Joe Jordan

Joe Jordan first entered the world in Cincinnati before growing up in St. Louis, where he obtained formal musical instruction at the Lincoln Institute in Jefferson City. During 1900 the youthful musician played fiddle and percussion alongside the Taborian Band of St. Louis. He further joined Tom Turpin, Sam Patterson, and Louis Chauvin for a vocal act built around four pianos. In 1902 Jordan traveled to New York to partner with Ernest Hogan, the performer widely billed in show business as the “Unbleached American.” At the dawn of the twentieth century the swiftly expanding American entertainment business rested heavily on the use of ethnic stereotypes. Hogan’s major success bore the title “All Coons Look Alike to Me,” and the stage production he developed with Jordan carried the name “Rufus Rastus.” Another specimen of the era’s racial subject matter appeared in “Dandy Coon,” the piece Chauvin and Patterson devised in 1903. Jordan served as stage manager and musical director for that minstrel presentation, which traveled with a thirty-member company featuring a “beautiful octoroon chorus.” After the production collapsed in Des Moines, Jordan headed for Chicago. He soon performed at the Pekin, the former casino and saloon at 27th and State that Robert T. Motts had turned into a beer garden. Jordan marked the lively venue with his “Pekin Rag,” issued in 1904. He made a short return to St. Louis to appear at the Faust Restaurant during the 1904 World’s Fair. By then recognized for rapid, on-request orchestration, Jordan went back to New York in 1905 to join Ernest Hogan and James Reese Europe in forming and leading the Memphis Students, an ensemble of seventeen African-American performers who were neither students nor natives of Memphis. Their first New York showing took place at Proctor’s 23rd Street theater in spring 1905. James Weldon Johnson later described the “playing-singing-dancing orchestra” as “the first modern jazz band ever heard on a New York stage.” The group’s instrumentation comprised saxophones, brass, banjos, guitars, mandolins, piano, and drums. Later that year the ensemble appeared in Paris, London, and additional major European cities. For these musicians Jordan supplied the numbers “Rise and Shine,” “Oh, Liza Lady,” “Goin’ to Exit,” and “Dixie Land,” while also releasing the “J.J.J. Rag.” Back in Chicago, Motts’s enterprise had grown into a multifaceted entertainment hub known locally as the Pekin Temple of Music. In 1906 Motts enlarged the facility by constructing the Pekin Theatre directly above the existing structure. With the March 31, 1906 reopening of the renovated and expanded Pekin—one of America’s earliest African-American-owned theaters—the Negro District on Chicago’s South Side began its evolution into a springboard for the jazz surge of 1915–1925. Jordan directed the sixteen-piece house orchestra, composed, and served as musical director, all for a weekly wage of $25.00. Deepening his New York connections, Jordan penned two songs for Ada Overton Walker: first “Salome’s Dance” and then, in 1909, “That Teasin’ Rag,” whose central theme the Original Dixieland Jazz Band appropriated for their 1917 release “The Original Dixieland One Step.” Upon hearing the recording Jordan initiated legal action. All copies were withdrawn, and the label was altered to read “introducing ‘That Teasin’ Rag’ by Joe Jordan.” Also in 1909 Jordan teamed with Bob Cole and Rosamond Johnson on “Red Moon,” a Broadway operetta that defied Jim Crow norms by allowing performers of color to deliver serious romantic material conveying authentic human feeling, an approach then largely restricted outside New York City. In 1910 Jordan created “Lovie Joe” for Fanny Brice. Prevented as a Black man from entering the theater on opening night, he remained on the sidewalk and wept upon hearing the audience demand eight encores. Jordan sailed to Germany in 1911 with King & Bailey’s Chocolate Drops. On the return voyage he performed throughout England. Once more at the Pekin he resumed his duties for roughly three years. Songs from this interval include “Dat’s Ma Honey Sho’s Yo’ Born,” “Oh Say Wouldn’t It Be a Dream,” and “Brother-In-Law Dan.” He prospered in Chicago real estate, resulting in the 1917 erection of the J. Jordan Building at 36th and State. During 1918–1919 he acted as assistant director and financial advisor for Will Marion Cook’s New York Syncopated Orchestra. In 1928 Jordan led a band comprising Jabbo Smith, Garvin Bushell, James P. Johnson, and Thomas “Fats” Waller for the musical revue “Keep Shufflin’.” His own touring unit bore the name the Ten Sharps and Flats. Throughout the 1930s he conducted the Federal Theatre Project’s Negro Unit Orchestra in New York. In 1936 Jordan collaborated with James P. Johnson, Porter Grainger, and Asadata Dafora on music for a Federal Theatre Project staging of Shakespeare’s Macbeth directed by Orson Welles. In 1939 he directed a symphony orchestra joined by a 350-voice chorus at Carnegie Hall. He also wrote songs with W.C. Handy, led military bands during World War II, and later enjoyed a prosperous real-estate career in Tacoma, Washington, where he died on September 11, 1971.