Morris Donald interview recording, 1993 June 13
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Transcript
Transcripts may contain inaccuracies.
Morris Young Donald | Until she left, yes, I was telling you about Dorothy Fletcher Steele. Seems that when she came to Charlotte, as this beautiful young woman whose photograph we are looking at, Dorothy Fletcher Steele was the oldest of several children, and being from a religious family, her father was a barber, but they were very religious, they had been in Redding, Pennsylvania. Redding. And she was out, first born to seek a job, and she got a job here in Charlotte, North Carolina. Came in new, knew no one. But during this relationship she was able to bring a perspective of what she saw as different from what she was used to being brought up in, and also a perspective of social life on a Black college campus doing the 1930s. | 0:01 |
Morris Young Donald | It's not too well known or publicized about those things. You almost have to get a word of mouth kind of a reaction to it. Now since you have a routine, why don't you go ahead and routine me? And then maybe I'll get back to Ms. Steele as we go down the routine. It will probably come up if that's okay. You want to do that? | 1:15 |
Leslie Brown | Would you like to begin by talking about you and how you came to Smith? When did you come to Smith? | 1:41 |
Morris Young Donald | I Morris Young Donald, the second son of five boys, born from a Jamaican father, Gilbert F. Donald, who migrated from Kingston to Shaw University in Raleigh and met my mother Josephine Price. And to that union, there were five children. | 1:49 |
Morris Young Donald | They were educators. He was a minister educator and she was from [indistinct 00:02:27] County. Gosh, that's not right. But however, a rural county in North Carolina. They moved, my mother's family moved here in Charlotte, when they were young. She was the youngest of nine children born to Charles Price and Mary Latimore Price. | 2:18 |
Morris Young Donald | Now, what happened with my mother and father is that he became an ordained Presbyterian minister. Johnson C. Smith, being a Presbyterian school, attracted him there. But more than that, there was a kind of environment here. I can remember as a kid never seeing White people. If I did, it was a street vendor, maybe selling peaches or something from a truck. And that was unusual. That was a completeness of segregation at that time. There was no racial congress at all, at least in my small juvenile mind. There probably was. | 2:59 |
Morris Young Donald | My daddy was fiercely Jamaican in a sense that his pride was such that he might have been considered that these times a rebel or rebellious. He brought us up in such a way that we didn't think too much about race. It was forced upon us if we had to go to town and we saw the White and Black drinking fountains and so forth, but we were sort of insulated. They sort of protected us from that, Black schools and so forth. | 3:52 |
Morris Young Donald | I went to all the neighborhood schools. Forget it. And all the neighborhood schools were totally Black. I matriculated from West Charlotte High School, whose chief competitor was another Black school on the other side of town called Second Ward High School. I'm sure you've come in contact with it in your interviews. | 4:27 |
Morris Young Donald | My daddy was a violinist and my mother played the piano and for some reason my mother had this rather unique idea that she was going to form a family band. So I never played the violin in my life. I hated it. It would squeak. My dad wasn't such a good player. My mom was just a mediocre piano. But she bought us all instruments. I ended up with a cornet. My younger brother Charles had a clarinet and the one younger than that, a trombone. And the oldest kid, Gilbert, had a tenor sax. The youngest one who died early, he came up and played saxophone too, but we never materialized that. | 4:57 |
Morris Young Donald | What happened after I graduated from high school, I have to relate this because this all has a difference. For one year while I was in high school, I had a music teacher named Campbell Aurelius Tolbert. Mr. Tolbert was unique in that he had finished with a master's degree at that time. And this we're talking about in the late '40s at Columbia and had gone on to Julliard and was quite an accomplished musician. Of course, I didn't know anything about that, but my parents were very astute and he came and had the unique position of being the instrumental music instructor at the two rival high schools, Second Ward and West Charlotte simultaneously, which in itself set up a kind of barrier. But it caused us, those of us who became as private students, to transcend the adversarial position. | 5:45 |
Morris Young Donald | I began to have some friends who went to Second Ward who played instruments. Before, it was all rivalry. I got to be the ace trumpet player. Oh, I was so proud. You know? And I wondered years after that when I learned something about Mr. Tolbert that he was a woodwind specialist. And I said to myself, "Now why did my mom and pop insist I take private lessons with this woodwind specialist?" But Mr. Tolbert introduced me to Arban's method for the trumpet, which is sort of international, the Arban method. I guess it was at a time when it was good to have a young man's mind busy with all his hormones being affected by something that would challenge him intellectually, but the trumpet became my one desire in life. | 7:00 |
Morris Young Donald | I remember my English teacher and I, Elizabeth Randolph, you probably run across that name, having the foresight to tell me in the 12th grade, well Morris, you do your theme on how the trumpet works. Well, I was afire with that. She had challenged me in a way that I knew I could handle, but still, the English structure could be fulfilled through a process of something that she knew I had interest in. | 7:59 |
Morris Young Donald | I left West Charlotte. My brother had matriculated to Talladega. I had an older brother. We didn't have no money. He only went down to Talladega cause he had a cousin who decided to be his mentor, so it was left, when it came my time, we didn't have no money. Five children struggling with poor, rural, primitive minister, and a mother who was a former school teacher who had full-time duties raising five boys. Shucks, but we didn't know we were poor. And it came time for me to go to college. They told me, "Well we invested out everything we had in your older brother." And I said, "Well what was that?" | 8:40 |
Morris Young Donald | At any rate, it was up to me to work my own way through school. I didn't have any problem with that. I'd been industrious. So I went down to John C. Smith and so many else did and talked to Dean McKinney, Dean Theopolis McKinney, who said to me, "Well you compare a little down and a little week and you can even just give me $25 and we'll find some work aid for you." And I'm a city student who don't live. I can't afford the luxury of living on the campus. I got a job at the A&P, American and Pacific grocery chain, and I worked there. But in the meantime I had not given up my trumpet love. As a matter of fact, just before I left high school, which had a change in band directors, Fred Jackson who later became a physician in Atlanta, and Fred Jackson was playing in a local orchestra. | 9:32 |
Morris Young Donald | Now, I'm going to just show you how serendipitous this all turns out to be. The orchestra leader's name was Raymond "Flat Tire" Mason. Raymond "Flat Tire" Mason. Well he was a little midget, sort on the scope of Chick Webb. He was a drumming terror. Oh wow. But he had grown to a point where he had graduated to administration. He was just a stick waver, now, like Lucky Millinder had done. He didn't play anything anymore except those rare occasions when he felt like he had to show off and he would jump in the middle of it and embarrass our drummer by playing him better than him. So what happened was Fred Jackson, seeing that there were some of us who could play trumpet well enough, in his decision, to do what he thought was professional, asked several of us when the vacancies came in this band to try out for it. | 10:42 |
Morris Young Donald | I remember one young man who was my island named Ralph Abel. Oh, he was just a natural trumpeteer. And I would sit on, he was in the 12th grade and I was in the 10th and Ralph could play everything, but Ralph soon graduated into that group of Raymond "Flat Tire" Mason's orchestra. After a while, they asked me to travel. Donald can read and Donald can fill in. We need a second trumpet. So all right. I tried out and I made it. But that was my introduction into a whole different life, because professionally, these guys who I was playing with, though I didn't realize at the time, were also people who had serious music backgrounds and serious music training. | 11:48 |
Morris Young Donald | Here I am, the little boy. He called me the little boy. Sitting there, and wouldn't let me do nothing that I wanted to do that was wrong and kept me in my place when we travel around. Soon, Fred Jackson left, and as I graduated from high school, and went to work down, went to matriculate at Johnson Smith, working at the A&P to pay my way, I was still playing with this organization, trying to help pay my way through college, which turned out not to be difficult at all. I was surprised. Of course it wasn't that much money that I was making, but things didn't cost that much. | 12:44 |
Morris Young Donald | Well, let me be succinct. I didn't have a chance to graduate. I got drafted. But by that time, I had learned so much from them old guys, particularly about how to arrange, and arranging brought in extra money. If I would write arrangement, Flat Tire would give me an extra 10 or 20, so you know I was always writing something to get that extra money. But learning to arrange from guys like Red Booker and Henry George, these guys who had been through the academic part of it, when I got to Smith, my parents wanted me to be physician and I did a pre-med course was a major in biology and a minor in health preparing to go into the be a physician. | 13:31 |
Morris Young Donald | But I didn't really want to be a physician. But I got drafted and I had to serve some time in the armed services, in which at that time I avoided like the plague playing anything. Now, that's an aberration I know, but I didn't want to be in a military band, and so I just avoided it. That's two things I avoided. I avoided officer's Army Corps the same way. This was Korean War and I remember taking the Army aptitude tests and making a score that qualified me to go into officer's candidate school, but I turned it down. Then they looked at my record and said, "Well you got some experience in biology so we going to send you to the medical hospital, local based hospital, and you can train as a medic." I'm fine. I'm not going to the front lines. That's great. | 14:27 |
Morris Young Donald | I went down to train as a medic, had a good time, became what was the hospital administrator, Captain [indistinct 00:15:51], I became his medical librarian. I was in heaven sitting there reading the medical books. You know? And not only that, I get to do all the charts of people coming in from wounds overseas. I get to see these strange exotic disease. Of course, the Army had a name for all of them, nomenclatures and stuff. And it's my job to fit that in, the nomenclature, and keep the medical record library. Well that was fine. I stayed there in a town, Gap Pennsylvania. Isn't that something? Pennsylvania again. | 15:38 |
Morris Young Donald | I stayed there for my term, which was only two years. And then, when I was released from the Army, I came back to Johnson C Smith, but this time I had just a few courses to take to finish the biology thing. I went on and finished it. But I had a GI Bill, then, so then I could study what I wanted to, which was music. And I had been sneaking courses in it all the time. | 16:20 |
Morris Young Donald | I immediately started out in a degree program. But Johnson C Smith, at least I thought at the time, I know better now, it didn't have any music background such that I could see an advantage to that, but it was where I had to go because I was constrained here, and soon after got married and I didn't need to leave. And anyway, it was easy cause I almost knew it all anyway. Met a band director there. They had a guy came in named Daniel Owens. He came from Alabama by way of Pittsburgh. We always get back to Pennsylvania some kind of way. | 16:53 |
Morris Young Donald | Daniel Owens and I became fast friends. He taught me advanced harmony, chromatic harmony, theory and those kind of things. And when I came back, Flat Tire Mason had disbanded this band, but along with some others, we were instrumental in getting it started back again and Daniel was playing with us. My professor in music was playing with me in the band, and then we got the high school band directors to join, and pretty soon we had a hot thing going again. I was just having a lot of fun. | 17:36 |
Morris Young Donald | When I graduated from Johnson C. Smith, I took a job in Ahoskie, North Carolina. It's just on the age of the Virginia line. Ahoskie was a peanut capital and I ain't know nothing about that. The thing that amazed me was they had a caste system and everybody there from the darkest dark to the lightest White might be called Colored folks. And there was a whole lot of different kinds, but the caste system was pretty strict. | 18:11 |
Morris Young Donald | If you were a "teacher," you could transcend all that. You know? I stayed there one year. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I was fairly confused by the time I left there about what it all meant, but they had their own mores and folkways. For instance, this little town named Colerain, where the salmon, the fish would run, it wasn't salmon. I don't know what the kind of fish that was. It amazed me because people would go down there with buckets and just dip out fish because this fish was spawning, I guess. You know? Running back. And if you try to buy, you could buy two fish for a penny. They didn't care what it weighed at the store. That's how plentiful it was. And those were the idiosyncrasies. | 18:45 |
Morris Young Donald | I had little déjà vu. I remember going down a lane with a windmill type water. Not windmill, with a water wheel mill. And I said, "I've been down here before," knowing I never have. Never been to that part of the county in my life. And it seemed so familiar. I even knew what was around the bend. Now I can't explain that, but you know how you ESP people do. They have a reason for everything in your past. But that was strange. And it is a little town called Whitten, where I was the band director for one year. I enjoyed that. | 19:33 |
Morris Young Donald | Then I got an offer back here at home where my wife lived and we moved back and I started playing with Flat Tire Mason's band again. Let me tell you what is so funny about all this. When I began doing this research, I went over to the Afro-American Cultural Arts Center. The director at that time was a young lady named Green. Her name was Vanessa Green. She said to me, "We don't have any resource about local musicians, Black around us. The kids come here and they don't know. The kids are not turned on by what they see. They don't know of any history." She said, "Will you help me?" My wife said, "Yeah." My wife is smart. | 20:19 |
Morris Young Donald | My advocation is farming. I enjoy just growing stuff. You see that banana tree? The one like that. Well, I just enjoy growing stuff, but I was intrigued by that, so I started doing little research on it. There was a local high school in the county name that used to be called J.H. Gunn, named after a guy named James H. Gunn, who I knew was instrumental in having a terrific band many years ago. But I didn't know anything about it except that when I was a small boy and I used to pass the rehearsal hall, I would just be overwhelmed by what I'd hear. My mother would drag me on. I must have been five or six. But see, that was so far in my past. I had no idea. | 21:07 |
Morris Young Donald | When I began to discover things about Jimmie Gunn, Miss Steele told me, "Oh yeah, I remember Jimmie Gunn." And I said, "Well what about Campbell Tolbert?" "Well, he was the man who made Jimmie Gunn." | 21:55 |
Morris Young Donald | One of my stints in high school, when I was taking those private lessons, with Tolbert, and playing with him at the same time, is the one time that he came back to Charlotte. He left here the following year and took a job as professor of woodwinds at Texas Christian University. He remained there until he retired. I was speaking with a physician friend of ours, Emery Rand, who knew him also. When I started doing this research, I would look up these people, called them, whatever they would say about, about Skeets Tolbert, and Emery said, "He's still living." I say, "Come on, Emery." He said, "Yeah, I got his address." I wrote a letter to him and got a reply. Not only did I get a reply. He sent me all kinds of information. | 22:09 |
Morris Young Donald | "Yeah, I remember you, Donald, that one year I was there in Charlotte." I said, "Well you know, I don't know what to say." He even has a videotape that I'll show you because I got it set up in there. But I was just amazed at the response. I called him on the phone. His wife said, "He ain't home." I couldn't imagine that guy, that old bid, out. But he just left here. But he called me back. We had a conversation. He wrote me a long letter then he wrote a letter to Dr. Rand. Let me share something. I want to show you something. I'm going to read this because I want to explore on the record. This is how it all began. And then I'm going to show you some photographs. Now, I was doing this research on James H Gunn and the Dixie Serenaders. | 23:08 |
Morris Young Donald | Now, the Dixie Serenaders was one name that this musical group had. This group was sort of like Erskine Hawkinson at Alabama State. It was one of those Black things that started out and just developed. They received a certain amount of notoriety. Listen to this. J.H. Gunn graduated from Johnson C. Smith in 1922, having been awarded the Bachelor of Arts degree. Now my source for that is the Bill of Justice C. Smith story by Ines Parker. Ines [indistinct 00:24:32] Parker. Paris McCorkle, he's a local fellow here who was a former principal of J.H. Gunn High School, in [indistinct 00:24:41] County, states that Mr. Gunn was from Danville, Virginia, having a sister resigning there in the 1980s. And he was a teacher in Anderson, South Carolina with Reverend Francis before moving to Charlotte, where he was a music director organist at the Seventh Street Presbyterian Church. | 24:00 |
Morris Young Donald | Hey, I had no idea he was also a church organist. I only thought he was a pianist. Perhaps as livelihood was difficult, as Campbell A. Skeets Tolbert—you have to stop. | 25:00 |
Morris Young Donald | Campbell A. Skeets was an original member of the Dixie Serenaders. He related this follow scenario to me about what happened. He said the Serenaders were formed as a result of a theatrical change from silent pictures to talking pictures. | 25:18 |
Morris Young Donald | What happened was there was a silent theater called the Rex Theater soon to become known as the Lincoln Theater when they changed over to talkies. It became Lincoln Theater, which was located on Second Street, which was sort like the business mecca for Black people in Charlotte, North Carolina. There was a violinist named David Taylor, who was also from Virginia. Here's a photo of David Taylor. He was a concert violinist. He had a music store down on Trade Street, downtown, and a studio. | 25:40 |
Morris Young Donald | This is where they used to rehearse. Mr. Tolbert says that Taylor was a violinist and Jimmie Gunn were pianists and they were both talented musicians and they were forced into another form of music because of this silent movie change. They used to play in the pit of the Rex. When all the solid movie was going on, they would make up stuff. But now, that was over with. So they formed a small jazz combo. During the same time at Johnson C Smith University, they added a non-credit course in instrumental music under direction of a French teacher named Professor Bordin. And he was a well-trained musician. | 26:25 |
Morris Young Donald | Here's a photograph of Professor Bordin given to me by Mrs. Floretta Gunn. Okay, this photograph here is the one Tolbert sent me in the high day of this band's creation. They were on a boat in New York doing a tour. And when is this? 1930-something? '32. You're not going to say a word, are you? Is that your analysis technique? Okay. | 27:07 |
Morris Young Donald | All right, let me continue. Professor Bordin was well trained. He was an artist as well as a French instructor. And the musicians trained by him became the backbone of this Dixie Serenaders, because they knew theory and harmonies, and so forth, trained by him. | 27:41 |
Morris Young Donald | Okay, Dave Taylor became ill. He was the violence leader and had to retire. As a result, Jimmie Gunn became the leader, the pianist, organist, the band members of the Serenaders were at that time, in the later years of the 1920s, as follows. And this is a list according into Mr. Tolbert. Jimmie Gunn was the leader. Al Harrington, banjo, later guitar. Lester Mitchell, trumpet. And by the way, I have photographs of all these guys in here somewhere. I'll show them to you as we go by. | 27:55 |
Morris Young Donald | There's the banjo guitar, for instance, Al Harrington, and Franklin, Trombone. JL Jordan, his lady played with Count Basie. And this guy here, Johnakins. But let continue with what Tolbert is saying. Al Harrington played the banjo. Lester Mitchell, trumpet, Victor Jones, the trombone, Harry Prather, the sousaphone. Isn't that something? A big sousaphone. But this was a Dixieland group like Louis Armstrong and those guys, you say. Okay. And Skeets Tolbert played the saxophone and the clarinet. Bill Monk later replaced—Bill Hart, rather, as drummer. And Bill Davidson later replaced Vic Jones on the trombone. | 28:34 |
Morris Young Donald | Then Mr. Tolbert goes on to say, "You will know that the instrumentation is basically that of the Crescent City style, New Orleans." That is one or one trumpet, one trombone, one clarinet, with a banjo, piano, tuba, or sousaphone, and drums. Mr. Tolbert continues, "Dance band arrangements became very necessary to the growth of dance bands, which were written for full rhythm sections." | 29:19 |
Morris Young Donald | And Tolbert was a master at this stuff. He came in, I remember, just to digress for a minute. We were playing in a town called Southern Pines, which was kind of like a resort town. And Tolbert was mischievous. I'm the youngest guy in the group. You know? But I sat right behind him. And Tolbert did two things that night that I would never forget. One was, he said, when Flat Tire came out to start the band playing, we bought commercial music. We had business stacks of commercial music, dance music, and Flat Tire had a way of trying to show off. He was a mighty small man. And he had a way of trying to show off, particularly when he got a little inebriated. He would get up there showing off and he would start and nobody would be ready. He jumped up and hollered, "We're going to play 'Jumping Like Mad.'" I said to myself, scuffling, trying to find the song, "I can't—" [INTERRUPTION] | 29:46 |
Morris Young Donald | So he said "Jumping Like Mad," [indistinct 00:31:01] stomp and others. The band started. But only three people started, the drummer, [indistinct 00:31:11] and Tolbert. And I'm stuck on [indistinct 00:31:15] everybody else is. [indistinct 00:31:27]. So how come Tolbert started? When I got through [indistinct 00:31:56]. And then there were many [indistinct 00:32:37]. He also had, a habit in a way, of tapping his foot, which was beside me. No matter how bad, I could find the pattern. I was fascinated by him. Of course, it was always challenging [indistinct 00:33:11]. Serenaders [indistinct 00:33:14] so [indistinct 00:33:42]. (laughs) He rolled his eyes up to the ceiling, looking at me like sideways, "can you play me that Satchmo?" | 30:50 |
Morris Young Donald | And I saw [indistinct 00:34:15]. And I guess [indistinct 00:34:34] jumped down [indistinct 00:34:38] outside. And I said [indistinct 00:34:55]. [indistinct 00:35:02] He said, "I can't remember [indistinct 00:35:10]. We were on [indistinct 00:35:24] summer [indistinct 00:35:32] first performance [indistinct 00:35:44] Charlotte, at that school [indistinct 00:35:48]. My career [indistinct 00:35:52] Serenaders [indistinct 00:35:55]. They [indistinct 00:37:04] played [indistinct 00:37:21] musicians [indistinct 00:37:25] first [indistinct 00:37:27] and I was [indistinct 00:37:30] travel each year [indistinct 00:37:38] New York [indistinct 00:37:46]. I was [indistinct 00:37:53]. And then, [indistinct 00:38:00]. That's [indistinct 00:38:14] I told you. [indistinct 00:39:07] 48 [indistinct 00:39:08]. | 30:50 |
Morris Young Donald | Too young to get in it. They let me see that. Let me go through a few more of these pictures because I have some updates on these. This was a trombone player named Jimmie Green. He still lives around here. Here is the latest Flat Tire Mason group. Returned from the Army, there I am. And there's my instructor, Danny Owens. Flat Tire's got gray hair by now, shortened down. Yeah, that's that Herbert Reader they were talking about. | 37:36 |
Morris Young Donald | What happened actually was the Jimmie Gunn band, through the years, became the Flat Tire Mason band with the same personnel. Even when Tolbert came back, he played with that group. It's sort of like the history going on sort of like the Alabama State people, where who is that guy was up in West Virginia, had such a terrific group up? Oh. I can't remember. | 39:56 |
Morris Young Donald | The rest of these is just sort of local groups. He has a local group that I played with. I'm not on that photograph, but it was a Lou [indistinct 00:40:34] group, and some of the musicians on here will mentioned. Danny Daniels, for instance. Fred Jackson, who was my high school band director and Dob Hart, just to mention a few. | 40:24 |
Morris Young Donald | Now I did a lot of stuff. Here's Danny Owens again, the college band director, and his photograph of one of his bands at Johnson C Smith. I don't know the date. And that's a chapel show that I had to do while I was under his tutelage. Am I messing that up? Okay. Okay. | 40:45 |
Morris Young Donald | And then here's a letter that Tolbert wrote to Dr. Rand. But we covered just about everything in it with that narration. And I want to show you this, because this is really interesting. You probably have heard of Stuff Smith. He was the first jazz violinist. Stuff's, his name was Hezekiah Leroy Gordon Smith. Nickname, Stuff. Born in Portsmouth, Ohio, in 1809 and died in Munich, Germany. But he started the violin very early, in eight years, it says. And with a violin made by his father. But what is interesting about this for us is that he got a musical scholarship to Johnson C Smith University. He came there, he didn't graduate, but he spent some time at Johnson C Smith University on that scholarship. He left in 1924 to a [indistinct 00:42:00] band, from New Orleans, Al Font's Trip. | 41:09 |
Morris Young Donald | He later on became [indistinct 00:42:05] Martin, Donna Jones and Cozy Cole and went to Europe and died over there. They said about Stuff was when he went to New Orleans and played with this group, they blew too loud and drowned out his violin. So Stuff got something, and rigged him up. Amplification, the first amplified jazz violin. And the encyclopedias say that stuff was the best, most well known jazz violin. Jazz violinists, it's so strange to jazz. Now it's question time. | 42:03 |
Morris Young Donald | Senior in 1931. | 42:44 |
Leslie Brown | You said Tolbert as a senior? | 42:47 |
Morris Young Donald | He was as a senior in 1931. See, he was interested. We paralleled in a lot of ways. Notice something. His major was biology. So was mine. But he turned out to be a musician. Climb though the rocks be rugged. Skeets was a musician on the New York Serenaders fame, you see. With his saxophone, he can interpret Carl Sandberg's Jazz Fantasia. He is more interested in Gastonia, I think that's a reference to some young lady, than in the Hydra Mendelian law. | 42:50 |
Morris Young Donald | It is all men in school. But it was quite interesting back then. Have you ever seen one of these yearbooks? | 43:29 |
Leslie Brown | No. [indistinct 00:43:32]. | 43:32 |
Morris Young Donald | Take a peek through one. See what you think. As a matter of fact, I might. No, I can't do that. I started say, I might let you take one behind. No, no. I changed my mind on that now. | 43:33 |
Morris Young Donald | What I will do is let you look through them. I got a centennial one. Oh listen, I got permission from Emory. Dr. Rand, he's been sick. He had a stroke, but I got permission from him to give you his Black physicians in Charlotte, North Carolina. | 43:46 |
Leslie Brown | Thank you. | 44:02 |
Morris Young Donald | If you send it back, let me put my name on. Is my name in there? No, he just autographed it, I think. Yeah, let me put my name in there. This is some good stuff too, from the physician part. Let me see a pen. Yeah, you ain't got your tape on that? You still taping? Those places where they had these special dances and how the people who were there and it just fascinates me. | 44:04 |
Leslie Brown | Well- | 44:35 |
Morris Young Donald | Is that anywhere close to what you were looking for? | 44:36 |
Leslie Brown | That's exactly what I was looking for. And I'd like to ask you more questions. | 44:38 |
Morris Young Donald | Yeah, go ahead. | 44:42 |
Leslie Brown | I tried to follow your story and I'd like to ask you some questions about yourself and about your family and things like that. | 44:45 |
Morris Young Donald | Yeah. Okay. | 44:54 |
Leslie Brown | But I'm going to. | 44:54 |
Leslie Brown | —back and ask you about your father. You said he was West Indian and in that way, he was considered to be a rebel of sorts. | 0:02 |
Morris Young Donald | It may have only been his personal orientation, but he was fiercely independent in the sense that he used to tell me he came over here on the banana boat and it wasn't like escaping, but it was like going somewhere where he could find better opportunity. No, he wasn't a radical. He wasn't a shaker. But then he had a way of not being intimidated and there were too many times when it was more or less the status quo among Blacks here in Charlotte to take a solicitous attitude. And he refused to do that. So, well, you get a reputation when you do that. And that's what I'm referred to. | 0:10 |
Leslie Brown | Could you give me an example of what you mean by the kinds of things that he did that set him apart from— | 1:12 |
Morris Young Donald | Well, I can only relate to you what a lady told me, a Ms. Bee Stoney came up to me many years after my father had passed and said to me, "Your daddy would stand up to White folks." So my curiosity piqued. "Well, what you mean?" She related some story about having a meeting in a mixed company and where my father was the only one who would confront a obviously erroneous report. That's what I mean. She said he just stood up and told those White people. "No, that's wrong." Yeah, but I don't think he—Well, I know he wouldn't have—He was a minister. He was a peacemaker, but he wasn't—In other words, he would throw the merchants out of the temple. | 1:18 |
Leslie Brown | Did he come directly from the West Indies to North Carolina? | 2:17 |
Morris Young Donald | As far as I could recall, he got drafted, I remember. And I thought that was interesting. He came over here, but he received his citizenship. And maybe that's why. It was World War I. And I don't remember it, but I remember reading something about it in some of his past papers. And God, he was a book reader. Huh. I remember as a little boy, we would stumble all over his books and he'd get mad, but we were mischievous. He was a good father. Sometimes I think his no nonsense attitude has really helped me. He didn't overindulge, at least me. No, nobody. He didn't overindulge anybody. | 2:21 |
Leslie Brown | What did you learn from him? | 3:10 |
Morris Young Donald | So much patience, which I thought I'd never learn. He loved the soil and now I find myself doing that. A friend and I share a acre where we raise vegetables to distribute to widows and whoever. But with no commercial intent and just a general—But I learned to enjoy it. My dad used to do that too. And I learned too, my dad had a very fierce integrity. He did not abide lying. I don't care who it was. And I learned to respect integrity from that. | 3:15 |
Morris Young Donald | I used to laugh at his British accent. He said to me, "Morris, go get your at." Meaning my hat. The typical way British drop off the H. But he had been influenced in that and he never lost that accent. That's what it was amazing to me. Lived here most of his life. He had one very good West Indian friend, Dr. Blackman. And they used to sit on the front porch and talk and I couldn't understand what they were talking about, but there was a kind of pride there. I always saw that. I learned that too from him. I guess there are many other things. | 4:04 |
Leslie Brown | You said your mother was a school teacher. | 4:47 |
Morris Young Donald | The youngest of a family of nine. The doted, pampered youngest daughter, Josephine. Willie Josephine Price was a fashion model, clothes horse and darling of her mother and grandmother. She had everything. That's what they said. And then she wanted to marry this foreigner. Quite a thing. Quite a thing. I used to hear my cousins talk about how they used to go up—They lived with grandmother before they moved out [indistinct 00:05:34], go up and lock their door and they wouldn't let nobody see them. And then the babies began to come. Gilbert and then me, Gilbert is named after my father, Gilbert. Gilbert Fuller. I don't know where these names came from. | 4:54 |
Morris Young Donald | You know how much the names are taken from slave owners and so forth? I got a suspicion that's where the Donald came from. Where would you get a Scotch name like that? But yeah, but mama was pretty. I show you a picture of her if you unhook me. Before her time. That's my great-grandfather Charles Price. I was telling you about these people. Page from the old Bible. They used to go by that. That was documentation. Look at that man. Charles—No, Joseph Price. Look at that man. | 5:52 |
Leslie Brown | This is your grandfather? | 6:43 |
Morris Young Donald | That is my grandfather's brother, Joseph Price. You saw Charles back here. Now some people, I'm going to use a colloquialism, I bet you, I wonder if you know? "Nigger in the wood pile?" You ever heard of that? | 6:46 |
Leslie Brown | No, I haven't. | 7:02 |
Morris Young Donald | When some aberration in the White family would come up that looked negroid, they would say, "Ah, nigger in the wood pile." Well, that look like Caucasian in the wood pile, doesn't it? (laughs) Huh? Oh wow. My uncles. But I want to show you my mom, my mother. Don't worry about that stuff. It's just old stuff, my Uncle John. See, I had this out yesterday, showing it to my niece because she—Oh, Aunt Laura. Aunt Laura. Bless her heart. But showing it to my niece because she didn't have any idea. Now here's my dad. Look at those piercing eyes. You couldn't lie to him. He cut right through it. Gilbert Fuller here later. There she is. Josephine, a beauty. Yeah, you're right. Here they are in later years. | 7:05 |
Morris Young Donald | This is the latest one, I think, before he passed. But you were talking about her. Can't you see? Everything Josie wanted, Josie got. And so she was spoiled to a tee. These are my brothers, but we ain't into that. I just want to show you how pretty mom was and I hate that she was about 32 or three at that age. Yeah. So what else you going to ask me? | 8:12 |
Leslie Brown | So she was a school teacher? | 8:37 |
Morris Young Donald | Yeah, she went—Where did she go to school? But what happened at that time, you didn't have to have a college degree to teach school. But she did get a college degree, I think from Cheyney up in Pennsylvania. I don't know why my family has so many roots in Pennsylvania. Seems like every time we come back, we talk about something in Pennsylvania. Between Ms. Steele and that. Yeah. For you got any more questions about her? | 8:39 |
Leslie Brown | She was from Pennsylvania and she came to North Carolina. | 9:07 |
Morris Young Donald | No, that was Ms. Steele. | 9:13 |
Leslie Brown | I'm sorry. | 9:13 |
Morris Young Donald | Ms. Steele was from Pennsylvania. | 9:13 |
Leslie Brown | I'm sorry. | 9:13 |
Morris Young Donald | But no, she was born here in Mecklenburg County. Yeah. | 9:13 |
Leslie Brown | Do you remember your grandparents? | 9:18 |
Morris Young Donald | Sure, sure. I'll show you. You know when I was talking about Charles—that's my dad leaving. See Jamaica, Kingston? | 9:22 |
Leslie Brown | Mm-hmm. | 9:29 |
Morris Young Donald | Leaving there. Ah, Carl Jackson. That's my cousin. But let me get back into these people who you asked about. Grandparents. My grandparents. Okay. I got a family tree in there somewhere. That's Charles Price. Grandfather. | 9:30 |
Leslie Brown | Your father's father? | 9:51 |
Morris Young Donald | My mother's father. | 9:52 |
Leslie Brown | Your mother's father. | 9:53 |
Morris Young Donald | I can't tell you about my father's side in Jamaica. And that's Mary Price, his wife. Here is a thingamajig here. Starting with them, Charles Price and then coming up through her nine children. And this is before Charles Price. So I did a little family tree. So I had my niece out here. I had to show all this. She wants her daughter to know, so I gave her a copy of all this stuff. But this is the Price side of the family. My mother is where? See there? Gilbert Donald and Josephine Price and these children here. The children here [indistinct 00:10:54] all around here. But that's as far as I could go. | 9:54 |
Leslie Brown | Do you remember any stories about the Prices, your grandparents? Do you know where they were from? | 11:01 |
Morris Young Donald | Up around the mountains, Charles was from, and I never pronounce this right, Rutherfordton. Yes, that's it. Rutherfordton. Up around there. They were farmers but Mary Lattimore's from like South Carolina, Chesnee, down in that area. I had a marriage license for those guys somewhere. That's my grandmother's mother, Judy Lattimore. | 11:15 |
Leslie Brown | What do you know about her? | 11:53 |
Morris Young Donald | Nothing except that's grandmother's mother. Oh, there was some stories. I had some tapes. I did a tape of my aunt. There was some stories. Look at that marriage certificate. See Rutherford. And John Price and Mary Lattimore. | 11:54 |
Leslie Brown | Was looking for a date. 3:00 PM. 1875. Does that say 1875? | 12:19 |
Morris Young Donald | Yeah, that's about right. Yeah. Yeah. Oh. Yeah, you going to have to save that stuff. Is there any way I can save that stuff? | 12:28 |
Leslie Brown | Yes. Save everything. | 12:44 |
Morris Young Donald | Okay. | 12:46 |
Leslie Brown | So you said that you did remember some stories about them? Do you remember why they came to Charlotte, for example, or why they came to Mecklenburg County? | 12:49 |
Morris Young Donald | Yeah, it's a whole lot of reasons, but mostly had to do with economics. It's interesting about my grandfather's brothers, he had two, Matt and Joe. Uncle Matt and Uncle Joe. Their father was a White man named Bob Price. Bob Price owned a lot of property around Charlotte. But just around the Emancipation Proclamation time, these two young men, I think my grandfather had already left, but I think Matt and Joe remained there and their father wanted them to have an occupation. So he sent them to a catering school in New York where they both became quite proficient. I don't know whether it was Matt or Joe who went to Paris as a hotel manager or something. | 13:05 |
Morris Young Donald | But anyway, well, Uncle Joe, Uncle Big Joe, we call him cause he's oldest, but he came back to Charlotte. He retired from the catering business, hotel business. Came back to Charlotte. Actually he published a little book about that. I had it somewhere but I don't know. Anyway, Uncle Big Joe came back to Charlotte and he bought a whole lot of property. He became a land speculator and he would buy property in Florida for 50 cents an acre, just oodles of it. And then when it got to be a dollar, he'd sell it all. I could choke him. He bought the area behind Johnson C. Smith, back over there off of Barringer Street. He bought all that area and he gave part of it for the establishment of a Black elementary school, Fairview Elementary. | 14:03 |
Morris Young Donald | And his wife named Mandy was very paranoid. After he died, his estate included all that area where all that super spaghetti bowl highway runs through and here again. But his wife was paranoid to the point where she didn't trust nobody. She got herself a lawyer, a female lawyer, Caucasian, who in the end, ended up with all of it. Yeah, well that happens all the time. And she was finally destitute, put out and living there. I don't know what happened to her. I don't remember her personally, but some of them do. But interesting story about it, my uncle had a dairy just on the outskirts of town, where Northwest Middle School is now on Bridgeport Road. That used to be where our farm was. | 14:58 |
Morris Young Donald | And my uncle had a dairy farm. And what was interesting about that, you talk about the veil. Man, all the professors from Smith used to come up and get milk and he was giving everybody, local hotels, he had plenty of poultry and he was bringing eggs in and milking, supplying the downtown hotels. But there was a rival White dairy, I'm not sure what it was. Hunter Farms or what? Hunter sounds familiar, but the city limits became extended and took in his farm and the city passed the orders that all his cows were condemned. We couldn't use that milk. We grew up on that milk even after that. But that sort of put him out of business. And then he went into something else, I think grading, landscaping or something. But you asked about incidents, that's one. All those kind of little funny incidents. I don't really like to talk about it too much because of the inequities, but they happened. That's reality though. | 16:01 |
Leslie Brown | Well, tell me about the neighborhood where you grew up. Where in Charlotte did you grow up? | 17:25 |
Morris Young Donald | On Beatties Ford Road. I can show you the house now. It got to be so bad over there, I had to move off, move out though. But Beatties Ford Road and that was the old home house, Beatties Ford Road. But my mother and father moved down into a parallel adjacent street called Fairmont Street and we had a family home down there. So all of my childhood and all was right in that immediate area. Oh, I guess between that and John C. Smith was all the whole world for us. Later my father became a minister out in the outskirts and we used to go out there with him, but still our center location—We grew up right there. The same old stories that you hear all the time. | 17:32 |
Morris Young Donald | I remember this lady living down on the corner saw me doing something wrong and came out and whooped me. I was flabbergasted and I went home and I told my mama and she whooped me. But I was very mischievous. I deserved it, I know. But the family were that close knit and it was like extended family. None of this nuclear stuff. Anybody would get you from doing wrong. Yeah, that was true. They call that area Biddleville and there was a Wesley Heights and around, mostly building. But what it had become after a while was residential in the sense that most of the people who lived there were middle class and a lot of well educated from the university. So it was a mixture. There was one street called Carmel Street that I had alluded to when a friend of mine retired the other day, Carmel Street. | 18:22 |
Morris Young Donald | They changed the name. I can't remember what they changed the name to, but there's about four blocks running from Johnson C. Smith up to where the Biddleville church was. You see, right on one end of the street was a big Presbyterian church, Biddleville, and further down was the AME Zion right in the middle, Gethsemane. And then down there to anchor it off was the Big Baptist church, Mount Carmel on Carmel Street. So you were thrown right in the middle of the mecca. Course my mama was a Methodist. That was interesting. But she married Dad and then she used to take us to the Presbyterian church. | 19:35 |
Morris Young Donald | I ended up—I'm an elder now in that church. Yeah, they moved that church in 1968 to Beatties Ford Road and I-85 and it's right there between McDonald's and Texaco, commercialism choking us out. But yeah, it's been an interesting thing how all that close-knitness, we didn't think anything about locking the door. Nobody locked the door. We didn't even have a lock on our door. Somebody come by, might want to spend the night. It'd be a total stranger, mama take them in and feed them, give them a good meal and make me get out of my bed. But that was a way of life that's lost. The trust is never to be regained and that was something valuable. People just had trust. | 20:19 |
Morris Young Donald | And I can't really ever remember any animosity toward White people. People talk about—I don't remember any. The first animosity I remember is when the young Counts girls tried to integrate—did integrate local high school here and they had all that furor in the paper and went international and people spit. But maybe it's my naivete that I don't remember it. I'm sure it was there. | 21:24 |
Leslie Brown | Did you have any contacts with Whites at all? | 21:58 |
Morris Young Donald | Yeah, actually. But you didn't even think whether they were White or not. I remember one time when our band director left. I was going to high school and the White band director came out and taught us. Yeah, I remember incidents like that. My mother used to work for a couple. I can't remember their names, but my mother impressed them so much that they used to come home and bring her home and sit around in the front room and I always thought that was strange. But yeah, so Southern Whites have a way, a kind of pride on what they call "their Black folk." And guess what? It's reciprocal. You ever hear Mae may talk about her White folk? | 22:05 |
Leslie Brown | [indistinct 00:23:04]. | 23:02 |
Morris Young Donald | Yeah. It's interesting, which underscores that way. All human beings. It's just— | 23:04 |
Leslie Brown | You had four brothers. | 23:12 |
Morris Young Donald | Gilbert, Charles, Edward and Timothy. Gilbert has predeceased me. He was the oldest. He died from the family scourge, diabetes. My youngest brother predeceased me because he got into drugs way back when drugs wasn't popular and overdosed up in New York. The other two brothers live in California around the Bay Area. One is a practicing clinical sociologist. The other one is a practicing beatnik. Charles would kill me if heard me say that. But he's well educated, but he took a different turn after a while. Both are interesting though. Both of them married White and both of them divorced. Very interesting. Laura, my brother's daughter. I'll show you a photograph. Here's Charles. Her name is Laura Joanne. Where is she? There she is, but let me give you an update. See this is one of those mixed children. Here it's 1991, she sent me this. | 23:15 |
Leslie Brown | She's beautiful. | 24:36 |
Morris Young Donald | What is she? | 24:36 |
Leslie Brown | She's beautiful. | 24:44 |
Morris Young Donald | Okay. I guess that suffice. That's her father Charles. Here she is again. Yeah. She is in some school in San Luis Obispo, some state school down there. I think she's a junior, a rising junior or something. I don't know. There she is. | 24:46 |
Leslie Brown | What is this? | 25:10 |
Morris Young Donald | The other brother, Edward, the one who's a practicing clinical psychologist working for the city of San Francisco. He tickle me. He always considers himself the odd sheep of the family. He tell me this over and over. I say, "Why you say that?" "Well, you guys so and so and so." I said, "What?" But what happened, you see this photograph of him in the Marine Corps? I counted a feeling of insecurity. He wouldn't let that do, he came out in Marine Corps, went to West Virginia Wesleyan. God knows why you want to go out there? West Virginia Wesleyan. Got a degree, went back into the Marine Corps to be a officer. Now why couldn't he let it alone? | 25:10 |
Morris Young Donald | Served as a officer in the [indistinct 00:25:59] for a while, came back and married this half-blind White girl here, yeah, who says her profession is a belly dancer (laughs). She wrote several books on the [indistinct 00:26:20] method and she really got to be quite successful in it. So much so till she dumped him. Oh, he was just torn up. That's their child, John. There he is. Mr. Marine Officer and his wife Mary Ellen, a young girl from Pennsylvania Mountains (laughs). Yeah, she's a Pennsylvania hillbilly, that's what she said. That's their son. John. Oh, way back, I don't know. Pennsylvania wreaks havoc. That place wreaks havoc. | 25:57 |
Morris Young Donald | This is my youngest brother who OD'ed and that was his daughter right here who was here yesterday with her baby. This is her son who I told you—I mean, her brother who I told you said he was getting his PhD and I ain't quite sure if that's kosher with the world and the Lord for him to have a PhD. So the end of it—that's his father's obituary. I didn't know you were going to get into my family. | 27:00 |
Leslie Brown | Yeah. Well, one of the things you said earlier was that when you were a kid you felt protected or insulated. | 27:36 |
Morris Young Donald | Yeah. Yeah. | 27:46 |
Leslie Brown | Can you talk about what that means? In what ways were you insulated? | 27:48 |
Morris Young Donald | I didn't realize it at the time, but we were severely overprotected. I never even thought about going anywhere except—The furthest I would venture, even as a teenager, was perhaps I'd go across town to that Lincoln Theater and they had a library over there and I might go across the opposite way to Greenville. But that was forbidden stuff and I had to experience. But we, it's all sort of close knit and protected in a way that is good—Excuse me. That is good intended. This is my dad's [indistinct 00:28:44] sister. My daddy's sister in British West [indistinct 00:28:47] She wrote several letters to my mom. I had a cousin who went over there to visit. That's a view Kingston. I tried to trace down those roots, but they petered out and I couldn't find. But anyway, that's an interesting thing. | 27:51 |
Morris Young Donald | Yeah, we were insulated, though we didn't realize it, but most Black communities were, out of social necessity and economic necessity, isolated. It wasn't anything particularly unusual by that. At least it didn't seem to me. I saw too much of it. Yeah. | 29:04 |
Leslie Brown | Tell us about West Charlotte High School. | 29:31 |
Morris Young Donald | West Charlotte High School. I suppose you could say its apogee was when the principal was Clinton L. Blake. Clinton L. Blake was a man who knew how to manipulate the White power structure and get what he wanted. And what he wanted was a high school that had no peer in the state. And to that end, he emphasized strong faculty. That's one of the reasons Tolbert worked there. But he was complete, let me be gentle, it's hard to be gentle, a impresario. He orchestrated everything and ran everything and knew everything and told everybody everything. But he was in a sense, benevolent and we were able to do a lot. | 29:34 |
Morris Young Donald | My early interest in biology didn't find me with a laboratory that wasn't just as complete as any I've ever been in. We didn't have a band room, but we had the instruments. We had a topnotch athletic department. We won state championships as a matter of course almost. We had a drama department. I was in several plays and you don't even think about that. Track team, debate team. And I'm talking about 1940s. There was a terrific amount of pride among both of those high schools. | 31:13 |
Leslie Brown | Was there rivalry? | 32:05 |
Morris Young Donald | Oh, so thick you could cut it with a knife. I didn't like that part of it and I still don't like it. I admire and still do admire the memory of the principal of Second Ward, Mr. Grisby, Jefferson Grisby. Later on we became associates in a credit union and we would sit around and talk a lot. I want to show you something. This is digressing just a minute. You could never miss that. | 32:07 |
Leslie Brown | When is this? | 32:46 |
Morris Young Donald | Oh, about 1978. Yeah. | 32:49 |
Leslie Brown | [indistinct 00:32:52]. | 32:49 |
Morris Young Donald | Friend of mine. Yeah. Travel is so broadening. Just don't wait till you're old to do it. I was glad to be able to do that. | 32:54 |
Leslie Brown | Did you travel with the band at all? | 33:05 |
Morris Young Donald | Yeah, but it was local. It was local. We used to travel to South Carolina. We'd go up to the mountains, Flat Rock was one of our place to play, Flat Rock, North Carolina. The home of, what is that poet? Oh, I can't remember. He had a home there, but they had a big dance hall up there and as a matter of fact, my wife's brother, they used to live around Hendersonville and they knew this place. Flat Rock. Flat Rock had a big dance hall. We'd travel, like I said, Southern Pines, all around North and South Carolina. It was never extensive. What we call a tour, we'd go out and stay a week and hit three or four different places, Winston-Salem and Greensboro. That was big time. | 33:07 |
Leslie Brown | Where did you stay when you were on the road? | 33:56 |
Morris Young Donald | Very interesting. Where did we stay? Mostly in people's homes. Or there'd be boarding houses. Sometimes I'd rather not be in the boarding houses. They was a place down in South Carolina that guy called Billy Bolden's House of Blue Lights and he had these little rooms back there. I didn't know they was renting them rooms. I'm naive and so we was hosteling up in them rooms, but if I'd have known that, I'd have been a little upset about that. I didn't know. Except some guy stole my trumpet and the nerve of him. He stole my trumpet and came back inside and tried to sell it on the bar. (laughs) Flat Tire was infuriated and Billy Bolden put a gun on his nose and made him give me my trumpet back. I just bought that trumpet, a new Selmer and I left to go to dinner and I came back, it was gone. Yeah, yeah. We had some interesting experience with that traveling around. | 34:00 |
Leslie Brown | How did you find out about the people's houses that you stayed in? | 35:02 |
Morris Young Donald | I'm not that sure except I remember one time we went to—I started to say Newton, but I can't remember the exact time. And we stayed with a family named Burton. I remember this because the next year when I matriculated at Smith, I met the young man whose father owned the house. His name was Wilbur Burton and he was matriculated at Johnson Smith too. So what that means in terms of finding lodging was we usually got lodging in pretty decent places. It was like you always had to do when there wasn't any hotels, people would take you in. Yeah. | 35:09 |
Leslie Brown | Were these people that you knew or people that— | 36:03 |
Morris Young Donald | No. | 36:04 |
Leslie Brown | —that people you were traveling knew? Or just find out— | 36:05 |
Morris Young Donald | Maybe the band leader would come in and say there was a mortician or a old musician or somebody he knew in the town. Just somebody who was very much a part of community in terms of being this ombudsman, I guess you would say, unofficially. And asked them and they said, "Well, maybe you can get a—Mr. Burton's got a couple of extra rooms over there, nobody's in." And I think that's the way that happened and they would sort of shift us around and usually they'd be just very good places and they'd give you a good meal in this morning. Yeah, that got to be tiring to me though. I wore thin on that quick, that eating out on a suitcase. At first it was exciting because it was something different. But after a while, I think that's what ages musicians that don't know when to stop, just keep on doing that. Entertaining is hard life. | 36:09 |
Leslie Brown | What kind of places did you play? | 37:12 |
Morris Young Donald | All right. The Flat Rock Dance Hall was in Flat Rock, North Carolina. That was a big place where it was sort of like at a fairground. The Black people would have all their stuff going on there, dances and stuff. Down in Southern Pine for instance, they had an Ambassador Club. Billy Bolden's House of Blue Lights was I think in Spartanburg. There were places where Black folks met. And here in Charlotte, for instance, it was something called Sunset Park that later became, earlier it was some kind of casino. It had several different names, but they were those places around. Black people always had their kind of places for entertainment and usually there wouldn't be anything extravagant. You heard of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band and that kind of place where they play on them rough benches and so forth and still do? Well, it's sort of like that. | 37:19 |
Leslie Brown | Played for mostly Black audiences? | 38:22 |
Morris Young Donald | Almost exclusively. We played for White—I remember one time going up to Taylorsville and playing for some White audiences and then we played a little, when television first made its debut here, they had a program called The Hour of Opportunity. We used to play on that frequently and so we'd reach White audiences in that way and sometimes reaching those White audiences, we'd get bookings into White clubs. But they treated us nice, but we'd always have to go through the back door. It was like that. But it was all right. They used to paid well. | 38:24 |
Morris Young Donald | Somebody trying to get me. I didn't answer. That's the joy of being retired. | 39:08 |
Leslie Brown | When you played at the Black clubs, what kind of people came to hear your band? | 39:14 |
Morris Young Donald | It's something that you should ask that. There were mainly two types. There were the dancers, people who liked to dance and there were a lot of people, Ms. Steele was one of them. There were the dancers and then there were the people who just stood around more or less. You could feel yourself being scrutinized. In other words, "Wonder what these guys got?" And it was those kind. And usually among those kind were some of the intelligentsia and the [indistinct 00:40:02] just standing around. But we enjoyed playing for the dancers because the dancers could inspire you just to do it. Yeah. The dancers were the one. Yeah. | 39:23 |
Leslie Brown | What kind of dancing? What was it? | 40:17 |
Morris Young Donald | I remember—You see what? I never learned to dance until later. I was always busy playing, but they would do gymnastic types of dancing. What were the names of some of them? The Lindy Hop. The most infamous one was called the dog and oh man, you'd see circles around people when they were doing the dog and then there was those kind of group dances like the Madison where there were lines formed and then there were exhibitionist kinds of dances where they would throw people. | 40:21 |
Morris Young Donald | Jitterbug was one of those, but it always ended up with some slow drag stuff, after intermission and everything. Close body contact. After I learned how to dance, that's the only kind I wanted to do. All that athletic stuff, jumping up and down, would make me tired. But dancing, I never quite understood the social phenomena of dancing. Even now, sometimes I go to the ballet trying to really get into the artistic side of it and my wife can do it. I can't quite seem to get it. It's the nuances of kinesthetic joy and pleasure, expression. | 41:07 |
Morris Young Donald | Well, I know my limitations. That's one of the main ones, not being able to appreciate that as I think other people do. Sometimes I have a hidden suspicion that I may be doing just as much as everybody else. I don't know. It's like people—You ever see people get excited about what they call good music and you listen to it and you say, "What in the world are they so excited about?" Yeah, that's what I mean. | 42:04 |
Leslie Brown | Did you go back to the same clubs over and over again? | 42:37 |
Morris Young Donald | Almost routinely. Yeah. And we built up a following, so you go back over and over and over again. It was sort of like a little circuit, but we had another thing. We used to play an awful lot of social, fraternal and sorority and debutante engagements, had to play the quadrille. They walk across two at a time, three, four at a time, eight at a time. You know how they did that? And I thought that was the most pompous thing I ever saw my life. Couldn't figure what was the worth of it, but everybody was dressed fine and they wouldn't let you play any hot music. No, it had to be Debussy like, gentle or waltz or something. But these were people who were intent on proving to somebody that they were the societal elite, till they got inebriated. | 42:39 |
Leslie Brown | What was your favorite place to play, or what was your favorite setting to play in? | 43:53 |
Morris Young Donald | Of all the places I've ever played? Club Bali. Now let me explain that to you. On Beatties Ford Road, just below the Excelsior Club— | 43:57 |
Morris Young Donald | You ran out of tape. | 44:17 |
Morris Young Donald | Well, let me tell you about the Bali Club. First of all, the Bali Club was run by Flat Tire, the guy who had the orchestra. And at first, it was just a little tavern where you could buy a hamburger or something. It was called the Sportsman's Grill. And you used to buy us some ice cream and stuff. But we stored all our band equipment there and so when we get ready to travel, we always meet there, pack it up. And for some reason, he decided that he was going to make half of it a grill and then the other half into a club with liquor lockers, whatever. It had a kitchen. | 0:02 |
Morris Young Donald | I'm almost sure he never even heard of Bali. He called it ballet, but it's Bali, from that island. And he had it done in white and blue, and somebody told him to name it Club Bali. And people began to call it The Bali House. But what was nice about it was, it was sort of like a watering hole for the people who felt disenfranchised from The Excelsior Club up the street, which was supposed to be for professionals. But the professionals came down there, particularly when the music started. | 0:48 |
Morris Young Donald | What happened was, after a while, Flat Tire would hire three or four of us just to play there. So three, maybe Saturday and Sunday. And I think they charged admission, though I'm not too sure. But because of its familiarity, the musicians and all, we were all familiar. That was our point of departure. So, it got to be fun to play down there. And then people knew you. Yeah, it was a lot of fun. That's probably my favorite place. They tore it down, put a highway through there. Bill, what's the name of that place? That highway? | 1:28 |
Bill | Brookshire? | 2:19 |
Morris Young Donald | Brookshire. Yeah. Yeah. | 2:20 |
Leslie Brown | Now, you said you didn't play when you were in the Army, though? | 2:23 |
Morris Young Donald | No. One of my main deterrents was, I was in the Fifth Infantry, which had a Scottish band. Kilts. I don't know if it's true if they wear anything under those kilts or not, but I was vehemently opposed to being in the band. Kilts. As a matter of fact, I carried my trumpet with when I went. But that turned me off so much. And then there was some prejudice going on there. And I understand now what happened. People were waiting in line, because that was cushy job. My brother played in the band, though, with Charlie, when he was in that service. He played in Japan and all around. But he was a good clarinetist, see? And besides, those guys up the Indian Town Gap was intent on sending me to OCS, and I was getting all kinds of pressure, and they wasn't listening to no band, no way. No. | 2:31 |
Leslie Brown | So you were in an integrated unit? | 3:40 |
Morris Young Donald | Yeah. That was an integrated unit. Most of the guys were from New York. Most of the guys were from New York. That's interesting. The army at that time, I think they must have purposely done that. They take Blacks from the South and Whites from the East and put them in a unit together. | 3:42 |
Bill | Yeah. | 4:08 |
Morris Young Donald | You found that to be true? Yeah, I made a lot of White friends that way, but there was no follow-through, and mainly because I don't had no follow through and I don't figure they did, either. We served our time and went back home. I met some Italian guys, Albanian guys. Used to go over to Philadelphia. They invite me over. But I felt uncomfortable most of the time. | 4:09 |
Leslie Brown | Had Charlotte changed when you returned? | 4:46 |
Morris Young Donald | Tremendously. | 4:48 |
Leslie Brown | What were the differences you noticed? | 4:50 |
Morris Young Donald | Well, them little girls had grown up, one thing. Whoo. And there were some geographical changes in streets and so forth. When you think about it, it wasn't any basic change, it was just surface stuff, new buildings and new geography. I left here for a year or so to teach up in Ahoskie winter. And when I came back, so many geographical changes. For instance, last year none of that was back there, and I had the peace and serenity of all that wooded area. Now, houses everywhere. And you hear the hammers going every once in a while. But Charlotte is really growing fast. I wouldn't have imagined living out this far, ever. But such is progress. | 4:57 |
Leslie Brown | When were you in Ahoskie? | 6:07 |
Morris Young Donald | When I first graduated from college. The year must have been 1956 or '7. But I only stayed one year. And the only reason I went there was a former Charlottean who I knew had been there as the band director and he was going, leaving, going to another place, and he was leaving it in good shape and that would be a good place for me to go. I didn't regret it, and I've been back to visit several times. Strange mores up there, though, I tell you. | 6:13 |
Leslie Brown | Like what? | 6:51 |
Morris Young Donald | I'm trying to think of the word they used to use all the time. I can't remember. Everybody said this up there. But you see, I have successfully erased that from my mind. I didn't want to remember, the truth be. What was strangest though of all was the caste system. I told you about that before, how they were all different colors. Oh, man. Just as Caucasian-looking as you could see to just as dark as you could see, and stiffly segregated into their caste. [indistinct 00:07:48] About that. There's a physician up there named Joe Dudley— | 6:55 |
Morris Young Donald | Thing about it is, but the professionals, as I told you, always transcended that. They didn't care about it. But most other folks. And see, they only had one hospital, and Joe Dudley was—His last name, I can't remember. I saw him a couple of years ago. He's retired. Joe Dudley was only Black physician there. But Joe Dudley—I think, let me get this right. He was the only physician there. It's a small town. So he had Miss Nick's clientele. Yeah. I stayed with his sister, that's how I got to know him. I roomed with his sister for a year. Eastern North Carolina. Tobacco. Peanuts. | 7:52 |
Leslie Brown | Well, who were your students? | 8:55 |
Morris Young Donald | Down there? | 8:55 |
Leslie Brown | Mm-hmm. | 8:55 |
Morris Young Donald | They had a unified high school. Busing was just like it's—Everybody bused them in from wherever. They came, 20, 30 miles. | 8:59 |
Leslie Brown | All Black? | 9:09 |
Morris Young Donald | Yeah. In name. But I tell you, it had that rainbow. We had redheads with freckles, blue-eyed blondes, and Black folks, some who look like Kenyan herdsman. Tall, you know, what's that? Watusis? Tall, dark, and fierce looking. Yeah, we had them all. All different kind. And that was interesting, because it was obvious to me that there was a lot of crossing the color line up there. | 9:12 |
Leslie Brown | You taught music, but did you do other things in the community as well? | 9:58 |
Morris Young Donald | Up there? No. But teaching, that was an ideal situation. The principal said to me, "Mr. Don, we want you to teach the band. Now you can set the schedule up you want to." I never heard of, that was a dream. My music instructor had told me, "If you ever get a chance to set up a schedule like they want you, there's what you should do. You should have training classes for this, especially classes for woodwinds, and class for brass and a class for percussion." | 10:02 |
Morris Young Donald | I was able to do all that. So there was no way it could be a failure. It was a booming success. Can you imagine, a music teacher teaching all day long individual groups of students, private students, beginning students, and at the end of the day, putting it all together? Every day. When I came to Charlotte-Mecklenburg, I got to meet in twice a week if I was lucky. Had seven, eight different schools to travel from. Quite a bit. But those days are gone when those principals had that kind of authority and power anymore, I don't think. HD Cooper, no. HC Freeland was his name. Wenton High School, from the first grade to the 12th. | 10:40 |
Leslie Brown | You're saying that the principals were able to determine what happened in their own schools? | 11:39 |
Morris Young Donald | Complete control of curriculum. Part of it had to do with the laissez faire position on the county superintendent to a Black school. You didn't care what they did over there. And most of the time that worked to the advantage of them, because they could do things where they couldn't—Were clearly against state regulations, it seems to me. And then you see a quote, band man was a rare commodity. So they would do all kind of things to entice you. Say, "Well, we'll give your wife a job." So all that was part of it. Unheard of stuff now. | 11:46 |
Leslie Brown | Did the bands have a performance? Did your band perform at the end of the year, or— | 12:38 |
Morris Young Donald | There was a system at that time in the mid '50s, a Black confederation of music teachers where they had a state music festival. We would come together in the regions and compete and the winners there would go to the state and compete and have judges to judge the quality of it. And it would be groups according to their school size and according to their instrumental ability. Course, the band director had a lot to do about choosing what they could play. I always liked to choose the hard stuff, though. Because kids have more pride in playing the hard stuff, even bad, than they do the easy stuff well. And they work hard. | 12:45 |
Morris Young Donald | I had a long successful music career, though, when it came to the Charlotte area. I tell you, boy, it's good to have a vocation that's your avocation. Doing something you like and getting paid for it. Like you doing (laughs). Asking questions. Women like to do that. See, you don't even want your voice on the tape. Yeah. Okay. | 13:38 |
Leslie Brown | What was social life like in Charlotte when you were in high school? And then when you were in Johnson C Smith? | 14:06 |
Morris Young Donald | I had a different perspective, because I was always on a bandstand out there looking at these jokers. I thought they were silly most of the time. But it was very important to people. The Kappa Dawn. I used to hate that. Stay up all night playing for these crazy people. They come in about—Dance started about 2:00 and played till sun up. You ever heard anything so ridiculous? Kappa dawn dance. I wouldn't call it the Kappa Dawn. And it was called a Kappa—I think what happened was that everybody was vying for a dance that would be unique. And so the Kappa fraternity, Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity, came up with the idea, "Well, let's have a dance starting in the middle of the night and ending in the morning, and we all leave it and go to breakfast." But I'm sitting there sleepy-eyed and yawning, red eyes, and wondering what these idiots are hanging around here. | 14:25 |
Morris Young Donald | But it was a big social deal. Ask Ms. Steele. She can tell you about the Kappa Dawn. But every fraternity had this special dance. According to Ms. Steele, they had a dance every weekend and everybody had a full dressed up, and evening gowns and stuff. And down at Smith there was all these fraternities would do it, but then they had the other social clubs and other clubs, and you had to belong to one. If you belong to a fraternity, you get invited to all the fraternity and sorority dances. And if you belong to social club, you got in to—So it was every night. I mean, every weekend, according to her. But I just can't imagine. | 15:15 |
Morris Young Donald | But that explains why Jimmie Gunn went into this business, because there was all that going on. They had a ballroom called a Caden Ballroom, which was in a big building, it's still standing on Graham Street. A big building that used to be a cotton warehouse. And they would decorate that thing up. And I've never seen it, but I don't think I've ever seen the inside of it. The building was built way back, I think in the 1700s. Old building. Anyway, that was the place, and they'd go down there. Every weekend it'd be a different group trying to out-vie each other for decorations. | 15:57 |
Morris Young Donald | Ms. Steele said it just dazzled her. She couldn't imagine Hollywood having such. It's just a unending line of entertainment, you see. And the Smith men had a reputation for their gallantry, and so they were going to try to outdo everybody else in their parties and in their entertainment. Then baseball was a rage at that time. They had a good baseball team. I don't even think whether they had played the first—The first intercollegiate Black football game was between Smith and Livingston College, I think. But you can verify that. But the social life was all hooked up into that, and athletic games, and parallel to perceived White. What they thought the Whites would do. | 16:46 |
Leslie Brown | Did you ever want to live anywhere other than Charlotte? | 17:55 |
Morris Young Donald | Yeah, but I'm glad I never did. Particularly after I traveled a little, away from the colloquial traveling I was doing. Got out the country. Charlotte's a good place to live. Extremely good. I really only lived during my Army time—Guess where? | 17:59 |
Leslie Brown | In Pennsylvania. | 18:37 |
Morris Young Donald | Right. Indian Town Gap, right out of Hershey. Not too far from Philadelphia. Pots Town. Lived there, it was all right. But there's a comfortableness about living here that I had come accustomed to. And I'm not one to say that you shouldn't change your residence. I guess I would've changed. My brothers moved out to California. I went out there. I didn't particularly have anything against it, but I didn't see anything much to entice me to want to live there. Climate, the climate is different. I won't say better. It's different. But it's still temperature. I wouldn't move to New York and freeze my can off like y'all do all the time. Didn't they have snow up there last week somewhere? | 18:39 |
Leslie Brown | Probably somewhere. | 19:43 |
Morris Young Donald | Yeah. Yeah, I heard it over the Weather Channel. Snowing. I had enough of that. You ain't got enough of me? | 19:44 |
Leslie Brown | You have a lot of respect for Tolbert and Gunn. Would you tell me why? | 20:00 |
Morris Young Donald | Well, yes. First of all, Gunn, it seems that even when I was a youngster and Gunn was rooming up on Beatties Ford Road not too far from where my family home is, I would always be fascinated by the music that came out of that little house. And I sort of had a fascination where I wanted to be like these people and be able to make that kind of really happy music. And it was fulfilled in one sense. I finally got to play a little with Jimmie Gunn before he'd passed, when he was on his decline. | 20:06 |
Morris Young Donald | And as far as Tolbert was, when I look back at Tolbert, he was an experience for me of grace. I had no right to ever expect to have that kind of leadership from a man with foresight and who my parents could see, but I couldn't, and who was a superb musician in every sense and who never, ever disappointed me in anything he did. He became an idol. And so I really count myself as fortunate for having had the experience to have had these two guys. I didn't know Gunn as well as I knew Tolbert, but even so, I was sort of fulfilling the tradition when I went in there. | 20:54 |
Morris Young Donald | Like so many early beginning Black musicians, particularly in our only true folk music of this country, jazz is, it's a legacy that I appreciate, and I'm talking to you because knowing body's going to be gone. The real legacy of all this, as well as a social legacy, will be lost. I really feel fortunate in having had that experience. You hearing a side of me that many people don't ever hear. I have never been one to want to talk too much about—It's been a kind of personal thing to me. | 21:53 |
Morris Young Donald | I went down to Columbia, South Carolina a couple of weeks ago, because two reasons. My son lives there, and I wanted to visit, but they have a jazz festival called the Main Street Jazz Festival. It's not very well known, but the people who perform there are very well known. Rosemary Clooney, for instance, was a feature down there. Clark Terry was a feature down there. Urbie Green, Bill Watchers, the trumpeteer, the White trumpeteer of Dizzy Gillespie fame, Red Rodney and his group was down there. And I am a mainstream jazz aficionado, and I love it. So we went down there. But I wouldn't have had this background or I couldn't appreciate the improvisations that they do had it not been for my experience with Gunn and Tolbert. And at that, I am eternally grateful. | 22:44 |
Morris Young Donald | (playing music) | 23:41 |
Morris Young Donald | That's it! | 23:41 |
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