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Buddy Bolden, c. 1905
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Buddy Bolden’s Bounce
……………(September 6, 1877- November 4, 1931)
Having invented jazz, Buddy Bolden
Tried to imagine what else he’d invent,
Maybe the light bulb or dry cereal,
A cure for syphilis or dementia
Praecox, something he was familiar
With, but he stuck with jazz, American
And quintessential as coffee with milk
And sugar, shrimp gumbo or chicory,
The scent of magnolia blossoms fallen
To the ground after rain. The smell of earth
After rain, cornet in hand, he climbed up
A funky tree in New Orleans, played us
We-the-people music, then flew away
From that perch, never to be seen again.
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M.G. Stephens is author of 24 books, including the just published hybrid work of prose and poetry, fact and fiction, about an out of work actor who lands the part of Hamlet, and is entitled History of Theatre or the Glass of Fashion(MadHat Press). In the autumn, Dispatches Editions will publish his nonfiction work, When Poetry Was the World, about downtown New York in the 1960s, including chapters on Thelonious Monk.
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There are no recordings of Buddy Bolden in existence. In 1957, trumpeter Clark Terry is heard on this recording, “Hey, Buddy Bolden” which is from Duke Ellington’s suite A Drum Is a Woman
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