Correction and Elaboration

I’m already making mistakes!

Last week I claimed that this photo dated from the 1920s:

I clipped it from an undated article that was filed along with materials from the 1920s, and Jackson looks young enough in the photograph that it could easily date from that period of his life. However, I read the article more closely and followed some leads, and I can now confirm that this photograph was published in 1946.

The article contains a verbal portrait of Jackson that accompanies the photograph quite nicely:

Graham Jackson, the dark troubador who can cake [sic] and accordion utter sounds which the angels might envy, came by the office the other day lugging a huge, strangely shaped leader case that looked as if it might contain a medium-sized piano. In a sort of happy, hysterical daze Graham set his burden down, unlatched it and extracted from it what was probably the most magnificent accordion ever seen in these parts. Approximately the size of a double cash register, it was a glistening beauty of shining black metal and snowy ivory and shining chromium.

Fondling it as tenderly as a new-born baby, Braham [sic] sung it around his neck, threw back his head, rolled his eyes and broke into that great song from Traviata which goes—well, I can’t put down how it goes, but it is one that sets the heart to singing and causes the feet to beat a rhythm on the floor.

The imagery here is not original: a happy, even hysterical, demeanor, accompanied by rolling eyes, dancing, and physical abandon have long been the property of the minstrel.

The narrative continues to explain how Jackson came into possession of so fine an instrument (it was a gift from Winthrop Rockefeller). Throughout, the author—one Harold Martin—portrays Jackson in childlike terms. He explains that Jackson was so excited at the prospect of getting a new accordion that he couldn’t sleep, but instead ran straight downtown after a late night party and waited, “with his nose against the glass of the music stores,” for opening hour. His only response when Rockefeller offered to purchase a top-end accordion for $1,500? “Where I come from a man can get a house and a lot for $1,500.”

Maybe that really is exactly what Jackson said. Taken in context, however, the comment suits Martin’s casting of Jackson as a naive, exhuberant, unworldy black musician—a man with a disturbing degree of musical talent but little self control and no real comprehension of civilized life. Jackson is irrevocably an outsider. We smile at his wide-eyed excitement, laugh at his antics, and wonder at his gifts.

The article concludes as follows:

That night Graham played his new instrument for the debut party [of Rockefeller’s niece] at the Piping Rock Club. He played all night again, and at daylight, Mr. Rockefeller put him on the plane bound for home.

He didn’t even sleep when he got here. He went straight home from the airport and broke out his new accordion, and walked up and down the neighborhood laughing and singing and playing for the neighbors.