When Norman Sylvester was 12, long before he garnered the nickname “The Boogie Cat” or shared a stage with B.B. King, he boarded a train in Louisiana and headed west, toward the distant city of Portland, Oregon, where he would go on to shape Oregon's Black music history. He’d lived all his life in the rural South, eating wild muscadine grapes from his family’s farm, fishing in the bayou and churning butter at the kitchen table to the tune of his grandmother’s gospel singing. When his father, who’d gone to Portland in search of better job opportunities, sent for him, Sylvester felt he was being pulled from paradise.

 It was the fall of 1957, and Oregon had a long-standing reputation as a hostile place for Black families like Sylvester’s despite Oregon's Black music history, which was also shaped by this reputation. From 1844 until 1926, Oregon enacted a series of exclusion laws aimed at barring Black people from residing in the territory. The Oregon Donation Land Act of 1850 granted white settlers up to 640 free acres while prohibiting Black people from claiming any land at all. Oregon declined to ratify the 15th Amendment, and, in 1917, the state’s Supreme Court sanctioned racial discrimination in public places. By the 1920s, Oregon was home to the largest Ku Klux Klan chapter in the West.

Despite all this, Black people were among the earliest settlers to arrive in Oregon, where they carved out lives and sought equality amid these hostilities — the Portland chapter of the NAACP, formed in 1914, is the oldest operating chapter west of the Mississippi. But the state’s anti-Black policies were powerful deterrents: By the time Sylvester arrived, fewer than 1% of Oregon residents were African American, and Portland’s Black population was the smallest among major West Coast cities. This was in stark contrast to Sylvester’s hometown, and he stepped out of Portland’s Union Station into culture shock, shaping his later contributions to Oregon's Black music history.

Sylvester would soon start seventh grade at his first integrated school, and he needed a haircut. So the first place he ventured in his new city was a barbershop near the crossing of Williams Avenue and Russell Street in North Portland. When he reached the intersection, he found it bustling. A handsome brick building capped with an onion-shaped cupola stood on one corner, homes and businesses lined the others: a cafe, a drugstore, a produce market. And everywhere he looked, he saw just what he’d seen in Louisiana: “African American people — in charge of businesses, driving nice cars up and down the street, strutting their stuff.” Later, he’d compare the scene to Harlem, but that day it only reminded him of the place he’d left behind. Despite the thousands of miles stretching between him and the muscadine grapes twining his grandmother’s fence lines, standing on the corner that day he felt at home, foreshadowing his contributions to Oregon's Black music history. Even the air was familiar, laced with the scents of Southern cooking and carrying riffs of gospel and jazz. “The place just embraced me,” Sylvester recalled recently. “Everybody was singing the same song, if you know what I mean.”

Read the full article about Oregon's Black music history by Jaclyn Moyer at High Country News.