Things were different for the nation’s blacks, however. The music world in particular knew that Naptown had a thriving, jiving scene going on in the clubs, ballrooms and theaters along Indiana Avenue. It was a scene that boasted some of the greatest names in blues and jazz.
The Avenue and the surrounding neighborhood were typical of the way black culture asserted itself in cities prior to the civil rights movement. As was the case in Harlem, Watts and other mainly black sections of the nation’s urban areas, the Avenue district was quite self-contained. It had lots of its own service and retail businesses, professional offices, schools and churches and its own newspaper. Also typical of these black communities was a thoroughfare that served as an anchor, a street on which gossip, commerce, food and music filled the senses for blocks.
In the late 1920s, a hard-drinking young pianist and singer named Leroy Carr began a residency at an Avenue club called Dee’s Paradise. He was accomanied by a guitarist named Scrapper Blackwell. Carr and Blackwell recorded several sides for Vocalion, a “race” label, between 1928 and 1935. The first of these “How Long How Long Blues” was recorded in Indianapolis, but the subsequent releases were cut in either Chicago or New York. Carr died of alcohol-related health problems in 1935. A brokenhearted Blackwell rarely played again before his 1962 death.
During the 1930s, Fred Wisdom’s big band was rocking the house at The Cotton Club, a four-story venue in the Avenue district. It offered a dining room, and one’s choice of three or four entertainment acts, perhaps comedy teams, shake dancers, a dance orchestra, or blues shouters, performing simultaneously.
Champion Jack Dupree was the house pianist and show emcee at The Cotton Club for a year in 1940. He had drifted northward from New Orleans. He had the good fortune to meet Cotton Club owner Sea Ferguson when he got to Indianapolis, hence the job. It was during his Naptown period that he went to Chicago to cut his first sides for the Okeh label.
Ferguson and his brother Denver owned several of the night spots along the Avenue. Denver Ferguson also ran a booking agency that handled top-flight talent for decades. He raised eyebrows around town when he married a mail-order German bride.
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