Danny Barker’s Folk Heroes

Barker wrote about New Orleans, the music business, New York, racism and Jim Crow segregation, and the pleasures of dancing, drinking, and having a good time. Like his near-contemporary Zora Neale Hurston, Barker often approached his subjects through the framework of African American folklore, recasting events and people from his own life as folk archetypes. Tricksters, badmen, blues mamas, white devils, and everyday people living what he called the “raw life” all populated his oeuvre.

Folklore, Hurston wrote, “shows the adaptability of the black man,” allowing each African American writer or storyteller to draw from a vast cultural well across time, place, and social status. Barker drew from that well time and again, blending history with autobiography and a dash of mythology and creating indelible characters in the process. Here’s a look at five of his biggest standouts.

One of the central set pieces of Barker’s 1986 autobiography, A Life in Jazz, is the chapter titled “Animule Hall,” and Joe Baggers is its main character. At the hall, Baggers presides over a weekly cycle of drinking, “belly-rubbing,” dancing, and fighting, all interwoven with the blues music of Long Head Bob’s Orchestra. With his pointy-toed boots, iron pipe, and brutal ways of keeping the rowdy crowd in line, Baggers is a classic badman—one who transgresses “normative heroic action,” yet functions as a hero because of his ability to transcend the limitations of his station, according to John Willie Roberts in his book From Trickster to Badman: The Black Folk Hero in Slavery and Freedom. Like Stagger Lee or Railroad Bill, who became folk legends through their violent deeds, Joe Baggers is not to be trifled with. He is, in short, “a very rough man,” yet he is a stabilizing force when the hall’s blend of booze, blues, and brawling spins out of control. 

In the unpublished “Mr. Meatball Charlie of New Orleans,” Barker composes a vivid picture of 1920s New Orleans while using the title character as a framing device for several outlandish folk tales, such as “Jazzabelle and King Pharaoh in the Desert” and “Li’l David and His Fifteen Virgin Sisters.” Barker writes Meatball Charlie as a trickster, a fountain of tales, boasts, observations, and wordplay. Always greeted “like a big celebrity or gloom chaser,” Meatball Charlie is the life of the party, and his defining trait is his “diarrhea of the mouth.” Barker portrays him as a master of signifying—the African American art of performative double-play, which can take the form of braggadocio, insults, jokes, tall tales, or even fashion.

In one memorable sequence, Meatball Charlie takes young Barker to the funeral of a respected Confederate general as part of his sideline racket, stealing flower arrangements from fresh gravesites. When a white funeralgoer asks why they’re there, Meatball Charlie puts on his trickster guise and successfully evades suspicion by launching into a story about how his grandparents were enslaved on the general’s plantation and that he was the kindest, most generous master there could ever be: “That is why me and little Dan are here today with heavy hearts, paying our respects to a great man who’s surely going to Heaven.” Young Barker asks Meatball Charlie why he deferred to the man so easily. Meatball Charlie responds, “What I said, is not what I meant. . . . When you know you cannot win, be like a lamb. Remember that, my boy, and you will live to see another day.”  

Though Barker asserted in 1974 that Meatball Charlie was a real person, his daughter, Sylvia Barker, shared a different take in her play adaptation of “Meatball Charlie,” calling him a “fictional character taken from the mind of Mr. Danny Barker.”

Barker grew up around first-generation jazz musicians such as his grandfather, Isidore Barbarin, who played mellophone in the Onward Brass Band. Always observant, Barker soaked up their stories and memories, and later on he conducted his own research, interviewing jazz elders through mailed questionnaires. It’s likely that these sources formed the basis of Dude Bottley, one of the central figures of Barker’s second book, Buddy Bolden and the Last Days of Storyville, published posthumously in 2001. Presented as the brother of Bolden’s bandmate Buddy Bottley, Dude Bottley is a portal to the past, telling of Jelly Roll Morton, greased-pig chases, and comically dangerous hot air balloon rides.

Bottley was a fictional device—“definitely Barker’s invention,” said Alyn Shipton, who worked with Barker to edit the volume. “Buddy Bottley was a real person, and Dude was a way to ground all of Danny’s material about jazz history in a single story.” David Chandler, who interviewed Barker for New Orleans magazine in 1974, compared Buddy Bolden to Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi, precisely because the two books employ fantastical stories and capital-C characters to make “geographical concepts (Storyville and the Mississippi) part of America’s folklore.”

As a songwriter, Barker found a muse in his wife, the singer Blue Lu Barker, who delivered these lines in the song “Ways Like the Devil.” He wrote a number of blues songs for her, scoring a minor hit with “Don’t You Feel My Leg,” first recorded in 1938 as “Don’t You Make Me High.” Through Barker’s blues songs for Blue Lu, he played with themes of sex, violence, and humor by wrapping them in the package of a transgressive badwoman. Like her brother the badman, the badwoman “flouts the norms of society . . . to gain the upper hand,” writes musicologist Ayana Smith. “The tradition embodies a narrative method of dealing psychologically with power struggles and lack of self-determination.” At a time when the popular imagination regarded Black women through the stereotypes of the subservient “mammy” or the oversexed, doomed “tragic mulatto,” blueswomen’s independence, irreverence, and authority imbued them with powerfully modern charisma.

Blue Lu said she knew even as a child that the blueswoman’s badness was a put-on—a form of signifying—and she maintained that opinion for the rest of her life. “Onstage, I say all these things,” she said in an undated radio interview. “I shake, I dance, I just have a good time. It would give you the impression that I’m a bad or fast person. But if you know me, you find out that I ain’t none of those things . . . not a real ratty person. I’m fun.”

One of Barker’s most popular storytelling refrains, exemplified in the above passage from A Life in Jazz, was his theory of the two types of people in the world, “day people” and “night people.” On the surface, they were a shorthand for the vast difference in life experience between people with stable, conventional livings and the characters and workers of the underworld—bankers, housekeepers, and mechanics versus pimps, gamblers, and the jazz musicians who entertain them all night. Barker positioned himself as an ambassador to both worlds, and while he valued the upright respectability of day people, he championed night people as essentially more worldly: “Day people know very little about what happens with the night people,” he said in a magazine interview. “Night people have to know the day people because they live off them. Day people don’t really know them.”

This sense of unknowability resonated with Barker, who spent the first half of his music career as a sideman—one of 10 to 20 faces on a bandstand behind the main attraction, the bandleader. “A musician has much time to observe,” he said in a 1974 interview. “You watch the people who come in. What they do. Night after night. Seven days a week. . . . You see everything, because a musician is invisible.” By aligning himself with the rarely seen, unknowable night people, he transformed the grind of the musician’s life into mystique. Through that mystique, along with his stories, music, historical work, and deadpan sense of humor, Barker became something of a folk character himself. His death on March 13, 1994, occasioned one of the biggest jazz funerals the city has ever seen, and musicians, fans, and scholars continue to celebrate his life and legacy through the annual Danny Barker Banjo and Guitar Festival.