Charlie Parker, Harry "Father" White, and Sweet Lucy

While it is undeniably true that formal education is generally a benefit both to the student and to society as a whole, it is equally indisputable that many jazz greats got their best education outside a classroom. Johnny Hodges claimed he got the nickname "Rabbit" from his ability to outrun truant officers. Charlie Parker said of his four years at Kansas City's Lincoln High School that he "Went in a freshman, and came out a freshman."

From the age of fifteen Parker roamed the streets of Kansas City, Missouri, at night, carrying his saxophone in a pillow case; he escaped parental detection because his mother worked midnight to eight in the morning cleaning offices. He would sneak into nightclubs when he could, and stand outside listening when he couldn't. He joined a band of older students, The Deans of Swing, but Parker in his youth was not the formidable talent he later became.

"He couldn't play, and was mad about it," said bassist Gene Ramey. After he left school Parker found a regular job at a nightclub outside Kansas City's entertainment district where he "played nothing but pops, commercial material, and standards requested by drunks." Ramey, who would later give bandleader Jay McShann a guarantee that he could get Parker to jobs on time, described Parker's tone in his younger years as "thin and weak, a 'Sweet Lucy' or wine tone, that sounded 'like a combination of a man talking and drinking wine at the same time."

Which raises the question—what was "Sweet Lucy," and what did Ramey mean by it? To answer that question, we must go back to a jazzman a generation older than Parker—Harry Alexander "Father" White, born in 1898. White worked with Duke Ellington and Elmer Snowden in the 1920s, then joined Cab Calloway. He played trombone and was a composer, writing Evenin' for Calloway, later made famous by Jimmy Rushing with Count Basie. White had a drinking problem, and he coined the term "jitterbug," which came to mean a hyperactive dancer, but which was originally intended to describe the condition officially known as "delirium tremens," or alcoholic nerves.

Like many heavy drinkers without a steady income, White favored cheap high-alcohol wines. One type was sold under the brand name "Sweet Lucy," and Danish jazz promoter Timme Rosenkrantz found White one morning "sprawled in the street on Eighth Avenue" in New York, "a bottle of Sweet Lucy cradled in his arms." Rosenkrantz described Sweet Lucy as "a non-vintage port wine that sold for twenty-five cents a pint. The cheapest booze to be found anywhere."

White was on a bender but Rosenkrantz sobered him up to the point where he began to write arrangements for a band led by trumpeter Bill Coleman that Rosenkrantz had put together, which included Hayes Alvis, a former Ellington bassist, and Jimmy Hamilton, who would later play clarinet with Ellington. When the musicians developed a thirst after the first day of rehearsals, they pitched in to buy some booze, and Rosenkrantz "had to trot across the street to the alcohol factory to pick up five or six bottles of Sweet Lucy." When White saw his first bottles of the stuff in three weeks, "he bellowed and almost ate the whole bottle."

The musicians made their way home with minor mishaps; one lost his trombone in a garden, another spent the night in a neighbor's closet. White outdid them all; hallucinating that he had put together a band that included both the living and the recently-deceased Chick Webb, he locked himself in a room and conducted a rehearsal. Rosenkrantz was unable to talk White out of his fantasy until he gave him a quarter—proceeds of the sale of White's song "Mad Moments" to Cootie Williams—to buy more Sweet Lucy.

White wasn't heard from again until he enlisted in the Army as he was pushing forty. When the Army doctor examined him, he took a blood sample and said "Hmm—Canadian Club." "He had never heard of Sweet Lucy," Rosenkrantz said, but given White's advanced age and musical background—he dropped the names "Duke" and "Cab" during his enlistment interview—he was put in charge of bands at Fort McClellan, Alabama. So when Gene Ramey said Charlie Parker had a "Sweet Lucy" tone when he was young, he didn't mean it as a compliment.