Who Remembers Davenport
“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.
“Long an aficionado of jazz, from the oldest traditional jazz up to free jazz and beyond, if it goes there, I have often found subjects in the music and the people who create it. ‘Who Remembers Davenport’ evokes two jazz pioneers, one white and one Black, and centers on the moment when Bix Beiderbecke, then in his late teens, heard the greatest trumpet player in history, Louis Armstrong—an encounter that naturally had a profound effect on Beiderbecke. The transmission of the art across generations and racial boundaries is a source of fascination for me, no matter what the art; but jazz, more than most, has reinvigorated itself many times in just this way over the decades. Perennially reborn, jazz (and most other musical forms) remains for me a central source of inspiration.”
—T. R. Hummer
T. R. Hummer
T. R. Hummer is the author of thirteen poetry collections, most recently Eon (LSU Press, 2018) and After the Afterlife (Acre Books, 2018).