Bunk Johnson: The Trumpet Player They Had to Find

The Trumpet Player They Had to Find

In the late 1930s, two music historians named William Russell and Frederic Ramsey Jr. were writing a book about the origins of jazz when they kept hearing about a trumpet player from New Orleans named Bunk Johnson. The old musicians they interviewed all remembered him — one of the best in the city during the golden age of early jazz, from around 1905 to 1915. But nobody knew where he was.

They found him in New Iberia, Louisiana, working in the rice fields. He'd lost his trumpet and his front teeth in a fight at a dance hall in Rayne in 1931, and he hadn't played in over a decade. Russell and Ramsey got him new dentures and a new trumpet, and in 1942, Bunk Johnson recorded for the first time.

The recordings were a revelation. Here was a direct link to the earliest days of New Orleans jazz — a man who claimed to have played with Buddy Bolden and who had definitely been one of the leading trumpeters in the city during the years when jazz was being invented. Johnson's playing, alongside clarinetist George Lewis, captured something that record collectors and jazz historians had only read about.

The revival made Johnson a star in his sixties. He toured New Orleans, San Francisco, Boston, and New York, playing for audiences who treated him like a living artifact — which, in a sense, he was. He was the bridge between the unrecorded pre-jazz era and the modern world of recording and radio.

Johnson suffered a stroke in late 1948 and died in July 1949. Scholars have debated the accuracy of some of his claims about his early career — Bunk had a tendency to embellish — but the music speaks for itself. He was a New Orleans trumpet player from the earliest generation, lost for decades, found in a rice field, and given one last chance to play the music that had defined his youth. It's one of the great second-act stories in jazz history.