Welcome to the second installment of Bangkok After Dark, the story of an intimate relationship between Thailand and the United States during the Cold War, told at the level of nightlife.
In last week’s post, I described finding the name of Maurice Rocco in an R&R pamphlet made for U.S. soldiers visiting Bangkok. For the past three years I’ve been searching for information about Rocco — his life, his career, his music, his motivations, his death. In research, small signs can lead to long trails with further offshoots of their own. That is what happened with Rocco. And although of course not everything I’ve found about him appeared in order, here I’ll tell the story chronologically.
The narrative begins in the U.S., in a time and place that might seem like its concerns are self-contained. But it was never so. Even when Maurice Rocco was a child, playing music in a living room in southern Ohio with his working-class family, his life was on course to intersect with Asia. Power, aesthetics, and people were already circulating, even if their circulations weren’t entirely visible yet. From the beginning, Rocco was on a global trajectory.
Maurice John Rockhold (he would take the stage name Rocco in the 1930s) was born June 26, 1915, in Oxford, Ohio, to a father, John Westly Rockhold, nicknamed “Bum,” who worked as a butcher’s assistant at Hornung Meats, and a mother, Ruby May Rockhold (née Young), who was a housekeeper and pianist as well as a piano teacher. By all accounts Ruby was an excellent musician, and she was Maurice’s first instructor. She played regularly in her church, and also served as an accompanist for silent films at the nearby Oxford Theater. Both Ruby and John were born in Indiana, he in a tiny town called Liberty in 1885 and she in Richmond in 1891. They met in Ohio, and married in 1908. The couple settled on Sycamore Street in Oxford, less than a mile from Miami University, where one of their sons would later work, and whose library now holds one of the few collections of any size related to Rocco anywhere in the world. Maurice had at least seven siblings, named Ohmer (sometimes Omar), Thomas, Michael, Malcolm, Morris, Genevia, and Charlotte, as well as a cousin, Samuel, who later lived in their house.
Both sides of the family had been free for many decades, and although they had limited formal education, were able to read and write. According to older census records, Maurice’s great-grandmother on his father’s side, named America Rockhold (née Arnold), was born in 1826 in Kentucky, and moved with her family to Cincinnati as a young girl. There, she was employed for several years as a servant to the abolitionist and author Harriet Beecher Stowe in Ohio, until Stowe left for Bowdoin College around 1850.
America and her husband John later moved to Oxford, where they had a son, Charles, who was Maurice’s paternal grandfather. Both sides of the family moved often throughout the nineteenth century -- through Kentucky, Tennessee, Indiana, and Virginia -- before settling in Ohio, a free state with an active abolitionist movement as well as abundant employment opportunities, around the time of the Civil War. John Rockhold, America’s husband, registered to be drafted into the Union Army while living in Oxford. Another of Rocco’s ancestors, Thomas (probably Maurice’s great-great uncle), served as 1st Sergeant in the Civil War from 1863 until 1865, when he was discharged after being “wounded in Right Foot and … completely disabled,” according to a later veteran’s schedule. Maurice’s family history involved extraordinary labor and sacrifice, as well as marks of valor and distinction.
Many members of his family, on both sides, were also musically adept. Ohmer Rockhold contributed an article about his family’s musical skill to the Oxford Press in March 1938, writing that “Since our mother is musical, I guess it’s no more than right that the rest of the family should have something musical about us, and we do. Everyone in our family does.”
Ohmer goes on to describe his mother’s regular impromptu playing at home, listing his family’s talents at length. His mother “played in two theatres, a number of churches, and minstrel shows of all kinds. My father used to be a comedian in several small towns. He also was a dancer. When mother plays, he pulls his cane across his finger to make the sound of a bass fiddle … my brother Malcolm plays a bass fiddle … my sister Geneva plays the piano … my other sister, Charlotte, plays the piano and dances … my other brother, Thomas, is learning to be a tap dancer.” This early history of Maurice’s family and young life owes a special debt to researcher Paul Watson (of Watson Research Services in Maryland), who uncovered layers of genealogical information, and located military and civilian information from the U.S. National Archives later on as well. He has also read drafts and helped to shape the writing at every level. I acknowledge Paul Watson.
Maurice began playing the piano around age four, and practiced as many as ten hours a day while tagging along with his mother to housekeeping gigs. His mother preferentially took cleaning jobs at homes with pianos so that her son could practice while she worked. Ruby knew mostly classical repertoire, but she tolerated Maurice’s emerging preference for jazz. Maurice later told a friend that another local piano teacher, recognizing his talent, had briefly offered him lessons when he was very young. But during practices he would rebelliously add syncopation, which his teacher regarded as incorrect. His lessons thus ended after just a few months. Thereafter, he played at school, as well as at fraternity parties at Miami University. He was very successful, and became a sensation in the area, with plenty of work and local newspaper coverage attesting to his talent.
Around age 16, Maurice took a job performing as a single (that is, without a band) at Cincinnati radio station WLW. WLW had one of the highest-wattage transmitters in the country, so powerful that it used the slogan “The Nation’s Station” because its signal could be picked up as far northeast as New York City and as far southeast as Florida, even into Cuba. The WLW gig is likely what brought Maurice to the attention of Noble Sissle, a leading Black composer and Harlem bandleader who subsequently brought the young pianist to play in New York City at the original location of the Cotton Club on 142nd Street.
According to the memoirs of Rocco’s childhood friend, Louis Rodabaugh, Maurice first toured at length outside of Ohio in 1934, at Sissle’s invitation. As Rodabaugh recalls:
He spent the summer when he was 17 and I was 21 in Cincinnati. When I saw him I asked what he had been doing. He replied, ‘Oh, I was toppin’ for Noble all summer at the Cotton Club.’ Noble Sissle, one of the better bandleaders, used two pianos. One pianist played chords in the lower and middle registers, and the other played chime-like figures in the upper register--this was called ‘topping’. When we reached his parents’ home after this conversation his mother, Ruby, was frantically waving a telegram. It was from his agent, and it read, ‘COME NEW YORK NOW STOP HAVE JOB RKO THEATER CIRCUIT WITH DUKE ELLINGTON.’ At Sissle’s suggestion, Maurice had adopted the stage name of ‘Rocco.’ Maurice Rocco left at once for New York … he arranged with Principal Milholland to complete his High School work by correspondence.
Rodabaugh’s reflections need to be qualified, and in the next post I will explain where and how Duke Ellington entered the picture. Ellington played an important role in Rocco’s career, and in setting him on a global trajectory (they would even spend time together in Bangkok in the early 1970s). But Rodabaugh was getting ahead of himself, and like the music press in general indulging in some excitable exaggeration. This exaggeration — and its racial implications — will come up next week, along with words from an interview with a nonagenarian Ohioan who saw Rocco play in Cleveland in the 1940s, and the story of Rocco’s move to New York. All the while, the story continues to move toward global encounters …
-Ben