In Search of Buddy Bolden

Donald Marquis takes you firmly by the hand and leads you into that Wonderland that was New Orleans from 1877, when Bolden was born; then through the brief but extraordinary rise of Bolden’s personality and the powerful sound of his trumpet echoing through the streets of New Orleans. The author brings out Buddy’s tragic descent into mental illness, his entrance into the Insane Asylum of Louisiana, and his untimely death in 1930 at the young age of thirty-three. The book is a very sober tale of life in those times, it is rooted in the political and artistic history of… show more.

In the 1890s, about thirty years after emancipation, African American culture blossomed and produced three genres that determined much of what has come since in American music – blues (most notably in the Mississippi Delta), Ragtime (in particular, St. Louis), and jazz (in New Orleans). Of course, no one person “invented” jazz. It coalesced around the fact that band instruments were much more available in New Orleans than anywhere else, among other things. But it’s Charles “Buddy” Bolden that the players who came up in the early 1900s all remember. Yet he’s an invisible man, his story full of myth… show more.