Memories of Philly Joe Jones

Call it dumb Irish luck, my sitting down next to Philly Joe Jones’ sister Geraldine at the Mellon Jazz Festival jam in his honor this summer. She and the drummer’s son Chris formed a kind of honor guard for the star’s widow, Eloise, in the front row in the Warwick’s grand ballroom.
 
First thing I knew, the matronly looking lady in a lovely rose silk dress with ruffled collars was whispering sweet somethings about “little Joe” in my left ear, between every tune and between sets. You see, Mrs. Lee was six years older than brother Joseph Rudolph Jones, the youngest of nine children of Amelia and Louis Jones, which puts her on the brink of 70.
 
And when Joe’s bricklayer dad died (at age 37) when the drummer-to-be was one, Amelia had to start as a housekeeper in Chestnut Hill, thereby making Geraldine “little Joe’s” de facto mother. Geraldine carted him off to the Joseph E. Hill elementary school in Germantown where he “day-cared” in kindergarten from age three to six. Out of this mothering came the lovely recollections with which she blessed me the night of what Mayor Goode had proclaimed Philly Joe Jones Day in Philadelphia.
 
She said—with the only sad look she gave me—that little Joe used to ask every man who came to their house, “Are you my daddy?” Geraldine theorizes that his drumming developed from his deep frustration. When he got the inevitable “No!” from each male visitor, he’d wander off, pounding everything that made noise with any stick that came to hand—furniture, banisters, glassware. It was, she believes, a tortured apprenticeship.
 
But the overriding impression she leaves of her childhood with little Joe is his mischievousness, an overflowing of animal spirits. She recalled that when he tried their tired mother’s patience, beaten down from a day of dusting and cleaning with the white folks in Chestnut Hill, she’d hide Joe in her bed, to turn away the wrath of the dog-tired parent.
 
She has the liveliest recollection of his first “professional” performance on the drums, decked out in a white suit with a sailor’s cap, the unexpected high point of May Day festivities at their elementary school. He was four. But when the piano player came to the end of their piece, little Joe wasn’t finished—he just kept paradiddling, to the delight of the astonished audience of parents and children.
 
There was no end to the madcaps she fondly recalls. He’d go into the 5 & 10 in Germantown, get the sales lady to put on a jazz record, then he’d improvise, dancing up and down aisles.
 
“He was something, all right. You know, colored couldn’t eat in Horn and Hardart in Germantown back then. But little Joe shined shoes to help out with the family’s expenses. And after he finished shining someone’s shoes, he’d march right up to the counter, sit down and eat. I think they were all just too amazed to bother with him. I never saw the likes of little Joe.”
 
Did his mother like his jazz?
 
“Did she ever! At the last party we had for her at our brother William’s—he was a chief warrant officer, 32 years in the Army—they put on Philly Joe’s records, and Momma walked over to him, held out her arms and said, “Let’s dance, Joseph.” They did, too. She was wonderful, shaking to his drumming.”
 
As the musicians picked up and packed away their instruments after the last set honoring Philly’s most famous drummer, Geraldine Jones Lee retreated up the center aisle with her memories of mothering as fresh as dawn. I thought to myself, some sibling! Some sister!
 
Reprinted from Welcomat: After Dark, Hazard-at-Large, October 21, 1987