77 years later, bandleader's death continues to confound
Was Jimmie Lunceford poisoned?
In the 1940s, Seaside, Oregon, was witness to a curious and disturbing
incident, the death of an internationally famous jazz bandleader,
Jimmie Lunceford, his death coming while signing records at a store on
the city’s main street. The nature of his death on July 12, 1947,
whether it was a a heart attack, food poisoning or something else
remain in question even 77 years later. Even eyewitnesses— the
musicians in the band remembered the incident differently.
One thing is clear: Lunceford’s death came at the conclusion of a
racially charged visit to Oregon.Oregon didn’t repeal its Exclusion
Law, which barred Blacks from the state until 1926. The next year the
Oregon Constitution was amended to remove a clause denying Blacks the
right to vote and eliminating restrictions that discriminated against
Black and Chinese voters. The Ku Klux Klan arrived in the state in
1921.
In the post-World War II years, the state’s demographics were
changing. As described in “Jazz Back in the Day” from Oregon Public
Broadcasting, the racial segregation that had long characterized the
city, began, in modest increments, to break down. In those new North
and Northeast Portland clubs — and eventually in other venues around
town — customers began to sit, dine and sometimes even dance together.
Seaside, 78.4 miles to the west, was unique in its role as a getaway
for Portlanders and a recreational playground for the Northwest to
Idaho and Utah.
As an escape valve for defense workers who migrated to Portland and
the Pacific Northwest during the World War II years, Seaside attracted
an increasingly diverse population.
More than 200,000 people flooded the Portland area during the war
years, 20,000 of them Black.
In the 1940s, Seaside’s Sandy Winnett worked as a waitress at the ice
cream shop adjacent to the Bungalow. Winnett remembers an “open-minded
attitude” among most Seaside residents, a time when people of all
backgrounds “came to dance” in Seaside.
It wasn’t just white bands like Glenn Miller, Les Brown and Tex Beneke
that headlined Seaside’s top club, but Lionel Hampton, Cab Calloway
and Fats Waller.
“Dancing in those days was a much bigger social event than it is
today,” said Seaside author Gloria Stiger Linkey in a 2016 interview.
“We danced every Friday night at the high school. After the basketball
and football games, we had a dance. We danced all the time.”
Linkey remembered a time when teens would drive their cars — or their
parents’ cars— to Seaside’s Cove, turn their radios on and dance
through the night by the beach.
”We did have African Americans in the summer from Portland,” Linkey
said. “There was an influx during World War II. They worked in the
shipyards.”
There was no animosity, she said. “No racism at all. At least growing
up in Seaside, I didn’t feel it.”
As a tourist town, the goal was to sell as many tickets as possible,
she added. “Because if you can serve tourists, you can serve African
Americans.”
African Americans also came to Seaside and nearby Gearhart employed as
domestic help for wealthy families, Seaside’s Mary Cornell, a teen at
the time, recalled.
‘The King of Syncopation’
James Melvin “Jimmie” Lunceford, born June 6, 1902 in Fulton,
Mississippi, moved to Denver, Colorado at the age of 15. There he
studied music under the instruction of Wilberforce J. Whiteman,
conductor of the Denver Symphony Orchestra. Whiteman was the father of
Paul Whiteman, the world’s highest-paid dance bandleader and known to
the public as the “King of Jazz.”
Lunceford studied the saxophone, flute, guitar, and trombone at an
early age, making his professional debut in early 1920 with the ninepiece Morrison Jazz Orchestra.
Urged by his family, Lunceford left for Nashville in 1922 to enroll at
Fisk University, a prestigious Black educational institution that had
produced thinkers and artists like W.E.B. Dubois, scholar James Weldon
Johnson, and pianist Lil Hardin, who later married Louis Armstrong.
After receiving his degree from Fisk, he moved to Memphis to begin
teaching music classes at Manassas High School, a school already
renowned for its advanced musical curriculum and record of
achievement.
Lunceford recruited his brightest students for his own band, the
Chicksaw Syncopators, spending summers and holidays at a resort in
Lakeside, Ohio on the shores of Lake Erie. In late 1929, the group
turned professional.
Under Lunceford’s direction, the band launched a series of one-
nighters throughout the midwest.
Their big break came when they arrived in New York City and began a
residency at the famed Cotton Club in Harlem. The band was known for
its tight ensemble work and sophisticated arrangements rather than for
individual soloists.
The music is upbeat, intimate and fun. It can be silly and
sentimental.
The goal was getting kids onto the dance floor for a spin. The tunes
were playful, sometimes gimmicky and the titles funny: “I’m Nuts About
Screwy Music,” “Call the Police” and “Water Faucet Drip-Drip-Drip.”
Lunceford’s 1935 “Harlem Express” tour shattered box office records —
families traveled more than 100 miles to see the band; attendance less
than 1,000 people per night was considered a slow night.
Often it was more than 4,000, Lunceford’s biographer Eddy Determeyer
wrote in “Rhythm is Our Business: Jimmie Lunceford and His Harlem
Express.”
The great jazz pianist Fats Waller recognized Lunceford’s genius by
dubbing him “The King of Syncopation.”
Although the band first started recording in 1930. they scored 22 hits
between 1934 and 1946, more than any other black swing band with the
exceptions of Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway.
Like other big bands, Lunceford was having difficulty financing his
big band in the mid-1940s. Against the tide, Lunceford rebuilt his
band with studio and classically trained musicians; critics praised
the ensemble’s “self-confidence” and considered it “one of the best on
the scene.”
July 12, 1947
It was into this environment that Lunceford and his orchestra arrived
in Seaside in July 12, 1947 to play the Bungalow, the city’s
preeminent dance hall.
The previous night, the musicians had been hassled at a Portland
restaurant, according to trumpeter Joe Wilder in Edward Berger’s “Joe
Wilder and the Breaking of Barriers in American Music.”
The Lunceford band had played McElroy’s Spanish Ballroom in Portland.
At intermission they went into a restaurant across the street. The
break was only 20 minutes, but after 40 minutes, no one came to take
their order. Finally one of the musicians asked, “Can we get some
service?”
The owner replied, “We don’t serve you people here.” She made a phone
call and “the next thing you know,” Lunceford trumpeter Joe Wilder
remembered, is that four policemen descended on the restaurant.
The musicians received an assist from the officers, who told the owner
that according to the law, if she wouldn’t serve the men, she would
have to close the restaurant. “So she walked over to the door and
pulled the curtain down with a sign that said ‘closed.’ And that was
it. We just didn’t eat and went back and played.”
The next day, late in the afternoon after the bus ride to Seaside, the
band members found more difficulty in simply ordering a meal.
Lunceford band bass player Truck Parham remembered that band members
walked into a restaurant on Downing, not far from the Bungalow.
On scanning the group, the waitress told the musicians: “Can’t serve
you. We don’t have no food.”
Determeyer writes that Lunceford, normally even-tempered, even
restrained, pounded the table with his fists.
”What the hell do you mean, you can’t serve us?” Lunceford demanded.
“Call the manager!” The waitress panicked and hurried back to the
kitchen.
After a minute or two, Determeyer wrote, she came back and said the
men could order after all. They ordered hamburgers.
”No, I’m sorry,” the waitress said. “We don’t have nothing but beef
sandwiches, hot beef sandwiches.”
Wilder remembered the menu differently — he told Determeyer that they
had to “content themselves with strawberry pie.”
“Most of us ate two slices of it and Jimmie did likewise,” Wilder
said. “And I think he caught what I thought was indigestion.”
According to Determeyer’s account, after the meal, most of the band
members returned to the Bungalow before the show, except for
Lunceford, who complained he was tired and wasn’t feeling well.
According to Determeyer, he complained to trumpeter Russell Green he
was tired and wasn’t feeling well. After a short walk on the city’s
oceanside Prom, he was approached by a record store owner who asked
him to sign autographs.
After sitting on a bench Lunceford got up and told Green, “I’ll be all
right, I gotta go across the street here and autograph some records at
this record place.”
Trumpeter Wilder said that Lunceford took some BC tablets — aspirin —
after complaining of a severe headache. “He took a double dose,”
Wilder said.
Lunceford headed to Seaside Radio and Record Shop at 411 Broadway in
the Strand Theatre building— sometimes called “Callahan’s,” after its
owner Mike Callahan — accompanied by Wilder and trombonist Al Cobbs.
According to the report in the weekly newspaper the Seaside Signal,
Lunceford was about to autograph a wall reserved for names of musical
celebrities who came to Seaside, when operators Edward and Walter Hill
noticed Lunceford looking weak and ill. A moment later the bandleader
collapsed and was seized by severe convulsions.
Lunceford was autographing albums when suddenly he spun around and
keeled over and fell, Wilder said. The Hills called the police and an
ambulance arrive a little later, but Lunceford died before the
ambulance reached the Seaside hospital half-a-mile away.
He was 45 years old.
Meanwhile, before the gig, the band knew nothing about the collapse.
Band members were fully focused on the Bungalow policy discouraging
Black patrons.
The Bungalow, despite having featured Ellington, Cab Calloway and
Lionel Hampton among dozens of acts, remained a segregated venue.
Determeyer reports that the date of Lunceford’s appearance in Seaside,
some of the customers were Black, so the Bungalow management offered
Lunceford’s valet $50 to discourage black couples waiting to purchase
tickets from buying by telling them, “They don’t want to sell tickets
to people like us.”
Wilder, the first trumpeter, refused to play, and the band couldn’t,
or wouldn’t, play without him.
“Finally, Eddie Rosenberg, who was the manager, came back,” Wilder
said. “He had gone with Jimmie to the hospital. But he didn’t tell us
that Jimmie had died, you see. He said, ‘When Jimmie comes back, he —
naturally, he wouldn’t play, if he knew the circumstances. But if we
don’t play, then the contract becomes null and void. So why don’t we
just play, so that we fulfill our obligations?’ At that point, I said,
OK, and we played. It was at the intermission that he told us that
Jimmie had died.”
End of an era
The show, despite Lunceford’s death, went on that night, Determeyer
wrote, but one musician after the other left the bandstand and headed
to the restroom. “I’m the only one that didn’t get sick,” Parham said.
“Botulism, you know.”
A preliminary examination by Clatsop County coroner William Thompson
“revealed that death was due to natural causes,” wire services wrote.
An autopsy performed by Dr. Alton Alderman in Astoria — about 15 miles
north of Seaside — disclosed that Lunceford died of coronary
occlusion.
A memorial service with remaining band members took place that week at
Rockaway Beach, the last concert before the Lunceford orchestra
permanently disbanded.
According to the Memphis Commercial Appeal in their obituary, his band
played its scheduled engagement an hour later. It was a one-night
stand on a West Coast tour, their last performance, announced by band
manager Rosenberg.
At the request of his wife, Crystal, Lunceford’s body was flown to New
York City for the funeral service. Returned to Memphis, a procession
of family, friends, and band members accompanied Lunceford's casket to
the historic Elmwood Cemetery.
Returned to Memphis, a procession of family, friends, and band members
accompanied Lunceford’s casket to the historic Elmwood Cemetery, wrote
Scott Stanton.
Before long, Determeyer wrote, “the myth surrounding Lunceford’s death
was in full swing.”
Seaside’s Linkey thought it was unlikely Lunceford and his bandmates
were deliberately sickened or worse, or even turned away from a
Seaside restaurant.
She added the idea of poisoning “takes giant leaps” in suggesting a
racial incident was a factor in Lunceford’s death.
Jazz historian Lewis Porter pointed out that botulism, as suggested by
Truck Parham as the source of Lunceford’s death, is not a poison and
cannot be “manufactured” or “planted,” Porter said.
“It’s simply a severe form of food poisoning that can occur in, for
example, rotten meat,” Porter said. “But he (Lunceford) died from a
heart attack—nothing to do with the food! He’s not the first guy to
die suddenly at a relatively young age from unsuspected heart trouble,
especially in those days.”
Ronald Cortez Herd II, an expert on Lunceford, his life and music,
visited Seaside in 2016 from his home in Memphis, Tennessee, in search
of clues to the bandleader’s sudden death, and has spent years
tracking down theories.
He learned theories abound about Lunceford’s death, including
Lunceford was killed by gangsters for rights to his music. Others were
convinced Lunceford died in a mysterious plane crash like that of
bandleader Glenn Miller. The incident in Portland at the restaurant
the night before his death conflated the question. Even eyewitnesses
disagreed.
In 2023, Herd spoke to Lunceford’s relatives at a family reunion in
Mississippi. He suggested that they should exhume his body and “find
out the truth once and for all.”
“Many of them agreed,” Herd said via Facebook messenger this month.
“What makes the Jimmie Lunceford story so compelling is that it is
still contested how he actually died. … Jimmie Lunceford’s music
legacy is incredible, but his death is also intriguing.”