This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
Remember that doll that sat forgotten in a corner of your room when you were a kid, until a visiting cousin found it and loved it. Suddenly, it became your favorite doll, too, and you wanted it back.
Before you imagine that adults outgrow this tendency, listen to this Rock Island story.
The story began in 1971 when the Bix Beiderbecke Memorial Jazz Band from New Jersey came to Davenport, Iowa, to play a musical tribute at the grave of their namesake, Leon Bix Beiderbecke. When they scheduled an impromptu jam session that evening at the Holiday Inn, filling the ballroom to capacity with hundreds of jazz fans, we Rock Islanders woke up.
A few local jazz buffs knew the outlines of Bix's life the same way we vaguely remembered the forgotten doll in the corner. Bix was born in Davenport in 1903, had gone to high school there where he learned to play the cornet, and had played with some of the big bands out east until alcohol ended his career and his life. Several of his classmates remembered him.
But we had no idea that he had disciples out there, that he had helped jazz spread from vaudeville and small clubs to America's dance halls and eventually to the recording industry.
He was ours, and we wanted him back. And so was born the Bix Beiderbecke Memorial Jazz Festival held the last weekend of July on the Davenport levee. Bands from around the United States come to play their music as a tribute to Bix. The three days of jazz soon spilled out into the streets of Davenport as food and craft booths took over. The Bix 7, a road race up and down Brady Street hill was added in 1975 and has become a world class race attracting the world's best runners and 20,000 Rock Islanders.
Bix and his cornet are now part of our folklore. His picture is on posters and murals. The three or four living musicians who played with Bix have become celebrities themselves.
And those Rock Islanders who crowded into that Holiday Inn ballroom in 1971 brag to friends that they were there in the same reverent way an aging flower child might say, "I was at Woodstock."
Rock Island Lines with Roald Tweet is underwritten by Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois.
