Setting a Tone: Chapter Five–John Hancock to Sell Fine Hotel

Lessons with Sammy Price, the King of Boogie-Woogie

Sammy played month-long gigs at the Copley, followed by a month off. As I returned to the Copley to hear Sammy Price, as the months turned into years, I saw that the entertainer was equally skilled in the art of public relations.

In the previous chapter I told of when Eubie Blake crowned Sammy the King of Boogie-Woogie in 1976, a well-deserved title, though there was another more imperative reason for that ceremony.

When Sammy arrived at the Copley and as the hotel was celebrating its 70th year in 1982, he suggested they also celebrate his 60 years in the music business. William Heck arranged and promoted an event for people to meet Sammy for cocktails, and follow him to Copley’s Bar for the evening’s entertainment.

I also mentioned that Sammy worked in Harlem’s antipoverty programs, taking a leave of absence from his life as a professional musician. Part of his work was in public relations, meant to promote those "Youth in the Ghetto” programs. His first effort was to stage one of the largest parades ever in Harlem, with floats composed primarily of Harlem youths.

You could most definitely claim that being a street speaker in Harlem, standing on 125th Street at the corner of Seventh Avenue, with a microphone in hand, gathering a crowd, was a public relations effort of the highest order.

You could say that leading a trio in a nightclub called the Yellow Front in Kansas City in 1929, a club where the husbands gambled in the backroom while the wives sat at the tables, entertained by the man at the piano, was a public relations effort of another high order.

After he settled in at the Copley, Sammy asked for a round table to be placed in the hallway, next to the open brick stage. There he hosted guests. People in the bar could get a glimpse of Sammy during breaks, and watch him mount the stage when he left the table. The hotel placed small tables for two in the hallway, close enough for people to see Sammy and his guests but not close enough to listen in.

Many of Boston’s institutions of higher learning had a seat at that table. Roxbury Community College came to hear Sammy play, and eventually Sammy went to the college to speak with students about his life and music. Berklee College of Music met with Sammy at the table–eventually William Heck arranged a ceremony in which Sammy presented Berklee with a boogie composition, and the college established a scholarship in Sammy’s name for students from Boston’s public schools. A story, “Berklee, Copley’s, Sing Praises of Musical ‘King’’, appeared in the Boston Herald in April, 1984.

Among the politicians at the table was the community organizer and State Representative Mel King. Mayor Raymond Flynn spent time at the table. Thomas Eisenstadt, High Sheriff of Suffolk County, enjoyed his time so much that he appointed Sammy as an honorary deputy sheriff.

Seiji Ozowa, conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, sat with Sammy at that table. Ozawa loved listening to the blues, stemming from when he lived in Chicago and visited clubs there.

The jazz tenor saxophonist Illinois Jacquet dropped by one night. He was working at Harvard as an artist-in-residence. Among his many accomplishments, Jacquet played with the Lionel Hampton band and created the iconic solo for Hampton’s signature tune, “Flying Home,” which some historians claim was the first rhythm and blues sax solo. Jacquet was about to perform his final concert of the residency, and invited Sammy to attend and sit backstage. Sammy didn’t plan to perform, but when Jacquet announced that the King of Boogie-Woogie was in the house, and asked the audience if they thought he should play something, he came onstage.

When Sammy` made a deep, comic bow that caused the crowd to burst into laughter, he realized how popular he had become in Boston. He announced he was going to play “The Harvard Boogie.” Off they went, “climbing the stairs” with ease. The applause was overwhelming. Sammy knew he had brought down the house. To his great surprise, a week later he received a thank-you note from Derek Bok, the President of Harvard.

Around that time, in 1984, Sammy celebrated his 76th birthday at the Copley. The event was publicized in the Globe. I was there that night. When Sammy walked by our table during a break I said, “I have a gift for you.” I handed him a copy of his Leeds Boogie-Woogie Folio.

As he looked through pages he asked, “Where did you get it?” I told him I had placed an ad in a blues magazine.

“Do you play piano?” he asked.

“I do,” I said.

“You probably play cool jazz, Dizzy Gillespie and all that.”

“I learned on Jimmy Yancey.”

“That’s good to cut your teeth on.”

He looked behind us, to a woman who was standing at the brass rail. He held up the photo of himself, taken forty years ago, and said, “This is me when I was a good-looking man.” Sammy went to the rail and stood beside her, shoulder to shoulder, until it was time to go on again.

On Valentine’s Day in 1944, Sammy gave an autographed copy of his Leeds Boogie-Woogie Folio to his mother, Alberta Price.

I returned to the Copley two weeks after his birthday party. When I entered I saw Sammy sitting with another person at the table. I went to the table, and we chatted for a bit. I asked what he had thought of the Leeds folio.

“I lost it,” he said. He asked if I could send another copy, and gave me his address. I thought I was taking a gamble when I asked for his phone number, thinking maybe he didn’t give that out easily. “It’s in the book,” he said. “Under Captain Sammy Price.” I’m sure I looked confused. He repeated, “Captain Sammy Price."

Two things about this moment. First, I had seen a number of people approach that table, ask a question, and then turn away glumly. I didn’t want to be one of those. Second, there actually was a Captain Sammy Price, and a gold-plated badge to prove it, presented by the Harlem NYPD Precinct in a ceremony in 1973 to honor his service to the community. But I didn’t know about that when I went to the Amherst library to find the phone book for New York City, and then called the ten or so Sammy Prices listed. One of the Sammy Prices I talked with pronounced the title with a sense of curiosity: “Captain Sammy Price,” he said.

I sent Sammy another copy of the Leeds folio, and included a letter, telling him about myself and also that I wanted to write about him. I included a self-addressed stamped envelope, like any good freelancer would.

I didn’t hear from Sammy, and wondered if he even got the letter. But the next time I went to the Copley, he invited me to sit at the table.

After Sammy played with Illinois Jacquet, he received a letter inviting him to become the next artist-in-residence at Harvard, in their Living Artists series. Sammy was so shocked that he couldn’t respond. A week later he received a second letter, asking for a meeting the next day. This time, he agreed to meet.

Sammy couldn’t sleep that night. He thought about his youth in Dallas, thought about the cornet teacher who told him he had no talent, and about the piano teacher who told him he had rhythmic imagination. He remembered his tours in France and how he wanted to talk to the youth about jazz, but the language difference prevented him. As Sammy drifted off into that space between waking and sleep, an image came that shook him fully awake. Several pianos on stage. Students playing the blues. Let them play, he thought.

He left the meeting at Harvard in awe, in that he would be able to conduct a program with his own ideas, at Harvard no less. He called his daughter Sharon, and promised he would do his best. The residency would consist of five weeks meeting with students in workshop format, and a final concert.

Months later, in the summer of 1986, Sammy learned that his job playing at the Copley would be coming to an end. The John Hancock Company had decided to sell the hotel. There would be a change in management.

Toward the end of summer, I went to hear Sammy on a weekday night. I sat at one of the small tables in the hallway. During the break, he came to my table and sat with me. I felt tongue-tied at first.

“How are you doing?” I asked.

“Oh, not so good,” he said. “I’m getting old.”

I said he didn’t look old, and that he didn’t play old.

“Yeah, but it’s not what you see. It’s what’s on the inside. I lost my wife a few years back. It’s hard to be with someone twenty-seven years and suddenly they’re gone.”

“I’m sorry. That must be so hard to get over.”

“Hard to get over. After she died, I was working at a hotel in Switzerland, up in the mountains. I played every night but I didn’t talk to anyone. I went straight to my room after I finished playing. During the day I walked in the mountains and meditated. That’s how I got over it.”

“That sounds like a good way to do it.”

He asked where I worked. I said I was teaching writing as an adjunct professor at the University of Massachusetts.

His expression brightened. “They had me over at Harvard, you know. I talked to students about jazz and the blues. I had them play, and we had a performance at the end. They played damn good. They surprised me.”

He chuckled and said, “Derek Bok sent me a certificate. They made me an associate fellow.”

I like to remember those times when the words come to mind unbidden, as if from the unconscious, words that surprise you when you say them.

“You should come to UMass,” I said. I didn’t know how to arrange that.

“Set it up,” Sammy said.

I spent an hour a day making calls. In early September I learned of the approval for a five-day residency for Sammy Price, in February during Black History Month. I went to the Copley that weekend to tell Sammy. When I explained, he called out to his drummer, Carl Goodwin.

“Carl! We’re going to the….” he paused, looking at me. “What’s the name of it?”

“The University of Massachusetts.”

“The University of Massachusetts!”

“Count me in,” Carl said.

William Heck arranged a celebration for Sammy’s 78th birthday in October. Heck and his staff reached out to the media. WGBH radio spread the news. The Boston Globe ran a feature announcing that Mayor Raymond Flynn declared October 6, 1986, as Sammy Price Day in Boston. Christopher Lydon of WGBH-TV narrated a feature about Sammy, who, to make it special, wore a robe and crown for the interview.

Later that year on Christmas Eve, Sammy sat in his living room and wrote of his experience during the residency at Harvard. As he began, another more distant memory intruded upon his consciousness.

“I am writing this little piece on Xmas eve and I remember my father was a wimp. You see, my mother had told my father to bring home a turkey for Christmas but my father used to hit the bottle and forgot what my mother told him. Around midnight he came home with a possum and all hell broke loose in my house, and my mother threw a lighted lamp on my daddy and we had one hard time trying to put the fire out. On Christmas day the menu read ham and eggs. We all got a big laugh and my mother went out in the backyard and ran the possum away from our house.

“The date of the concert was like a school graduation with the young people in their best dress on the scene early to show what they had learned. The theater was packed and the people were saying it had been a success.”

John Hancock sold the Copley Plaza to a group from Harvard in 1988. Hancock stated to the New York Times that the venture had been profitable. Indeed, Hancock received $56 million for the Copley, $49.5 million more than they paid for the hotel in the troubled year of 1972.

Given the management’s strategy to restore the Copley through entertainment, you could say that Sammy Price and the other sophisticated pianists had served their purpose and done Hancock well.

A final moment from the WGBH-TV interview struck me as prescient.

Image credits: Schomburg Center for Research in Black History, Archives Division, Sammy Price Papers.

Sammy Price’s written words: Schomburg Center for Research in Black History, Archives Division, Sammy Price Papers.