Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Frank “Big Boy” Goudie  was born on September 13, 1899 in Youngsville, Louisiana, 150 miles west of New Orleans, Louisiana in the area of the state known as Cajun country, where he lived until the age of eight. His family then moved to New Orleans, where he began playing cornet, and became proficient enough to find work with local bands such as Papa Celestin’s Original Tuxedo Band and the Magnolia Band, two of the top New Orleans bands at that time. He began studying clarinet and tenor saxophone, which would eventually become his primary instruments.

Arriving in New Orleans around 1907 meant Frank had a front-row seat to the blossoming of early jazz with King Oliver, Kid Ory, Johnny Dodds, Freddie Keppard, Jimmie Noone and a host of others, were in their prime and working at many venues throughout the city.

With the 1918 closure of Storyville and the early 1920s, New Orleans experienced a diaspora of musicians, one of whom was Goudie. In 1921 he joined a band accompanying a traveling minstrel show, and for the next four years he performed in Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico and California. He joined another traveling group, Frank Matthews and the Louisiana High Browns, ending up in Tampico, Mexico in 1925.

That same year he sailed to France, making Paris his home base for the next 14 years. Work was plentiful for expat Black musicians in Paris prior to World War II. He would go on to work with bands led by Benny Peyton, Louis Mitchell, Sam Wooding, Noble Sissle, Freddy Johnson, Bill Coleman, and Willie Lewis during the Thirties. He worked at “Bricktop’s,” owned and operated by Ada “Bricktop” Smith, who was a supporter of American jazz musicians. Frank played often and recorded with Django Reinhardt.

While living in Europe, Goudie carried a wicker suitcase full of upholstery tools with which to augment his income – a trade he learned as a young man in New Orleans. He left Paris in late 1939, moving to South America, where he worked in Brazil and Argentina with guitarist Oscar Aleman, and fronted his own groups.

In 1946, Frank moved back to Paris, playing there with Arthur Briggs, Harry Cooper, and Bill Coleman. In 1951, he moved to Berlin, led his own band and recorded there in 1952 and 1953 and in Yugoslavia in 1955.

Returning to the States in 1957 to run his uncle’s business in San Francisco, California, his presence became known to the close-knit Bay Area jazz community. It didn’t take long before  he again was in demand and playing with trumpeter Marty Marsala, pianists Earl Hines, Bill Erickson and Burt Bales, trombonist Bob Mielke and other local groups.

Trumpeter, alto and tenor saxophonist and clarinetist Frank Goudie, who as a young man, his great height earned him the nickname “Tree,” and he became known as “Big Boy” during his years in Paris, transitioned from cancer at age 64, in San Francisco on January 9, 1964.

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