With Louis and the Duke [electronic resource] : The Autobiography of a Jazz Clarinetist

It must have been in 1972 sometime. "Barney. Why don't you write a book?" "On what?" "You." "Oh I don't have time for that." "Well," I said, "since we get together to chew the fat anyway, we just need to bring a tape recorder and that's that." Here, thirteen years later, is the result of that work. Barney must have been the all-time hardest interviewee. For one thing, he was not the world's best talker, seconded by the fact that he was the most modest man I have ever met in the jazz world. But as the weeks went by I began amassing a solid pile of tapes. I tried to keep all of them in some kind of sequence; some of them had the same stories twice but all were important. He told his tale the way he saw it, spun silver-webbed accounts of the early days in New Orleans, solid gold stories from many an era long gone, and it all started to come into place. The hardest thing was to get him to say anything about his own contribution to it all, but as time passed I began to realize that this was not so important. The very fact that he was with all of these people spoke for itself. They were all telling his story for him. Front Matter....Pages i-x Front Matter....Pages 3-3 “All my people, they all spoke French.”....Pages 5-9 “I wanted to be a musician.”....Pages 10-13 ‘The best damned clarinet player in New Orleans.’....Pages 14-19 “All down the line there was music.”....Pages 20-26 “He was the King all right.”....Pages 27-34 “Oh! That music.”....Pages 35-39 “Give the Apple one more crack.”....Pages 40-43 “I started that Friday and ended fourteen years later.”....Pages 44-52 “The fastest company in the whole wide world.”....Pages 53-58 “They kept us runnin’, night and day.”....Pages 59-61 “Everybody in the band knew they were working with a genius.”....Pages 62-65 “The rigors of the never ending road.”....Pages 66-78 Front Matter....Pages 79-79 “The guys all asked me what I wanted with that old man.”....Pages 81-86 “I never was conscious that there was a whole movement.”....Pages 87-91 “Shoot, shoot and reshoot.”....Pages 92-95 “The All Stars.”....Pages 96-109 “Like I said, there’ll never be another.”....Pages 110-115 “From the inside looking out.”....Pages 116-119 “Guys came and went, but the band kept on going.”....Pages 120-124 “Play your own way.”....Pages 125-127 Front Matter....Pages 79-79 “I was never destined to rest for long.”....Pages 128-132 “Five years later it was still Indiana.”....Pages 133-136 “In the middle of a tour I read I had retired.“....Pages 137-141 “Finally they sent a Rolls-Royce.”....Pages 142-145 Back Matter....Pages 146-152