Marsalis matriarch, Dolores Marsalis, dies
24th July 2017 · 0 Comments
By Geraldine Wyckoff
Contributing Writer
“She was New Orleans through and through,” says Ellis Marsalis III of his mother, Dolores Marsalis. “Her Uncle Pomp, our great uncle, used to use the term old Creole girl,” adds the poet/photographer and the third- oldest son of Dolores and Ellis Marsalis Jr. Dolores Ferdinand Marsalis, a native of the Crescent City and matriarch of the renowned musical Marsalis family, died on July 18, 2017. She was 80.
Her husband, pianist/composer Ellis Jr., who Dolores married in 1959, says she helped him and their six sons, Branford, Wynton, Ellis III, Delfeayo, Mboya and Jason, in so many major and minor ways – “she took care of us all.” “She was always supportive in whatever they wanted to do constructively.”
“She would encourage us in art in general – art, music, poetry – whether she liked it or not,” said trumpeter Wynton Marsalis in a 2014 interview. “My mother is really intelligent and she also has a lot of integrity and creativity – everything she did would be original,” he continued. “Her way of talking was original, the food that she cooked was original and the way she would joke around or mess with you would be original.”
“She could definitely be funny – just straight-up,” her husband remembers. “She would speak her mind.”
Dolores Marsalis, not her noted husband, is actually the one who came from a musical family. “She was related on her daddy’s side to William Braud who was a bassist with the Duke Ellington band and on her mother’s side she was related to (clarinetist) Alphonse Picou,” Ellis Jr. explains. “She was also related to the Eugene brothers, trombonists Eugene and Homer and the (musically involved) Ferdinands, Kenneth, Keith and Kalamu ya Salaam.”
Dolores Marsalis attended St. Mary’s Academy High School and Grambling State University. Though her large family naturally kept her busy at home, Dolores did make use of her diploma by occasionally working as a substitute teacher. “Everywhere she went, the principal, who was a good principal, always wanted her to come back,” says her husband.
“Fortunately, I was able to consistently work so we could keep up with the bills,” he continues. “Neither one of us were ‘things’ people. When I say ‘things’ people I mean we didn’t have a big car, we didn’t have big liquor bills, we didn’t have any of that so consequently we were able to function with a degree of consistency which helps in the long haul.”
The couple continued to live in the modest uptown home they bought in 1975 until the present. There was a brief departure in 1986 as they left New Orleans when Ellis Jr. accepted a position at the Virginia Commonwealth University. “Dolores kept me from selling the house,” he once remembered – “I tried though.”
“My mother was the disciplinarian in the house,” saxophonist Branford, the eldest son, declared in an interview in 2014. “With dad in charge, we could have gotten away with almost anything, save burning the house down. Mama didn’t play that shit, at all. She has a good ear for music even with no training and so when we sounded like crap, my dad would just laugh, understanding it as part of the process. Mom would let us have it.”
“She was always big on them practicing – always,” her husband agrees.
“The way that we are creative comes more from my mother – she is really creative in a certain kind of way,” trombonist Delfeayo, the fourth son once explained. “We are all more like my mother than my father. My dad played music and brought home the bacon and my mother did, basically, everything else. It was always important to her that we had a strong male figure in the house. That goes back to the old southern woman/southern man. Typically, the man is more laid back and the woman is more fiery. Then when you have people of color who had to ride in the back of the bus and came from that segregated era that was amplified even more. It was the woman who was allowed to have a lot of spirit.”
Facing the challenge of Mboya’s autism was at first difficult for Delores, says her husband. “As time went on she began to develop a certain amount of patience because it took awhile for her to accept the fact that he was not going to be what people call ‘normal,’” he explains. Dolores made sure, as she did with all of her sons, that Mboya received an education and Mboya would also occasionally accompany her when she would come out to her husband’s or one of their sons’ gigs.
In earlier years, it would be Jason by her side at Snug Harbor. When the yet-to-become a noted drummer and vibraphonist was around eight years old, he’d fall asleep with his head on his mother’s lap until it was time for him to sit in with his dad. Dolores’ pride in her youngest boy would glow from her face with no trace of her reputation as the person who ruled the Marsalis household.
“She was a very tough person to be around in the sense that she made you better at whatever it was that you were doing,” explains Ellis III, who, as a student of English history, sometimes calls himself Ellis the Younger. “The process was an arduous one and it wasn’t always an enjoyable one but the outcome was (enjoyable).”
He offers an example of the benefits of his mother’s determined style of raising her children by relating his experience in a U.S. Army boot camp where, he says, 25 percent of the enlistees dropped out because they couldn’t take the pressure. “It wasn’t really that difficult for me,” he offers. “When I looked back at it, I attribute most of that to Dolores. The appreciation was really in hindsight.”
Dolores Marsalis was a strong woman – she had to be as the mother of six sons and raising them on her husband’s salary as a musician and teacher. She also had an extremely engaging, welcoming personality and liked to laugh. Dolores made others smile too with her very individual, what Ellis III calls “sharp” sense of humor. “You know the term brutal honesty – you had to be ready for it,” he explains with a laugh.
At The Ellis Marsalis – A Jazz Celebration, a recorded concert in recognition of Ellis Marsalis Jr.’s retirement from his endowed chair at the University of New Orleans, vocalist, pianist and honorary “member” of the Marsalis family, Harry Connick Jr. hit it on the head when he declared: “If Ellis deserved a chair, Delores deserves a throne.”
The celebration of the life of Dolores Marsalis includes a viewing on Monday, July 31, 2017 at the Rhodes Funeral Home, 3933 Washington Avenue. Services will be held at the Mater Dolorosa Church, 8128 Plum Street on Tuesday, August 1, 2017. Times to be announced.
This article originally published in the July 24, 2017 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
