There had been a gangland shooting at the Horn Palace Inn in April of that year. The victim was Billy Keilman, the owner of the truck stop, an ex-cop who survived the attack by two gunmen.

As the rest of Cotton Bailey’s dance group dove for cover, young Jack Teagarden stood staring at the action from the bandstand as if watching a movie. But reality hit hard when Teagarden was subpoenaed by the prosecution and then received messages that testifying would not be good for his health.

During the Prohibition years, San Antonio was rightly known as “Little Chicago”.

When the sale of alcohol became illegal in 1920, Keilman moved the Horn Palace Inn (named after the deer head trophies that decorated the joint, not the hot brass sections that filled it) from 312 E. Houston St. three miles outside of the city limits. The outskirts, where alcohol was banned in the blink of an eye, was where the 1920s roared in San Antonio, then Texas’ busiest city.

Jazz was almost entirely a New Orleans affair at the time, but its sister city of Texas took hold early on, making it the perfect place for a teenager determined to take the trombone from behind. of the group in the front and in the center. In his hometown of Vernon, 10 miles south of the Oklahoma border, he was known as Weldon Teagarden, but on the way to that first gig in San Antonio, he changed his name to the more worthy of the stars “Jack”.

He just wanted to play jazz, but he was there in 1921, stuck between a boulder and a Horn Palace, with both of his picks found in contempt of court for not showing up or possibly being erased if he did.

And then, as the case was about to be judged, the September rains came. The downpour started with a downpour over the Olmos Creek watershed and did not stop for 18 hours, from Friday September 9 to the morning of Friday September 10, creating a wall of water downtown that s’ is raised almost to the second floor of the Gunter hotel. The courthouse was flooded, the papers destroyed and the Horn Palace Inn case was dismissed.

“Jack Teagarden was going to be the greatest of all Texas jazzmen,” wrote Cullum, whose father, Jim Sr., played occasionally with Teagarden. “In addition to his virtuosity, he brought a depth of feeling or ‘soul’ that has rarely been matched.

Houston and beyond

A cheering Teagarden packed his Stanley Steamer car and headed for Houston, where he joined Peck’s Bad Boys, who were having a summer concert at a Galveston Bay resort. Led by sensational pianist John “Peck” Kelley – a fan of Vladimir Horowitz, but more commonly compared to the great jazzman Art Tatum – the group also included 18-year-old clarinetist Pee Wee Russell, who came from St. Louis believing he was the most prominent young jazz player.

He was jamming with Kelley when Teagarden walked in, casually removed his paperclip from a coat rack, and whispered a phrase that almost made Russell pass out.

“He had never heard a warm trombone with this kind of sound and fluidity, and so deeply favored by the blues,” wrote Richard M. Sudhalter in his jazz history book “Lost Chords”.

Kelley preferred accomplished obscurity to all-consuming glory, so he refused to leave Houston for the jazz hotspots of New York and Chicago and declined offers to perform with Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman and other bands from hot swing. He brought New York to him, which John Hammond did in 1939 to write “Peck Kelley Is No Myth” for Down Beat magazine.

“If I worked with a top band,” Kelley said, “it would be rehearsing, recording, streaming, playing, rushing, hurrying, with no time for me.”

This program suited Teagarden very well, however, and he moved to New York City in 1927.

The 22-year-old with a Texan drawl performed wherever he could and created a fervor among the most jaded jazzbos. As jazz critic Leonard E. Guttridge wrote, Teagarden “emerged around the world, so completely adapted to his instrument that at times it seemed like he and the trombone had been invented at the same time and had grown up together.” .

It was Teagarden’s vocation to bring the trombone of vaudeville, where it was mainly used for comedic effect, to jazz clubs and concert halls.

The great Fletcher Henderson, whose 1920s orchestra, along with Louis Armstrong and Coleman Hawkins, sparked the swing craze, took Teagarden all over Harlem and “showed him like he was a man from Mars.” », According to Dave Oliphant’s« Texan Jazz ».

During this time of segregation, Teagarden couldn’t perform in public with his musical parents, but he broke the studio’s color line in 1929 when he recorded “Knockin ‘a Jug” with Armstrong.

Required

Because his solos said a lot in short spaces, Teagarden was one of the most recorded musicians of the 1920s and 1930s. A particularly memorable year was 1933, when “Big T” played both on the recording. finale of her hero Bessie Smith and on the studio debut of Billie Holiday. Teagarden was part of that passing of the torch in the short interval between his stint with the Ben Pollack Orchestra and the financially secure, but musically unsatisfying five years he spent with the ever-popular Paul Whiteman Orchestra during the Great Depression.

Teagarden was to the trombone what Armstrong was to the trumpet, so it was fitting for the duo to tour the world together from 1947 to 1951 in the Louis Armstrong All-Stars. They were also both great singers, with Teagarden saying it all with his signature song “I have the right to sing the blues”. He was also known for “Basin Street Blues”, “St. James Infirmary” and “Beale Street Blues”.

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“What sets Teagarden apart, both in his playing and in his vocals, is his sense of melody,” said Austin trombonist Jon Blondell. “He brought the vocalization to the trombone and sang it as he played it.”

In a 1958 interview, Teagarden admitted that the spirituals he heard in a black Pentecostal revival tent in a vacant lot next to his home in Vernon had deeply influenced him at the age of 7, to a year of his first trombone.

“The singing, which would build up to this climax (speaking it in tongues) was really great,” he said. “I would sit on the fence we had and listen to him. And this music felt as natural to me as anything.

A musical family

Teagarden’s father Charles, a gin mill mechanic and amateur cornet player, died of the Spanish flu in 1918, forcing his wife Helen and their four children to move to Nebraska and then to Oklahoma, where they had problems. parents. In Oklahoma City, a 14-year-old Teagarden had another eye-opening musical experience, at an authentic Native American powwow on the outskirts of town.

“When they were singing those Indian songs, you know, it came naturally to me too,” he told an interviewer, “I could spruce it up and play an Indian thing – just take my horn and hit it. playing where you could, don’t make a difference.

Due to his dark hair and high cheekbones, Teagarden was often thought to have Native American blood, but both of his parents were German. Mother Helen was an accomplished pianist who taught her children to read music from an early age. All four went on to become renowned professional musicians, with trumpeter Charles (known as “Little T”) almost matching the success of his older brother.

In September 1963, the Teagarden family, even mother Helen, who shared the piano with her daughter Norma, played together at the Monterrey Jazz Festival. Like the good old days in Vernon.

Less than four months later, Jack Teagarden, born in 1905 and reborn in 1921 on his way to his first club gig in San Antonio, died in his beloved New Orleans. The cause of death was pneumonia, with alcoholism a contributing factor. He was only 58 years old, but he had made his mark for a long time.

The esteemed critic and historian Leonard Feather summed up Teagarden’s legacy: “Always years ahead of his time, possessing a totally individual sound as both instrumentalist and singer, Teagarden ranks with Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke, Coleman Hawkins and a handful of others as one of the undisputed titans in jazz history.

Texan musical writer Michael Corcoran is the author of “Ghost Notes: Pioneering Spirits of Texas Music”.