Jazz. It Ain’t Just About the Music
— From the Archives: A 1920s Article by Lanie Price —
Mamie Duval. Once, she was untouchable. She had this way of making you feel like every note she sang came straight from your soul. Like she’d reached into your heart, pulled out your story, and gave it back to you wrapped in melody. Dreams, hopes, pain—she made them hers, made them yours all over again. It hurt to listen, sure, but it was the kind of hurt that left you lighter somehow. Like a wound you didn’t know you had was finally closing up.
I’d heard her on a rare recording once, but I’d never met her. Never had the opportunity and figured I never would. But then, a story brought us together.
Mamie’s name hadn’t been spoken in years, not since she walked off that Harlem stage ages ago. She’d disappeared at the height of her career, leaving behind unanswered questions and rumors: some said she’d fled after a scandal; others whispered about organized crime or heartbreak.
I tracked her down to a tiny Eastside apartment near 125th Street, where the elevated train trundles by. She was surrounded by relics of her glory days—a battered but pristine piano, worn sheet music, and fading posters of her performances. She didn't want to talk at first, but I kept pushing.
“So, why’d you do it?” I asked. “Why’d you leave the stage?”
Mamie’s lips twitched, almost like she was going to smile but thought better of it. Without a word, she stood and crossed the room, opening a cupboard to pull out a bottle of moonshine and two mismatched glasses. It was clear—could’ve been vodka, but it had the sharp, piney edge of gin. Brutally strong and lovingly homemade. She poured two generous glasses and slid one of them across the table toward me. I caught it like a gunslinger, the liquid catching the light.
“Funny thing about questions like that,” she said, finally sitting down again. “They got a way of making you look backward, and me? I try to keep my eyes forward.”
I picked up the glass to be polite but knew better than to drink. She took a sip from hers, her movements slow and deliberate. “Let’s just say... there comes a time in every woman’s life when she’s got to make a choice: her voice or her peace.” Her tone was calm, but there was a sharpness to the words—a warning not to press any further.
What started as a casual interview soon turned into a deeper conversation about survival, sacrifice, and the compromises that kept Mamie alive.
Mamie sat across from me, smoothing the folds of her dress as though it were silk instead of crepe. She studied me for several long seconds, as if weighing whether I was worth the trouble. Finally, she sighed, her shoulders settling into a posture that said she was tired of fighting ghosts.
“You’re persistent,” she said. “I’ll give you that.”
“I just want to understand,” I replied. “Not just the music, but... you.”
Her lips curled into a faint smile. “You think the music and me are separate things?” She shook her head, a low chuckle escaping her throat. “Child, the music is me. And I’m it. You can’t pull the two apart, not after everything we’ve been through together.”
She reached for a cigarette from the tin on the side table, turning it thoughtfully between her fingers. “People think jazz is just music,” she said, almost to herself. “Something you listen to while you sip a drink or groove on a dance floor. But for people like us?”
She lit the cigarette with a steady hand, the flame catching with a soft hiss. Her voice dropped, smoky like the curl of her exhale. “It ain’t just about the music. For people like us, it’s the…” Her words got lost as a train rumbled by, and I just caught the end tail of her sentence: “... to survival. You see, sugar, life doesn’t come with a plan. It’s messy. Full of things you don’t expect and can’t control. But jazz... jazz teaches you how to move in and out of it, to ride the chaos—like a wave.”
Her gaze turned distant, her mind drifting to a memory I couldn’t see. “I grew up in a little shotgun shack, down in Georgia. Born not long after the war, you know? Slavery was over, but we weren’t free. I had my dreams—but I learned quick not to talk about ‘em. My mama, I know she’d had her dreams, too. But they got beaten out of her. The last one died when Daddy got hit by a freight train on his way to sharecropping. After that, Mama stopped talking. She’d never been one to say much, but after that, she didn’t say a word. But she’d sing while she worked. Soft spirituals. You know the kind.
“Mama had a voice that could bring the house down. Coulda used it to help bring in some money. But she thought singing for money was a sin. Preacher man told her God only wanted her to sing for him. Course, singing for him meant she was singing for the money—only not for her or us kids.” She tapped the ash off her cigarette, her nostrils flaring in remembered disgust. “That nigga used her voice to pull people into his church and put money in his own damn pocket.”
“Sad,” I said without thinking.
She shrugged. “That she fell for preacher man’s lies? Sure. But the songs? Naw.” A shake of the head. “Not really. They were hopeful, in their own way. Them songs was the only way she had of telling us that maybe, just maybe, tomorrow would be better. We didn’t have no Victrola. No piano either. But on Saturday nights, if the wind was just right, I could hear the music from the juke joint down the road. Fiddles, banjos, sometimes an old cornet somebody’d brought up from N’Orleans. The sound was wild, free. I didn’t know what it was, but I knew it was something that could carry you someplace else.”
She took another drag from her cigarette. “I was sixteen when I left home. Mama didn’t want me to go, but I told her I couldn’t stay. ‘There’s nothing here for me,’ I said. ‘Not a life worth living.’ So I packed what little I had and hit the road. Had a head full of dreams and not much else. Found myself in N’Orleans first, then St. Louis, and finally up here in Harlem. I sang wherever they’d have me—saloons, backrooms, churches. I thought my voice was enough. Thought I’d open my mouth and the world would fall at my feet. It didn’t. Men who wanted to own me, women who wanted to bury me. Nights when the hunger and loneliness just about broke me. When I thought about giving up. ‘Cause I didn’t think I’d make it through.”
“But you did.”
She nodded. “Yeah, I did.”
“How?”
She arched an eyebrow. “Good question.”
“Church?”
She chuckled and flashed a naughty smile, just wicked enough to show me the young woman she’d once been. “Baby, if you’re looking for sin, go to a church. Me? I found salvation in a speakeasy. Ain’t no hypocrites there.”
She smoked and smiled, pleased at the effect her saucy little comment had on me. For a moment, the room felt lighter. Then her tone shifted, growing softer, heavier.
“The answer’s simple when you think about it. The music taught me to listen. It ain’t just about the notes or the rhythm. It’s about... figuring out how to keep going when everything and everyone’s telling you to stop.”
Her eyes narrowed, remembering. Smoke curled like a whisper above her. “Surviving... It’s about having the courage to keep playing, even when the song changes. Even when you don’t know where the melody’s going.”
Mamie’s eyes softened, her smile fading into something quieter, gentler. “You learn to improvise. When the rhythm changes, you change with it. When the notes don’t fit, you find new ones that do.”
She snapped back to the present, her eyes locking onto mine. “That’s what jazz taught me. And that’s how I survived—through everything this world’s thrown at me.”
She flicked the ash off her cigarette and gave me a sharp, knowing look, then leaned back, her silence saying it all.
Mamie’s words stayed with me long after I left her apartment. Back at the newsroom, I checked my notes. I’d been pretty good at taking down what she said, but I’d missed that one line when the train drowned out part of her sentence. That one line. Something told me it summed up everything she’d said. I tried to reconstruct it. What was it?
“Jazz. It ain’t just about the music. For people like us, it’s the … to survival.”
The what? That one word was missing. I thought about it. Then it clicked. Can you figure it out?
—Lanie Price, Society Reporter, The Harlem Chronicle
