Harry Choates - Biography
By Eric Brightwell
Harry Choates, “the fiddle king of Cajun swing,” is one of the most important, tragic, misunderstood and overlooked figures of 20th century American music. His life was short and unrestrained yet almost every aspect has been obscured by oft-repeated myths including that he couldn’t read or write, that he sold the rights to his most famous composition (“Jole Blon”) for a paltry sum and a bottle of booze, that he never owned an instrument, and that he was beaten to death by prison guards. Though the reality of Choates life bears little resemblance to the myth, what little is known is just as interesting as the legends more commonly told and is central to mainstream America’s understanding of Cajun identity, as well as many Cajuns views of themselves.
Cajun swing is a largely overlooked American musical form that has made categorization of Choates’s work difficult for those who’d prefer to place him in either the swing or Cajun camps. Ironically, this is in large part due to the work of field recorders like the Lomaxes, who sought to instill regional pride and prove the legitimacy of the music folk by ignoring any musical suggestions of hybrid that didn’t fit into theirs and other ethnomusicologists’ notions of authenticity, which they usually equated with lack of education, impoverishment and genre-specific purity. Cajun swing first appeared in 1933, the year before the Lomaxes made their first recordings of Cajun music. In part to distance themselves from common musical hobbyists, pioneering Cajun swing acts like Leo Soileau’s Three Aces, The Hackberry Ramblers and the Rayne-Bo Ramblers all cultivated wholesome images inspired by western swing acts that translated to Ivy League-educated Lomaxes as impure and inauthentic. In addition, practitioners of Cajun swing were openly and obviously engaged with Anglo-America which went against the Lomax’s attempts to portray Cajun culture as a culturally and musically isolated continuation of European culture comparable to their efforts to connect black music roots solely to Africa.
Thus the field recordings of Cajun performers all shared a romanticist agenda that sought to portray Cajun culture as an untouched window into the past and in the process ignored the adaptive and syncretistic nature intrinsic to Cajun identity. By publishing only music that supports their outsider’s notion of pure Cajun music, they reduced Cajuns to their Gallic roots, ignoring the heterogeneous reality of their past. The original Cajuns did come from French speaking Canada, which they left in an event known as Le Grand Dérangement in 1755. But 180 years and 5,000 kilometers later, it’s ridiculous to pretend they didn’t absorb aspects of the many cultures they were exposed to musically, culturally and genetically. By the 20th century, Cajun ethnicity wasn’t exclusively French, but also often included various mixes of Creole, German, Igbo, Italian, Jewish, Lebanese, Native and Yoruba ancestry. In 1921, compulsory English education through total immersion became the practice of Louisiana schools and English became as much a lingua franca as French. Ironically, the Cajun Renaissance of the ‘60s sought to purge the perceived impurities at the center of Cajun culture, in large part due to the efforts of the Lomaxes, whose 1930s recordings were turned to more often than earlier, more authentically representative Cajun recordings from the 1920s which reflected a taste for blues, hillbilly and pop music. Cajun swing then is as essentially Cajun, despite outside influences, as the famous, and obviously fusion cuisine.
Two Cajuns, Edolia (also spelled Edolie) Menard (née Rouen) and Clarence Choate, both lived in Abbeville at the time of their marriage. She was a 34-year-old homemaker with a son, Edison – likely a product of her previous marriage. Choate was a 42-year-old itinerant worker and respected accordionist in Rayne. They married in Port Arthur in 1918. Their son Harry was born on December 22, 1922 in rural Vermilion Parish. The family may’ve also lived in Acadia and New Iberia, which are sometimes listed as Choates’s birthplace. In 1929, the Choates moved across the Sabine River to Port Arthur, Texas, as many other Cajuns did, (including three of Clarence’s brothers) to work in the oil fields. At first the elder Choate worked for Texaco but ended up a janitor for Port Arthur schools. Documents from 1931 list both Edolia and Clarence as being single, although no record of their divorce has been found. Although Clarence died in 1943, Harry revealingly told most people that his father had died when he was a small boy.
What was true about Choates early years is that began spending considerable time in honkytonks where he listening to and absorbing the music he heard there. By 1935, at the mere age of twelve, he’d developed both considerable skill with a fiddle as well as a tremendous alcohol problem. He also learned to play guitar, mandolin, piano, steel guitar and accordion. Accompanied by a friend on guitar, he played fiddle for tips in the barbershops on Proctor Street and quit school in the seventh grade. Throughout his life, Harry Choates seemed to care about little besides music and booze. By some accounts, he was sweet and polite when sober but violent, selfish and reckless when drunk. By other accounts, the change in his personality when drunk or sober was imperceptible – of course this may stem from the fact that he was, by all accounts, nearly always drunk. Unlike other famous musicians who used alcohol to tap into deep pools of sadness and channel them into their music, Choates apparently wanted to drown his emotions and his music is rarely personal or confessional in nature.
What is universally agreed by all that witnessed Choates in action is that he was amazing performer whose playing captivated audiences and inspired his peers. In nearly every existing picture of him there’s either a bottle or a woman in his hands. His lust for music and fast living left no room for time for what most would consider practicalities. He never saved money, - never having a bank account, he wrote bad checks for booze – and paid little to no attention to thoughts of education, employment, health or family. He often seemed to have as little regard for those around him as himself. His pranks included sticking a lit firecracker in a sleeping bandmate’s ear (leaving him partially deaf) and placing the corpse of a rat in another’s bed. He abused his wives and, as with all commitments, completely ignored them when other women came along. Yet for all his apparent unpleasantness, most of the musicians and women in his life seemed willing to cut him considerable slack.
When he turned sixteen, Choates joined his first professional band, Happy Fats and the Rayne-Bo Ramblers, in 1939. The well-known Cajun Swing band performed at clubs around Acadiana almost every night as well as on Lafayette’s KVOL. Choates made his recording debut as fiddler with the band at a 1940 session in Dallas. His bandmate Popeye Broussard joined him in burning through their incomes on smoking, drinking and gambling. However, apparently unimpressed by the band’s growing success and the increased opportunities it offered for wealth and fame, Choates quit the month after the band signed a recording contract.
Choates next started playing electric mandolin with Shelly Lee Alley and the Alley Cats. In a Houston Heights Citizen article from 1940, Choates was singled out for his skill. On June 10, 1941, he married a girl named Jessie Mae. Though their union lasted until 1945 and produced one son, Clifford, his commitment to her was apparently taken as lightly as all others in his life and no one that knew Choates ever seemed able to recollect her or the child. Later that year, he was playing guitar with Pancho and the Farmhands over in Beaumont. Between 1940 and 1942 (and by some accounts, as early as ’38), Choates also played guitar and second fiddle for Leo Soileau’s Aces with Joe and Abe Manuel, and Francis “Red” Fabacher. For unknown reasons, it was around this time that he added the final “s” to his family name.
In January of 1944, Choates was drafted into the army and shipped to California for basic training – possibly not the frontlines since his older brother had already died in combat. In large part due to his alcoholism, he was discharged in November. Back home, he played off and on with Leo Soileau’s Rhythm Boys, Toby Kelley’s Kings of Swing, Dean Rasberry’s Streamliners and as a solo performer. The Rhythm Boys lived in a rooming house in Orange, the Sikes Hotel. One night Choates passed out with a lit cigarette in his mouth and his bed caught on fire. Soileau and another bandmate pulled him, still unconscious, to safety. By late 1945, he quit the Rhythm Boys for good.
Most notably, however, Choates began playing jazz guitar with guitarist Esmond “Eddie” Pursely at The Club Irving, one of East Orange’s many nightclubs. After a short time together, both musicians joined Leo Soileau & His Rhythm Boys at a notorious venue called the Showboat, a permanently docked steamboat in the Sabine River and known for its rowdy clientele, gambling and fast women. One of them was Helen Daenen Cundiff, whom he fell in love with. Hardly a reputable place to meet a bride, they later claimed to have met at the shipyard they both worked at across the river in conservative Orange. They married on July 11, 1945. She often drove their ‘38 Ford station wagon with “Harry Choates” painted on the side to performances where she sold tickets and then afterward, put up with his cheating and abuse.
In 1946, whilst playing in Longview, Texas, Helen gave birth to their son, whom they named Edison after Choates’s his brother. Not long after, Pursely, now in Jimmy Foster & His Swingsters, tracked Choates down and convinced him to join that group. Before long, Choates took over the group’s direction. One song in their repertoire was Choates’s version of “Jolie Blonde,” a traditional Cajun song considered by some to be their national anthem. The melody of the Choates’s version was first recorded as “Le Valse de Gueylan” in 1929 by John Bertrand. That same year, Amédée Breaux’s take, “Ma Blonde est Partie” was recorded. Choates’ version simplified the lyrics, changed the key and sped up the tempo, giving it a “Bob Wills beat.”
One night, whilst playing a honky-tonk on Beaumont Highway in Houston, a local record producer, Bill Quinn, caught a performance and, impressed with Choates’s playing, convinced the band to record for his pioneering independent label, Gold Star. Though operating with the slogan “King of the Hillbillies,” Gold Star was actually a much more diverse, pioneering indie label with gospel, Spanish, square dance, blues, “vanity or custom releases” and “hillbilly and Cajun” series. On April 1, the band cut “Jolie Blonde” and “La Value Zulbaugh.” Quinn was a pioneer of DIY music who, unaware of how to make material for records, simply melted down pre-existing ones and re-pressed them. Quinn’s casual approach to recording involved misattributions, misspellings (sometimes out of ignorance, other times to avoid paying royalties), no promotion and rarely copyrights.
Harry Choates next formed his own band, the Melody Boys, joined by his former bandmates from the Swingsters, Eddie Pursely and B.D. Williams, as well as the Manuel brothers from Leo Soileau’s band, and a teenage drummer named Curzy “Pork Chop” Roy. They were later joined by Julius “Papa Cairo” Lampirez and Joe Manuel’s wife on piano. In June of ‘46, the Melody Boys returned signed with Gold Star and cut “Basile Waltz” and another version of “Jolie Blonde.” The ever amateur Quinn, whether by accident or design, pressed the Swingsters’ version of “Jolie Blonde” as the B-side (which he misspelled “Jole Blon”) and attributed to “Harry Shoates & & His Fiddle” [sic]. After a Houston DJ began playing the “Jole Blon,” the song exploded in popularity and Gold Star was unable to meet the public’s demand. A Galveston-based jukebox operator, Lester Bihari , convinced Quinn to license the track to his Modern Records. Although pressings now misspelled Choates as “Coates,” the song reached number four on Billboard’s “Most Played Juke Box Fold Records” on January 4, 1947. Jimmie Foster sued and was subsequently awarded a half cent for the first 50,000 recording sold, amounting to $250.
Choates was now in considerable demand. Quinn narrowly stopped Choates from recording with Decca in violation of his contract. On February 11, Choates recorded for Jimmy Mercer’s Swing Records in Paris, Texas on his new label, Cajun Classics, created just for Choates, including “Jole Brun.” When the records went on sale, Quinn contacted Mercer, only to find Choates had signed a contract with him as well so he and Mercer settled on an arrangement.
Moon Mullican, a musician from Port Arthur, had recorded “New Pretty Blonde (New Jole Blon)” in September of 1946 and it went even further in the charts after Choate’s success, reaching number two. Red Foley’s subsequent version outsold Mullican’s and then a whole slew of sequels followed: Roy Acuff’s “(Our Own) Jole Blon,” Johnny Bond’s “The Daughter of Jole Blon,” Dickie Jones and the Skyliners’ “Jole Blon Likes the Boogie,” Jesse James and All the Boys’ “When Jole Blon and Kilroy Got Married,” Sheb Wooley’s “Peeping Through the Keyhole (Watching Jole Blon),” Tommy Thompson and All the Boys’ “Dinner with Jole Blon,” Bill Mack’s “Jole Blon On the Farm” Wayne Raney’s “ Jole Blon’s Ghost,” Bud Messner’s “Slipping Around with Jole Blon,” Hank Snow’s “When Mexican Joe Met Joli Blon” and Mullican’s follow-ups, “Jole Blon’s Sister” and “Jole Blon Is Gone (Amen)” (about hearing Choates’s version for the first time). America’s Cajun craze reached its apex in 1947. In the fall, Quinn enticed Choates back to the studio, insisting on straightforward Cajun music. Choates cut “Allons a Lafayette” and “Port Arthur Waltz.” Choates stayed with The Melody Boys, who recorded two dozen songs for Gold Star Records in 1946-47, primarily to promote his live performances. For one session, Choates had to buy a fiddle from a pawn shop on the way to the studio, having absentmindedly left his regular instrument with a woman he’d spent the night with. Although Choates’s and others’ Cajun recordings failed to make anywhere near the same impact, nationwide fascination with Cajun culture continued with Robert Flaherty’s romanticized 1948 documentary, Louisiana Story and Hank Williams’s 1952 hit, "Jambalaya (On the Bayou)." As a result, many Cajuns felt resentment at the appropriation and commoditization of their culture.
By 1947, the rotating roster of musicians backing Choates was known as The Jole Blon Boys. When Ernest Tubb came to Lake Charles, Choates opened and Tubb asked Choates to come to Nashville but Choates saw no point in playing the Grand Ole Opry with steady gigs at home. However, when Lent started, gigs dryed up. On top of that, Choates was caught having sex with Johnnie Manuel, the band’s pianist and wife of Joe. As a result, the band, the Manuel’s marriage, and Joe and Harry’s friendships all disintegrated. To make matters worse, Choates’s wife was three months pregnant with their daughter, Linda. Despite the difficulties of his own making, on April 4, 1947, Choates and Manuel booked a month long engagement at Dessau Hall in Austin. By May or June, he had a show on KWBU in Corpus Christi. When Linda was born in September, Choates was with Manuel, but after he knocked her from her piano stool in front of an audience, she left him in early ’48. On April 19, to make matters worse, Helen filed for divorce. Choates signed the papers but by the end of the year they were living together again and Choates only resumed recording when he needed money. In June, he signed a contract with Quinn guaranteeing $100 just for showing up, $100 for any masters, and one penny per side sold.
On April 19, 1949, Hank Williams played in Lake Charles. After his performance, he headed over to catch Choates and the two played together. In November, saxophonist Link Davis joined the band after Choates invited him via telegram (sent collect). Davis, although an admitted stoner, was as volatile and combative as Choates. Together they played Kilfore and Odessa, but mostly around Opelousas and Lawtwell. Around January of 1950, they headed to Houston to record Wynonie Harris’s, “Good Rockin’ Tonight” (retitled to avoid royalties, “Have You Heard the News”) and “Joe Turner.” Soon after, Choates and Davis parted ways because Davis wanted to record more steadily and Gold Star stopped operations. Davis moved to Corpus Christi and Broussard defected to Davis’s band in June.
In the spring of 1950, Choates moved to another Houston label, Macy’s, for whom Quinn was by then pressing records. The Jole Blon Boys relocated to San Antonio but were shut out from most gigs for non-payment of musician’s union dues, instead playing gigs in Kerrville, Austin and Bandera. The band returned to Port Arthur without Choates, who made his sole TV performance on KOAI’s Red River Dave’s Country and Western television program in San Antonio. At the same time, his health began to seriously deteriorate. He was no longer the lively showman, sometimes even playing sitting down but his playing was still good. Once he got up to be sick in the middle of a song, carrying his amplified instrument into the ladies room and returning, reportedly without having missed a beat.
In the summer of 1950, Choates and his family moved into an apartment in Austin where he continued with a new version of The Jole Blon Boys. In his first gig with another’s band since Jimmie Foster, he also played with Jesse James and All the Boys on their daily slot at KTBC. James was not especially talented as a musician but he always recognized and recruited talented players. Despite being sponsored by Pearl Beer, James sought to project a clean image and forbade his musicians from smoking or drinking. Obviously Choates had to be granted exception and, rarely sitting in with the band, he usually played solo as a featured attraction. Later in the year, his wife took the kids and they returned to Port Arthur without him. The subsequently homeless Choates then befriended Gene Snowden, a local singer who let Choates stay with him in return for making him a part of the Jole Blon Boys.
Choates also performed as a special guest with Bill Freeman’s Texas Plainsmen and sat in unannounced in local shows. In 1951, he was still getting gigs, playing borrowed instruments and, on one occasion, having to be bailed out of jail by a promoter for drunk driving in time for a performance. For another, he bought what he thought was a smart suit but turned out to be an ill-fitting bellhop’s uniform. When he fell off the bandstand during the performance but continued playing, some audience members thought it was part of an act. On February 21, 1951, Helen again filed for divorce. This time there was no reconciliation. In the settlement, his wife first she requested $125 a month but lowered it to $85. He was due to pay on April 14th. He failed to show up then, or any of the following months. On July 11 he was found in contempt of court and a warrant was issued.
On July 14th, he was arrested and taken to the Travis County Jail. After Jesse James and All the Boys’ played their KTBC broadcast without him, three of his bandmates went to visit him and witnessed Choates violently banging his head on the bars and walls of his cell, apparently unaware of their presence. They notified the guards and returned to the station to get help. When they got there, they were informed that Harry Choates had been pronounced dead at 2:45, just thirty minutes before he was scheduled for transfer to Beaumont. He was just 28 years old. In addition to self-inflicted lacerations, the autopsy listed cirrhosis of the kidneys and fatty metamorphosis of the liver as contributors to his death.
Gordon Baxter, a DJ at KPAC, raised enough money to bury him in Cavalry Cemetery after a funeral attended by his mother and few others. After his death, Houston’s Humming Bird Records released “Jole Blon’s Farewell,” a demo now overdubbed with backing musicians. They continued releasing similar tracks into 1953. In 1955, H.W. Pappy Daily purchased the masters and began releasing them on Starday and later, D Records. Like those before, Daily only focused on his straightforward Cajun tunes at the expense of his groundbreaking, jazz-influenced Cajun Swing numbers. In 1960, he released The Original Cajun Fiddle of Harry Choates. In the mid-'60s, Cajun musician Rufus Thibodeaux was one of the first to pay homage to Choates' influence when he recorded an album of Choates' songs, A Tribute to Harry Choates.
For a roguish, unreliable, mostly unknown to score a national, French language hit and spawn a Cajun craze on a no-name label with no promotion seems to have defied all odds. The fact that Choates seemed almost unaware of his own impact and completely uninterested in building upon it seems even less likely; and yet, thanks to a convergence of talent, technology and luck, it happened. Devil in the Bayou (2002-Bear Family) is the best representation of Choates’s talent, collecting 57 tracks including all of his entire Gold Star recordings as well as his 1940s session s with Happy Fats and the Rayne-Bo Ramblers. A listen to the songs contained thereon is the only way to begin to explain Choates’s genius.