The story of Knoxville's premier jazz band leader of the '20s and '30s, Maynard Baird

by Jack Neely

As searchlights played the skies above the Andrew Johnson Hotel, six-foot loudspeakers blasted live music throughout a 20-square-block area of downtown, music with a fast tempo that had people jumping all the way to Market Square.

Back then, before Roy Acuff ever picked up a fiddle, home-grown Knoxville music was already making waves around the country, from New York to Chicago to Alabama. But this music getting national attention in 1929 wasn't country. It was music that had been a favorite in Knoxville for years. It was jazz.

Hundreds of local jazz musicians, black and white, played in various Knoxville venues, in park bandstands and vaudeville houses and dangerous nightclubs and country-club dances and posh hotel ballrooms between 1900 and 1935. Most we'll never know by name. But one we do know, thanks in large part to several 78 rpm recordings he made in 1929 and 1930, relatively late in his career.

In 1996, a high-speed dance tune, "Postage Stomp," appeared on a compilation CD issued by Yazoo called Jazz the World Forgot (Volume 1). It's a lighthearted but disciplined piece, with breaks for trombone and saxophone. A banjo played like a snare drum keeps the headlong tempo. The liner note mention it's a 1930 recording by a band led by one Maynard Baird, whom the CD publishers seem to know little except that he was based in Knoxville, Tennessee.

A genial man in his 60s is enjoying a comfortable retirement in a brick house overlooking a serene inlet of Fort Loudon Lake. He has a customized UT Vols mailbox and a pickup truck in the front yard. He's a soft-spoken fellow, a retired electrical engineer for TVA. His name is Bob Baird, and he's bandleader Maynard Baird's son.

If you ask him, Baird will tell you about the guy playing banjo at 200 licks a minute on that cut. "I just barely remember my father playing on a bandstand on the top floor of the Andrew Johnson Hotel," he says. "It must have been 1934." Baird's mother—Maynard's second wife—had died when Bob was a baby, and until his dad remarried, he often found himself hanging out with his dad and the other musicians. "He didn't have anybody to keep me," Bob says.

He knew his dad after his greatest fame, as a guy with a regular job who loved to tinker. But even in his workshop, his thoughts were never far away from music. The elder Baird even invented a new instrument, which Bob describes as a cigar box with a broom handle attached: the Baird-ola. It sounds fascinating.

"Well, I think I've got one in the basement," he says, getting up. He returns with an almost-handsome, carefully crafted instrument, several stages beyond the cigar-box stage, with fiddle slots and a single string, now hanging loose, which was to be played with a bow.

Today, Bob is the Keeper of the Baird-ola and of a thick scrapbook of clippings, letters, photographs, fliers, and dance cards, covering the years 1926 to 1930, the height of Baird's popularity.

"My older brother remembers him a lot better than I do," he says.

His brother, Maynard Baird, Jr., is in fact 18 years older than Bob. When he blew trumpet in Knoxville in the '30s, he was known as "Sonny." Today he lives outside of Camp Pendleton, in California. His 33 years in the U.S. Marine Corps spanned active duty in three wars. He still keeps a military schedule, and asks to be called at 6:00 a.m., Pacific time. He tells his father's story.

Maynard Baird was born in Memphis around 1895. Sonny says nobody knows for certain. Like many musicians, his father was vague about his age and never celebrated birthdays. He spent his early youth in the Memphis of W.C. Handy's early days—but by 1913, for reasons now forgotten, the teenage Baird was in Knoxville, working as a vaudeville musician and movie-show operator. During the slow transition from vaudeville to movies, theaters showed both on the same ticket, and a successful movie operator had to entertain. Baird learned quickly.

He could play nearly everything, they say: piano, banjo, drums, harmonica, sometimes several at once, novelty one-man band shows. He fell for local piano player Mae Adams. Sonny was born in Knoxville in 1915, when his dad was only 20; he says his parents were on tour at the time, on their way to Cincinnati.

In 1921, Baird formed the first version of his best-known band, the Southland Serenaders—a large jazz combo with cornets and saxophones that made room for his own banjo, and, sometimes, jazz fiddle. He and his young family lived like gypsies, touring and keeping a dozen different Knoxville residences in as many years.

Sonny was only 7 when his dad bought him a cornet at a local pawnshop. Around 1924, Baird divorced Sonny's mother, who then moved to Montgomery, Ala. "He was quite a ladies' man, in his younger days," says Bob. The bandleader married at least three times; his sons say there may have been more to it than that.

Baird spent much of the decade touring, playing his own compositions and the pop standards of the day: "St. Louis Blues," "Tiger Rag," "Blue Heaven," "Yes She Do!," and the Charleston classic, "Paddlin' Madeline Home." He was a habitual entrant in battle-of-the-bands musical competitions; in 1925, playing a casino in New Jersey, Baird entered one more, and won. Among the rivals he bested was a band fronted by pop star Rudy Vallee.

Baird toured widely, but Knoxville saw him more than anybody else. His hometown wasn't necessarily limiting. Baird's live audiences at Whittle Springs and elsewhere sometimes approached 2,000. And by the mid-'20s, the city was getting a reputation for its powerful radio station, WNOX, which could be heard over much of the eastern half of the country. Baird's performances on WNOX's show "Midnight Frolic" from 1926 to 1928 drew an astonishing array of fan mail from Pittsburgh, Chicago, South Bend, small-town Pennsylvania: "the best band in the air" they called Maynard's Serenaders.

A letter from Woodbury, NJ, described the Serenaders as "one of the finest dance orchestras I have ever listened to...your only fault is...that you signed off too early." (The Midnight Frolic signed off at 3:10 AM.) Baird's best radio fan mail may have come from Norfolk, Va. "I thought the old Radiola would have a short circuit, for your station has the live wires" wrote a fan in 1928. "I mean the boys played hot—and how."

He headlined various prime-time radio shows over the years: the Style Shop Hour, Tradin' Claude's Studebaker Program, McClung's Radio Frolic. Baird also played on another station with reach—Nashville's WSM, not yet famous for its new Saturday-night variety show, Grand Ole Opry.

At several regular stops, he was treated like a superstar: Waldameer Beach Park, in Erie, Pa., where he sometimes shared a bill with the great black bandleader Fletcher Henderson; Luna Pier in Lakeside, Michigan, (alongside a young Duke Ellington); an Ohio nightspot called Greenwich Village, "Dayton's Smartest Supper Club." On ads for these shows, Maynard's Southland Serenders sound almost exotic: "The Hottest and Sweetest Band in the South," "The Versatile Sensation of Dixie," "Dixie's Hottest Dance Band." One bill hailed them as "America's Greatest Collegiate Orchestra"—perhaps one reason Baird was vague about his age and background. (He sometimes introduced Sonny as his kid brother.) At the time he fronted "America's Greatest Collegiate Orchestra," Baird was well into his 30s.

"Dad had a lot of ham in him," says Bob. "He was almost cocky." In 1929, Baird rode in an airplane over Huntsville, Ala., and carpeted the city with leaflets advertising his show at nearby Monte Sano. It made headlines in the Huntsville newspapers: "The Modern Way to Advertise." "I wish I had some of those traits," says his modest son. "They left me out."

Baird played extended engagements of weeks at a time but seemed to have the busiest band in his hometown, too, hosting Charleston contests at the Bijou and "Surprise Revues" at the Riviera.

Modern musicians know the phenomenon of being least appreciated at home. The only negative comments Baird saved in his scrapbook came from the Knoxville papers. After a 1926 gig at the Riviera, a conservative reviewer for one of the dailies sniffed, "The music was all right, we suppose, for those who like the sort of tinpanny tantrum modern orchestras are supposed to put out." Of a later show there, a reviewer wrote, "Members of the band would be better if they would devote their exclusive time to playing and cut out the attempted comedy."

The comedy bit somehow worked up North. According to an Erie newspaper, the band kept the large crowds at the Waldameer "in a constant roar of interest and excitement," even when they were just "dancing or grouped chummily around a table."

The Serenaders often featured a full variety show, with music, comedy, and dancing. As a boy, Jack Comer (later owner of Deane Hill Country Club) danced with the band in a bellhop outfit—the Charleston, of course. Lillian Law, an exotic dancer and contortionist from Chicago, also performed with the Serenaders. Joe Fox, was billed as an "eccentric dancer" and "clown drummer." For a time the Serenaders toured the nation with silent-movie star Helen Munday, promoting her Tennessee-based movie, Stark Love.

Jazz was dance music and purely entertainment. "In those days, there was Kansas City-style jazz, New Orleans jazz, Chicago jazz, all just a bit different," recalls Sonny. "Most of Knoxville's jazz musicians, and my dad, leaned more toward the Kansas City type than anything else."

Baird advertised his band as "10 Musicians—30 Instruments," but his bands ranged in size from about 8 to 15 members; over 30 local musicians were official Serenaders at one time or another. Baird's brother-in-law, Vic Johnston, was billed as "King of the Ivories." Another pianist, Ralph Maloney, was "the Prince of Jazz." Saxman Bugoo Gallaher was "One Ton of Fun." Among the stars was Sammy Goble, "Dixie's Sweetest Trumpeter" and a veteran of Paul Whiteman's seminal big-band orchestra; he taught Sonny to play. Another trumpeter, Jerome Licht, went on to play for Ray Miller's popular New York-based band. Perhaps the most famous musician ever to play in Baird's band was the legendary jazz violinist Joe Venuti. Sonny recalls the Italian-born Venuti—who played in a style only later associated with Stephane Grapelli—was in Knoxville for a time as a member of the Serenaders.

In 1926, the Southland Serenaders were invited to New York to make the first recordings at "Brunswick Recording Laboratories" for Vocalion. It's unclear what became of those experiments. But in 1929, Vocalion set up a recording studio at the old St. James Hotel, near Market Square. Most of what they recorded there was country music, but they cut a few jazz records, too—among them tunes by the Tennessee Chocolate Drops, the maverick string-jazz band, and Maynard's Southland Serenaders. Sonny remembers the studio. "During those days, they only had one microphone, and, of course, there was no mixing."

Maynard Baird's first two Vocalion records, each bearing two songs, were released on October 15, 1929. It's unknown whether the Crash that followed only two weeks later was a decisive factor in his career.

In late 1929, a new venue opened in downtown Knoxville: Advertised with searchlights, one rotating, and the other fixed on McGhee Tyson Airport (then located in Bearden) to direct aeroplane traffic in those pre-radar days, it was the fabulous new Andrew Johnson Hotel. Baird signed on as the hotel's house band, playing in the Crystal Ballroom and broadcasting on WNOX from the Venetian Room. The Serenaders gave two supper-dance shows a week at the AJ. Shows were broadcast over the airwaves and from "mighty" loudspeakers on top of the building. They say you could hear it for six blocks around.

According to that CD's liner notes, "Postage Stomp" was recorded in 1930—again, probably, at the St. James.

The scrapbook ends in 1930, and you get the impression the jazz-age decade of the Southland Serenaders was about over, too. Maynard Baird kept playing, but kept changing personnel and names: Maynard's Syncopators, Maynard's Southern Foot Warmers, Maynard Baird and his Southern Gentlemen. A handbill from those days is poignant: "REGARDLESS OF THE DEPRESSION," it reads, "THIS ATTRACTION WILL DRAW THE CROWDS TO YOUR DANCES LIKE [a] MAGNET."

Maybe it did, but Baird apparently didn't travel as much in the '30s. "Making a living in the music business was not easy in those days," says Sonny. Bob recalls growing up on Oklahoma Avenue with an old school bus in the driveway, ready to take to band wherever they were called. A description of one Newport gig in 1937 is tucked into the scrapbook. Sonny says his dad was still getting royalties for his recordings in the late '30s. He doesn't know when they stopped.

In the '30s, some old jazz stars who'd worn tuxedoes behind monogrammed podiums in the '20s put on overalls to play country music for WNOX or WROL. "It was a jazz band that played at that Mid-Day Merry-Go-Round," says Sonny. "See, it was more steady work. So they played country in the day and jazz at night."

By 1938, Maynard Baird was turning his attention to the labor movement. His sons say he got involved in it through the Knoxville Musician's Union, and advertised his band as a union band. The bandleader once famous in Ohio as "that Great Big Man from the South" ran for Knoxville City Council in 1939 but lost. Neither son knows for sure why he gave up jazz right at the high point of the Swing Era; in his 40s, he may have been getting a little long in the tooth for the lifestyle.

His erstwhile "little brother" Sonny wasn't. As a teenage trumpeter, Sonny joined Stan Stanley's orchestra, based in West Palm Beach, Fla. Then he was back home in Knoxville playing for Bob Lavin's band. In 1938, when Lavin enlisted in the army, 23-year-old trumpeter Sonny stepped up to lead the band. "We were quite popular down Kingston Pike way," he recalls. "It was a hotty-totty area in those days. All the clientele at Cherokee Country Club wore tuxedoes and tails." Sonny says they were "more a society band" than his dad's had been. But Sonny was good enough that he was occasionally invited to sit in as a trumpeter down at the black nightclubs of Vine Street.

In 1942, Sonny enlisted in the Marines, fully intending to return home and resume his career as a jazz trumpeter. Fate had other plans. "On the Okinawa operation, I got hit by a mortar round," says Sonny. "It took my teeth and jawbone out." Plastic surgery fixed him up, and today the 83-year-old Baird speaks without impediment. Still, "it ended my trumpet-playing days." Without jazz to return to, he stayed in the Marines, good for a tour in Korea and three tours in Vietnam before he retired. He still leads a military life in his home outside Camp Pendleton, up every morning at 5:00 sharp. He's now regional commander of the Military Order of the World Wars, a combat veterans' group.

Meanwhile, Maynard Baird lived a quieter, more practical life than he had before, but stayed close to the music business, occasionally coaxed out of retirement to play with old cronies at a country-club dance. In the '50s, he fashioned a recording studio out of his home on East Fifth, making tapes and cutting records for Jerry Collins and the big bands that remained. He died in Knoxville in 1965, identified in the news stories mainly as a union leader.

His third wife, the young singer he married in the '30s, still lives in Florida, but Baird's sons believe all of the old Serenaders are gone. Perhaps the last surviving member, drummer Joe Parrott, a neighbor of Bob's in Concord, died only last year, in his 90s.

Two of Baird's surviving 78s, "Postage Stomp" and "Sorry" are listed in record guides at $50 each. Both brothers have copies of "Postage Stomp." "Mine is so scratchy, I can hardly hear it," says Sonny. They don't know who owns the rights, and don't seem to worry about it. Bob has bought out all the local record stores' copies of Jazz the World Forgot and has more on order. He and his brother are just grateful, after 70 years, to have a clean copy of the music that, for one enchanted decade unlike any other, made their father famous.