Life with a ‘colored’ Big Band in the 1940s was about as romantic as a romp with a pillow.

 If  fortunes were good and the outfit picked up some profitable gigs, the members got to share a cheap hotel room with two or three others from the group; and eat in a dirty diner that served a mound of potatoes  and a  postage stamp piece of  beef  drowned in watery gravy.   

If things were not going quite as well, they’d likely end up sleeping on the ‘Silver Meteor’ a shuddering train that ambled all the way from New York to Miami.  Lunch, if  any, was a couple pieces of bread and a slice of cheese.

They stopped at trackside towns like Rocky Mount, North Carolina, played a few hours in a juke joint, and then walked or staggered  (If someone bought them enough drinks) back to the train station to wait for the next run  of the flagship combination of the Seaboard Air Line Railroad. 

If the world was turning extra  slowly, the whole group would be forced to see a three-ball man.  There were dozens of them in every city. ..they didn’t even require a name - just three balls on a stick in front of their door.
 
One New York band  that frequently  went broke,  would march en masse - from the Bowery down East Fourth Street.  Instruments in hand, they would walk somberly, two abreast.  Onlookers, spying a column of twenty marching musicians, thought a parade was forming.

Sometimes it became a parade….or at least a procession.

If there were no police in sight, the trumpet player would lift his horn and start a  moaning wail.  Before he got three bars into an old New Orleans funeral  tune, the whole crew  would join the dirge.  Soulfully playing ‘St. James Infirmary‘, they  headed for  Cooper Square, home of pawnshop great,  B. Berkowicz.  

Inside the hockshop, which had more various and sundry items than a department store, the instruments would be surrendered one by one:  exchanged to B. for a few dollars.  It was  enough to  sustain the musicians -forced to take ‘day jobs’-  until they found  paying gigs.

About as often as rain on February 29, a man would bring back his pawn ticket,  redeem his horn, and rise to musical stardom.   
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Mostly the tickets expired and the instruments stayed on the shelves.  The men got other work. They became porters, or Red Caps, dishwashers, or lumpers.  They took whatever work they could find.

  Dreams of playing before thousands at Carnegie Hall were traded for steady  meals and a regular place to sleep.

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