Buddy Bolden

Buddy Bolden was an African-American cornetist who is widely credited as a key originator of jazz in New Orleans at the turn of the twentieth century. Born Charles Joseph Bolden in 1877 in the Uptown neighborhood of New Orleans, he grew up in a working-class Creole-of-color community surrounded by the city's brass bands, blues singers, and church music.

By the late 1890s he was leading his own band, which played in dance halls, parks, and clubs across the city. Contemporaries described his cornet sound as exceptionally loud, blues-inflected, and rhythmically driving, and credited him with being among the first to mix the syncopation of ragtime with the slow drags and blue notes that would soon be called jazz. The tune known as Funky Butt, later titled Buddy Bolden's Blues, was associated with his band, and musicians including Jelly Roll Morton and Sidney Bechet later cited him as an inspiration.

No verified recordings of Bolden survive, although a long-rumored cylinder is part of New Orleans music lore. In 1906 he began to suffer from severe mental illness, and in 1907 he was committed to the Louisiana State Insane Asylum at Jackson, where he remained for the rest of his life.

He died there in 1931 at the age of fifty-four and was buried in an unmarked grave in New Orleans. Later writers and filmmakers, including Michael Ondaatje in Coming Through Slaughter, used the gaps in his biography to reimagine his music and his collapse.

The name Buddy is an English nickname meaning friend or companion, often given informally in childhood. He carried it from the streets of New Orleans into the founding mythology of jazz.