“Didn’t He Ramble”—Fate Marable and His Orchestra
with Louis Armstrong (1920)
“Singin’ the Blues”—Frank Trumbauer and His Orchestra
with Bix Biederbecke (1927)
Who remembers Davenport, Iowa, in 1920,
the year the city voted Socialist?
No one now alive could cast a ballot,
and the white-boy jazzers of Scott County
Didn’t care about the Revolution, but stood
on a wharf overlooking the muddy river,
Waiting for a riverboat loaded with music
from the red-light district of New Orleans.
One of them, just seventeen that year,
heard it hardest. On the deck
Of the paddle-wheeler, high above the dock
and its straggling crowd, a Black man lifted
His ordinary cornet and blew the world away.
No one in all of Iowa knew his name
Except that young man, who understood
his betters when he heard them.
That day he heard it all and soon he would ride
Like Armstrong up river to Chicago on a golden cornet.
You want a revolution? Music was his manifesto.
The clarity of his tone, his comrades said,
was like bullets shooting a bell.
Copyright © 2025 by T. R. Hummer. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 14, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.
