Not long after Jackson Street After Hours was published [in its first edition] in 1993, I was talking to a guy about Seattle music. Out of the blue he said, “You know, like the old Jackson Street scene.” I was a bit taken aback. It wasn’t just that he didn’t seem to know I’d written a book about the subject, it was the way he said it, as if this were common knowledge in Seattle and always had been—like, say, the Sonics winning the NBA Championship in 1979.

When I wrote Jackson Street, I thought new ideas took years to be absorbed. But I was wrong. In a matter of months, the message I had wanted to send to Seattle—that there had been a robust, almost completely unacknowledged African American jazz culture in our city for most of the twentieth century—had not only sunk in, it had apparently become common knowledge.

That was a very pleasant surprise. So was the fact that older Black musicians who had played on Jackson Street, people like Floyd Standifer and Jabo Ward and Buddy Catlett, seemed to be getting a little more respect. Suddenly, instead of being thought of as random old guys who didn’t quite fit in, they were now recognized properly as the city’s jazz elders.

“Jackson Street changed everything,” Floyd Standifer told me. That meant an awful lot. It’s not an exaggeration to say that before the book was published, most local jazz fans and even most of the players didn’t know much about Seattle jazz history. I know, because I was one of them. Back in 1984, when I was writing a cover story for the Seattle Weekly about jazz, I called Jabo to ask him for some background. He was a sweet man, but after a few questions that must have struck him as unforgivably stupid, he cut loose.

“You don’t know anything about jazz in Seattle,” he said. “Do you know who Bumps Blackwell is? What about Al Pierre? And Vernon Brown? Have you ever heard of Quincy Jones? All kinds of musicians came out of Seattle. Did you know Ray Charles lived here?”

Thanks, Jabo. I owe you, big- time. That conversation is what got me started on this book. Jabo wouldn’t be the last person to give me a piece of his mind. When you do community history, you discover that when you finally finish your project, it’s not the end. It’s the beginning. Because that is when all the people you couldn’t find, find you. When Earshot magazine published a photograph of Leon Vaughn’s 1944 band at Basin Street and I couldn’t identify all the players, a guy called from Anchorage, Alaska.
“Is this Paul de Barros?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Well, this here is ‘Unidentified.’” That is how Milton Walton’s name got into the second edition. Many others did not. For years, I’ve carried around a tattered copy of Jackson Street After Hours marked up in pencil with all the omissions and mistakes and new discoveries I wanted to add in a future edition. I am so grateful to the University of Washington Press for giving me a chance to convert those pencil marks to ink, not only to make corrections but also to take advantage of the avalanche of research that has come out since 1993.

The first was Quintard Taylor’s monumental The Forging of a Black Community: Seattle’s Central District from 1870 through the Civil Rights Era. The book was followed by other indispensable works by David Keller, Christopher T. Bayley, Kurt E. Armbruster, Peter Blecha, Brad Holden, Mark Miller, Phil Pastras, Robert Dietsche, Sam Stephenson, and Phil Moore. Their books are all included in the Sources section if you want to know more, and so are the articles published by Ashley Harrison, Desmond Power, and Linda Holden Givens.

During these years I, too, added to the body of knowledge about Jackson Street, collaborating with guitarist Greg Ruby on Frank D. Waldron: Seattle’s Syncopated Classic, and with a committee of community stakeholders who launched the Jackson Street Jazz Trail, a digital self-guided walking tour of the old jazz district. I also delved into the background of the murals Tanya Woo discovered under the Louisa Hotel, which turned out to have housed the old speakeasy, the Club Royale.

Thanks to the internet, these more recent research projects were a lot less arduous than those for Jackson Street After Hours in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Back then, my assistant Ted (Theo) Dzielak pored over microfilm of Seattle’s old Black newspapers. Today, all those newspapers are digitized and searchable online. What a treat it has been to go back to them to find new gems about Oscar Holden, Gene Coy, the Whang Doodle Orchestra, the Black Elks Club, and the Black and Tan, and to finally settle, once and for all, that old Bruce Rowell wasn’t lying to me forty years ago when he said blues singer Mamie Smith played Seattle. Because there she is, big as life, in the May 7, 1923, edition of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Digital technology—and the passage of time—has also unearthed many recordings that were unavailable thirty-five years ago.

But as much new material as I found for this new edition of Jackson Street After Hours—and there’s a lot—the core of the book remains the same: the sound of the voices that tell the story. Going over the manuscript these past few months, I found myself delighted all over again by the kaleidoscopic language and syncopated cadence these musicians used to tell their tales. Or, as the eminent ethnomusicologist Chris Waterman put it in his review of the first edition, the “polyphonic” quality of their story. That was always exactly the point. Not to recite a litany of facts, but to offer a chorus of overlapping community voices. They are all still here, maybe with a few more facts tucked in around them, but still jamming into the night, sometimes until the next morning. I invite you, once again, to listen.

Paul de Barros has written about jazz for DownBeat and The Seattle Times since 1982. His work has also appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, Washington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer, and Los Angeles Times. In 2025, he received the Jazz Journalists Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award. A founder of Earshot Jazz and former program director of Northwest Folklife, de Barros has taught jazz history at the University of Washington, Seattle Pacific University, and Cornish College of the Arts. His books include Shall We Play That One Together? The Life and Art of Jazz Piano Legend Marian McPartland, which was named the 2012 Book of the Year by the Jazz Journalists Association.

Excerpted from the Preface to Jackson Street After Hours, second edition. Author photo by Erika Schultz.