Lil Hardin Armstrong - Early Education and Mentors

Early Education and Mentors

Hardin first received piano instruction from her third grade teacher, Miss Violet White, then her mother enrolled her in Mrs. Hook's School of Music. "I later learned that they had taught me all the wrong things," Hardin recalled in 1971, "but they meant well."

It was at Fisk University, a college for African Americans located in downtown Nashville, that Hardin was taught a more acceptable approach to the instrument. Hardin stayed at the school for one year, returning to Memphis in 1917. In August 1918, she moved to Chicago with her mother and stepfather. By then, she had become proficient in reading music, a skill that landed her a job as a sheet music demonstrator at Jones Music Store. The proprietor, Jennie Jones, also ran an employment and booking agency, which attracted many performers to the store. A visit by Jelly Roll Morton would profoundly affect Hardin's musical education. "He sat down", she wrote in her unpublished biography, "the piano rocked, the floor shivered, the people swayed while he attacked the keyboard with his long skinny fingers, beating out a double rhythm with his feet on the loud pedal. Oh, was I thrilled and amazed. He finally got up from the piano, grinned and looked at me as if to say, 'Let this be a lesson to you.' Well it was a lesson." When a small crowd urged Hardin to play something for Morton, she did. "I laid Witches Dance and Rachmaninoff's Prelude in C Sharp Minor on him."

Morton's visit had a profound effect on Hardin, who began embellishing the sheet music with her own ideas, much to the delight of customers. She had been on the job for three weeks when clarinetist Lawrence Duhé's New Orleans Creole Jazz Band came in for an audition. Jones booked the band at the Chinese Café, and sent Hardin there when Duhé was asked to add a pianist. "I did my best to be a miniature Jelly Roll Morton," she said, "and Duhé decided to keep me.

The store had been paying Hardin $3 a week, but Duhé offered $22.50. Knowing that her mother would not approve of her working in a cabaret, she made it known that her new job was playing for a dancing school. Three weeks later, the band moved on to a better booking at the De Luxe Café, where the entertainers included Florence Mills and Cora Green. From there, the band moved up to the jewel of Chicago's night life, the Dreamland. Here the principal entertainers were Alberta Hunter and Ollie Powers, and there was no finer night spot in Chicago. When King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band replaced Duhé's group at the Dreamland, Oliver asked Hardin to stay with him. She was with Oliver at the Dreamland in 1921, when an offer came for the orchestra to play a six-month engagement at San Francisco's Pergola Ballroom. At the end of that booking, Hardin returned to Chicago while the rest of the Oliver band went on to Los Angeles.