Like his older brother, clarinetist Johnny Dodds, Warren “Baby” Dodds was a musical pioneer. Credit: William P. Gottlieb, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Like his older brother, clarinetist Johnny Dodds, Warren “Baby” Dodds was a musical pioneer. His instrument of choice, however, was a drum. 

“Dodds paved the way for much of the jazz drumming that followed,” a Percussive Arts Society (PAS) article states. “He was the first to use a cymbal as a timekeeping element, and he gradually moved away from the use of ‘traps’ to a selection of drums and cymbals that foreshadowed the modern drumset.”

Born in New Orleans in 1898, Baby Dodds made his first drum out of a lard can and nails. “Then I took some rounds out of my mother’s chairs and made drumsticks,” Baby Dodds said in Larry Gara’s 1955 book “The Baby Dodds Story.” “I used to kick my heels against the baseboard and make it sound like a bass drum, using the can as the snare drum.”

After working various jobs to buy his first professional drumset, Baby Dodds began performing in street parades. At the same time, he studied under legendary drummers to learn the basics and to read music. 

Baby Dodds played with several New Orleans bands before joining a riverboat band in 1918. In 1922, he joined Joe “King” Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band and moved to Chicago. He also recorded with his brother Johnny, Louis Armstrong and under his own name. 

“By all accounts, Baby Dodds was a gregarious, fun-loving character fond of whisky, high-jinks and practical jokes,” Drums in the Twenties states, “though still obviously someone who worked extremely hard at and thought deeply about his art.” 

“I always worked to improve my drumming, and I never drummed just for money,” said Baby Dodds, who died in 1959. “A drummer provides a very important foundation for the rest of the musicians. You can’t get into a locked house without a key, and the drum is the key to the band.”

For more tales from New Orleans history, visit the Back in the Day archives.

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Tammy C. Barney is an award-winning columnist who spent most of her career at two major newspapers, The Times-Picayune and The Orlando Sentinel. She served as a bureau chief, assistant city editor, TV...