Papa Jack Laine: The Father of White Jazz Who Didn't Care About Color

The Father of White Jazz Who Didn't Care About Color

Papa Jack Laine holds one of the more awkward titles in music history: the "Father of White Jazz." It's a title that sounds like it should be accompanied by an asterisk, and in a way, it should—because the man they gave it to spent his career ignoring the color lines that the title implies.

George Vitelle Laine was born in 1873 in Milneburg, the lakefront neighborhood where New Orleanians went to escape the heat and listen to music. He started leading bands in 1885, when he was twelve years old, and for the next thirty-five years he ran the most important training ground for white musicians in the city. His Reliance Brass Band was a factory that produced jazz musicians the way Detroit would later produce automobiles.

The list of musicians who got their start in Laine's bands reads like a who's who of early jazz. Members of the Original Dixieland Jass Band—the group that made the first jazz recording in 1917—came out of Laine's orbit. Many of the New Orleans musicians who spread jazz around the country in the 1910s and 1920s learned their craft playing in one of his outfits.

But here's where the story gets interesting, and where the "Father of White Jazz" title starts to crack. Laine's bands weren't strictly white. In a city governed by Jim Crow, where playing in mixed-race bands could get you arrested, Laine found ways around the rules. When darker-skinned musicians showed up in his bands, he identified them as "Cuban" or "Mexican" to satisfy anyone who asked questions. His Reliance Brass Band was, as music historians have noted, the first to fuse European, African, and Latin musical traditions—which is really just a fancy way of saying Laine didn't care what color you were as long as you could play.

Laine believed that music brought people together, and he acted on that belief at a time when acting on it carried real risk. He wasn't a civil rights activist—he was a bandleader who wanted the best musicians he could find, and if the best musicians happened to be the wrong color for Jim Crow Louisiana, he figured out a workaround.

He retired from music booking by 1920, having spent thirty-five years training the musicians who would carry New Orleans jazz to the world. He lived another forty-six years after that, dying in 1966 at ninety-two, old enough to see jazz go from a local phenomenon to a global art form—and to know that his bands had helped make it happen.

Papa Jack Laine's title is a relic of an era that tried to segregate everything, including music. The truth of his life was more complicated and more admirable: he was a bandleader who cared about the music more than the rules, and who trained a generation of musicians who changed the sound of the world.