9: Django: The Life and Music of a Gypsy Legend, Michael Dregni

This took me forever to read, not because it's bad (it's actually quite good), but because I am reading a million things at once. Some amusing or interesting bits: When going to England in 1934:

Django refused to fly and confessed a horror of boats. When Ekyan queried him, Django replied mysteriously, "Because there are spies!"

Dregni claims that Bojangles was part of James Reese Europe's band during World War I. He was almost certainly not, though many modern sources claim so. Noble Sissle wrote about James Europe and the 369th Hellfighters band in 1918 in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. He used some language interesting to jazz and swing dancers:

The audience could stand it no longer, the jazz "germ" hit them and it seemed to find the vital spot, loosening all muscles and causing what is known in America as an "eagle rocking it."

And a little later in the same article:

To everyone's surprise, all of a sudden [an old French woman, about 60 years of age] started doing a dance that resembled "Walking the Dog." Then I was cured and satisfied that American music would one day be the world's music.

I also learned paguba means "raiding party" in at least some Romani languages. The Romanian pagubă derives from Slavic paguba, "loss." It's not clear to me which direction the borrowing went. Dregni of course shares the famous story of Django hearing his first (?) Armstrong records and groaning "oh, my brother."