Frankie Newton: Lost and Found 

In the mid-1940s, when Weegee took his haunting photograph of Frankie Newton, the trumpeter was already retreating from the jazz scene. He was working as a superintendent at an apartment house on East 17th Street; the picture shows him playing alone in front of the building’s furnace, surrounded by heaps of coal. A cigarette burns between his fingers. His horn points toward soiled sneakers. Eyes shut as he blows, he seems totally absorbed, transported beyond his surroundings. Not long after, in 1948, a fire broke out in this building. All Newton salvaged from his apartment was a fragment of a horn, which he made into a necklace. He died in 1954 at the age of forty-eight. 

Today Newton is remembered, if at all, for playing on Bessie Smith’s last record date and on Billie Holiday’s original recording of “Strange Fruit.” But he was a major figure in the 1930s and early 1940s, when he ran with the greats and made over a hundred recordings, including some of the first releases on the Blue Note label. A master of tone, he had a penchant for mutes, setting a mood even on the shortest of solos. According to the trumpeter Bill Dillard, “It wasn’t exciting like Roy Eldridge, who played with abandon, but it seems that his playing represented the country and the woods and the rolling hills.” Listen to “The Blues My Baby Gave to Me” from 1939, where Newton makes a smoldering drama out of shifts in timbre and texture. Or to his solos on “Port of Harlem Blues,” also from 1939, with its delicate legato phrases that seem to drift on the edge of time.

Newton was also a painter, a writer, an athlete, and an outspoken Communist. In the 1940s, during the era of segregation, he lived with his partner Ethel Klein in Greenwich Village, moved in integrated circles among artists and intellectuals, and counted the likes of Henry Miller and Paul Robeson as friends. James Baldwin described meeting him as a foundational experience.¹ Eric Hobsbawm wrote his jazz column in the New Statesman under the pseudonym Francis Newton as an homage to a fellow traveller. The jazz critic Nat Hentoff acknowledged his political influence, frequently recounting this anecdote in which Newton pays back a debt: “At the bar, Frankie gave him the money. The photographer said something like, ‘That’s mighty white of you.’ He wasn’t thinking. Frankie pulled him up by his collar and said, ‘No. That’s mighty black of me.’”

Though Newton was championed by jazz historians and critics alike, his name carries little cultural currency today. His recorded output is partly available on streaming services, largely in poor quality releases. Many of his great live performances circulate only among collectors. Due to the fire and his early death, biographical information about him is scarce, and a legend has emerged in this vacuum. The article titles are telling: “Frankie Newton: The Forgotten Trumpeter,” “The Mystery of Frank Newton,” “Looking for Frankie,” “The Search for Frankie Newton,” “The Elusive Frank Newton.”

As a researcher and archivist, I’ve been obsessed with Frankie Newton for over ten years. I’ve travelled to his birthplace, spoken with his surviving family members, and scoured archives around the country in the hope of finding more music, stories, or really anything about him. That search paid off when I uncovered a trove of articles Newton wrote for The Daily Worker in the 1940s—articles that, to my knowledge, were previously unknown to researchers. This body of work sheds new light on his character and convictions, his activities outside music, and above all the political project his art was part of. For the first time, they allow Newton to speak for himself.

A grandson of former slaves, William Frank Newton was born in 1906 in the rural community of Blacksburg near Emory, Virginia. “I was thirteen when I first pushed the little valve down on a trumpet,” he recalled in a 1939 essay:

That was a minor victory in more ways than one for the horn had been given to me second-hand and I had to put half a jar of vaseline on the valves in order to run the scale. Since then I’ve had better horns but I still like to remember keeping the neighbors up half the night down in Virginia tooting away, practicing and experimenting. My own parents were not able to send me to music school and I worked as a carpenter and at dozens of odd jobs while I earned enough money to pay for lessons.²

That last sentence glows romantically in face of the facts—Newton’s parents were both dead by the time he was thirteen. The 1920 census shows him living with a cousin in Bristol, and his great-nephew believes he ran away from home as a teenager. It’s unclear how he received his musical training, though he named Bix Beiderbecke and Louis Armstrong as his two biggest influences. In the mid-1920s, Newton played in bands around West Virginia, Kentucky, and Ohio, and in 1927 Lloyd Scott’s Orchestra brought him to New York City.

For the next ten years Newton lived in Harlem and earned his living by playing in big bands, although he really excelled in after-hours jam sessions at places like the Rhythm Club, the Alhambra Grill, and the Brittwood, where he could stretch out on extended improvisations. It was here that Newton contributed to the revolutionary idiom that would later be known as swing. In 1937 he joined a small band led by the bassist John Kirby at the Onyx Club on 52nd Street. Known as the “Biggest Little Band in the Land,” the group specialized in grooving on tight arrangements—many written by Newton—that showcased the virtuosity of its soloists, including the clarinetist Buster Bailey and the saxophonist Pete Brown. It took off after the band’s vocalist Maxine Sullivan recorded a hit rendition of “Loch Lomond,” but Newton soon left after a stormy fallout with Kirby.

In 1938 the producer John Hammond, one of Newton’s first champions, hired him to lead the band at Café Society, a new club in Greenwich Village modeled after the political cabarets of Weimar Germany. Billie Holiday first performed “Strange Fruit” there in 1939, and the nightspot counted numerous artists and intellectuals among its patrons. Newton played at the club for two lengthy stretches in 1938–1939 and 1943, befriending the painters Beauford Delaney and Don Freeman, the writers Henry Miller and William Saroyan, the actor Canada Lee, and his greatest hero, Paul Robeson. His relationship with Hammond deteriorated and in 1943 he left for good, later citing “the damn uniform, the damn regularity and the damn spotlights” as his reason for departing.³

This pattern of bitter fallouts in part resulted from Newton’s uncompromising principles. The writer Ralph Berton recalled watching him perform at a nightclub in the 1940s when the tap dancer Baby Laurence unexpectedly arrived and began dancing. When a group of rowdy businessmen threw coins on the floor, Newton stopped the music, laid down his horn, picked up the money, and approached the hecklers:            

“Gentlemen,” Frankie said, “I don’t want anyone throwing nickels, dimes and quarters at the greatest dancer in the world. You just happened to be here tonight when he danced for us. Of course you don’t know anything about what we were playing, or what Baby Laurence put down on this floor. You see, he’s a creative man, and all my musicians are creators. Of art. All you know how to do is make money from other people’s work. So when you see something you don’t know anything about, you throw some coins at it. I don’t want that to happen again.”    

There wasn’t another sound from the big table.⁴

The American Communist Party soon became Newton’s primary employer: in the late 1930s and early 1940s his band played at many Party-sponsored dances and events. He had leaned left as far back as the early 1930s, when he performed at benefit shows for the Scottsboro Boys and regularly participated in jam sessions broadcast on the Socialist Party of America’s radio station WEVD (named after Eugene V. Debs). His involvement gradually deepened: in March 1939 he contributed an autobiographical article, from which I have already quoted, to the Daily Worker, the Communist Party’s primary newspaper. In 1940 he led the resident band at Camp Unity, the party’s unofficial upstate summer retreat, and the next year he sponsored a meeting of the American Peace Mobilization at the Triboro Stadium on Randall’s Island.

Newton’s work with the Party waned after America entered World War II, and in 1942 he moved to Boston to play at the Savoy Cafe with a band that included the trombonist Vic Dickenson, the saxophonist Ike Quebec, and the pianist Ram Ramirez. (The recently deceased drummer Roy Haynes—a singular figure in postwar jazz—got his start playing with this group as a teenager.) At a jam session in Boston, Newton met Ethel Klein, a fellow Communist. In a 1985 interview with the author and journalist Mark Stryker, she recalled that he was then living at Lowell House, an undergraduate dorm at Harvard.

I said, “Oh, what, are you studying there?” 

“Oh no, no, no,” he said, “I’m the social lion this year.”

And I said, “Well how did you manage that?” I had graduated from Radcliffe myself.

He said, “Oh it’s very easy. First of all, I wear Harris tweeds. I don’t dress like a Negro. And secondly, I walk across the Harvard yard with my horn under one hand and a tennis racket under another. And just to be sure,” he said, “in my pocket is a copy of Das Kapital.”

The two moved to Greenwich Village in 1943, where Klein found secretarial work and Newton returned to Café Society before moving down the street to a dive called George’s Tavern. Well over six feet and now dressing like a professor, he became a neighborhood fixture: he ran the chess tournament at Chumley’s, invited people to play ping pong at his apartment, gave free music lessons to children at Greenwich House, and took up painting. That’s not to suggest the integrated couple had it easy. “He came as close to being colorblind as possible,” Klein told Stryker. “But he was constantly being reminded, you know. We were put upon in Sheridan Square by southern sailors with knives and whatnot.” 

Jazz was undergoing another revolution around this time—soon labeled bebop—but Newton felt betrayed to see his generation of swing pioneers abandoning their idiom. Klein recalled him confronting Pete Brown, one of his closest collaborators:

“Why are you doing this? Why are you going with the trend?” 

Pete looked at him and he said, “You have to keep up with the times!” 

I can remember Frank drawing himself up, he was six foot five and a half, and he looked down at Pete and said, “Oh for God’s sake you don’t need to do that. I just blow and hope the times can keep up with me.”

After the fire in 1948 and amid struggles with alcohol, Newton and Klein returned to Boston, where the promotor George Wein, a childhood friend of Klein’s, secured Newton steady work. In 1951 he moved back to the Village with the hopes of making a comeback; the couple also married. But in his final years Newton could be found more often holding court at watering holes like the San Remo Cafe on MacDougal Street than playing on the bandstand. His entry in John Chilton’s Who’s Who of Jazz concludes, “for last years of his life did little regular playing, lived in Greenwich Village, devoting considerable time to painting and politics.” Newton died of acute gastritis on March 11, 1954. Ethel recalled that Louis Armstrong was one of the first to arrive at the funeral. “Don’t cry,” he told her. “We can all reach for a mute now.”

The first time I heard Frankie Newton was on a shellac 78 rpm record from 1939 of “Who?,” the Jerome Kern standard, with a group that included Brown and James P. Johnson on piano. From the top, the piano punched through the speakers and the tension ratcheted up chorus after chorus until Newton’s tightly muted trumpet led a cathartic ride out. On “The World is Waiting for the Sunrise,” from the same session, he creates tension and excitement with a climactic repetition of two notes, while Brown and the clarinetist Mezz Mezzrow weave a tapestry of countermelodies. Newton’s main concern was never grandstanding, but what he called “the beauty of the form.”

I looked up Newton and found other recordings. In the wee hours of September 17, 1941, at Clark Monroe’s Uptown House in Harlem, he and the pianist Art Tatum play “Sweet Georgia Brown.” Tatum initially dominates, playing melody and countermelody, barreling through the changes with nimble runs. But Newton declines to joust and instead enters in a laid back rhythm, unfolding long lines of imaginative improvisation. As Tatum lays down increasingly eccentric chords, Newton diverges further from the melody, keeping pace without trying to outplay anyone. A dialogue opens between them.

Michael Steinman’s blog, “Jazz Lives,” was the only reliable source of information about Newton that I could find. Eventually I met Michael, who shared a recording of Hentoff interviewing the trumpeter in 1946. Newton’s southern-inflected voice was surprisingly modest and soft. “Originally it was in conjunction with Claude Thornhill,” he says about the formation of the John Kirby Sextet. “I think we, I would like to say, are responsible for the Kirby idiom more or less, the soft accompaniment plus the little muted deal. I don’t wish to brag about it, but I think we were responsible for it.” 

Later on, digging through stacks of records at a Brooklyn junk shop, I came across an eight-inch acetate disc with a label in fountain pen ink: “(F. Newton) (3 Sides) (3) 5/28/46 (Frankie Newton).” The store owner did not remember where he found the disc. In an uncanny coincidence, it was another piece of the same interview—one that nobody knew existed. The recording begins with the conclusion of Newton’s Blue Note recording of “Pounding Heart Blues.” Hentoff then asks, “Now lest we forget, how’s your painting proceeding?” 

“Well, it’s pretty lousy,” groans Newton. “It’s gotten to the point where I’m hiding all my paintings and not boring my friends with them.”

“And from which do you get more kicks, your horn or your brush?”          

“Well, it depends. I get a nice kick from my horn assuming that I’m playing well and the environment that I’m in is conducive to it and I can contribute something to it. But with painting I can stay all by myself all afternoon. Of course I can’t pay my rent off of that, but it’s better than going to the asylum.”                                

I figured the FBI kept tabs on Newton because he was  involved with the Communist Party. But his file, which I received through a Freedom of Information Act request, merely revealed that he played at events like the Young Communist League’s New Year’s Eve Party in 1940. A dig into Loren Schoenburg’s Smithsonian oral history project with Hentoff, however, led me down a different road. “Newton wrote for the New Masses and that kind of publication and got himself on various lists,” Hentoff remarks. “He wrote with a very clear, determined prose.” 

Until then the only piece of writing by Newton I was aware of was the Daily Worker article. I combed through back issues of the New Masses on marxists.org without luck (although I did find a few film reviews by Klein). Then, recalling his given name, William Frank Newton, I tried a search for “Bill Newton.” Nothing in the New Masses—but there were over a hundred articles under that byline in the Daily Worker, which are available online.

Further research confirmed the identity. In the Daily Worker photo archives at NYU’s Tamiment Library, I found two images of Newton sitting against a blank wall, sporting a tweed jacket. The lighting, the background, and the pose match other staff portraits. On newspapers.com I found a 1943 interview with him published in the Morning Union out of Springfield, Massachusetts. “I have written a soap opera which deals with the everyday life, joys and sorrows of a Negro family and I am now trying to put it on the air,” he notes. “I feel that something of this sort would do a great deal of good toward solving the differences between the blacks and the whites.” Until that script surfaces, the Daily Worker writings are the best sampling of Newton’s literary endeavors.

Bill Newton’s articles appeared in the Daily Worker between spring 1940 and fall 1941. Many of them were placed near advertisements for performances by Frankie Newton at Daily Worker events. Most are about sports: he was filling in for Lester Rodney, a legendary journalist who pushed for Major League Baseball to desegregate. Newton didn’t limit his purview to professional athletics, advocating for better playgrounds in Greenwich Village, launching tirades against Jim Crow policies at NYU, protesting the exploitation of wrestlers, and covering union activities. In “Some Advice to the Tennis Moguls,” he proposes: 

Let them slash their prices. Let them cut out the swank and the extravagance. Let them give all players a chance, regardless of race, creed or color. Then they won’t have to depend on the fickle desires of Park Avenue and Newport society. There’ll be plenty of fans, and more than enough good players to put the game on a stable basis.

In “Army ‘Sports Boom’ Means Profits but Less Equipment for Kids,” Newton discusses a “double trend” at the dawn of World War II: professional athletics were increasingly profitable due to a wartime morale boost while public school sports were withering under budget cuts. “Like the twin foreign policies of appeasement and intervention,” he writes, “the two trends in American sports life just discussed lead straight to war and fascism.” 

Newton also discussed jazz, advocating for public jam sessions, integrated groups, and cooperatively owned bands. In an editorial from October 1940 he expressed outrage that the New Orleanian clarinetist Johnny Dodds, who had died two months earlier at forty-eight, had not yet received any obituaries: 

The life he led was the insecure existence of many honest Negro musicians, unable or unwilling to fit into the commercialized routine of popular dance bands. … For though many clarinetists who never could hold a candle to Johnny Dodds borrowed from his style, robbed it of its simplicity and sincerity and thereby became jitterbug favorites, Dodds continued to play in the same old honest way.

It’s hard not to see a parallel with Newton’s refusal to abandon his own idiom. He would die at the same age as Dodds.

In “At a High School Athletic Field,” Newton describes a morning baseball game at DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, which descends into a screaming match after a close play: “Words fly. Dust flies.” But the coach observes the chaos paternally, “impassive and solemn.” After the game breaks up, one of the players, Pete, approaches the coach, “heatedly pointing to second base, to the outfield, and to everything else he can point to.” Newton concludes: “The teacher tugs his cap, and claps Pete on the back. Pete smiles. The sun shines hot on the suddenly empty fields.” Reading this passage, I think of Newton’s own childhood—orphaned poverty in the mountains of Jim Crow Virginia.

Recently at the New Hampshire Library of Traditional Jazz, I found Newton’s last known recording. It comes from a jam session in March 1951 at Wein’s Boston jazz club, Storyville, and features Newton alongisde the trombonist Tyree Glenn and the clarinetist Bob Wilber. On “The World is Waiting for the Sunrise,” Newton’s solo begins with a long-held note that crescendos into a drifting phrase, serenely detached from the beat. At the end the tempo drops and Newton blows alone, before everyone returns for the final chord. The recording embodies Newton’s spiritual nonconformity. As I listen to his wistful, searching phrases, I picture him playing with his eyes closed, transported, like in Weegee’s photo.

One of the last surviving photographs we have of Newton was taken in the summer of 1951, when he was working as a counselor at the integrated Kiddie Kamp in Sharon, Massachusetts. In it he stands near a lake, his arms around a group of adolescents, their skin tones ranging from pale pink to dark brown. Everyone is grinning. Newton’s hair is wet and he wears a necklace, perhaps the one he made from the horn salvaged from the apartment fire. I’ve never seen him happier.