The government required that any alcohol manufactured for industrial purposes be denatured according to a certain formula. People definitely did die-but not because the U.S. Here, then, is how Nicholson claims this to be murder: Instead, he was most likely drinking alcohol that had been (legally) poisoned and, as we'll see, perhaps only partially (and illegally) un-poisoned. It was possible because he was not imbibing the high-quality liquor available to us today. People have asked me over the years how it was possible for someone like Bix, even assuming he was an alcoholic, to die so young. And if he also drank poisoned alcohol, then that exacerbated the effects of his illness. I think it's clear that Beiderbecke was an addict. This strikes me as not a very useful point. Denatured alcohol- not alcohol addiction-is what killed Beiderbecke, Nicholson writes. ![]() Following Sandke's lead, he reminds his readers that during Prohibition, the government poisoned, or "denatured," any alcohol manufactured for industrial use in order to prevent it from being consumed as a beverage. It turns out that Stuart Nicholson agrees. "Alcohol," Spencer writes, "was the 'poison' in Beiderbecke's system." Spencer quotes a letter from Beiderbecke to his friend Frank Trumbauer in which Bix complains of how "the poison in my system has settled in my knees and legs." And yet there is virtually no evidence of this, and what little there is comes to us on the authority of a non-physician.ĭr. And yet nowhere does Spencer-an actual medical authority-suggest that Beiderbecke's symptoms were inconsistent with alcoholism.įor readers to accept that Bix was murdered or at least poisoned by the federal government, they must accept that his health was destroyed by something other than his own alcoholism. Spencer, whose book Jazz and Death: Medical Profiles of Jazz Greats presents a physician's take on the same evidence, also argues that this incident did not involve a case of the DTs. It must have been something else, something more.Īnd yet what evidence does he provide? In a footnote he argues that Bix was not suffering from the DTs when he had his breakdown.Īs it happens, Dr. Beiderbecke's health problems could not have been caused simply by drinking a lot. This is the crucial premise of Sandke's-and Nicholson's-argument. It seems all too obvious that Beiderbecke's near fatal attack resulted not from prolonged use of alcohol, but rather sudden and acute poisoning caused by substances of far greater toxicity. Nevertheless, in the winter 2013 issue of the Journal of Jazz Studies, he published the article "Was Bix Beiderbecke Poisoned by the Federal Government?" In it, he refers to a breakdown that preceded Beiderbecke's stint in rehab, writing: But he is by no means a medical authority. Sandke, of course, is a wonderful horn player in the Beiderbecke style. But Nicholson, in his new book Jazz: A Beginner's Guide, offers a slightly different narrative.Ĭiting the musician Randy Sandke, he asserts that Beiderbecke's symptoms were "hardly consistent with prolonged use of alcohol, rather a sudden and acute poisoning-but with what?" That's the standard accounting of Bix's death, and it hardly suggests murder. Whatever the success of his subsequent treatment, it's fair to say that Beiderbecke's health never fully recovered, and when he caught pneumonia during the summer of 1931-pneumonia he may have been suffering from even while at Keeley-his immune system couldn't fight it off. After Beiderbecke had arrived and been examined, the doctor wrote to inform his mother that her son suffered from a loss of appetite, diarrhea, heart palpitations, dizziness, neuritis in the feet, an enlarged liver, balancing problems, and a tremor in his fingers. ![]() The records of his stay can still be found, of all places, at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum. In September of 1929-almost two years before the end-he was admitted to the Keeley Institute, in Dwight, Illinois, the nation's premier alcohol rehabilitation facility. ![]() Was someone out to get Bix? Did he have enemies I didn't know about?īeiderbecke was twenty-eight when he died and by nearly all accounts he was an alcoholic. Did I miss something in my research? I wondered. The British jazz critic Stuart Nicholson caught my attention the other day when he provocatively suggested that Bix Beiderbecke may have been murdered.
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