Frank Adams on Becoming a Teacher

In 1950, Frank Adams had recently graduated from Howard University and was working as a supplier (subbing for a regular player) in the Duke Ellington Orchestra. When Ellington took his band to Europe that year, Adams returned to Birmingham and began what he considered a temporary gig, replacing his own childhood band director, William Wise Handy, at Lincoln elementary school. As Adams explains in this interview excerpt, he had no intentions of staying in the position and only began helping his students for selfish reasons (“the little ones would make so much noise … I couldn’t stand it”) — but in the process he quickly found his calling as an educator. Adams would remain at Lincoln for twenty-seven years and serve twenty more as music supervisor for all of Birmingham City Schools; even after his retirement from the school system, he would work as director of education at the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame, where he taught free music classes until his death in 2014.

Adams began his career in the era of segregation and in this excerpt describes his band’s competition with the affluent white schools just “over the mountain” in the suburban communities of Homewood and Mountain Brook.

This interview was conducted by Burgin Mathews on September 19, 2009, in Frank Adams’s office at the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame. A transcript of the excerpt is included.