The towns they left

by M+N In Other

Everybody is from somewhere, but not everyone is there anymore.

For example, it’s a little known fact that North Carolina gave birth to some of the country’s most renowned jazz musicians, but they all left, most at an early age.

The list is long: John Coltrane, born in Hamlet in 1926; Thelonious Monk from Rocky Mount (1917); Max Roach from Newland (1924); Billy Taylor, born in Greenville in 1921; and Woody Shaw, born in Laurenburg in 1934, among many others.

All seemed to have departed in the great African-American diaspora, moving north to the big cities – Chicago, Detroit, New York.  Only Trane made it to his teen years in the North State, attending high school in High Point.

They didn’t come back, either, except maybe on tour.  Coltrane’s sweet alto sax, Monk’s funky dissonance, and Roach, rising from a no-horse town in the shadow of the Great Dismal Swamp to help give birth to bebop, backing Bird, Coleman Hawkins, and Monk himself, among others.  All took flight elsewhere.

Let me just say I’ve been to Hamlet, and like a lot of other small towns it seemed like a great place to be from.  In my case I was hitching through with a friend on the way to New Orleans. We stopped for a few hours to have a beer and shoot some stick in the pool hall.  We spent the next night in a ditch and the dawn after that watching the sun rise over Biloxi in Mississippi. I could hear Trane howling then, a lost soul blowing on a warm gulf wind, with Max Roach beating out a line of rhythm rattling like a screen door slamming: rat-a-tat-tat.

Note: photo credit town of Hamlet ‘Trane