That was no lady,
that was:

Bix at eight with his mother
(according to Bix, Man & Legend, by Richard M. Sudhalter and Phillip R. Evans, Arlington House, 1974. Photo credit: Wayne Rohlf)

Bix, age 8 with a neighbor, Nora Lasher
(according to Bix, The Leon Bix Beiderbecke Story, by Phillip R. and Linda Evans, Prelike Press, 1998. Photo credit: Beiderbecke family)

Bix...posing with the tutor his family hired to help him keep up with his school work
(according to Bix Beiderbecke, Jazz Age Genius, by David R. Collins, Morgan Reynolds Inc, 1998.)

(Although this widely reproduced photo has been credited in various sources to the Davenport Public Library, Rich Johnson, Kay Runge, and Rochelle Murray, all printed reproductions show the same nicks, creases and scratches, so they presumably share a single original source within the Beiderbecke family.)

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Mainspring Press
Publications:

So, what's bixing? It's a common habit in jazz history both written and oral, of passing off rumor and opinion as fact. It's named for Bix Beiderbecke because people have probably used more smoke and mirrors to augment and glorify his particular legend than anyone else's. The harm that results is usually minimal and often risible, but bixing creates a folklore tradition that newcomers to our music hear and believe at the expense of truth.

Many if not most of us catch the jazz addiction through one of three figures; Armstrong, Morton or Beiderbecke. In my own case, a friend at boarding school brought his dad's copy from home of "The King of New Orleans Jazz," bearing 14 classic Morton tracks from 1926-27 Victors. A minute into "Black Bottom Stomp," I was hooked for life at the age of 13. High on Jelly-Roll, I then began to seek the same euphoria from other similar sources, and soon found Bix, Louis, Johnny Dodds and other seminal figures. I also started to look for information about them, beyond just the music. This is what I gleaned from friends, liner notes and books of the day, about Bix Beiderbecke:

So that's what bixing is. Bixing serves the purpose of portraying someone or something in a biased light, whether for better or worse. Whether it consists of puff, fibs or whoppers depends on the bixer. Applied to Bix Beiderbecke, it's pretty much benevolent. It seeks to portray him as a frustrated artist, an introvert who died a classic death in a garret at a young age, after a life of tragedy. It chooses to ignore, for example, that he was vicious and unpleasant when drunk, which both Paul Mertz and Bill Challis have said clearly he was. That's also not good romantic tragedy; it's much more cathartic for the audience for our hero waste away from artistic frustration, than to choke during a self-inflicted fit of DTs. Unpleasant facts get in the way of rosy legend, and become tacitly or explicitly ignored.

Bixing began in the later 30s, with a desire to confer heroic status on favorite performers, especially those who came to sticky ends, like Bix and Bessie Smith. It persisted through the following decades, making legends of Charlie Parker, Chu Berry, Billie Holiday. The pop-music world of the 1960s bixed Robert Johnson into the world's best-known blues singer by acclamation, largely because of yet another mist-shrouded, agonizing death, and the story that he had to die because he sold his soul to the Devil at a crossroads. Owing his fame to the fervor of people like Eric Clapton and Keith Richards, he's the only pre-war blues singer most people under 50 have heard of.

It continues unabated. Inspiration, divine revelation, emotion-based deduction and wild-assed guessing still occupy an unassailable place alongside fact-based research, eyewitness corroboration and the scientific method. Unfortunately, the injection of romance into historical study may enhance readability, but does nothing for credibility.

The version of Bix's life I first learned, quoted at the beginning of the article, only changed for me by applying the knowledge that writers and enthusiasts across the decades have used their particular brand of grease on the historical lens to cast events in the soft or harsh light they desire to throw. As a result, all too often, romantic notions have become "facts" that "everybody knows..."

Staying with Bix one moment longer, it's interesting that the visual image most Bix books and reissues have used to typify him in the past is the studio shot of a slightly lost-looking 18-year-old (though one book I have does a nice bit of bixing, giving 1923 as the date) in his first tux, holding his cornet on his knee, on his way to one of his early semi-pro gigs before he even left Davenport: a perfect ingenu. Far from being the pale, Byronic introvert such histories would have us envisage, young Bix was extroverted, gregarious, good at sports, going out for football, basketball and baseball at Lake Forest. His correspondence both as a youth and a professional musician shows him to have been forthright and assertive, at times ebullient. As for grammar and spelling, he had no time for rules. Isn't this exactly in character with what we hear in most of his music?

Bixing is open to all comers, of course, not just Davenport's most famous son. But an aura of romance and Schadenfreude is of the essence. Don Murray, for example, died a horrible and tragic death even before Bix did, but he does not have the "doomed by his art" stamp of a Beiderbecke, Billie Holiday or Charlie Parker, so he isn't lionized in the same way. And who now weeps for Mario Perry, Eddie Lang, even Frank Teschemacher? Their shortened lives, for reasons of their own, don't fit the criteria for Harlequin Romance musical history.

In the realm of blues singers (another heavy-laden field, emotionally) "everybody knows," or at least everybody has heard at some time, that Bessie Smith bled to death when the ambulance called to the scene of her auto accident took her to a whites-only hospital, where the personnel would not treat her. The myth, for such it is, was positively and indisputably dispelled in the sixties. But there still exist diehards who quote it ferociously as gospel. It makes an excellent parable. Set in 1937, it fits a mental image of the times; Pa Joad scrabbling in the dust-bowl dirt, our grandparents' tales of childhood spent finding the way to the outhouse in the dark through the snowdrifts, and the Southern Trees Bearing a Strange Fruit. This is PC bixing. So if it reinforces a truth about race relations in the 1930s with a little white lie, who suffers? The truth is, we all do, for PC bixing fosters ignorance, not enlightenment.

Recently, Ken Burns did a great service to this music, in terms of public awareness, by making his documentary, "Jazz." It undoubtedly engaged many converts, and if you're one such reading this, welcome. It also provided new avenues for bixing in the form of personal opinions expressed as fact, from both hosts and guests, and also writers. Perhaps again, the gain for the music offset the loss of credibility, but not totally so for me. In Episode 4, Louis Armstrong's erstwhile manager, Tommy Rockwell, is referred to as "a tough-talking booking agent with mob connections;" an ugly enough insinuation. It makes him sound like a shady, dishonest, hustling, greedy opportunist, even to my ear, and I know a bit about him. The reality is somewhat different.

Rockwell managed the Chicago OKeh Records division of the Consolidated Music Publishing Company in the mid-20s, and later their New York office. He was personally responsible for giving Louis Armstrong his break in 1925 (on Richard M. Jones's recommendation) to record for the first time under his own name on the Hot Fives and subsequent Armstrong combinations for OKeh, effectively launching Louis' career as the first virtuoso bandleader. This was no small gift to Louis or to us. Rockwell became, essentially, a mentor for Louis' career from then on, and to a greater or lesser extent, a contributor to Louis' success for the whole time he was with OKeh. This history and its contribution to where Louis was by 1929 goes unmentioned. The commentary also doesn't mention that in 1929, when Rockwell summoned Armstrong to come to New York, Armstrong thought enough of this man to drop everything and do it. Could it be because it doesn't fit the film's Leitmotiv of racial exploitation, another example of PC bixing?

Could it also be for the same reason, that Louis' recording the same year of "Knocking A Jug," one of the most important fully integrated studio recordings of the decade, goes unmentioned? Jazz broke race barriers 30 years before American society made it law. Anyone who knows the music can think of five examples without racking brains; Coleman Hawkins, Lonnie Johnson, Clarence Williams, Fats Waller and a good many early blues singers either led or performed with white musicians and bands. I can't see why a program built heavily around Louis and especially the music he played would ignore this, absent an agenda.

However, the film commentary does explain that the call and Louis' move were a breakthrough for Armstrong's career, exposing him for the first time to a wide white audience, which accepted and loved him from then forward, piling success on success. But it doesn't attribute any of this to Tommy Rockwell. To find out how much Louis felt he owed Rockwell, read his own words, it's in his books; but it's also in letters I have seen from him to Rockwell.

Now to the mobster innuendo; that Rockwell booked bands into venues owned or operated by crime figures is indubitable. That was where the gigs were. Agents everywhere had deals to make in a public entertainment network permeated by organized crime. That network, moreover, usually purveyed an illegal substance, whose manufacture and distribution took place substantially under the aegis of organized crime. So anyone doing business in the industry did business with the mob. It was true for Rockwell, true for Irving Mills, Joe Glaser, Sam Lanin, anyone big or small. In that sense, they all had "mob connections." By its choice of words, the film's phraseology insinuates a mob-insider role for Rockwell, which neither the film nor the book then clarifies, sources or substantiates. No-one of my acquaintance who knew or worked with him, including his former employers and a close relative of his, has voiced this idea as even a possibility, let alone confirmed it. I've had to write a page here to rebut seven words, but I draw the line at bixing ill of the dead.

The bixing beat doesn't only go on, it grows, and it isn't even limited to "our" music. A collector I revered in the 1960s told me as gospel that he had "a friend who knew the guy who wrote the melody and lyrics for 'Yesterday,' which he then sold to Paul McCartney for five pounds." Yeah, man, right on! ...

New examples show up every day. Auction sites are a goldmine of innovative bixing. Consider, for example, the advertiser who quotes the personnel of one of the records he has at auction as including one "William McKinley, who later went on to found his much-more-famous Cotton Pickers." Or the one who states of a hill-and-dale Edison for sale, that: "In spite of what the collectors say, you can play these on a regular Victrola; they just don't sound as good." (Nor, perhaps, do they thereafter sound much like anything at all...)

Bixing is a combination of ignorance, mental laziness and reckless enthusiasm, sometimes combined with an agenda, political or personal. It's fun to search out, it's common enough and it can give you a laugh on a rainy day. I think there's a book in it, somewhere. When you come across them, send me your examples, and I'll acknowledge them!