Bix Beiderbecke - Early Life

Early Life

Bix Beiderbecke was born on March 10, 1903, in Davenport, Iowa, the son of Bismark Herman and Agatha Jane (Hilton) Beiderbecke. There is disagreement over whether Beiderbecke was christened Leon Bismark (and nicknamed "Bix") or Leon Bix. His father was nicknamed "Bix," as, for a time, was his older brother, Charles Burnette "Burnie" Beiderbecke. Burnie Beiderbecke claimed that the boy was named Leon Bix and subsequent biographers have reproduced birth certificates to that effect. However, more recent research—which takes into account church and school records in addition to the will of a relative—has suggested that he was originally named Leon Bismark. Regardless, his parents called him Bix, which seems to have been his preference. In a letter to his mother when he was nine years old, Beiderbecke signed off, "frome your Leon Bix Beiderbecke not Bismark Remeber" .

Beiderbecke's father, the son of German immigrants, was a well-to-do coal and lumber merchant, named after the Iron Chancellor of his native Germany. Beiderbecke's mother was the daughter of a Mississippi riverboat captain. She played the organ at Davenport's First Presbyterian Church, and encouraged young Bix's interest in the piano. Bix Beiderbecke was the youngest of three children. His brother, Burnie, was born in 1895, and his sister, Mary Louise, in 1898. Bix began playing piano at age two or three. His sister recalls that he stood on the floor and played it with his hands over his head. Five years later, he was the subject of an admiring article in the Davenport Daily Democrat that proclaimed: "Seven-year-old boy musical wonder! Little Bickie Beiderbecke plays any selection he hears."

At age ten, his older brother Burnie recalled that he stopped coming home for supper, instead hurrying down to the riverfront and slipping aboard one or another of the excursion boats to play the Calliope. A friend remembered that the plots of the silent matinees Bix and his friends watched on Saturdays didn't interest him much, but as soon as the lights came on he would rush home to see if he could duplicate the melodies the accompanist had played during the action.

When his brother Burnie returned to Davenport at the end of 1918 after serving stateside during World War I, he brought with him a Victrola phonograph machine and several records, including "Tiger Rag" and "Skeleton Jangle" by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band. From these records Bix Beiderbecke first learned to love hot jazz; he taught himself to play cornet by listening to Nick LaRocca's horn lines. Beiderbecke also listened to jazz music off the riverboats that docked in downtown Davenport. Louis Armstrong and the drummer Baby Dodds claimed to have met Beiderbecke when their New Orleans-based excursion boat stopped in Davenport. Historians disagree over whether that is true.

Beiderbecke attended Davenport High School from 1919 to 1921. During this time, he sat in and played professionally with various bands, including those of Wilbur Hatch, Floyd Bean, and Carlisle Evans. In the spring of 1920 he performed for the school's Vaudeville Night, singing in a vocal quintet called the Black Jazz Babies and playing his horn. He also performed, at the invitation of his friend Fritz Putzier, in Neal Buckley's Novelty Orchestra. The group was hired for a gig in December 1920, but a complaint was lodged with the American Federation of Musicians, Local 67, that the boys did not have union cards. In an audition before a union executive, Beiderbecke was forced to sight read and failed. He did not earn his card.

On April 22, 1921, a month after he turned 18, Beiderbecke was arrested by two Davenport police officers on a charge brought by the father of a young girl. According to biographer Jean Pierre Lion, "Bix was accused of having taken this man's five-year-old daughter into a garage and committing on her an act qualified by the police report as 'lewd and lascivious.'" Although Beiderbecke was briefly taken into custody and held on a $1,500 bond, the charge was dropped after the girl was not made available to testify. According to an affidavit submitted by her father, this was because "of the child's age and the harm that would result to her in going over this case." It is not clear from the father's affidavit if the girl had identified Beiderbecke. Until recently, biographers have largely ignored this incident in Beiderbecke's life, and Lion was the first, in 2005, to print the police blotter and affidavit associated with the arrest. He dismissed the seriousness of the charge, but speculated that the arrest nevertheless might have led Beiderbecke to "feel abandoned and ashamed: he saw himself as suspect of perversion." Beiderbecke fans and scholars continue to argue over this incident's relevance and importance.

Beiderbecke's parents enrolled him in the exclusive Lake Forest Academy, north of Chicago in Lake Forest, Illinois. While historians have traditionally suggested that his parents sent him to Lake Forest to discourage his interest in jazz, others have begun to doubt this version of events, believing that he may have been sent away in response to his arrest. Regardless, Mr. and Mrs. Beiderbecke apparently felt that a boarding school would provide their son with both the necessary faculty attention and discipline to improve his academic performance. His interests, however, remained limited to music and sports. In pursuit of the former, Beiderbecke took the train into Chicago to catch the hot jazz bands at clubs and speakeasies, including the infamous Friar's Inn, where he listened to and sometimes sat in with the New Orleans Rhythm Kings. He also traveled to the predominantly African-American South Side to listen to what he called "real" jazz musicians. "Don't think I'm getting hard, Burnie," he wrote to his brother, "but I'd go to hell to hear a good band." On campus, he helped organize the Cy-Bix Orchestra with drummer Walter "Cy" Welge and almost immediately got into trouble with the Lake Forest headmaster for performing indecorously at a school dance.

Beiderbecke often failed to return to his dormitory before curfew, and sometimes stayed off-campus the next day. In the early morning hours of May 20, he was caught on the fire escape to his dormitory, attempting to climb back into his room. The faculty voted to expel him the next day, due both to his academic failings and his extracurricular activities, which included drinking. The headmaster informed Beiderbecke's parents by letter that following his expulsion school officials confirmed that Beiderbecke "was drinking himself and was responsible, in part at least, in having liquor brought into the School." Soon after, Beiderbecke began pursuing a career in music.

He returned to Davenport briefly in the summer of 1922, then moved to Chicago to join the Cascades Band, working that summer on Lake Michigan excursion boats. He gigged around Chicago until the fall of 1923, at times returning to Davenport to work for his father.