Working at a bookstore that specializes in rare archives, books and ephemera, I often have the privilege of handling lesser-known and obscure history: people, places or moments in time that have been long forgotten.
Recently, while excavating a source in pursuit of local history, I stumbled on a collection of photos taken inside a jazz club on Greenwood Ave in the 1940s. One of the photos was of Louis Armstrong.
Twenty years before knocking The Beatles out of the number one Billboard spot in 1964 with “Hello Dolly,” there Armstrong was, in Tulsa, in a jazz club I’d never heard of.
I immediately went into internet sleuth mode and found … nothing. No information about this place existed online, apart from a couple of auction reports for photos and a random tour schedule that featured the club as a stop for Tiny Bradshaw and Lil Green in 1941. I reached out to Tulsa historians and experts in the field of Oklahoma music to no avail.
Now, it’s not uncommon to learn of Oklahoma’s more interesting, underground or despicable past outside of schoolbooks. I remember wondering why I learned about the 1921 Race Massacre in my 20s, as opposed to in school. Why didn’t more people know about Larry Clark and his deeply unsettling book, Tulsa, or the poets Ron Padgett, Joe Brainard, Ted Berrigan and their ties to The Beat Generation? Not to mention one of the best crime writers of the 20th century, Jim Thompson from Anadarko, OK, and his influence on Stephen King?
Here again, Oklahoma’s history presented a historical mystery. What was this club and how long was it open? And why hadn’t I heard of it?