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COPYRIGHT 2007 Center For Black Music Research
In the spring of 1934, the Chicago Defender ("Detroit Likes Them" 1934) and Philadelphia Tribune ("Chappie Willet" 1934) ran a publicity photo of "Chappie Willet and His Greystone Ballroom Orchestra." The image not only provides one of the few glimpses of jazz composer and arranger Francis "Chappie" Willet (1907-1976) from his early, pre-New York City career, but it also documents the final chapter in the history of Edwards' Collegians, a West Virginia territory band. Typical of many jazz dance orchestras, the story of Edwards' Collegians begins at the height of the Jazz Age and ends in the midst of the Great Depression. But the group's migration to Philadelphia left a lasting impact on that city's music scene, as band manager Frank Fairfax Sr. (1899-1972) led the formation of Philadelphia's black musicians' union, American Federation of Musicians (AFM) Local 274.
Chappie Willet: Composer, Arranger, and Bandleader
Entertainer Harold Cromer (2004; b. 1920) describes Francis Robert "Chappie" Willet as being dressed like "you'd think he was going to Wall Street." By all accounts, Willet--over six feet tall and an articulate speaker, typically adorned in a three-piece suit, wire-rimmed glasses, a carefully trimmed moustache, and occasionally posing with a pipe--radiated refinement. (1) Guitarist Chico Hicks (2004b) remembers his former bandleader as "very clean cut ... no regular, you know, run-o'-the-mill guy."
Willet does not receive an entry in the New Grove Dictionary of Jazz (Kernfeld 2001) or in Chilton's Who's Who of Jazz (1985). (2) All but forgotten during his own lifetime, Willet was one of many whose career fortunes seemed to rise and fall with the Swing Era. At the peak of jazz's role as popular music in the late 1930s and early 1940s, the composer, arranger, and pianist was one of the first-call writers in New York City's vibrant nightclub and stage-show scene. Willet created arrangements for tap-dancing stars such as Charles "Honi" Coles and the Nicholas Brothers, working at venues that included the Apollo Theater, Cotton Club, Kit Kat Club, Ubangi Club, and Cafe Zanzibar. (3) Bandleaders such as Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Teddy Hill, Gene Krupa, Jimmie Lunceford, Lucky Millinder, and Red Norvo all used Willet's talents, often during their extended New York theater or nightclub engagements. (4) The writer collaborated with once-legendary Broadway figures such as composer and lyricist Porter Grainger (ca. 1891-?) (e.g., "I Ain't Gettin' Nowhere Fast," 1938) and conductor and arranger Russell Wooding (ca. 1891-1959) (Cromer 2004), as well as established icons such as composers James "Eubie" Blake and Donald Heywood ("Gala Opening" 1941).
Willet enjoyed a formidable reputation during this time. Lunceford sideman and arranger Gerald Wilson (2004; b. 1918), in describing the Swing Era music scene, called Willet "one of the great arrangers around at that time." Among performers, Willet's name was identified with technically demanding music: Millinder sideman and trumpeter Harry "Sweets" Edison (1981, 2:18) observed that Willet "used to write such hard arrangements it would take so long to get these players together. And musicians could read in those days." From a later version of Millinder's orchestra, drummer David "Panama" Francis (1918-2001) remembered a Savoy Ballroom band battle in which the group "opened up with one of our big flag-wavers, 'Prelude in C-sharp Minor,' a great arrangement by Chappie Willet, to show off our musicianship" (quoted in Dance 2001, 380). Journalist Steve Voce related John "Dizzy" Gillespie's joking anecdote: "You remember Chappie Willet? He used to write a lot of way out things for the Millinder band in crazy times--three-eight; five-eight; twelve-eight; sixteen-ninety-five--you name it" (quoted in Shipton 1999, 367 n2:9).
Although not containing any of the odd meters cited by Gillespie, Willet's composition "Blue Rhythm Fantasy" did provide him with a modest hit: the work was featured as Teddy Hill's radio theme and was also performed by Armstrong, Krupa, and Millinder. (5) Krupa (1909-1973) called on Willet to help create his band book, including his radio theme "Apurksody," when the drummer formed his first big band in 1938. The leader recalled: "Chappie Willet was my first arranger and we got some great things from him. ... I'll never forget how much he did for bands that had to play shows; invariably vaudeville acts brought in music that was worse to listen to than to play. ... Chappie had the knack of being able to put down on paper what the performer wanted, and yet make it sound good" (quoted in Klauber 1990, 46).
Willet also participated in projects outside the theater world, such as his collaboration with Langston Hughes on Adam Clayton Powell Jr.'s 1944 campaign song, "'Let My People Go' Now!" (Rampersad 1988, 98). But the majority of Willet's music appears to have been written and performed for live audiences, while published songs, stock arrangements, and discs recorded by the bandleaders already cited represent only a sample of his total output.
The postwar years took their toll on the nightclub business as well as on the dance bands, and Willet's name appeared less frequently in press and industry publicity during the late 1940s. A final entry in the 1952 New York Local 802 musician's union directory, listing his phone number and office address at 156 West Forty-fourth Street, may be the last trace of Willet's professional career before his death at the age of sixty-eight, back in his hometown of Philadelphia. His wife, Olena Mariella Hunter--a professional stage performer (Cromer 2004) working under the name "Olena Williams" (6)--died in 1989, and no living relations have been found to fill in the story of the musician's final twenty-five years.
Francis Robert Willet was born to Chester "Buck" and Elizabeth "Lizzie" Hill Willet in Philadelphia on September 6, 1907 (see Wriggle 2005, 2). Census records show that Chester and Elizabeth--who both worked in domestic service--were living together in Atlantic City as early as 1900 but had moved to Philadelphia by the time Francis's older sister Elizabeth was born in 1903 or 1904 (U.S. Bureau of the Census 1900, 1930). The Willets were part of a growing black community in Philadelphia during the early twentieth century, comprising over 11 percent of the city's population by 1930, a proportion greater than that of New York, Detroit, or Chicago (Hardy 1989, 135). A major consequence of the Great Migration era was Philadelphia's construction of "more single-family row houses than any other city in the nation" (Allen 1998, 31); city directories list the Willet family as residing in its own two-story row house, at 1125 South Eighteenth Street, from 1925 through 1978. (7)
By 1930, Francis was listed in the census schedule for Institute, West Virginia, as a resident student at West Virginia State College, a land-grant school originally named the West Virginia Colored Institute. There, he studied composition under Joseph W. Grider ("Program of National Music Week" 1933) and performed recitals of solo piano music by composers such as Christian Sinding and Alexandre Tansman ("Department of Music" 1932; "Joint Recital" 1933). Documentation of Willet's extracurricular music activities can be found in the Yellow Jacket, the West Virginia State school newspaper. On November 1, 1932, the headline "'Chappie' and Band Score Hit at Daniel Boone Hotel" ran below a school portrait photo of "Francis 'Chappie' Willet": Willet's eleven-piece dance band, the Campus Revelers, had recently opened at a hotel in nearby Charleston, featuring the leader's "superb" arrangements (Ryder 1932). (8)
The Revelers--which at one point included jazz drummer and Charleston native William "Keg" Purnell (Feather 1955, 251)--appear to have been fairly active throughout that school year. The Charleston Daily Mail ran notices of the group's performances at a local country club in the fall ("Pine Manor" 1932), and the Philadelphia Tribune gave notice of Willet's regional radio broadcasts from Charleston's Hotel Ruffner the following winter (Baillou 1933; Wilkinson 2006). (9) Any real popularity that Willet had garnered by the time of his graduation, reported by the Yellow Jacket in the spring of 1933 ("Mr. Francis Willet" 1933), may have helped him to make his next career move: joining another West Virginia dance band that had already earned substantial regional fame.
Edwards' Collegians
The territory band Edwards' Collegians had been performing and broadcasting in West Virginia and the surrounding area since at least 1928 ("Wilberforce Notes" 1928)--the year preceding saxophonist and West Virginia State alumnus Leon "Chu" Berry's brief affiliation with the group (Chilton 1985, 32). An October 1931 notice in the Pittsburgh Courier announced that the Collegians had been "broadcasting for the past eighteen months from the Greystone Ballroom in Cincinnati over station WLW" and were "on tour under the direction of Sylvester Massey, Seventh Avenue, Huntington, W. Va." ("Latest Sensation" 1931).
A photo of Edwards' Collegians accompanied the article: the group had just moved into fifth place during a five-month-long national readers' poll of favorite bands conducted by the Courier since...
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