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* September 24, 1872 New Orleans, La
† June 12, 1960 New Orleans, La.
Instrument: alto horn (mellophone)
As a brass band musician he played with:
Bunk Johnson,
Excelsior,
Henry Allen,
Onward,
Tulane,
Tuxedo,
Original Zenith Brass Band
Isidore was the father of Paul,
Louis, Lucian (1905-1960) and William (1907-1973) Barbarin and grand
father of Danny Barker.
Isidore Barbarin was born September 24, 1872
into a French speaking household of gens de couleur. He played trumpet and
mellophone in the Excelsior Brass Band and later the Onward Brass Band.
The earliest known document written by Louis Armstrong is a letter of Sept
1 1922, written to Barbarin. Armstrong, who had just arrived in Chicago to
join the band of his mentor Joe Oliver, is responding to a letter from
Barbarin which, alas, has not been found. Armstrong
calls the older musician "pops" and says " I was glad to hear from you
I heard all about you all having those funerals-I'm sorry I ain´t
down there to make some of them with you all."
It is easy to imagine Barbarin, by then 50 years old, writing a paternally
encouraging letter to a 21 year old Armstrong, still a little homesick
from the hometown and friends left behind.
Barbarin was married to Josephine Arthidor (her brother Louis played
clarinet in the Onward). They had nine children, and three of their sons
became musicians: Paul, Louis and Lucien. Paul played drums for the Creole
Jazz Band in Chicago before Armstrong's arrival and helped Oliver get his
position in that band of which he eventually assumed leadership.
Isidore Barbarin earned his reputation on the mellophone, an alto horn, in
the Onward, the most fabled brass band in New Orleans from 1900 until the
end of World War I. The Onward's winter uniforms were blue with a black
side stripe. In summer they wore white pants, blue jackets and white caps.
Joe Oliver and little Louis Armstrong were among the succession of players
who passed through Onward's early ranks, forging an idiom that bridged
streets and sacred spaces. Barbarin stood about 6 feet tall. In the words
of his grandson, Danny Barker, he was "always neat and well-groomed. He
wore dark suits tailored to his exact measurements and soft black shoes.
He had extra-large brown eyes which were very piercing and remindful of a
water spaniel."
Barbarin worked hard to support his large family. He was a driver fo the
horse-drawn buggies that undertakers used as hearses until automobiles
arrived. In 1901, Barbarin was manning the cash register at Francs Amis
("Free Friends"), a popular benevolent society hall in Treme, where a
dance was underway. A white man at the dance got angry when he learned
that his dance partner was a transvestite. He pulled out a pistol and
started blasting. Three people went down in a blaze of bullets. Barbarin,
hit in the stomach, spent 17 days in the hospital, but doctors never found
the bullet. He went home to his pregnant wife, lived well and continued
marching in parades for eight hours at a stretch.
Playing mellophone in funerals and driving a buggy hearse were compatible
vocations. Most musicians had day jobs. Wearing his dark suit and top hat,
Barbarin sat on his perch as a mortuary coachman, ever the stoic. "No
matter how much a bereaved family of people were carrying on, crying,
screaming, moaning, fainting, in a hysterical pandemonium, he never moved
a muscle:, wrote Barker in A Life In Jazz. "He sat as if his mind and
thought were miles away. Yet some of those funerals were so highly
dramatic they would make strangers looking on cry. He was not a regular
church going man. I guess he was constantly about churches, religious
services, preachers, priests, hospitals, death, cemeteries: everything
concerning a mortal's last hours on earth".
In the early 1900's, the Barbarin family lived in Treme. Paul Barbarin,
the son who became the most influential of the family's second generation
jazzmen, recalled in an oral-history interview: "Back in those days all
the undertakes hired out the carriages for all kinds of affairs. Many's
the night my father sat up on the carriage outside the old Opera House.
All the great music inside. All those people in fine clothes, furs and
jewels, and him a musician sitting outside in the rain with an old blanket
over him waitin' for them to come out. We lived just a couple of blocks
away on Toulouse Street, but after the opera he'd drive the folks home,
then go back to the stables, clean the harness, wipe down the horse and
walk home in the rain."
The elder Barbarin rode the buggy until 1925, when the horses were dropped
and hearse service became motorized. By then he had moved his big family
farther Downtown into the 7th Ward, a hearth of Creole culture.
Barbarin died in 1969 at the age of 88 and had quite a brass-band funeral
himself.
Source: New Orleans Magazine, May 2002
i1
The gravestone on St. Louis Cemetery number one tells Isidore died in
1960.i2
The gravestone of Isidore Barbarin
He was with the Onward Brass band in 1889-98 and 1899-1927, recorded with
the Original Zenith and Bunk Johnson's Brass Band.16
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