Swingin' Sisters

The two veteran entertainers step on to the Indiana History Center Theater stage dressed in loose, casual clothes and matching blue sandals. Aletra Hampton, 88, walks stiffly to the Steinway concert grand, while sister Virtue, 81, is conveyed in a wheel chair to her string bass. As the former prepares to sit, the latter prepares to rise, neither evoking confidence that this is a particularly great idea.

The ladies are here to record their first full-length CD, which is being sponsored by the Indiana Historical Society.

Aletra’s surprisingly adroit fingers warm up the ivory keys, filling the auditorium with a flourish of chords and arpeggios, while Virtue pulls deep tones from her bass, which seems to be doubling as a crutch. Sax-man Pookie

Johnson and drummer Larry Clark take their places and Jack Gilfoy, commissioned to engineer the session, asks if the band is ready to record.
“Yeah,” comes a languid response from Aletra, who then launches into the haunting intro to a Gershwin favorite. Virtue and Clark catch her by the third beat.

The pianist tilts her head back and closes her eyes. Then, in a smoky alto voice, she plaintively belts out, “Summertiiiiiiime … and the livin’ is easy …” Fraught with emotion, her vocal conjures images of the pain and suffering of a long, difficult life.

Next the band glides into Ellington’s “Take the A Train,” which pushes the band’s tempo up a notch. Over Clark’s smooth groove and Johnson’s tenor lines, the ladies harmonize a chorus of “doodlee doos,” an arrangement they must have learned as girls, and for a moment those giddy girls are here.

An amazing transformation is taking place. Aletra’s “stiff” legs are now raised above the floor and her toes point inward, while Virtue’s “crutch” has become a dance partner with whom she gently sways back and forth.

Suddenly, it becomes clear why these two octogenarians continue to venture out and perform.

“If we didn’t have the music at our age,” Aletra says, “we’d have dried up and blowed away.”

“Pop taught us, ‘Don’t dare cheat that public!’” Aletra says of their father, Clark “Deacon” Hampton, the self-educated family patriarch who instilled devotion and professionalism in his children.

Born in 1875, Hampton married Laura Burford and the couple settled in Middletown, Ohio. In 1915 they had Aletra, the first of what would be 12 children over a span of 20 years.

Pursuing his dream of having a family band, Hampton taught himself to play several instruments in order to pass the knowledge on to his children, almost as soon as they could walk.

Aletra learned the harp, and Virtue, who was the fifth child born, learned the baritone horn, which she had to set on a box for support.

The family’s earliest engagements were for local churches and meditations.

But, as the family increased in number, the act became more of a variety show, complete with popular music, comedy and dancing. Soon they were playing street fairs, sulky races and tent shows, traveling throughout the Eastern United States.

The audiences were mainly white, and the towns remote. Some of them hadn’t seen black people before.

“Life was exciting,” Virtue says.

“But it wasn’t fun,” adds her sister.

When the band wasn’t working, the industrious Hampton, who was a renowned painter, taught art at a school, gave music lessons, worked as a janitor — whatever it took to make ends meet. He expected the same dedication from his children.

“Pop was a hard task-master. He wanted perfection,” Aletra says, her dry sandy voice speaking in quick, rhythmic bursts. “I wanted to be like a child, but Dad wouldn’t have it.”

“But he did allow us the freedom to express ourselves,” Virtue says, her voice also rhythmic, but wetter, with a slower cadence. The children had a say in choosing music and material for the show.

Deacon Hampton and His Cotton Pickers, as they were billed, toured in a large panel truck “with skinny tires.” In back, as many as 10 bunks were wedged along the perimeter while the instruments, including tympani and a harp, were secured in the middle. Laura Hampton cooked the meals, often cornbread and gravy, on a pot-bellied stove and made the costumes, which included blue silk overalls with red shirts and clown suits.

Traveling on two-lane highways was sometimes dangerous. In the mountains, on dark foggy nights, Hampton had to walk in front of the truck carrying a lantern so they wouldn’t drive off the side, and on steep inclines everyone had to get out. “Pop would call and all of us, asleep or not, would jump out of the truck and start pushing,” Virtue says.

There were other hazards. Once, a white man named Hess agreed to provide music jobs and a truck for the family in return for commission and truck payments.

It worked well for a while, but then the jobs simply stopped coming in. “He didn’t even say, ‘Excuse me,’” Aletra says.

Hampton, forced to find work on his own, stopped making the payments. Months later, as the family performed at a county fair near Middletown, Hess showed up with local authorities.

“We sat there like a bunch of ninnies cause we don’t know what’s going on,” Aletra says. Hess and his posse waited until the family’s concert was over, then confiscated everything but their suitcases.

With an engagement only 10 days away, the family was in a fix.

Help came in the form of a white man named Mr. Kinder, a former student of Clark Hampton’s who owned several instruments. “Take everything I got,” Aletra remembers him saying.

Some of the instruments were different, and the band had to adapt quickly. There was no harp, so Aletra made the switch to piano, and Virtue, to sousaphone — sometime later she’d take up string bass.

Hampton rehearsed the band 10 hours a day to prepare for the upcoming show — and it paid off. “When the time came to get up on that stage, we were ready,” Aletra says.

In 1935, Aletra married the family’s driver. Although the marriage was not a good one, it produced three children, one of whom has carried the family’s musical torch: daughter Paula, a jazz drummer who now lives in New York. By the early 1940s, Aletra’s marriage was dissolved.

Work slowed for the family in the North, so they went on several movie theater tours in the South. Backing up celebrities such as jazz singer Betty Carter and black movie star Man Tan Moreland, the band gave concerts to promote new films traveling through the circuit.

Although the movie houses were black, many featured an integrated “midnight ramble” on Saturdays, during which white women came in droves to see the black performers.

Attending school was a problem for the children due to their busy touring schedule, so Hampton obtained permission to educate them himself.

What was acceptable in the North, however, was insufferable in the South. During a theater tour in Mississippi, Hampton was schooling his family — and anybody else who cared to join in — within earshot of a little white boy.

The boy told his father, who, along with some friends, paid Hampton a visit.
The sisters recall the incident with a twinge. “He walked up to Pop and smiled — you know, how the devil smiles,” says Aletra, fire in her eyes. “‘I hear you’re down here trying to educate our niggers. Now we’re not gonna have that. We can hang you down here where nobody cares.’”

Ready for a change, the family came to Indianapolis in 1938 to play an extended engagement at the Sunset Terrace on Indiana Avenue. It would be the only time the sisters would play on the Avenue.

“Pop said we’d make a home here,” Aletra says. Sixty-five years later, she and Virtue still consider Indianapolis home.

When World War II came and sent three brothers overseas, the sisters, including Carmalita — the second born — and Dawn, the last sister born, started an Andrews Sisters-type act.

Carmalita, who played bari-sax and sang, worked with Aletra at Fort Harrison during the day where both were servers. Virtue worked at the Century Biscuit Company. At night they all performed the “sister act” for the servicemen.

When the war was over, the boys came home and Hampton retired. Bebop, the frenetic new jazz of Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, became the rage and the younger brothers became devotees. One of them, Locksley “Slide” Hampton, became an internationally recognized jazz trombonist who now resides in New York.

The oldest brother, Duke, and the sisters continued to play the “old style” music at Elks Clubs and at Steins at 1110 N. Meridian, which became their home base.

By the early 1950s, the Indy music scene was thriving and scores of nightclubs had live music. Besides evening performances, there were Saturday matinees and Blue Monday matinees, and there were after-hours jams and Sunday morning breakfast dances. “They played a little bit of everything, including jazz and blues,” drummer Dick Dickinson says. “It was crowd-pleasing music, and the places were packed.”

The Hampton family enjoyed this musical prosperity. As the sisters drew crowds on Meridian Street, the brothers dazzled folks on the Avenue.

“The Hamptons pushed themselves harder than white people did, to be punctual, to be neat, clean, do their job to the best of their possible abilities, which they still adhere to,” Dickinson says, who is a longtime friend of the family.

It was the legacy of Clark Hampton, who died in 1951: Give absolutely everything you can during a performance.

“We have to go all out. We don’t know any other way,” Aletra says.

Virtue recently “fell out” after a performance at the Artsgarden and spent a night in the hospital. Turns out she was just exhausted. “It takes us two days to recover from playing a job,” she says.

Despite such hard work and dedication, the Hamptons had a difficult time being accepted here, Dickinson says. Whether it was their tightly woven family unit, their non-drinking, their religious devotion or their pride, the family always stood apart. Their names reflected this — Aletra, Virtue, Halo, Locksley, Carmalita — and so did their playing.

“They were wild. I mean, their music had a wild element in it, an electricity,” Dickinson says. “They’d be playing along, and then suddenly there’d be a flurry of something in a solo and you’d go, ‘Wow!’ It would wake you up.”

During this time the Hamptons lived in a large duplex on Vermont Street.

“They were very clannish, and I don’t mean it in a derogatory way,” Dickinson says. “They lived very close. Everyone had their own room.”

The family was a community to which all the members contributed.

“On pay night, on Saturday night, we’d go to their house late at night, and we’d all sit at the dining room table,” Dickinson says. “Mother sat there, and she would divide the money.”

Although the Hamptons were dedicated to family, their home was a virtual music clinic open to anyone with an earnest desire to learn, which was another legacy from their father.

“They were teachers,” Pookie Johnson says. “Anybody that hung around with them was learning.”

Music was constantly coming from the house. “People would come from everywhere and stand on the porch and stand out in the street, just listening or dancing,” Halo, Aletra’s daughter, says.

In the late 1950s, the Hampton sisters made several trips to New York City, appearing three times at the Apollo Theater and once at Carnegie Hall, the latter a result of a statewide dance-band contest that they won.

But the demand for live music was softening by the end of the decade, and Aletra and Carmalita answered a religious calling that brought them to Chicago, the black headquarters for the Worldwide Church of God. After working labor-intensive jobs at the Post Office during the day, they devoted leisure hours to the church.

Halo visited her mother, Aletra, in Chicago at the time. “I don’t know if she’d have been able to tell you what was five streets away from her house, because she was there for the church. And if the church didn’t have anything to do with it, she didn’t have any thing to do with it.”

During these years, Virtue was undergoing a trying odyssey of her own. She was married briefly to a traveling musician in the 1940s, and had a daughter by him. “He was a drinker,” she says. “I didn’t know too much about drinking even though we played a lot of places where it went on.”

In the early 1950s, she married Thomas Whitted, a gifted drummer whose keen sensitivity to music was matched only by his complete insensitivity to wife and family.

“Women musicians didn’t have many choices for a husband,” Virtue says. “Most men didn’t approve.”

Although the couple had five children together, marriage was a continuous struggle. Virtue tried to obtain a divorce on several occasions, but without success. Faced with the responsibilities of single parenthood — having to be both breadwinner and nurturer — while still having to deal with an abusive spouse, she was forced to go on Welfare.

Whitted died last year.

Of her six children, the last two, a son and daughter, carry on the family musical tradition: Pharez plays trumpet and directs the jazz studies program at Chicago State University, and Tamar, a singer, teaches elementary school music in Cleveland.

Laura “Mom” Hampton died in 1967, and sister Dawn moved to New York where, at 77, she works as a dancer and choreographer.

Aletra and Carmalita moved back to Indianapolis in 1981 — disillusioned with the church, and the world.

“They had a litany of grievances,” Jack Gilfoy says, who met the sisters during this period. “Husbands, lawyers who hadn’t taken them seriously, producers and managers of restaurants that hadn’t done right by them.”

Gilfoy gained their trust and has remained personally and professionally involved with them ever since, culminating in the present CD recording.

“Aletra is 100 percent straight ahead, and Virtue wouldn’t be doing anything other than the job at hand,” he says. But he remembers Carmalita as the humorous one. “She was like a little firecracker; she could go in any direction at a moment’s notice.”

Carmalita died in 1987. Since then, Johnson has been filling her shoes in the band while contributing musical gifts of his own.

Drummer Larry Clark joined the band a decade ago, replacing his father, Lawrence.

Today the engagements are primarily arts events and public concerts, such as this year’s Indy Jazz Festival, at which they received a standing ovation. But the number of jobs, as well as the sisters’ stamina, has decreased.

Having never had driver’s licenses, Virtue and Aletra are completely dependent on Clark and Johnson for transportation, set-up and moral support. Without them and several others who look out for their well-being, their lives would be severely limited.

They share a duplex. Aletra lives alone on one side, while Virtue lives on the other with her son Thomas, who suffers from a disability. They check in with each other every day. “The Lord allows us to wake up in the morning,” Aletra says, “so we ask him to show us what he wants us to do today.”

They believe they’re still here for a special purpose, to help others experience the arts in a positive way, and to encourage young people to get a good education in order to avoid the pitfalls of their own lives.

But how many years, months or days will they be able to perform? Both receive social security, in addition to which Aletra gets a small pension from the Post Office. And they make a few dollars playing. But their income is falling while their needs are rising. Aletra fell and bruised a hip the other day — fortunately, thick shag carpeting cushioned the blow. Arthritis plagues both sisters, and Virtue has a pinched nerve in her back.

“They need a benefactor,” Dickinson says.

The ladies hope the CD project, while contributing to posterity, will increase their present prosperity through proceeds from sales. Considering the wealth of culture these two ladies have bestowed on Indianapolis since 1938, not only through their performances, but by passing the family heritage to succeeding generations, it’s a travesty that in their later years, they have so little left for themselves.

On Nov. 16, their CD project now complete, Aletra and Virtue again cross the stage at the Indiana History Theater before a boisterous crowd. There’s a noticeable spring in their steps and, decked in sequins and radiant smiles, they glow like the national treasures they are. The Sunday afternoon benefit concert and CD release for the sisters — hosted by Chuck Workman — began with a warm welcome by first lady Judy O’Bannon, and moved on to family, friends and members of the jazz community, who feted them in high style with song and praise. Now the sisters prepare to give back some of that positive energy with a performance of their own.

Virtue, Clark and Johnson take their positions as Aletra, after giving heart-felt thanks, says, “I consider the bunch of us on this stage family. We’ve got lots of miles and time behind us and we know each other well. We’re a team. Every time we spit, they spit behind us. And, sick or well, we’ll give you the very, very, very best that we’ve got.”

For those interested in the Hampton Sisters’ CD, contact the Indiana Historical Society at 232-1882.