Rare Autograph Note Signed (“Hughes”) below another note written by “Mike” in Brooklyn, asking to meet Pollard at 125th Street in Harlem. NY, no date, probably 1914, before his departure for Europe. Provenance: From  Fritz Pollard family archive sold in 2011 by Todd Mueller Autographs.

Pollard wrote: “Sorry to have disappointed you but I didn’t see your letter until this A.M. [Mon?], What’s the real trouble… P.S. Ha ha, you know I am so busy.”

Hughes Pollard, who died prematurely at the age of 34, a popular Black Jazz musician before and after World War I, is mostly remembered today as the “flamboyant…crazy” elder brother of Black sports legend Fritz Pollard, who was destined to break racial barriers as one of the first Black players in the National Football League and then the very first African-American head coach in the NFL. Fritz was still in high school hen the theatrically handsome Hughes toured Hawaii and Australia, led a popular Chicago Jazz group, the “Melody Four”, then went to England as “one of the world’s leading trap drummers” with another Black band, arriving at the start of the World War. Remaining in Europe, he joined the French Army on the Western Front, where he was wounded in a gas attack. He married two white women (one French, one Australian), and returned to the US to carry on his musical career, but, in 1926, died in Chicago of his wartime maladies.