Reconstructing a Life: Charles ‘Buddy’ Bolden

Michael Ondaatje’s novel Coming through Slaughter is a fascinating attempt to bring literature and oral history together in order to recreate Charles ‘Buddy’ Bolden’s mysterious life. Daily routines and gestures, inner thoughts and high musical notes form a puzzle to which the citizens of the flamboyant New Orleans keep adding pieces. With the help of his only existing photograph, the present paper focuses on the unquestionable father of jazz, who kept “away from recorded history”.