1899.

I bought my first Ellington record in 1973 or ’74: This One’s for Blanton, piano-bass duets with Ray Brown. I bought my second Ellington record not long after: At His Very Best, an RCA compilation. The great 1940 recording “Jack the Bear” — side one, track one — was my introduction to the Ellington band.

Here is the best version of that recording that I can find on YouTube (it’s unembeddable). The players: Duke Ellington, piano, composition; Wallace Jones, Cootie Williams, trumpets; Rex Stewart, cornet; Joe “Tricky Sam” Nanton, Lawrence Brown, trombones; Juan Tizol, valve trombone; Barney Bigard, Otto Hardwick, Johnny Hodges, Ben Webster, Harry Carney, reeds; Fred Guy, guitar; Jimmy Blanton, bass; Sonny Greer, drums. Recorded in Chicago, March 6, 1940. The arrangment is by Ellington and Billy Strayhorn. The soloists are Blanton, Ellington, Bigard, Williams, Bigard, Carney, Nanton, Blanton.

I’ll invoke Emerson: “perpetual modernness is the measure of merit in every work of art.” “Jack the Bear” will never be out of date.

Related reading
All OCA Ellington posts (Pinboard)

Slipshod logic

“This would not be the first time in the pandemic that unwarranted assumptions about human behavior have obstructed an effective response to Covid”: in The New York Times, Zeynep Tufekci writes about the slipshod logic behind delays in authorizing vaccines for children and other instances of slipshod logic in the management of COVID-19.

Dictation failure

[Dictating a text.]

“I just mowed the whole lawn”

I just move the whole lawn

“Mowed exclamation point mowed exclamation point”

Mode! Mode!

Other dictation failures
Boogie-woogie : A concluding truck for belated pubs : Derrida : Edifice and Courson Blatz : Wrath scholar

Not lonely, not a bird

Derek Warren, twenty-nine, ploughman:

Ronald Blythe, Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village (1969).

Also from Akenfield
Davie’s hand : Rubbish : “Just ‘music’” : “Caught in the old ways” : “The blue rode well in the corn” : “I began in a world without time”

“I began in a world without time”

Horry Rose, sixty-one, saddler:

Ronald Blythe, Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village (1969).

Also from Akenfield
Davie’s hand : Rubbish : “Just ‘music’” : “Caught in the old ways” : “The blue rode well in the corn”

Days

Betty Horak (Beverly Michaels) is being sarcastic. From Pickup (dir. Hugo Haas, 1951):

“Oh boy, another one of those exciting days.”

I’d counter with words from the OCA sidebar, from Harvey Pekar’s story “Alice Quinn”:

Every day is a new deal.

Salinger in Ohio

[Click either image for bigger news.]

I never thought I’d see more than one of these headlines. They’re real, and may be found here and here, at least until there’s a correction. But I don’t think a correction is coming.

QAnon fans take note: J.D. Salinger, too, is alive.

Related reading
All OCA Salinger posts (Pinboard)

Birx’s merch

Dr. Deborah Birx has a makeover and a book. As she makes the rounds of “the shows,” bear in mind what she said in March 2020. You already know who “he” is:

“He’s been so attentive to the scientific literature and the details and the data. And I think his ability to analyze and integrate data that comes out of his long history in business has really been a real benefit during these discussions about medical issues. Because in the end, data is data, and he understands the importance of the granularity.”

I called it intellectual prostration back then. It renders irrelevant anything Dr. Birx now has to say.

[“Merch, merch, merch along the highway”: a Van Dyke Parksism.]

Is it Christian nationalism yet?

Representative Mary Miller (R, Illinois-15), or a staffer writing in her name, has responded to PolitiFact’s conclusion that Miller’s claims about gender-affirming care for trans and nonbinary children and adolescents are false. I won’t link to what Miller (or a staffer) wrote, but I’ll quote:

I am unashamed of our Judeo-Christian heritage and the values that most Americans hold to. God created us male and female — this [i.e., gender-affirming care] is nothing but rebellion against God.

And:

Why are we ashamed of our Judeo-Christian heritage and our values? We need to be loud and proud about them. They are the values that bring freedom and productivity to a country, to its communities, and that cause our families to thrive.

Samuel L. Perry, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Oklahoma offers a helpful ten-point checklist: How can we spot #ChristianNationalism in the wild? I score Mary Miller as an eight, possibly nine, of ten.

Related reading
All OCA Mary Miller posts (Pinboard)