The first time I heard ragtime, I was about eight years old; that was in 1894 or 1895. A Negro boy by the name of Leroy Watkins came out West because his mother was here, and she'd since married a man named Crouch. My mother, uncles, aunts, and what few Negro people there was in Oakland in them days, you could name most of the families on two hands, would come to my grandmother's house as we was considered rich in them days because we had a piano. It was an old four-legged Stedman; it really wasn't old, it was modern in them days. We gathered there to hear this fella Watkins play ragtime, and he was the first ragtime player we'd heard. It was straight ragtime. There wasn't any fancy doin's in his playin'. He also played boogie woogie and that was the first time I'd heard it. A couple of years alter Leroy Watkins came, Blind Tom come and we heard him play at the Presbyterian Church at Thirteenth and Clay in Oakland. He sure was somethin'. It was a few years after that that Blind Boone played here.

I still believe the best preparation for a jazz piano player is to study classical music. I think anyone, if they play the piano, cornet, clarinet, trombone, bass fiddle, or sax, should have a classical training at first. You've heard of Bach; there's no time, no air, no melody, I don't particularly care for it, but I have to take my hat off to anyone playin' it. It's all technique. There's a great Negro player named Hank Jones and that's how he got his start. You can't get the piano or any instrument right without knowledge unless you're a genius like Art Tatum or Erroll Garner or Blind Tom. Some of them who played by ear took piano lessons and it ruined them.

I never will forget the first ragtime piece I ever played. In them days, the San Francisco Examiner used to come out with a piece of popular music in the paper every Sunday, like the comic strip today. When I was eleven or twelve years old, they came out with a piece named Ambolina Snow. So naturally I read music and sat down and played it. My grandmother was married four times, and one of them was an Indian; my uncle whose father was the Indian went in the kitchen and says to my grandmother, and told her: "Ma, Sid is playin' ragtime." My grandmother came in and kind of pulled me over the coals about it. She said, "I spend the money for your music lessons and here you're playin' ragtime." So, after that, she got to talkin' to old man Lorenzo, he was a German and was a great dancer, and they got talkin' about me playin' ragtime. Then my grandmother comes to me and says, "Old man Lorenzo told me he thought it was fine you were playin' ragtime." Well, that was a nice way to tell me I could go on and play ragtime, and I went on and played the ragtime.

. . . Will Johnson's New Orleans Jazz Band . . . [was] the first New Orleans jazz band I ever heard of. He went East from New Orleans and then come out here. Will Johnson was quite a character. He was a real light fella, and he always had a cigar in his mouth, chewin' it. I don't ever remember seein' a cigar in his mouth lit. He played the bass fiddle with a glove on it, and we was kind'a amazed out here in the West to see a man pick a bass. We knowed that in theater and symphony orchestras they picked them, and it was generally what they called pizzicato on the bass. To see him in a jazz band pick it like that was somethin'. That's where I got the idea of the four beats.

I listened and I says to the fellas, "You know that old heavy two beats we play; you know we've got to get that four beats like them boys." I can hear that rhythm; I can hear the difference in that rhythm that was changin' them days. Nowadays they play the two beats and they play it a little more solid than we did in them days. So I stuck a bass in there because that was the Louisiana type. In the early days, the Louisiana-type bands, like Will Johnson and King Oliver, didn't have no pianos. I didn't know whether they didn't allow them to have any pianos in the South, or what. From what I seen, and fellas like Wade Whaley told me, when they first started to play, they went around from place to place with the bass fiddle, guitar, fiddle, cornet, clarinet, and trombone. So I told my boys we were gonn'a start playin' to four beats. I had a drummer, Old Pete; he'd traveled for twenty years with Richard and Pringle's Minstrels, the Old Georgia Minstrels. He could read all the notes that you could put up there in front of him but he wasn't much on fakin'. His fakin' was kind of raggety, as we called it.

When I told Old Pete I wanted him to play the four beats, he got kind of imminent[sic], and said, "Man, you don't know how much work that is!" I said, "Well, you know the man's payin' us to work!" Well, we had a little boy around there by the name of Georgia Huddleson who was a terrific drummer. Oh! He was terrific. We finally got rid of Old Pete and got this Huddleson boy, and he played four beats, and played them good. I told the rest of them fellas; I said, "You either got to do that or we'll have to get some more musicians." Finally, we weeded on out and weeded on out until we got the So Different Orchestra that's in the picture about 1916. Them fellas could play everything. After Huddleson joined the band, and we weeded out, well, gee, everybody thought this is another band, four beats, Jesus, it was great. It was along about 1912 when we switched to the New Orleans type of instrumentation. That's the bunch that played the overtures. We had a little six-piece band with piano, drums, string bass, clarinet, a fella who played flute and piccolo, and baritone euphonium, at first. My baritone euphonium player caught $2,500 in the Louisiana Lottery, so he got too rich to work, so we had to change over and get Reb Spikes to play baritone saxophone with us. We worked on them early in the evening at Purcell's, when there would be nothin' doin'. We went to work at eight o'clock and it'd be possibly ten o'clock before we'd get a crowd. What we would do, we would take the first movement of a piece and play it to see how far we could go and then we'd take the second movement of it and then we'd take the whole tune and go over it. We'd just memorize them and my memory for them is just as good in 1952 as it was for them in 1912. The help at Purcell's enjoyed them and sometimes we'd have quite a standin' crowd. Of course, sometimes a customer would want to dance and we'd play dances in between if somebody wanted them.

Imagine us fellas playin' such overtures as Poet And Peasant, Semaramidi, Morning, Noon and Night in Vienna, William Tell, and Pique-Dame and we played every one of them and every part from memory. A gentleman by the name of George Bryant was wintering here one year with Ferdon's Medical Show, and we used to have the fellas from his show and my band get together once a week and have a rehearsal. With my six-piece band and his six pieces, it made a twelve-piece orchestra to play them. We also played my Canadian Capers. Them overtures come in very handy later when we went to play for C. O. Swanberg at the Porta La Louvre in San Francisco at the corner of Powell and Market Streets and at the Alexander Young Hotel in Honolulu. Those overtures fit in right well durin' the dinner hour.

Take Adam Mitchell, my clarinet player in them days; he could play anything. He was from Martinique in the West Indie Islands and one of the finest clarinet players I ever heard. The only one that compares to him is Benny Goodman. We called Adam "Slocum." In those days, they used the A and B[-flat] clarinets; you used the B[-flat] when playin' the flats and the A when playin' the sharps. He used the B-flat clarinet; make no difference where he was or what he was playin'. In those days, we played a lot of waltzes . . . , and them old boys who composed them didn't care what key they put them in. They didn't stick in B-flat and E-flat. They went all over with three sharps and four sharps and five sharps. Slocum though, he'd just take that clarinet of his and play any of them. He played the old Albert System; it's all Boehm System now. He stuck to that Albert System of thirteen keys and it was late that he finally switched to the Boehm System. He's the first man I ever heard slur on a clarinet like you do on a trombone. And he played the worst clarinets you ever looked at; I still got one out in the barn as a relic. When a spring broke, he'd use a rubber band, and when something would happen he'd stick some gum in the holes and go right on. How he got all that music out, I'll never know. He finally got an E-flat clarinet too and he used it on Tiger Rag with all the squealin' goin' on there.

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