Mose McQuitty & His Routebook

Forty years after first seeing it, I’m still convinced that Mose McQuitty’s routebook reveals one of the great American untold stories. With its recent digitization at East Carolina University, that should change, and as his career is further explored, our understanding of his long ago world will become clearer. That career left no tangible documentation in terms of recording, visual or sound, and little by way of still photographs, mostly just this incredible routebook, 40 years rolling by in his handwriting, page by page. Imagining what he saw, from the 1890s into the Great Depression, in his travels–in all 50 states and east-to-west coast in Canada, mostly by rail–is difficult enough without thinking, too, that he had with him a big baritone horn and this 12-pound routebook, as well as the burden, sometimes, of being Black and on the road in America.

Although much of his story is only outlined in day & date notations, those specifics make it possible to develop a more complex story by tracking the histories of the shows with which he played. And occasional journal-style notations that accompany the day & dates add significantly to those histories. Some of the story that’s unfolded, so far, is not pleasant. There’s a reason he quit playing the South for many years: On September 18, 1900, he notes of his visit to Ripley, Tennessee with the sideshow band with the Sells & Forepaugh Circus, “citizens hung a colored man today,” an incident that seems for the most part undocumented. America’s Black Holocaust Museum notes three lynchings in Ripley but they are not close to this date, and another in Tennessee, on September 26, 1901, but miles away, in South Pittsburgh; those are the closest to the incident McQuitty reports. It’s also likely, given the small world in which Black traveling musicians lived, that McQuitty had worked with Louis Wright, the Richards & Pringles Minstrels musician whose lynching in New Madrid, Missouri, in 1902 was reported on extensively, especially in the Black press. 

 

• • •

Mose McQuitty’s life on the road had a long journey getting here, digitized. It got transcribed thanks in large part to student assistants hired through East Carolina University’s English Department and Joyner Library. Don Lennon, former director of special collections, where the routebook now rests safely, allowed it to be stored in archives stacks for many years while a long parade of students checked in, copied day and date and details, and clocked out. For a few years, I kept up with those students, and if any in the world happen upon this page, I hope they can understand in some way how important their work was.

After the transcription was completed, in the late 1990s, my wife, Elizabeth, and I created a data base that also allowed a printout of routes arranged by states. Today, you can read a chronological unfolding of McQuitty’s life as it was recorded, 1896-1937, in his routebook, or on site at ECU you can read copies of the pages broken down into the states in which the towns where McQuitty played are listed alphabetically with corresponding date(s) on which he played there. These pages also have my notes on them, and I hold out hope that I will also find that database.

Part of the package I transferred to ECU in 2023 is a set of files for each of the shows on which McQuitty played, as well as for the major theaters where he worked for extended periods of time. 

When Mattie Sloan gave me the routebook, at the end of our first meeting in 1986, it was clear that it had been rifled, some of its first pages removed. It starts abruptly now with a November 1895 date with P.T. Wright’s Nashville Students in Strausburg, Nebraska. Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff have helped immensely to fill in details of McQuitty’s earlier musical work. They document McQuitty’s performance with the MCabe & Young’s Minstrels, directed by W.A. Mahara, beginning with the opening of the 1892 season on October 1 in Elgin, Illinois. Mahara’s Colored Minstrels, Abbott and Seroff write in Out of Sight, “remained a powerful force in African-American minstrelsy until W.A. Mahara’s death in 1909,” and that they are “probably best remembered for having served as a launching pad for W.C. Handy,” who documents some of that work in his autobiography, Father of the Blues. Handy joined Mahara’s in 1896. Its cast included several performers who would work with McQuitty over the next 40 years, including P.G. Lowrey, George Moxley, Billy Young, Al Watts and Harry Fiddler.

Full disclosure: As McQuitty’s routebook was being transcribed, I thought that it might have some cash value to Mattie Sloan. A couple of places weren’t interested in it as anything other than a donation, if that, and then I offered it to Duke University’s archives as a complement to its impressive sheet music collection. But instead of selling it to Duke for $400, which they offered, I explained this situation to Mattie and sent her a personal check for $400, thinking that I could develop an interesting project of national scope from it more easily from where it already was, at ECU–and that it was really worth more than that.

Over the course of several subsequent visits to Mattie’s home in Laurinburg she cleaned out drawers and boxes of other “paper,” she always called it, “I found some more paper for you.” Programs, playbills, ticket stubs, show licenses, newspaper clippings, show cards and calling cards, photos, correspondence, payroll books for Winstead’s Mighty Minstrels in the early 1950s. That’s all part of the Mattie Sloan collection at ECU.

And over the course of the next decades, I couldn’t get anyone interested in the kind of state-by-state / town-by-town interactive web page it seemed, to me, to deserve.  

Maybe that’ll still happen. But meanwhile, I’m glad to facilitate anyone’s research interests in McQuitty’s world. You can get a feel for it from the next few images from these early pages of his routebook, all now online and courtesy of ECU’s excellent Special Collections work. And, like me, you can wonder what kinds of annotations he might have made on his routes between October 1, 1892 and November 2, 1895–and did he work with other shows prior to those dates?

• • • 

Sources

Abbott, Lynn and Doug Seroff. Out of Sight: The Rise of African American Popular Music, 1889-1895. Jackson, MS. U of Mississippi P, 2009.

Handy, W.C. Father of the Blues.

October 2, 2024