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Really Tremendous Sports |
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stick and march as grand marshal! of the second-line gang. He was a really tough egg and terrible to get along with, always in some argument.
Some of the enemy would say, "Listen, don t cross this line/'
''Why not?" Benny would say.
"If you cross it, it will be your ass."
"Whose ass?"
"Your ass."
"Well, lemme tell you something, I don't give a damn about you and your whole family/'
"If I hit you, your old double grandfather will feel it."
And about that time the broomsticks and brick-bats would start to fly, the razors would come into play and the seven shooters—which was a little bit of a .22 that shot seven times-would begin popping. I've seen one case when a fellow shot seven times and every bullet hit the other party and none of them even went into his skin. But, anyhow, everybody would move on out the way, because nobody wanted to take a chance with a pistol, because they'd known many of them to die that way. Myself, a razor was something I always moved from if I saw one in the fight. I knew what a razor was, my uncle being a barber. A razor is a very, very tough thing to come up against.
Well, if they'd have ten fights one Sunday, they didn't have many. Sometimes it would require a couple of ambulances to come around and pick up the people that was maybe cut or shot occasionally. This didn't happen all the time, but very seldom it didn't. The fact of it is, there was no parade at no time you couldn't find a knot on somebody's head where somebody had got hit with a stick or something. And always plenty to eat and drink, especially for the men in the band, and with bands like Happy Galloway's, Manuel Perez's and Buddy Bolden's we had the best ragtime music in the world. There was so many jobs for musicians in these parades that musicians didn't ever like to leave New Orleans. They used to say, "This |
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