Charles "Buddy" Bolden

Charles Joseph Bolden was born September 6, 1877; his father, a driver, died when he was about six. Historians credit his band, at its height from about 1900 to 1907, with a looser, improvised ragtime, with blues in the dance band and with strings as the rhythm section. Willie Cornish recalled a phonograph cylinder, and Donald Marquis concludes one was probably made and is lost. In 1907, at thirty, Bolden was diagnosed with dementia praecox after an episode of acute alcoholic psychosis and committed to the Louisiana State Insane Asylum in Jackson. He died there November 4, 1931.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Congo Square — steps away
  The 2.35-acre corner of Louis Armstrong Park where, from 1817, New Orleans confined Sunday dancing by enslaved people to one place, and where crowds of hundreds gathered to drum, dance and trade.
• St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 — 0.3 mi
  New Orleans' oldest surviving city of the dead, opened in 1789 after the fire of 1788 and the burial place of Homer Plessy, reachable only on a guided tour since March 2015.
• The Cabildo — 0.4 mi
  The Spanish town hall on Jackson Square, finished in 1799, where Louisiana changed flags in 1803 and where the state Supreme Court sat in the same room until 1910, Plessy v. Ferguson among its cases.
• The Historic New Orleans Collection — 0.4 mi
  A French Quarter museum and research center founded in 1966, whose 2015 Purchased Lives exhibition took on New Orleans' place as the largest slave market in antebellum America.

More markers nearby

• Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong — steps away
• Allison "Big Chief Tootie" Montana — steps away
• Sidney Joseph Bechet — steps away
• Mahalia Jackson — steps away