Joe's home in 1900, after he had completed his education, was supposedly St. Louis. The 1900 Census taken on June 5 shows him with his family in St. Louis. Zachariah was running his own restaurant at that time. Joe was listed as a musician with a birth year of 1880. That he does not show up in the 1880 Census with the family negates that as a potential possibility. Surprisingly, in the same Census taken three days later in Chicago on June 8th where he lists himself as a musician, this time questionably claiming to be 19. He was either there to perform or for a visit, as his home base was still St. Louis.
     From 1900 to 1904, Joe spent a lot of time in St. Louis, now learning even more from the Turpin, a considerable force of nature, and performing regularly with Chauvin and Sam Patterson, and possibly Charles Thompson at times. Jordan, Chauvin, Patterson and Turpin formed a quartet that played everything from the St. Louis clubs to church socials, and anywhere that two to four pianos could be found. He also played violin and sometimes percussion with the ten-piece Taborin Band. Jordan was tall at nearly 6' and handsome, so he certainly had little trouble finding places to perform, from the brothels to the popular black entertainment venues.
     In 1902 the youth is supposed to have made his first trip to New York City where he met and collaborated with "coon song" composer Ernest Hogan, who sometimes billed himself as the "unbleached American." The story is that Joe allegedly contributed to the score of Hogan's newest stage play, Rufus Rastus. It was Hogan's attempt to boost his name further following his success in Will Marion Cook's Clorindy a few years earlier. However, Joe's reported role in this in 1902 is doubtful, as the play did not open on the road until 1906. It is more likely that the single song of his in the production, Oh Say, Wouldn't It Be A Dream composed to lyrics by Earle C. Jones, was interpolated into the traveling version of the production during rehearsals in late 1905. Rufus Rastus lasted only eight performances on Broadway.
     Once back in St. Louis Jordan, Patterson and Chauvin wrote an ambitious musical titled Dandy Coon in 1903, and they attempted to stage it in St. Louis and take it on the road. Featuring a cast of thirty and a "beautiful octoroon chorus," the show folded on the road in Des Moines, Iowa after just a few performances. Only scant remnants of the production remain. At this point Jordan departed for Chicago to seek out work.
     Joe's efforts were validated when he got a job at the Pekin Beer Garden in Chicago at the corner of 27th and State Street. In mid 1904 Jordan briefly left that post to return to St. Louis where he reportedly played at the Louis and Clark Exposition on the pike at the Faust Restaurant. By late in the year Jordan was back in Chicago, where he would be theoretically based for at least the next three decades. His prowess at orchestral arrangements and music direction quickly found him hired by Robert T. Motts who owned the beer garden which had morphed into the influential and highly regarded Pekin Theater, one of the earliest African-American owned enterprises of its type in the United States. The Pekin Rag was written for the venue. During his tenure there, Jordan performed and composed many works for the productions staged by the Pekin Theater Stock Company, and gained the attention of black performers and writers in New York as well.
     While still primarily based in Chicago, Joe made frequent trips to New York and collaborated with many of the notable writers there, including Will Cook who had followed Clorindy with the first truly successful black musical on early Broadway, In Dahomey. In 1905 Hogan asked him back there for another bold collaboration with rising star James Reese Europe, resulting in The Memphis Students, a group comprised of seventeen singers, dancers and musicians. This troupe was successful in both the United States and on a subsequent European tour (Jordan did not participate) Ford Dabney also became involved with the group, and their success eventually led to great opportunity for black musicians in New York City, encouraging many of them to form the famous Clef Club in 1910.
     Back in Chicago by 1906, Jordan now graduated to the post of Musical Director for the Pekin. He briefly returned to New York again in 1907 to collaborate on his first major Broadway work with composer James T. Brymn and lyricists Aubrey Lyles and Flournoy Miller. Their production of The Husband which opened in August 1907 ran for only 8 performances, not the last time that Jordan would see such a disappointing end to his efforts.
     Back in Chicago Joe went headlong into his work at the Pekin. While he turned out a number of good rag compositions during the next few years, such as his J.J.J. Rag and his famous That Teasin' Rag which would also be made into a song, Jordan also contributed waltzes, comic songs, and notable stage pieces into the musical world. One of these would secure his fame as well as its performer's launch.
     Disregarding the myth perpetuated in the stage play/movie Funny Girl, comedienne Fannie Brice did not audition with Second Hand Rose (eleven years before it was composed!) and did not debut as a pregnant chorus girl. It was Jordan's newest song composed with Cook, Lovie Joe, that gave Fannie her first great success on the stage of the New Amsterdam Theater for the 1910 Ziegfeld Follies. Jelly Roll Morton claims that the title refers to a great lover (perhaps even implicating himself). Other sources claim he was a real person who owned a New York saloon in the years before the song debuted. Brice evidently worked very hard on rehearsals of the piece, but Florenz Ziegfeld's stage manager, Abe Erlanger, thought it to be a trifle, and Brice's blackface interpretation as even worse. She angrily retorted that she knew much more about negro dialects than he did as she lived on 128th Street which bordered Harlem. Both she and the song were quickly dropped from the Follies, but Ziegfeld insisted they both return over Erlanger's objections. It was launched on the road in Atlantic City with Brice in blackface, but wearing a very tight dress over her large figure instead of the one Ziegfeld had consigned for her. After a performance comprised of uncomfortable wiggling but stupendous singing, she pulled up the skirt, knocked her knees together, then ran off stage with a look of horror. The result was tumultuous applause and eight curtain calls. Jordan was outside the theater as blacks were not allowed in, but was so moved that he reportedly wept at the piece's reception. Once backstage, Erlanger conceded the moment by showing her his straw hat with a hole in it that he had broken while applauding her. Brice kept that hat as a poignant souvenir for the rest of her life.
     Jordan obtained a passport in Hamburg in October 1910, having left on a tour in mid September. He is listed as a music composer and still a Chicago resident. Curiously the notation "Traveling in Russia" was also on the passport, but if he actually went there on this particular trip is hard to confirm. He spent many months abroad in Germany performing with King and Bailey's musical Chocolate Drops, and later in many of the music halls around the United Kingdom. By mid 1911 he was back in Chicago, staying at his post as the Pekin's musical director for at least two years with one more brief trip to England in the interim.
     In June 1912, with business associate Tom Clark, Jordan opened The Mecca Buffet at 3334 State Street in Chicago.

Joe Jordan's 1915 passport photo.

They evidently had entertainment as the printed notice of the opening also included an advertisement searching for a "lady violinist and lady celloist" to perform there. By November there were reports of great success for the enterprise. He was still working for the Pekin and the States Theater, the latter now showing motion pictures as well. However, in December 1913 Joe announced his retirement from the States Theater. As he was preparing to do more composing for the stage this was likely a choice to realign his personal capacity. Two months later the Pekin abruptly closed down, and his orchestra was temporarily put out on the street.
     It was reported that at some point in 1913 during a New York visit that Jordan played with both Charley Thompson and Eubie Blake for the first time, but not for the last. After involvement with other touring productions in 1914, his passport was renewed in 1915 for a trip to England and France, and perhaps Russia. Records indicate that this tour lasted form April of 1915 to May of 1916.
     Once back from Europe, Joe parlayed his financial gain - some reports claim that he may have been approaching millionaire status - into an interesting enterprise - Real Estate. So it was in 1917 that he opened the three-story J. Jordan Building, an office building constructed with an investment of $220,000, at the corner of State Street and 36th in Chicago. It was in a predominantly black area of the city, but one that had some level of affluence just the same. The main entrance was topped by a name plaque with an elaborate lyre as an homage to the music which allowed him this indulgence. Black citizens were inspired by the effort, and many started in on enterprises of their own boosted by Jordan's success. Primarily an office building, Jordan never lived or worked there, and he didn't even own it for very long.
     Jordan's 1918 draft card shows him not as a musician, but in the business of Real Estate and Safe Deposit. In an August 1, 1954, article in the Chicago Daily Tribune concerning the demolition of many south side buildings in the area of State and 35th, Abram Wilson who was known as Red Dick recalled the area at its peak, and Jordan's business in particular. "Not one place ever was closed. 'Nobody had a key in those days,' says Red Dick. But Negroes did discover that locks had to be placed on their valuables. And Joe Jordan, a well known band leader married to a Parisian woman, erected an office building and made a tidy profit renting safe deposit boxes." It also references his aforementioned wife named Nellie, who was a white French citizen. It is difficult to locate her in subsequent listings, but that is a part of Joe's continuing story as well.
     It seems that Nellie somehow got Joe involved in an international smuggling scandal. An article in the Chicago Tribune of March 31, 1917, sheds a great deal of light on this first marriage and some of Jordan's travels at that time:

Federal Agents Seize Jewels of Song Writer      Diamonds, valued at $20,000 and brought to the United States a year ago by the white wife of "Joe" Jordan, Negro song writer, were taken from a safety deposit vault in the Lincoln State Bank last Wednesday by federal agents. The government is investigating on the theory that the jewels were smuggled. Jordan lives at 3406 South Park Avenue.
     Jordan, whom "black belt" authorities say is worth $250,000, said last night that the jewels were declared to customs inspectors in New York and that his wife was allowed to bring them in without duty as a British subject.
     "I married Mrs. Jordan, whom I met in London in theatrical work, eighteen months ago [October 1915]," said Jordan. "We came to New York and the jewels were declared. Recently I had a chance to make a god real estate deal, and my wife consented to allow me to sell a $10,000 necklace. I took it to a loop jewelry firm and they notified the customs agents. They thought they had discovered an international smuggling plot and hurried to my safety vault. The cashier of the bank, John Hardle, called me up, and I came over and unlocked the vault. They took me to the federal building, questioned me, and let me go."
     Mrs. Jordan's father, an East Indian merchant, now in New York, is a millionaire, according to those well acquainted with the Jordans. It is also said that Joe Jordan, the merchant's son-in-law, received $50,000 when he married the merchant's daughter. Jordan is now building a three story office building at Thirty-fifth and State streets.
     ...His father is the proprietor of a poolroom at 3232 South State street.

     Note that in a follow-up article in late May that it was reported that all of the jewels were returned to Nellie without any apologies for the action.
     It was hard to keep Joe grounded in the business world for very long. In 1918 Jordan was lured back to New York by Cook to be not only the director of the New York Syncopated Orchestra but its financial manager as well. Spending time in both Chicago and New York for the next few years (1919 and 1920 passport issues show him still as a Chicago resident), Joe eventually moved to New York, selling his building to Louis B. Schmidt. (It would finally be torn down in 1986 in spite of valiant efforts to preserve it.) This allowed him more opportunities not just for stage performance, but to work on records as well. This put him near center stage at the beginning of the jazz era. In fact, he was actually heard ON the stage, just not as he had planned.
     In 1917 the Original Dixieland Jass Band (later Jazz Band) fronted by trumpeter Nick LaRocca, clarinetist Larry Shields and pianist Henry Ragas started recording in New York. One of their first big hits was the Original Dixieland Jazz Band One Step which went by variously modified titles. "Original" was not entirely true, as the trio of the piece was also the verbatim trio of Jordan's That Teasin' Rag. Jordan heard this in 1918 and brought suit against LaRocca and the band, quickly winning a judgment that resulted in the records being recalled and subsequently labeled The Original Dixieland One Step: Introducing "That Teasin' Rag". The introducing part is obviously far from true, but it would make for a similar gag in 1937 when Benny Goodman released Sing Sing Sing (With a Swing): Introducing "Christopher Columbus". In any case, Jordan also received some financial compensation as well as composer credit, a deal which benefited him for many years.
     At some point prior to 1920 Joe and Nellie were divorced, but the terms of any settlement were kept out of the press. Around 1920 he met his future and final wife, Illinois native Irene Hudlin. With Joe being on the move so much it is difficult to find him in the 1920 Census records, but other records such as his frequent passport renewals and newspaper mentions did help when tracing Jordan's private activities and whereabouts. Joe and Irene were married in 1922 and Lowell Henry Jordan was born the following year in Chicago and Marie Jordan would follow in 1924. However, the Jordans would soon be settled in Harlem, New York City, at one point living at 47 W. 127th Street.

The Loew's State Theater c.1950.

     Jordan went on tour in the early 1920s to various motion picture theaters in the Loews chain, often performing with violinist Willie Tyler for special shows. When eventually decided to stay in New York City the company gave him a steady position in their prestigious theater there. An article in the Music Trade Review of June 23, 1923, highlights Joe's role that year as the musical director of enormous (3,300 seats) Loew's State Theater located in Manhattan at 1540 Broadway in Times Square. "Joe Jordan... has been featuring several numbers from the Bee Tee Publishing Co.'s catalog the past week, including the "Grand-daddy" number, which is incorporated in an overture composed of all the old "Daddy" songs. "Grand-daddy" comes in for special featuring, inasmuch as it is also sung by Lillian Leonard, with a special setting quite unique for a vaudeville house."
     The composer finally was heard on disc, as he recorded four sides in 1926 with a newly formed group called The Ten Sharps and Flats. Two were on the prestigious Columbia Records label, among the earliest electronic recordings by a black group, and two others were released under the lesser known Banner Records imprint. Joe released additional sides under other names as well. The group performed well into 1927, and were featured in the traveling company of the show Rarin' to Go playing interstitial jazz tunes and the intermission.
     In 1928 pioneering stride pianist and composer James P. Johnson composed his answer to Sissle and Blake's show Shuffle Along, calling it Keep Shufflin'. He hired Jordan as conductor and perhaps arranger, leading a group that included Johnson, his protégé Fats Waller, Jabbo Smith and other prominent jazz musicians. After a successful run, Jordan took some of the band on tour as a new formation of The Ten Sharps and Flats. Back in New York just ahead of the start of the Great Depression, steady stage work was getting harder to find. However, Joe still had kept some of his investments outside the stock market so he would not lose it all when the financial structure finally collapsed.
     Some of that capital was invested into a new show called Deep Harlem which opened in January 1929 at the Biltmore Theater. With a book by Salem Whitney and Homer Tutt, and lyrics by Tutt and veteran Henry Creamer, there was a lot of hope for this all black production. However it was pulled after only eight performances. During the year and into the early 1930s Jordan and his band were heard over the airwaves in New York from time to time, plus many appearances with him as an accompanist to an instrumentalist or singer.
     In the 1930 Census the family is found living in Manhattan on West 112th Street, with Joe listed as a band musician. They also had one boarder living with them, a Manhattan elevator operator. Evidently eager to still have a go at Broadway he engaged in a new show, Brown Buddies, a "Musical Comedy in Sepia." The core of the music was composed with Millard Thomas, but it also featured tunes by his colleagues Shelton Brooks, Ned Reed, Porter Grainger, J.C. Johnson, J. Rosamund Johnson, George A. Little, Arthur Sizemore and Edward G. Nelson. Opening at the Liberty Theatre in October it ran a fairly solid 111 performances into January 1931. The show didn't hurt for star power either, with dancer Bill "Bojangles" Robinson and singers Ada Brown and Adelaide Hall commanding the stage.
     In the summer of 1931 Joe was asked to help orchestrate some of the numbers for the somewhat depleted Ziegfeld Follies of that year. Things were tough for musicians and the American people in general over the next couple of years, but with the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in late 1932, opportunities for enterprising Americans were clearly around the corner, and Joe was most certainly one of them.
     Starting in 1933 Jordan led the WPA-sponsored Federal Theater Project's Negro Unit Orchestra throughout the 1930s. In 1935 he assisted with orchestrations for the Broadway revue Smile at Me which lasted nearly a month at the Fulton Theatre. For one production in 1936 which included James P. Johnson, Asadata Dafora and Porter Grainger, the Negro Unit Orchestra provided music for a production of William Shakespeare's Macbeth as staged by a young Orson Welles.

The Loew's State Theater c.1950.

The following year he was again engaged on Broadway, this time as the sole arranger for the musical comedy Sea Legs, which died after a mere two weeks at the Mansfield Theater.
     A great triumph came in 1939 when Jordan at last performed in Carnegie Hall, leading a 75 piece symphony orchestra and 350 voice choir for the ASCAP Silver Jubilee Festival. He had finally joined ASCAP just in advance of the event. The group opened the week of celebration with Left Every Voice and Sing by Rosamond and H. Weldon Johnson. In November 1939 it was announced that Joe had been hired by the (W.C.) Handy Brothers' Music Company to work in the arranging department, and as a liaison with broadcasting and recording concerns.
     After the Jubilee groups disbanded, Jordan once again found relevance and fulfilling work with many black Army bands and USO groups during World War II. He also did some benefits for the Red Cross. His 1942 Draft record shows him living at 188 W. 135th Street in Harlem, and employed by the Rubsam and Horrmann Brewery Company in Stapleton, Staten Island. Whether this was just a stop-gap job or if he was working as an investor or similar capacity is not clear. Part of the war was spent by Captain Joe Jordan posted at Fort Huachuca in Arizona to oversee the morale boosting needs of the Army's black soldiers. While there he organized bands and orchestra, wrote and arranged shows, staged dances, and formed a vocal group called the Deep River Boys. At one point racial tensions were running high on the base, and Jordan diffused them by distraction, starting a new show that involved everybody and kept them quite busy. He was forced to retire from his post in 1944 due to a proclamation from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt requiring personnel to step down at age 60, and he was 62 at the time. Still, he stayed on for another year in Arizona, and some copyrights and copyright renewals appear from that location in the 1945 Library of Congress records, including one written for the fort.
     After the war was over Joe was still musically viable, but in the changing musical world of New York City, less relevant in many respects. So it was that in the late 1940s Jordan sought out change again, migrating to Tacoma Washington where he would spend the rest of his life. In 1955 he surfaced as a lounge attendant for the state senate in Olympia. A picture of him playing during a break was accompanied by a statement that, "Once bitter about the 'color barrier,' Joe now feels prejudice is waning because of 'something changing in people's hearts.' This was right on the cusp of the Civil Rights movement in the Southeast United States, so he was definitely in touch with the pending change.
     Joe soon became involved with real estate once again in the late 1950s, and with great success, but he also continued to compose and publish songs. Among his final compositions was one crafted, perhaps commissioned, for the 100th anniversary of the founding of Tacoma. Historian Johnny Maddox also befriended Jordan during this period, and eventually came into a large number of his musical scores and private acetate recordings. The number of pieces he wrote varies, depending on source, from over 600 to perhaps 2000, most of them unpublished yet many of them still copyrighted with the Library of Congress.
     Another emerging ragtime figure to seek out Jordan was Robert Darch, who after working diligently to mine Jordan for information on his life story made a bold effort to secure his place in ragtime history via a recording. In 1962, Bob arranged a Florida recording session for Joe along with his two long-ago friends from New York and St. Louis, Charley Thompson and Eubie Blake. The resulting session, one of the first of its kind in glorious stereo, was issued as a special broadcast set and edited down to the Golden Reunion in Ragtime record on the Stereoddities label. It was reportedly one of the most joyous occasions of his later life, as well as Thompson's, and some of his great history is revealed through anecdotes along with solo and group performances.
     Jordan also found renewed fame with later editions of the pioneering book They All Played Ragtime by jazz historian Rudi Blesh and his friend Harriet Janis. In spite of all this, Joe stuck mostly to real estate and political involvement in Tacoma, performing only from time to time. Graduating from the position of senate lounge attendant, Jordan became the first black to serve in the Washington State Attorney General's office. His wife Irene passed on in the mid 1960s.
     Since the early 1960s Joe had known Tacoma pianist Lois Delano with whom he had done some mentoring and writing. She, in turn, recorded an album of Joe Jordan's pieces, The Music of Joe Jordan (Arpeggio Records No. 1205), two years ahead of Joshua Rifkin's famous record of Joplin piano rags. According to the press concerning the album, "Miss Delano studied for several years with Jordan who was 86 when this recording was made in 1968. She draws on his work from 1902 to 1920, concentrating on his rags, but including some songs and instrumental compositions. Jordan had a pleasant melodic flair and Miss Delano gives his pieces a lively treatment. On most of the selections she uses a strong, positive attack that eventually produces a sense of sameness, but she gives an appropriately sensitive interpretation to the gently glimmering 'Whippoorwill Rag.'" Few copies of this rare disc are in circulation today, but it has been featured on St. Louis station KDHX.
     There are three late events in his life that featured his playing. One was a 1970 concert with composer Shelton Brooks at the Wilshire Ebell Theater in Southern California arranged by historian Richard Zimmerman. Next was a Jazz and Ragtime Festival at the Nicholson Pavillion in Ellensburg, Washington on November 7, 1970, featuring Jordan, Eubie Blake, Bob Darch, guitarist John Lee Hooker, and the Ramsey Lewis Trio. Jordan's final performance was in Omaha, Nebraska on May 3, 1971 at Bill Bailey's Bar hosted by John and Janice Cleary.
     Joe Jordan finally left us on September 11, 1971, survived by his son, daughter and five grandchildren. He left behind a great legacy of important musical contributions and positive racial advances in his wake. While Jordan is still not in the same category as Scott Joplin in terms of piano rags, he certainly achieved considerably more over a much broader range of disciplines, and should continue to be recognized for those achievements as a musician and a person, not just as a black citizen. And that remains as one of his finest crowning achievements.