Harold Battiste interview recording, 1994 July 14

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Kate Ellis	Would you state your name?	0:02
Harold Raymond Battiste	I'm Harold Battiste.	0:03
Kate Ellis	And when you were born?	0:04
Harold Raymond Battiste	October twenty-eighth, 1931.	0:07
Kate Ellis	And were you born in New Orleans?	0:10
Harold Raymond Battiste	Yeah.	0:11
Kate Ellis	Okay. We're going to sort of try to do this somewhat quickly so you can to do everything you want to do. I want to ask you about pretty much your growing up years as far as what you remember of Jim Crow, how your life was affected by it. And then—	0:19
Harold Raymond Battiste	Well, actually when I think in terms of that, when I see myself as a child, it didn't really affect me, or at least consciously, I didn't know it somehow. I don't think young children know when they're poor. They don't know that they're being affected. They thought that with the way life was. So, I wasn't really conscious of all of the things that I was missing as a youth. And I was in a family that was very strong and very, I guess, loving and protective.	0:35
Harold Raymond Battiste	There was a vivid in incident that happened when I was a youngster, must've been about eight or nine years old, that probably was racial, but I didn't interpret it that way when I was a kid. Do you want me to relate the incident?	1:28
Kate Ellis	Yeah. Yeah.	1:48
Harold Raymond Battiste	I lived in a neighborhood on Second Street that was one block away from a Catholic church. And of course, at that time the churches were segregated, but the neighborhoods in New Orleans never were completely segregated. This was not like a across the tracks town. There were pockets of Whites and Blacks in the same neighborhood. And in my neighborhood there were about three White families. One of them had the corner vegetable stand. It was a Italian family and there was another family down the block.	1:49
Harold Raymond Battiste	Anyway, there were two little boys about my age and they were out skating one day and I was out skating also. They were out in the streets and I was on the sidewalk, and they invited me to come skate with them. And we skated down to the Catholic church where the pavement was. That was the best pavement of the neighborhood. You could skate through the yard and right up where the priests lived, you make a turn and come back out to the street. And where we skated through there, maybe about the third time through, the priest came out of the rectory. There was a flight of stairs coming right down and he came out running down the steps just after the two White boys passed. When I got there, he ran right after me and he kicked me and he kicked me so hard, it knocked me down and I wet my pants and everything. I mean, it was really a calamity.	2:26
Harold Raymond Battiste	I remember going home crying and my grandfather got his pistol out. He got his gun out. He was going down there to— and it really frightened the family with the women in the family, the family called it my grandfather's anger. But I didn't realize what that incident was until later on in my life when I— I still know the church because right now, oddly enough, the church is still there, it's very Afrocentric now. In fact, my cousin is a deacon at the church now.	3:37
Kate Ellis	Which church is this?	4:07
Harold Raymond Battiste	St. Francis de Sales.	4:07
Kate Ellis	Oh yeah. I've been there a few times.	4:08
Harold Raymond Battiste	Yeah. But that was the church. I'll never forget, Father [indistinct 00:04:17]. Well, incidents that happened during that time, it was back, must been in the '30s, I never didn't hear much talk about racial matters or anything like that. Evidently the family they just knew how to live with it.	4:13
Harold Raymond Battiste	I remember another time my mother, when we were going shopping at a grocery store and at the checkout counter there was a young White lady checking out the groceries. Well, by that time I started playing music, and for some reason she struck up a conversation with me and I started just talking back about a thing like that. My mother got very upset because she said to me that I didn't know my place, "You can't do that. You can't go around talking to White girls like that." And I didn't understand that then. But later, I understood the protectiveness, the way that she and maybe a lot of parents had to protected their sons from innocently thinking that you can do so.	4:35
Harold Raymond Battiste	Whereas, I don't recall any overt experiences. Most of them were in that vein, or in the vein of accepting a place, accepting what your situation is and make the best of that. Don't try to get beyond because that upsets the status quo, whatever it was. I didn't understand that then.	5:30
Harold Raymond Battiste	My grandmother worked, of course, up on St. Charles Avenue, was cooking for some White people. And that was the other thing that someone in your family had something, what they call their White folks. And I think the Elliot family was my grandmother's White folks. These were people whom when you had any kind of problems, it was sort of like a dependence. Since she worked for them, cooking for them, that was her backup, so to speak. And most Black families existed in that mentality that you are as good as your White folks backup, whoever you got. And they almost wore that like a status symbol.	5:56
Kate Ellis	Almost like a vicarious experience.	6:49
Harold Raymond Battiste	Experience of safety, security and power even, that, "I work for this— I got some good White folks." That's the way they was said.	6:54
Kate Ellis	Really?	7:02
Harold Raymond Battiste	Yeah. "Oh, you know him, he got good White folks." I can remember those kind of things. But by and large, I didn't live the way I could see it in retrospect, in the present tense at that time, my life was very good, and I was a very happy child. When I got to high school age, that was another incident because my mother chose to send me to the high school that was located up on St. Charles Avenue.	7:05
Kate Ellis	Which one was that?	7:42
Harold Raymond Battiste	Gilbert Academy. And that was the one place that was sort of like St. Charles Street was— Yeah, babe?	7:43
Koi Battiste	I'm sorry.	7:55
Harold Raymond Battiste	It's good.	7:56
Kate Ellis	Gilbert Academy.	7:56
Harold Raymond Battiste	So the very fact that we were a bunch of young Black kids that always was penetrating that area, going up St. Charles way uptown to go to school was in itself somewhat of at least an irritation at some place. I guess in some ways it was an outright outrage to have these Black kids coming up there to go to school. And we had a very strong woman who was our principal. I don't know, I forget who, who was way ahead of any notions of civil rights or movements like that. She was a very, very strong woman. So that protected us. Even though we were there, we never experienced any overt antipathy toward us. Of course, a lot of the streetcars were still segregated and so forth, but most of us walked, we didn't even bother to get on streetcars at that time.	8:02
Harold Raymond Battiste	As a musician, when I started playing, it affected us. But as I said, I accepted it. Most of us accepted it because we just knew that's the way it was. When we would play clubs downtown, Bourbon Street, the French Quarter had a lot of strip joints. Whenever we played, they would put us behind a curtain so we couldn't see the strippers. It was funny stuff because the reality was that most of the strippers was digging Black musicians anyway. But I mean, they couldn't have the public seeing us, seeing them. And it was a real joke.	9:14
Kate Ellis	How would you joke about it? How would you talk about it amongst yourself?	10:06
Harold Raymond Battiste	Well, I don't know. It just, we'd laugh at the customers. I mean, it was the customers who came in there. Well, it was just funny scene there because we know what the reality was as opposed to the facade. And it was for the public. I mean, because even the bartenders and owners, they knew what the real deal was.	10:09
Kate Ellis	That the strippers, if they were interested in anybody, they were interested in you all.	10:40
Harold Raymond Battiste	Yeah, right.	10:48
Kate Ellis	Not the customers.	10:48
Harold Raymond Battiste	No.	10:48
Kate Ellis	Who were there're performing for.	10:48
Harold Raymond Battiste	So that was always somewhat of a scene among musicians and several places where we played, even when it wasn't that, it was just, like we played in a lot of country, little rural towns around, and it was really bad.	10:54
Kate Ellis	What was it called, the Chitlin—	11:08
Harold Raymond Battiste	Well, the Chitlin' Circuit was not when we were playing with White people. See, when you call it Chitlin' Circuit, you're playing for Blacks.	11:10
Kate Ellis	Oh, okay.	11:14
Harold Raymond Battiste	That's the playing in the little country towns and you playing for your own people. But when we were youngsters, the better jobs always included playing for fraternity houses up at Tulane and playing for these little country clubs around the South. And we just sort of accepted, as a matter of course, that eat at a certain place, you eat the leftovers, you stay in the kitchen or wherever it is, you keep yourself out of the way. And some of the more harsh things were when we played at places where we had no control over when we could stop. I mean, if the gig was supposed to end at one o'clock, and they didn't want you to stop, you just kept playing until they let you go.	11:15
Kate Ellis	And you didn't have a choice?	12:04
Harold Raymond Battiste	No, there was no choice. I mean, we didn't think you had a choice. You can get your head beat up, and a couple of cats did. I mean, a couple cats who defied them, you pay the price.	12:06
Kate Ellis	You would get beat up?	12:23
Harold Raymond Battiste	Yeah, you could. Yeah.	12:27
Kate Ellis	Or would they ever not pay you if you wanted to leave?	12:27
Harold Raymond Battiste	Well, I never experienced that. I mean, I guess that would happen. But because when I was with bands I played in, we just complied. We just played until they let us go. But even so, I mean, it would cause a little anger a little bit. But because we had been raised in an atmosphere where we knew what the situation was, it was different than say, during the '60s, when there were people coming from other areas who had not been raised that way, and they were more defiant. They couldn't understand why you go through such things. And as I say, so my experience was always one of understanding the— Well, what happened after I finished school, when I taught a couple of years, I taught out in the rural area.	12:30
Kate Ellis	Now you went to Dillard University?	13:28
Harold Raymond Battiste	Yeah, I went to Dillard University.	13:30
Kate Ellis	What year did you graduate? Just so I can—	13:31
Harold Raymond Battiste	In '52.	13:31
Kate Ellis	Okay.	13:31
Harold Raymond Battiste	And I went out to a town called DeRidder, Louisiana.	13:42
Kate Ellis	What's it called?	13:45
Harold Raymond Battiste	DeRidder, D-E-R-I-D-D-E-R, my first teaching assignment. And something happened out there that really bothered me because the principal— When I went there, they hadn't had a band before. We had to get that started. And the first year we had no uniforms or had no instruments or anything like that. I had to raise— wanted to do that. But I went down to the school board with our principal, and he had to go with us for the school board to petition them to try to get us some—	13:45
Kate Ellis	This was a Black high school?	14:24
Harold Raymond Battiste	Yes, it was a Black. It was still segregated at the time. And when I heard the way the school board people talked to that principal. I mean, he's our leader.	14:25
Kate Ellis	Right. Yeah, he's a principal.	14:37
Harold Raymond Battiste	And then I was a new teacher, and the way they talked to him, and when they call him, "Boy," they called him by his first name, "Here, you come down on your knees. Every time the White school over there gets something, you come, you bend down." And it was embarrassing to me to see him have to stand up there and listen to them talk to him like that. I mean, that really sort of got to me because I had to respect him. He was a doctor, Dr. King. And in our community, he was a person to be respected. And I saw those people out there, and they sounded like real ignorant, just backwards people, who had the position, and they talked to him like that.	14:42
Harold Raymond Battiste	I began to understand, I began to at least formulate my mind how bad the situation was. I mean, although I had been raised in it and was able to understand it, but I began to get real feelings that this can't go on. I mean, because these people actually, I thought of them as being afraid. The White people seem to be real intimidated. That's why they had to treat us so bad or something. And it didn't take me long. I taught out there about two years, and when I got back, I came back to New Orleans to teach. And that was when I first heard the teachings of Elijah Muhammad, if you're aware of him, a Black Muslim. And when I start hearing that, I said, "Oh, I ain't crazy." I heard something that finally reinforced, whatever his story was, it made things make a little more sense than they had been making.	15:33
Harold Raymond Battiste	I remember very vividly, I was teaching here then, I was an itinerant music teacher and the supervisor, who still had that mentality that we were one thing and the schools were another—	16:45
Kate Ellis	I'm sorry, I'm not sure what you mean by that. When you were one thing in the schools—	17:03
Harold Raymond Battiste	Well, that the Black schools were just appendages to the system. They weren't really something to take serious, but he was the supervisor over the whole thing. When I got into the system, I realized that our children weren't really getting taught music theory and stuff like that. And I started taking some time to teach them how to read music and do all those things like that.	17:07
Kate Ellis	This is in the New Orleans—	17:37
Harold Raymond Battiste	Back in New Orleans here. And the supervisor, what had happened was, I mean, I had been out a couple of days 'cause I was listening to the teachings there. And when I came back, he came by to school to see me, came in my class, and he started talking about how much time I was spending teaching notes. I mean, he called it wasting time teaching—	17:38
Kate Ellis	Teaching music theory?	18:04
Harold Raymond Battiste	Yeah. He said, "You're wasting your time. The parents don't want to worry about that. Just teach them how to play some little songs or something like that. That's what'll make them happy." Well, I told him, I said, "Look, I know what's happening over at the White schools. I know what the level of music is over there, and I'm not going to let my children come up short when they finish. And then you say they're not qualified." And for the first time, what was significant about that, I realized that that was the first time I looked a White man in the eyes. I really looked him in the eyes, and he backed off. And I said, "Oh, it ain't hard." All that, he just had never really seen me. And when I looked at him like that, and it backed him off, I don't even know if you heard what I was saying, because I think his mind was more on the fact that I was confronting him.	18:05
Harold Raymond Battiste	So, that led to getting a letter from the school board, and they asked me to come down and to review whatever the situation was. They gave me an ultimatum of either complying with the supervisor's wishes and dictums, or I could tender my resignation. So I resigned. That took care of my teaching career here 'cause at that point, I could no longer tolerate. I mean, couldn't no longer do like I had been doing all my life, of just understanding and working around.	19:03
Kate Ellis	And maybe sort of laughing at it— It sounds like occasionally, you sort of laugh at something [indistinct 00:19:59].	19:52
Harold Raymond Battiste	Yeah, but this was affecting those children. And I saw the long-range implications of what was happening, that unless I expected them to be just like me and work around it, it would never stop. I mean, somewhere along the way I had to say, "Wait a minute, no, this is not right. These kids need to have the same opportunities, at least at whatever I can give them. Don't stop me from teaching them, telling me, 'Just teach them how to play some songs.'" So, that really affected, I mean, from the standpoint of the way the racial situation was, that affected my life. Because after that, and that's when I left here. I left here and went to Los Angeles.	19:59
Kate Ellis	Really? And what year about was that?	20:48
Harold Raymond Battiste	That was in '56, by then. Yeah, '56. I started teaching in '52. I taught two years out in the country, and then I came back here. And after two years and then I started to doubt myself. I thought that maybe I'm just not cut out to work in a situation like this. I knew that I was very conscious then of the racial situation. And I got my X, I became Harold X.	20:52
Kate Ellis	Really?	21:31
Harold Raymond Battiste	Yeah. Yeah. I got my own. Went to go to Chicago and I said, "Well, if I'm going to do this, I'm going to find out the whole thing." I wanted to get out. That was in about '56 or something, '57, '58, I finally got my X.	21:31
Kate Ellis	Did you meet the Honorable?	21:49
Harold Raymond Battiste	No, I didn't. No, because I didn't go to Chicago. I mean, I did it from here.	21:53
Kate Ellis	Oh, okay.	21:56
Harold Raymond Battiste	I had to write to—	21:57
Kate Ellis	I'm sorry.	21:57
Harold Raymond Battiste	Because it was a very strict, stringent manner. You have to write and you have to write perfectly, with no mistakes or nothing in your thing. And I wrote back two or three times before they accepted me.	21:59
Harold Raymond Battiste	So then, I knew that this was something that was a part of my life. I mean, knew we were bound up in this situation, and I had to understand why. And it affected me in that I thought that I had to find a way for our people to become independent. I thought that economic independence was what was missing. And then I realized that my family, my father, when I came up, more Black men were independent because they were not allowed to be a part of the mainstream. So my father had his own shop. He was a tailor, he had his own shop, and cleaner and presser.	22:15
Kate Ellis	Where was that?	23:12
Harold Raymond Battiste	It was on Rampart, 343 South Rampart.	23:12
Kate Ellis	Oh yeah. What was the name?	23:14
Harold Raymond Battiste	Eagle Tailor Shop.	23:15
Kate Ellis	And that was his store?	23:16
Harold Raymond Battiste	Yeah. I mean, he was in business. And all I remember from childhood, I mean, he had piles of clothes always. He worked really hard. Christmas, he'd be down there. So, because there was a lot of Jewish merchants in the neighborhood who sold clothes. Well, my father, he had his store and when people go and buy stuff, they would give him a little ticket and then they'd bring it to my father to alter the pants, put cuffs in them, do all the little stuff. So he was contracted. He had several stores around and he did the tailoring work for them.	23:21
Kate Ellis	So he did a good business?	23:58
Harold Raymond Battiste	Oh, he did a good business. He was really a hard worker. I can't say that he did business in the sense that the White society looks at a good business. He hadn't finished grammar school. He didn't know business. He just know how to work hard. And a lot of people in our neighborhood, among the Blacks thought that we were well-off because we had a telephone, and my father eventually had a car.	24:00
Kate Ellis	That was it.	24:30
Harold Raymond Battiste	So, that was it. But he was well-known. And everybody in the neighbor down on Rampart, all the pimps and hoes, that was known for Rampart Street was just the place. Everybody knew him. And they respected my father as the Eagle. But my mother, and that's another effect I think of the environment, my mother didn't want me to have to do that. She wanted me to get an education so I could get a good job.	24:35
Harold Raymond Battiste	Now, that's the way the mentality was. The mentality was that— Even my grandfather, he was an independent too because he had a little horse and a wagon and he used to sell wood and ice and coal. So he was an independent, him and his brothers, they all three of them had ice, wood yards. So they were energy suppliers, if you put it. And it was hard work. And we had even guys working for us. I remember some of the guys that used to work in the yard, cutting wood. And so for all practical purposes, our family was an independent business thing.	25:07
Harold Raymond Battiste	But when my generation came along, the parents thought that we would be elevated by having a college education and get you a good job, be a school teacher or something respectable. They thought of that as being better than these little hustle jobs that Black men had. I began to realize though, that I thought that was overall a great deficit because it led us away from what America's about. It's about capitalism, and about business ownership. And it led us away from that. It led us into thinking that education and jobs was a better way to do it. But jobs make you dependent. You got to go get a job.	25:43
Kate Ellis	And dependent on White establishment.	26:33
Harold Raymond Battiste	Yeah, on White establishment, who are the owners, then you got to go back to him to get a job. So my thought was then, that was earlier, was to find something that I thought we should at least own as a people. My thinking was then along ethnic lines because there were certain stereotypes that went with certain— they thought of Jews as merchants, and they thought of Italians as this. And they thought of various people and I said, "What do they think of us as?" And I realized that we produced a lot of art, a lot of music we produced, that our music was shaping the way people like music. So I said, "Well, why don't we own that?" We have great athletes. I wasn't an athlete myself, but I began to realize later that our athletes proved to be quite superior in several basic sports. Why don't we have any owners? So by '61, I decided to start a record label. That's what made me start a record label called AFO. I felt that—	26:34
Kate Ellis	Nothing, I just got this. For one second, I was like AFO, and then I just got it.	27:54
Harold Raymond Battiste	What?	28:02
Kate Ellis	What it stands for.	28:03
Harold Raymond Battiste	Oh yeah. Oh yeah.	28:03
Kate Ellis	All for one. They wouldn't know that on the—	28:05
Harold Raymond Battiste	Oh yeah. But I sort of felt that at that time, the music that we were producing was making tremendous amounts of money for the industry, yet we were on the bottom end of the ownership. And we didn't own the records, we didn't own the publishing, we didn't own anything. We just was working for somebody. And my thought then was really to try to at least demonstrate that here's an industry that we should make a stab at moving up the ladder, stop just being the artist and being the ones who supplied the product, but we ought to own the product. And that's all that was. So that really shaped the basis of my adult life.	28:13
Harold Raymond Battiste	But I, just like my father had no real business sense. I mean, I had no education as far as business. I had motivation, but I didn't have any real fundamental education about business. But we made a pretty good run for it. We became successful and got a gold record. I mean, the second record was a gold record.	29:09
Kate Ellis	Which is I Know—	29:41
Harold Raymond Battiste	I Know About Barbara George.	29:41
Kate Ellis	What year was that?	29:45
Harold Raymond Battiste	That was in '61.	29:45
Kate Ellis	Okay, wow.	29:45
Harold Raymond Battiste	1961.	29:45
Kate Ellis	And this was in Los Angeles?	29:50
Harold Raymond Battiste	No, it was here.	29:50
Kate Ellis	Oh, well, I thought you said that you went to—	29:51
Harold Raymond Battiste	I went to LA, but see what happened in LA, when went out there, I started trying to get a little music thing together, and they selected me to take it around a record company to see if we can get a record. Well, I went to one company and in order to try to get them to listen to our music, I agreed to help them produce something that they were doing. They were doing a record date on a guy named Sam Cooke. He's a singer.	29:52
Kate Ellis	You mean, Sam Cooke?	30:21
Harold Raymond Battiste	Yeah. So I helped him do that. The record in fact, I wrote some music out and selected a song for him to sing. Well, the song I selected, they didn't like. The owner of the company, he was an old Jewish guy named Art Rupe, he didn't like it. He came to the studio and thought, what is this? You got Sam singing all this pretty stuff with these White girls singing behind him like that. He was used to Sam as the gospel singer. See? So, he stopped the session and took over and it wasn't successful. The next day, he gave what we had done, he gave it to the other guy who was working for him in lieu of money that he owed him. The guy took the record and went to another guy and put it out and it became a big hit.	30:25
Kate Ellis	What was that?	31:08
Harold Raymond Battiste	You Send Me, a song called, You Send Me. I don't know if you've ever heard that song.	31:08
Kate Ellis	Of course. It's like my favorite song that he's done actually. Really.	31:10
Harold Raymond Battiste	Well, that happened in Los Angeles. So the guy after that, he was sorry. Then he hired me.	31:18
Kate Ellis	And you had done this work, you had selected this and you got nothing but—	31:23
Harold Raymond Battiste	Well, I got a job later on.	31:28
Kate Ellis	You didn't get the—	31:30
Harold Raymond Battiste	No, no. I was doing that just so I could get in the door. That's the first time I'd ever done anything, so I didn't know the value of it. I mean, the guy that asked me to do it, he just was getting me out the way because I wanted him to listening to our stuff. He said, "Well, why don't you take Sam, y'all go down there and pick out some songs, see what?" And actually when the record date came that day and these singers showed up to do background, well they had nothing doing. I had picked out this little song, which was really meant to be a B side because the main song for the session was Summertime. He wanted Sam to do Summertime. So he just throwing this song in as something to fill up the session. So I had to write out parts for the girls to sing everything, and that became hit.	31:38
Harold Raymond Battiste	That's what got me back here because the company hired me then, to come back to New Orleans to set up an office for them, for Specialty Records. And I spent three years with Specialty Records here. I had my office down on Claiborne Avenue. It was during that time too, that I met Sonny Bono, because Sonny used to write songs and he was driving truck. He used to come around to the office in Los Angeles, hustling songs. Well, after the company made that big full power with that song, they changed over. And he hired Sonny too, to work that office. And so we got to be tight, which was a sort of a setup for the future. When Sonny met Cher, then he asked me to do their music.	32:24
Kate Ellis	Does that—	33:15
Harold Raymond Battiste	That means I got to take my medicine.	33:18
Kate Ellis	Oh, okay.	33:32
Harold Raymond Battiste	It's my 2:00 medicine.	33:32
Kate Ellis	Should I pause this for a second?	33:32
Harold Raymond Battiste	Koi.	33:32
Koi Battiste	Yeah.	33:32
Harold Raymond Battiste	Could you give me some water?	33:32
Kate Ellis	So then you start doing music for them and playing music? I mean, writing music and arranging music for them?	33:32
Harold Raymond Battiste	Well, yeah. I mean, but see, they didn't come to later. The setting up of my record company, AFO came in between then. After I worked for Specialty two or three years, and I saw how it worked, I said, "We can do this. Why should our group, who can't keep time to a beat, come down to New Orleans with a few dollars in his pocket, line us up and we all go in there and sing and give him our song, and he goes off and cleans up? We said, "We can do that." And that's why we figured we should—	33:35
Harold Raymond Battiste	But see, even as far as your subject is concerned, as far as the way the racial thing broke down, all of that was a part off it. I mean, even Art group's attitude toward Sam Cooke was based on his perception of what we as Blacks should be doing. His perception was gospel and the shouting blues. And when he heard Sam Cooke— The guy that asked me to do this, his name was Bumps Blackwell. His thought was, he said, "Man, this cat's got a voice. He could be like Martin Downing or somebody. He's a beautiful tenor. We could break him pop. There's no reason he should be limited to this small market." And that's what the idea was.	34:19
Harold Raymond Battiste	Well, when Art Rupe heard You Send Me, that soft pretty sound, he figured that was not appropriate for Sam. He should be more emotional in that. And so all of those things have played along in the way we are perceived in the art, in entertainment, and we've had a tendency to go along, just like I did when I was a little kid. We knew what the situation, we know what they wanted to hear. It's like, "Well, you know how they want us to activities, so let's act like that, and that'll make them happy." I still see that, that still happens.	35:05
Harold Raymond Battiste	Well I mean, this town, particularly since it is focused on tourism now, part of the emphasis is to give White people a fantasy of coming to a place where they're going to see Blacks acting like they really fantasize Blacks are. So, you got all these cooks, you got cats dance in the street, driving the little [indistinct 00:36:15], and doing all the stuff that's they're here, that they want to see you do. And that's the way you make your living.	35:46
Harold Raymond Battiste	To me, it is tragic that people are that insecure that they need to have that feeling that these people like that. And I have, I guess in my way have always, I at least have learned to understand the tremendous strength and insight my people had to know how to survive through all of the stuff that was put upon them during my time and before my time. I mean, I wasn't there before, but if I can recognize that in order to survive, what we had to do was nowhere near what people before us had to go through in order to just stay alive. And as I began to understand the damage that was done to our people, even to the extent of not knowing your name, not knowing your religion, not knowing very basic things, that we've come to not know who we are. And we have had to try to invent ourself, what is an African-American?	36:25
Harold Raymond Battiste	We've been all kind, we've been African-American, Colored, and Black and Negro. And we're still trying to find out who are we. And when you got a name like Baptiste, I never realized how limited I was because I didn't know what my real name was. Until one time time, I was on the train coming from somewhere and I met a young White lady from Mississippi who was studying genealogy. And so she wanted to trace my name. And she realized that, wait a minute, this can't go back to Africa. Baptiste doesn't go that way. Baptiste goes somewhere else, to France maybe. And she said, "Well, so your name can only be traced back so far and it has to go back to some White person that owned your family." And then she realized that that was all of our situation, that we had no way of knowing basically, because we didn't have no names.	37:55
Harold Raymond Battiste	When I realized the implications of that, how that fanned out to various elements, I pick up book and there's acknowledgements. You pick up a nice non-fiction book and usually the author will give the acknowledgements. Well, by the names, you can almost say who was Mexican, who was Jewish, who was this, or something like that. But you can never find out who's African-American because his name is not going to give any— If he's in there, you don't know that he did anything because his name doesn't jump out. And I realized that that applies all throughout history. If you got a people who can't be recognized because of who they are. Whatever they do, you someday—	38:58
Harold Raymond Battiste	Another thing what happened, it must have been in the early '60s, when the Tulane Archives began collecting, doing something similar to what y'all are doing, they begin to collect a lot of jazz memorabilia, tapes and interviews and so forth. The Rockefeller Foundation had given them a big grant to research. My partner and I realized when we went there— and they were buying up books, they were buying up all kinds of books with the early history. Said, man, in a hundred years, Louie Armstrong might not be Black. Now, it seemed farfetched. But knowing how little I knew about what Blacks had contributed, because you see names in books and you don't see pictures, certain accomplishments, you don't think that Black people did that. You just assume that somebody else did it.	39:47
Harold Raymond Battiste	One of the big deficits that continues to happen is that we are constantly reinventing ourselves because we don't know where we've been. We don't know what we've done. We don't know what our contributions have been. We keep struggling, trying to learn, but just the loss of a name means that much. Of course, I'm talking about other stuff.	40:49
Kate Ellis	No. That's fine.	41:14
Harold Raymond Battiste	But what your subject is the way it affected me in a way. Coming up in this environment and the particular things that happened to me made me become conscious of the imbalance in the information about who I was and my own curiosity about. I knew how I felt inside, but the outside environment didn't verify the feeling I had about who I was.	41:18
Kate Ellis	What was it that you felt inside?	41:47
Harold Raymond Battiste	Well, first of all, I thought that I understood a lot more about things than it was expected. A lot of times, particularly when I was with Sonny and Cher, and it was a complete White environment. Cher even, I mean, there were times when she'd say, "Harold, I like to hear you use big words." Now, she would say that because that seemed like a trick. It wasn't expected to me to be able to converse. So for me, because I could speak, she thought that was so fascinating. And see, and so going through things like that all along, where I realized I would be in situations where the perception of who I was would limit what I could do. And even when I did something, it was looked at like, "Oh."	41:49
Kate Ellis	How novel.	42:51
Harold Raymond Battiste	Yeah, yeah. "Oh, he speaks." And I realize that it's not unique. Most our people have to figure out a way to deal with that.	42:51
Kate Ellis	Go ahead, please. I mean, just to kind of push that bottom line, how do you deal with that? I guess people do figure out different ways.	43:13
Harold Raymond Battiste	Well, my way has been to study, and study history, study anthropology, study the past as well as I could get a picture. I wanted to get a clear picture of who everybody is, trying to see at least what perceptions have been laying down over the years, to try to get us where we are now. And it gave me certain insights into our behavior that allows me to understand and tolerate. Because I understand, I think how we've all been victimized by the fears and so forth that go down when people write histories, when they do things, or that have a massive impact on history. And when they're acting out of fears, then that affects the way the perceptions are.	43:24
Kate Ellis	And are you saying in the writing of history?	44:25
Harold Raymond Battiste	Yeah, in the writing of history. And I mean, the very fact that it is written implies that it's written from some person's point of view. And then the fact that various persons and various systems have control over what information goes to whom and how, then that affects how people perceive things. You know what I mean?	44:29
Harold Raymond Battiste	Right now, I started doing a little survey of talk show subjects. Because here's a pervasive phenomenon that the media is perpetrating on all of the minds of people, and people live by what they see on talk shows. "Well, you know they said it on so and so. Well, on Oprah, they said this." And I'm looking at it from the standpoint as a producer, I'm realizing that these are people that have five shows a week to do. They've got to find subjects every day. And you got fourteen shows, so you got forty shows that's information that's being gobbled up, and they'll put anything on there, say anything. But people don't perceive it that way.	44:58
Harold Raymond Battiste	But then on a more serious, and that's the way history has been done and the publishing industry in the last, you may say the last fifty years, when the publishing industry has become such a pervasive thing and it's fighting for their economic life, they'll print whatever they need to print in order to make some bucks. You saw last week because of the current Simpson thing, a guy got a book out, Juice. He put it out in seventy-two hours. He put a book out. He said he's going to sell five hundred thousand copies of it. There are people who will read that.	45:45
Harold Raymond Battiste	Anyway, so I don't know. I tolerate. I guess I can find my way because I do a lot of thinking about it and trying to understand that one thing that I have been able to do is separate the collective behavior from the individual—	46:26

Kate Ellis	Okay. You were just saying you separate the individual behavior from the collective.	0:03
Harold Raymond Battiste	Yeah. Wherein it allows me to deal with people without, I mean, on an individual level, without having them carry the baggage of their collective orientation. I mean, you're a White person and that's a collective. But you are an individual and therefore my relationship with you is based on you as an individual. Yet, many of my philosophers and thoughts are based on the collective, when you have to deal with my collective, I mean, the collective. And then, it allows me to handle the information I get, whether I'm getting it about an individual or whether this is an individual that's been projected onto the collective, or whether a collective behavior is projected onto individuals. And it works that way. And so, it helps me to understand how people will not perceive me based on me. They might perceive me as based on being Black.	0:06
Harold Raymond Battiste	So, that's my collective, the collective perception of me. When I see the six o'clock news every day and they got a Black guy propped up against the wall, I'm one of them. And I know that to a lot of people, that's just what I am. So, that has helped me to at least understand. I mean, a few years ago when the Japanese was perceived as so brilliant because the few Japanese we see over here. So, they get the benefit of all of the positive projection of, "Oh, they're so smart." I remember out in California it was really a thing, man. And Japanese could not afford to be dumb because his collective perception was that, "Wait a minute, what? How can you be dumb? You Japanese."	1:15
Harold Raymond Battiste	It works all kind of ways. The same way it has been in music. I mean, we teach jazz here. In fact, one little man, one little guy just peeped his head in a little, the cat can play his off. He playing. But, he had the perception because he was White and playing jazz that he was sort of shy about his playing. Because, the collective impression is that you can't—	2:04
Kate Ellis	White people can't sling.	2:33
Harold Raymond Battiste	Yeah, yeah. So, he was a victim of his own, of that perception, and I have to try to help deal with that. I got to say, "Man—"	2:34
Kate Ellis	Yeah.	2:45
Harold Raymond Battiste	Yeah. It's far from being resolved. It's far from being resolved. So, the information that you dig out may help. I mean, there's a lot of information that has to be dug out.	2:52
Kate Ellis	Mm-hmm.	3:01
Harold Raymond Battiste	Yeah.	3:01
Kate Ellis	Can I ask you just a few more questions about—	3:09
Harold Raymond Battiste	Okay.	3:12
Kate Ellis	— your growing up time and then we can do this?	3:12
Harold Raymond Battiste	Okay.	3:13
Kate Ellis	Can you just describe to me a little bit more your community? It sounds like it was predominantly Black, but there were some Whites living in the area.	3:15
Harold Raymond Battiste	Yeah, yeah. I grew up on 2nd Street, see there, between 2nd and Saratoga.	3:27
Kate Ellis	Mm-hmm.	3:34
Harold Raymond Battiste	This was about three or four blocks from where Buddy Bolden had been born. This was considered sort of, it wasn't really uptown, it's sort of, it was called the Garden District. But, I learned later that it wasn't really the Garden District because the Garden District referred to where the White people lived over on the other side of St. Charles. But we lived on this side of St. Charles, which is the same sort of area. But they called it all the Garden District around Shakespeare Park, which is now called, I think it's called— I'm forgetting this name, after some preacher who was the first Black city councilman, anyway. But, the area was predominantly Black and it was a lot of Black history that went down. And one of the most famous nightclubs in the city, The Dew Drop Inn was around there.	3:35
Kate Ellis	Well, you used to play there.	4:27
Harold Raymond Battiste	Yeah, I played there. But, mostly, when I moved in to the Magnolia Project, my family moved into the Magnolia Project, I was living right across from the Dew Drop and I could sit on my porch, and hear all the music, and everything coming out of the Dew Drop.	4:30
Kate Ellis	The Magnolia Project at that point, that was a new, that was new and that was a nice—	4:43
Harold Raymond Battiste	It was new, yeah, 1941. It was, oh man, that was a move up the social ladder to become, go in the project.	4:47
Kate Ellis	Mm-hmm.	4:51
Harold Raymond Battiste	And we had so much pride. I mean, one of our little jobs as little kids, we could go to the office and get lawn mowers, and stuff, and every Saturday was out going around cutting grass for a quarter or something like that. And we just, I mean, it was, to live in that project was really a move up the social ladder. It was nice brick place and you had upstairs, and downstairs, it was wonderful.	4:52
Kate Ellis	Hm. [indistinct 00:05:17]. Go ahead.	5:17
Harold Raymond Battiste	No.	5:18
Kate Ellis	And, who was in your household? Who'd you grow up with?	5:18
Harold Raymond Battiste	Well, my grandmother and my grandfather, my mother and my father, and I had an adopted brother. Those were the, that was everybody in the house.	5:21
Kate Ellis	Mm-hmm.	5:33
Harold Raymond Battiste	See, because when my father married my mother, he moved into the house with my grandfather and my grandmother. I mean, but that was common. In fact, that was few people in our house because on the other side of our shotgun house, they had five kids. So, that was the family structure, grandfather, grandmother, father, mother, and two boys.	5:34
Kate Ellis	And so, and your father was a tailor. Your grandfather—	6:03
Harold Raymond Battiste	My grandfather was a ice man.	6:06
Kate Ellis	Your mother?	6:08
Harold Raymond Battiste	My mother was a school teacher for a while. In fact, she had a finished in a place called New Orleans University, which was a two-year preparatory school for Black teachers.	6:09
Kate Ellis	Oh, uh-huh.	6:22
Harold Raymond Battiste	And she was teaching school when she married my father, but she stopped after because they didn't allow, I think at that time, you couldn't—	6:22
Kate Ellis	If you were married, you couldn't teach.	6:28
Harold Raymond Battiste	— married you couldn't do it. Yeah, you couldn't, so she stopped.	6:28
Kate Ellis	Uh-huh. And your grandmother worked?	6:33
Harold Raymond Battiste	In the White folks kitchen, she cooked.	6:35
Kate Ellis	In the White folks kitchen.	6:39
Harold Raymond Battiste	Yeah.	6:39
Kate Ellis	What grammar school, what elementary school did you go to?	6:41
Harold Raymond Battiste	It was a school called F.P. Ricard, [indistinct 00:06:46] Ricard. It was named Booker T. Washington when I first went there, but when they built the high school, Booker T. Washington, they changed the name of the elementary school to F.P. Ricard.	6:42
Kate Ellis	Mm-hmm.	6:57
Harold Raymond Battiste	Then I went to a junior high school called Hornage, Eckhart P. Hornage. Well, he called it Hoffman at the time, it was John W. Hoffman at that time.	6:58
Kate Ellis	Mm-hmm.	7:08
Harold Raymond Battiste	And then I went to Gilbert Academy.	7:08
Kate Ellis	And then from there, you went to Dillard.	7:11
Harold Raymond Battiste	Yeah, I went to Dillard.	7:11
Kate Ellis	Okay.	7:11
Harold Raymond Battiste	Mm-hmm.	7:11
Kate Ellis	There was one thing I wanted to kind of get before—	7:11
Harold Raymond Battiste	Mm-hmm.	7:21
Kate Ellis	Just as far as, when did you start playing music? I mean—	7:26
Harold Raymond Battiste	My last year in elementary school, my daddy got me a clarinet.	7:28
Kate Ellis	Mm-hmm.	7:33
Harold Raymond Battiste	Mother had not wanted me to play. Before we moved in the project, we had a piano at the house and I used plunk that little thing, and I used to beat on the furniture with forks, and everything. So, she knew I was into it. But, my mother did not want me to be a musician. She wanted me to be a doctor. So, when we got ready to move in the projects, she said, "Well, they don't allow pianos in the projects, so we're going to have to leave this piano." And we left the piano. So, but after I, my father got me a little clarinet out the pawn shop and that's what got me started.	7:33
Kate Ellis	And she didn't want you to be a musician because?	8:07
Harold Raymond Battiste	It was a negative stigma with being a musician. It wasn't upstanding like being a school teacher or being a doctor, something respectable.	8:11
Kate Ellis	So it was all part of that kind of do something respectable—	8:20
Harold Raymond Battiste	Yeah.	8:23
Kate Ellis	— become a doctor or become a teacher.	8:24
Harold Raymond Battiste	Yeah, yeah.	8:27
Kate Ellis	And, mm-hmm, music didn't fall within that.	8:27
Harold Raymond Battiste	No, no, no. I mean—	8:38
Kate Ellis	Uh-huh. Huh.	8:38
Harold Raymond Battiste	— I couldn't be one of them dope smoking musicians.	8:38
Kate Ellis	Okay. Let me just get one more thing and then we can do these forms. Could you tell me a little bit more about when you were playing in gigs around New Orleans, and then I'm assuming that you traveled with the band? I mean, you've talked a little bit about traveling.	8:39
Harold Raymond Battiste	Yeah, we just, yeah—	8:49
Kate Ellis	Can you tell me a bit more about the treatment that you received or the sort of relationships you had with—	8:54
Harold Raymond Battiste	Well, I mean, actually that was it. I mean, because I didn't, you see, the problems would only happened when you worked for white gigs.	8:59
Kate Ellis	Yeah.	9:09
Harold Raymond Battiste	And, you don't work, I didn't work many of those. I mean, most of my playing was at Black clubs.	9:10
Kate Ellis	In the city?	9:15
Harold Raymond Battiste	In the city, there was a—	9:16
Kate Ellis	Like, which clubs?	9:18
Harold Raymond Battiste	Well, there was a place called the, one was called The Pentagon, it was right on Galvis and St. Bernard.	9:18
Kate Ellis	Mm-hmm.	9:27
Harold Raymond Battiste	Then there was another called the Trocadero, I think. It was on Claiborne and I forgot what street that was on. But, all of them were in the 7th Ward down here, what they call the 7th Ward. And, I was playing, by that time, I was playing with the little group called the Johnson Brothers, so it was not like spot gigs. We had a regular gig.	9:28
Kate Ellis	Mm-hmm.	9:54
Harold Raymond Battiste	We had uniforms and everything. We just played regular gigs. So, I didn't get much of the flack from Bourbon Street and the French Quarters, and all that stuff like that because—	9:54
Kate Ellis	You weren't there that much.	10:06
Harold Raymond Battiste	Into that, you know— And I was real young, see, I mean, that's another thing. At the time I started playing, I was fourteen, fifteen years old. And, my family was still I guess a great influence on me and so they didn't perceive— Like Ma didn't want me playing music at all, so I wasn't about to start really getting into no heavy duty stuff, man. She was still monitoring where I played and who I played with.	10:08
Kate Ellis	Mm-hmm. When you played for White audiences, how did you think about that? I mean, I just, or—	10:37
Harold Raymond Battiste	Mm-hmm.	10:53
Kate Ellis	— I mean, sometimes you might be mistreated.	10:58
Harold Raymond Battiste	Well, yeah, that could be, but I was not the kind of cat who, maybe I was too frightened when I was young, but I was able to see a situation and not do anything that would provoke anger.	11:00
Kate Ellis	Yeah, mm-hmm.	11:21
Harold Raymond Battiste	See, when I would play gigs, I wanted to have fun.	11:21
Kate Ellis	Yeah.	11:25
Harold Raymond Battiste	And, so I would not, and I would see them carrying on. I mean, that was one thing I saw mostly. I mean, they would fight, man. We'd play some of the little country town and them White boys would get— I mean, and I thought, even then I would realize and say, you know one reason why them people don't want us around is because they don't want us to see how they act. Because they act awful, you know what I mean? They'd get to fighting and throwing bottles, and doing all kinds of crazy stuff. And—	11:25
Kate Ellis	Yeah, mm-hmm.	11:50
Harold Raymond Battiste	But, I never would do anything that would make them go crazy. I just, that's the way I dealt with that. I mean, it was to me, I thought I was too valuable for that.	11:56
Kate Ellis	Mm-hmm.	12:10
Harold Raymond Battiste	I mean, I don't want to have to, I mean, I don't have to prove nothing to them. One guy I was working with, I mean, he was that kind of guy. If he see a sign that says for Colored only drinking fountain, he wouldn't, he'd go drink at the White fountain. Just to—	12:15
Kate Ellis	Mm-hmm. And what kind of, and what would he, what did you see him experience as a result of that?	12:29
Harold Raymond Battiste	I saw, I remember one time we was coming back from a gig in Mississippi, and Joe did that. This cat named Joe Jones, he was that kind of cat, man.	12:34
Kate Ellis	Mm-hmm.	12:42
Harold Raymond Battiste	And, he did that, man, and a man came out with a— I shouldn't laugh because it was— But, we laughed because we knew Joe. Joe will provoke stuff like that. The man came out with a, I don't know if it was a tire or something, a big piece of rubber or something like that, and whopped him upside the head. Whopped upside the head, Joe come running back to the car, "Go start the car, man, let's get out."	12:43
Kate Ellis	Geez.	13:07
Harold Raymond Battiste	But, we knew what the situation was and, I mean, when he did things like that, it wasn't like a tragedy or nothing because it was, I mean, we never experienced anything where anybody got seriously hurt or anything like that, because we just didn't go that far.	13:09
Kate Ellis	Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. All right. I'm going to start [indistinct 00:13:29]. Okay, can you tell me your address?	13:28
Harold Raymond Battiste	My mailing address, post office box 8598, New Orleans, it's 70182.	13:45
Kate Ellis	I'm sorry? Seven—	13:53
Harold Raymond Battiste	70182.	13:53
Kate Ellis	Okay. And, okay. And, you were born in New Orleans.	13:57
Harold Raymond Battiste	Born in New Orleans.	14:05
Kate Ellis	Okay. Tell us just your principal occupation, musician or professor, or both?	14:09
Harold Raymond Battiste	Well, occupation means what I make money, what I make my living, that's teaching here. So, I guess you can call this teacher. I don't know what's the— Let me see what I got here.	14:14
Kate Ellis	How would you like your name to appear in written documents?	14:35
Harold Raymond Battiste	Hm?	14:40
Kate Ellis	How would you like it to—	14:42
Harold Raymond Battiste	Harold R. Battiste Junior.	14:42
Kate Ellis	Harold. Oh, great.	14:48
Harold Raymond Battiste	Let me see if I can find—	14:52
Kate Ellis	What does the R stand for?	15:01
Harold Raymond Battiste	Raymond. That's supposed to be, it's a Catholic town and they all believe you got to have a, the name of a saint in your name somewhere. So, my father must've been Catholic. I didn't know what he was because he didn't do much of nothing. But I think, I've learned that my father's side of the family is basically Catholic.	15:02
Kate Ellis	Oh.	15:24
Harold Raymond Battiste	But, my mother's side was Protestant, so I was raised Protestant.	15:24
Kate Ellis	What church did you go to?	15:31
Harold Raymond Battiste	I went to a church called 1st Street AME. 1st Street African Methodist, or whatever it was.	15:32
Kate Ellis	I know you were born in 1931, but I don't know if you told me the actual date.	15:37
Harold Raymond Battiste	October twenty-eighth. October twenty-eighth, yeah.	15:42
Kate Ellis	Twenty-eight?	15:45
Harold Raymond Battiste	Yeah.	15:47
Kate Ellis	Okay. Are you married?	15:50
Harold Raymond Battiste	No, I'm divorced.	15:51
Kate Ellis	You're divorced, okay. What is your former wife's name?	15:54
Harold Raymond Battiste	Alviette, A-L-V-I-E-T-T-E.	15:58
Kate Ellis	And, her middle name?	16:04
Harold Raymond Battiste	Alviette Marie-Antoinette Dominic. What a name. Alviette Marie-Antoinette Dominic-Battiste. I can't find my—	16:04
Kate Ellis	[indistinct 00:16:19], okay. When was she born?	16:21
Harold Raymond Battiste	I think '35. She's four years younger than me.	16:23
Kate Ellis	Okay, so she's alive. And, was she born in New Orleans?	16:26
Harold Raymond Battiste	Yeah, uh-huh. Yeah, she's born in New Orleans too.	16:30
Kate Ellis	What's her occupation?	16:36
Harold Raymond Battiste	She's, I forget— Because most of her life, when we were married, she was a household engineer.	16:38
Kate Ellis	Uh-huh.	16:46
Harold Raymond Battiste	But then, she went back and got her degree, and she's in health services now. I know she goes out and she lectures people about how they do, old people about doing their medicine and all that stuff. So, she works for some sort of health service firm.	16:46
Kate Ellis	Okay, I'll say health service provider.	17:03
Harold Raymond Battiste	Yeah, that's right, that's what it is.	17:04
Kate Ellis	Okay. What was or is, or was your mother's name?	17:05
Harold Raymond Battiste	Pearl, Pearl Booker.	17:12
Kate Ellis	Booker is her maiden name?	17:12
Harold Raymond Battiste	Her maiden name, yeah.	17:12
Kate Ellis	Do you know her middle name?	17:12
Harold Raymond Battiste	Wilmer.	17:12
Kate Ellis	W-E-L-L-M-A?	17:12
Harold Raymond Battiste	W-I-L—	17:12
Kate Ellis	Oh, Wilma, I'm sorry.	17:12
Harold Raymond Battiste	— L-M-E-R. Like the Flintstones lady.	17:12
Kate Ellis	Right, Wilma Battiste.	17:12
Harold Raymond Battiste	Well, she's Pearl Wilma, what? What'd you say?	17:34
Kate Ellis	Battiste.	17:36
Harold Raymond Battiste	Pearl Wilma, well, oh—	17:37
Kate Ellis	Booker-Battiste.	17:38
Harold Raymond Battiste	Yeah, okay, yeah.	17:38
Kate Ellis	Okay. And, her birth date?	17:38
Harold Raymond Battiste	It was August twenty-seven, but I don't know what year. It must've been 1902 I think it was. 1902.	17:43
Kate Ellis	And, is she—	17:46
Harold Raymond Battiste	No, she's dead.	17:46
Kate Ellis	Yeah, when did she die?	17:46
Harold Raymond Battiste	She died in '57. 1957.	17:46
Kate Ellis	Okay. And, where was she born?	17:51
Harold Raymond Battiste	She was born in New Orleans.	18:02
Kate Ellis	Okay. And, she was a teacher and then a housewife?	18:03
Harold Raymond Battiste	Mm-hmm.	18:11
Kate Ellis	Okay. And, your father's name?	18:11
Harold Raymond Battiste	He was senior, Harold R. Battiste Senior.	18:20
Kate Ellis	Okay. And, he was, when was he born?	18:20
Harold Raymond Battiste	In 1900.	18:21
Kate Ellis	And, when did he pass?	18:21
Harold Raymond Battiste	1957, same year.	18:36
Kate Ellis	Oh, wow. And, he was born in New Orleans?	18:39
Harold Raymond Battiste	No, he was born in Vacherie, Louisiana.	18:41
Kate Ellis	Oh. Is that V-A-C-H-E-R-I-E?	18:46
Harold Raymond Battiste	I don't know how you spell it, man. Yeah, it's something like that. It sounds like this.	18:48
Kate Ellis	Okay. And he was a tailor?	18:48
Harold Raymond Battiste	Yeah.	18:48
Kate Ellis	And then, you had one brother. What was his name?	18:57
Harold Raymond Battiste	Yeah. His name was Albert Falls, F-A-L-L-S. He was, actually, he was my father's nephew.	19:01
Kate Ellis	Okay.	19:20
Harold Raymond Battiste	They adopted him before I was born, really.	19:20
Kate Ellis	Okay. Okay. And, do you know when Mr. Falls was born?	19:22
Harold Raymond Battiste	Let me see. He's sixty-five now, so he must've been born in—	19:35
Kate Ellis	'28?	19:37
Harold Raymond Battiste	— '28 or something like that.	19:38
Kate Ellis	I said that because I think my mom was born then.	19:39
Harold Raymond Battiste	Yeah, yeah.	19:39
Kate Ellis	And he's still living?	19:39
Harold Raymond Battiste	Yeah.	19:39
Kate Ellis	Was he born in New Orleans?	19:39
Harold Raymond Battiste	No, he was born in, I think it's Pass Christian, Pass Christian, Mississippi.	19:45
Kate Ellis	Okay. Do you know how to— I don't—	19:53
Harold Raymond Battiste	It's like Pass Christian.	19:54
Kate Ellis	Oh, thank you. Okay, I'm still kind of getting to know the area. And, do you have children?	19:56
Harold Raymond Battiste	Yeah, I have four children.	19:56
Kate Ellis	What are their names?	19:56
Harold Raymond Battiste	Harold the third, the oldest.	20:08
Kate Ellis	Okay. Harold— Oops, the third, when was he born?	20:20
Harold Raymond Battiste	1955.	20:21
Kate Ellis	And, in New Orleans?	20:23
Harold Raymond Battiste	Yeah.	20:23
Kate Ellis	I'm assuming all your kids were born in New Orleans.	20:25
Harold Raymond Battiste	Except the last one, yeah. I mean, the last one was born in—	20:26
Kate Ellis	Okay. And then, the next two.	20:28
Harold Raymond Battiste	The next child was our daughter Andrea, Andrea Lynn, 1959.	20:30
Kate Ellis	Uh-huh.	20:35
Harold Raymond Battiste	Then, Marzique Kahdija.	20:42
Kate Ellis	How do you spell that?	20:45
Harold Raymond Battiste	M-A-R-Z-I-Q-U-E, M-A-R-Z-I-Q-U-E K-A-H-D-I-J-A.	20:47
Kate Ellis	Is that kind of like Kahdija?	20:57
Harold Raymond Battiste	Kahdija, Kahdija.	20:57
Kate Ellis	Kahdija, okay.	21:01
Harold Raymond Battiste	Yeah.	21:06
Kate Ellis	What year was that?	21:06
Harold Raymond Battiste	'63.	21:06
Kate Ellis	Uh-huh.	21:06
Harold Raymond Battiste	And then, Harlis, H-A-R-L-I-S, Ray.	21:06
Kate Ellis	What year?	21:21
Harold Raymond Battiste	'64.	21:21
Kate Ellis	And, where was—	21:21
Harold Raymond Battiste	He was born in Los Angeles. He was born in LA, yeah.	21:21
Kate Ellis	And, do you have any grandchildren?	21:24
Harold Raymond Battiste	One, I have one grandchild. His name is—	21:28
Kate Ellis	It's okay. I just want to know. Okay.	21:29
Harold Raymond Battiste	Yeah.	21:29
Kate Ellis	Now, you grew up in New Orleans.	21:34
Harold Raymond Battiste	Mm-hmm.	21:36
Kate Ellis	What I'm doing right now is a history of where you lived. So basically, it was New Orleans from 1931 and then what year did you go to LA?	21:38
Harold Raymond Battiste	'56.	21:49
Kate Ellis	Okay. And I'm going to, I know that you've taught for a couple years in a town who's name I'm forgetting.	21:50
Harold Raymond Battiste	Deridder, D-E-R-I-D-D-E-R, Deridder.	21:56
Kate Ellis	Oh, because I just asked for that. Ah.	22:01
Harold Raymond Battiste	So, I guess the first time I left New Orleans was then.	22:07
Kate Ellis	And that was in '52?	22:08
Harold Raymond Battiste	Yeah.	22:08
Kate Ellis	So, 1952 to '54.	22:08
Harold Raymond Battiste	Yeah.	22:08
Kate Ellis	And then, New Orleans from—	22:09
Harold Raymond Battiste	'54 to '56. And then, Los Angeles, '56, actually that was just '56 to '57 because I came right back here.	22:09
Kate Ellis	Uh-huh.	22:32
Harold Raymond Battiste	And then, I was in New Orleans from '57 to '63.	22:33
Kate Ellis	'63.	22:39
Harold Raymond Battiste	And then, back in Los Angeles from '63 'til '89.	22:45
Kate Ellis	Oh, really?	22:46
Harold Raymond Battiste	Yeah.	22:46
Kate Ellis	Oh. And then back here since then?	22:46
Harold Raymond Battiste	Since '89 I've been back here.	22:46
Kate Ellis	How did you like living in Los Angeles?	22:46
Harold Raymond Battiste	Well, it was okay. I mean, Los Angeles never did feel like home to me. It was just a place to do better, you know what I mean?	22:47
Kate Ellis	Mm-hmm.	23:08
Harold Raymond Battiste	I could do more of what I wanted to do. And, I was really ready to get away from there. When Ellis called me about this, I had been looking for an excuse to come back home. Yeah.	23:08
Kate Ellis	And so, as far as your schooling, it was Ricard was the first—	23:21
Harold Raymond Battiste	Yeah.	23:24
Kate Ellis	— Ricard Elementary?	23:24
Harold Raymond Battiste	F. P. Ricard, Ricard, yeah, R-I-C-A-R-D, mm-hmm.	23:26
Kate Ellis	And that was from, what years was that?	23:35
Harold Raymond Battiste	I figured it out not too long ago, man. Damn. Damn, what years, let me see. I went, hey, I had, I figured it out, man, because there's always a problem. It was, I think I forgot, yeah, it was '44 or something like that.	23:37
Kate Ellis	Uh-huh. Did you, okay, elementary and then junior high.	24:01
Harold Raymond Battiste	Yeah, then I went to junior, I went—	24:05
Kate Ellis	Hoffman.	24:07
Harold Raymond Battiste	— I just went to Hoffman, John W. Hoffman. And then, where did I put that? Yeah.	24:07
Kate Ellis	Oh yeah. And then, because we can work our way back.	24:16
Harold Raymond Battiste	Yeah. And I went to Gilbert Academy. I know I went to Gilbert Academy and I finished in '47. So, I went there in '44. I just went there three years. Did I go there three years? Yeah.	24:18
Kate Ellis	That makes sense because you did junior high.	24:30
Harold Raymond Battiste	Yeah. Yeah.	24:30
Kate Ellis	And so, junior high would've been from—	24:30
Harold Raymond Battiste	No, I didn't, but it wasn't like a— What is junior high in here, three years?	24:31
Kate Ellis	It's seven to nine, seventh grade through ninth grade.	24:41
Harold Raymond Battiste	Yeah, I only did that one year. See, because when we were going, we only had to go to junior high one year. I went to seventh grade in the elementary school and then I went to one year at Hoffman, then I went to Gilbert for three years. That's the way it was.	24:42
Kate Ellis	Okay.	25:01
Harold Raymond Battiste	I mean, we only had to go 11th grade is all they got then.	25:01
Kate Ellis	Oh, right, okay. So, I get it. And so, then elementary would have been from 1936—	25:05
Harold Raymond Battiste	Six is the year.	25:14
Kate Ellis	— to '43.	25:14
Harold Raymond Battiste	Yeah.	25:14
Kate Ellis	And then you got a diploma from academy.	25:16
Harold Raymond Battiste	Mm-hmm.	25:19
Kate Ellis	And, a BA from Dillard?	25:20
Harold Raymond Battiste	Yeah.	25:23
Kate Ellis	And, Dillard was 1947.	25:26
Harold Raymond Battiste	No, Dillard was— Oh yeah, '47 to '52. I got out of there in '52.	25:27
Kate Ellis	And you got a BA—	25:32
Harold Raymond Battiste	Yeah.	25:32
Kate Ellis	— in what?	25:32
Harold Raymond Battiste	Music education.	25:34
Kate Ellis	Okay. And then, as far as your work history—	25:39
Harold Raymond Battiste	See, I can't find— I mean, I have to print out my beat, I got it on disc.	25:43
Kate Ellis	Would that be— Could you? You got a few minutes to do that—	25:47
Harold Raymond Battiste	Yeah.	25:48
Kate Ellis	— while we're finishing this?	26:00
Harold Raymond Battiste	Yeah, let me see.	26:00
Kate Ellis	That would be great. Because then I— That would be great.	26:00
Harold Raymond Battiste	I thought I had a copy. [indistinct 00:26:01].	26:00
Kate Ellis	Yeah, because some of this stuff comes up. We can take that— Oh no. Okay. Mm-hmm.	26:02
Harold Raymond Battiste	Like I said, I've been a Muslim, I've been a [indistinct 00:26:16], I've been, done the Buddha thing. I've done all that.	26:12
Kate Ellis	Have you?	26:17
Harold Raymond Battiste	Yeah. Oh yeah.	26:17
Kate Ellis	So it's been a real, a spiritual aspiration.	26:17
Harold Raymond Battiste	I've been a, yeah, I mean, just like I said, I study history, I study religions. And, so I don't really affiliate myself because it's too limiting. I am a this and there's a lot of beige that goes with—	26:18
Kate Ellis	Yeah.	26:39
Harold Raymond Battiste	— saying, "Well, I am a Christian."	26:40
Kate Ellis	Okay, so I'll say no particular denomination.	26:41
Harold Raymond Battiste	Yeah.	26:43
Kate Ellis	Yeah. And, current, past church memberships. It was the 1st Street, 1st Street—	26:48
Harold Raymond Battiste	That's what I was raised in, AME. My last church affiliation was with— He called it undenominational in Los Angeles. It was a church called Harvest Tabernacle.	26:53
Kate Ellis	Harvest?	27:11
Harold Raymond Battiste	Harvest.	27:12
Kate Ellis	Mm-hmm.	27:12
Harold Raymond Battiste	Okay, Harvest Tabernacle, undenominational.	27:12
Kate Ellis	Undenominational.	27:16
Harold Raymond Battiste	Yeah. Actually, it was a cat I knew who had been a singer and he decided he was going to preach, and he asked me would I come help him do the music.	27:18
Kate Ellis	Huh.	27:27
Harold Raymond Battiste	And, it was a, yeah, one of those kind of things like that.	27:28
Kate Ellis	Mm-hmm, okay.	27:36
Harold Raymond Battiste	It was a good social activity, so.	27:36
Kate Ellis	Really?	27:37
Harold Raymond Battiste	Yeah. Very. That's what the church really does in our, I mean, it's a social vehicle that helps us come together. Let's see, Katie, I got you.	27:38
Kate Ellis	You can check me off. Okay.	27:49
Harold Raymond Battiste	Yeah.	27:50

Item Info

Title:

Harold Battiste interview recording, 1994 July 14

Date:

July 14, 1994

Creator:

Battiste, Harold Raymond

Contributor:

Ellis, Kate

Description:

Name: Harold Raymond Battiste; Date of birth: 1931-10-28; Place of birth: New Orleans, LA; Occupation(s): music teacher; musician; educator; Residence: New Orleans, LA
Informant ID: 512; Interviewed by: Kate Ellis.

Occupation:

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Language:

English

Digital Collection:

Behind the Veil

Source Collection:

Behind the Veil: Documenting African American Life in the Jim Crow South interviews, photographs, and project records, circa 1864-2011, bulk 1990-2004

Series:

Related Resources:

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Provenance:

The David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library acquired the Records of the Behind the Veil Oral History Project from the Duke University Center for Documentary Studies in 1997, 1998, 2000, and 2002.

Rights:

Limited Re-Use

CC BY-NC 4.0

Rights Note:

Copyright for content created by the Behind the Veil project is held by Duke University and made available to the public using a Creative Commons Attribution / Non-commercial (CC-BY-NC) license.

Identifier:

RL00170-CS-1171
0e8cab52-6f68-4be5-ae95-5eaa49746d13
behindtheveil
a6f11dd1-2b7f-4580-93c3-99a3d559a570
ark:/87924/r43t9rg21
a6f11dd1-2b7f-4580-93c3-99a3d559a570

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Harold Battiste interview recording, 1994 July 14

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1. Harold Battiste administrative file, 1994

John Hope Franklin Research Center

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John Hope Franklin Research Center

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