Louis Armstrong,
the famed trumpet/cornet player and vocalist, arrived in Chicago in
July 1922 to join King
Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band. Here is his reminiscence about seeing
Ollie Powers performing.
“I’ll never forget the time Lil took me to the
Dreamland Cabaret on Thirty-fifth and State Streets to hear Ollie
Powers and Mae Alix sing. Ollie had one of those high, sweet singing
voices, and when he would sing songs like What’ll I Do he would really rock
the whole house. Mae Alix had one of those fine, strong voices that
everyone would also want to hear. Then she would go into her splits,
and the customers would throw paper dollars on the floor, and she would
make one of those running splits, picking them up one at a time.
“I asked Lil if it was all right to give
Ollie and Mae a dollar each to sing a song for me. She said sure, it
was perfectly all right. She called them over and introduced them to me
as the new trumpet man in King Oliver’s band. Gee whiz! I really
thought I was somebody meeting those fine stars.”
—from Hear Me Talkin’ To Ya: The Story
of Jazz by the Men Who Made It, ed. by Nat Shapiro & Nat Hentoff
(Rinehart & Company, 1955), pp. 104–105