Welcome back to a very exciting third installment in our ongoing Hot Five Centennial Celebration series. If you’d like to catch up, here’s a link to Part 1, which detailed the birth of the Hot Five, and here’s a link to Part 2, in which we broke some very exciting news about Lil Hardin Armstrong.
As mentioned in Part 1 of this series, Lil bought a scrapbook when Louis returned to Chicago, but it took her a minute to begin populting it, missing big ads for “Gut Bucket Blues” from March 6 and for “Heebie Jeebies” from May 1. But the pages we’re about to share are filled with Hot Five ads, press mentions, and more. (One thing we’re not going to share today? The ad for the June 12, 1926 OKeh Race Records Cabaret and Style Show, which we already did a whole piece on this past summer.)
Lil might have missed the main “Gut Bucket Blues” ad, but in the lower left hand corner of this page, you’ll see a small ad to listen to that record (referring to it “The Gut Bucket Blues”–the “The” must have been dropped pretty quickly):
Here’s page from the summer of 1926, featuring “Cornet Chop Suey,” which was backed by the first recorded Hot Five side, Lil’s “My Heart”:
The June 12 “Cabaret and Style Show” is mentioned in the “Cornet Chop Suey” ad, as well as in this small OKeh ad also clipped out by Lil (cropped because it was the only relevent item on the page):
“Heebie Jeebies” was really the song that helped launch Louis’s stardom, as this clipping from July 24, 1926 refers to the Hot Five as “The ‘Heebie Jeebie’ Song Recorders.” This is also one of the earliest print usages of one of the band’s soon-to-be-famous publicity photos:
Here’s the ad for “I’m Gonna Gitcha,” which also features the same publicity photo of the band:
By September 1926, Louis appeared on the cover of OKeh’s Italian supplement, advertising him as “Le Ultime Novita (the latest novelty)”:
That catalog was sent to E. A. Fearn, the OKeh executive in charge of overseeing the Hot Five sessions, along with a letter, stressing, “We would suggest your giving these to Louis, showing him the tremendous amount of publicity he is securing by means of his OKeh contract, so that any time he sees fit to go to Italy, they will welcome him with open arms.” Fearn passed the letter to Louis and it was added to the scrapbook:
The 1927 ad for “Big Butter and Egg Man” is the centerpiece of this page:
This next page has one of my favorite ads, with Louis doing an endorsement for a local Chicago dentist, Dr. Kaplan. It also has an ad from “Big Fat Ma and Skinny Pa” from June 1926, as well as a 1928 clipping featuring the final song recorded by the original Hot Five, “Savoy Blues”:
Lil’s scrapbook is light on the Hot Five after that and has nothing on the Hot Seven and nothing of the sides made with Earl Hines in 1928, however, there is one tantalyzing advertisement for a live performance by the “Hot Five” on July 10, 1928, which would have been right after the first batch of sides made with Hines (including “West End Blues”):
In addition to Lil’s scrapbook, Louis’s mistress–and eventual third wife–Alpha Smith was also keeping a scrapbook, which we have shared in full on this site. But since she got some clippings Louis missed, here’s a few relevant pages from Alpha’s volume, opening with one promising music the “Hottest Since the Chicago Fire,” listing two Hot Five sides:
Alpha managed to get an ad for “You Made Me Love You”:
And here’s Louis on the cover of another OKeh catalog:
One thing is missing in the above clippings: reviews. It took some time before music journalists realized the Hot Five records were a thing and by the time the first generation of jazz historians and collectors realized their importance in the 1930s, the original OKeh discs were out of print. The story of how these records were written about in the 1920s and 1930s will be the subject of the next installment of this series.