Jelly Roll Morton, 1907:
Those days I hung out at Eloise Blackenstein and Louise Aberdeen’s place – the rendezvous for all the big sports like Pensacola Kid, who later came to be the champion pool player of the world. Bob Rowe, the man who didn’t know how many suits he had, and his wife, Ready Money, were regulars, also the Suicide Queen, who used to take poison all the time. Tony Jackson also hung out there and was the cause of me not playing much piano. When Tony came in, the guys would tell me, “get off that piano stool. You’re hurting the piano’s feelings.”
One day we were all up at Lala’s saloon. Pensacola Kid was paying Buster Brown for ten dollars a round and they asked me to keep the game. In came Chicken Dick, the uptown roughneck, and started yelling, “Keeping the game, hey, little boy? You don’t know what you doing. I’m going to keep game.” He hit me hard and I fell on the table with my hands on some balls. I hauled off and hit him with a pool ball and he jumped like he was made of rubber. Then i laid into him with more balls and some billiard cues and they finally had to haul him out of there. That gave me a name. “Don’t fool with Winding Boy. He like to kill Chicken Dick.” I had sense enough to know it wasn’t healthy to wear a name like that around New Orleans where some tough guy might decide to see how hard I really was. So i decided to accept Tony Jackson’ invitation to visit Chicago.