The Serenaders
In the years before World War II, Alcee Vaughn served as both the football coach and music instructor at the Natchitoches Parish Training School. Mr. Vaughn taught countless young Black and Creole musicians, many of whom went on to play professionally. Mr. Vaughn and some of his students formed the longstanding musical group, the Sensational Serenaders, later known as the Natchitoches Serenaders, then simply the Serenaders. This group played venues all over north Louisiana, from private blues clubs to Grambling State University. Musicians who got their start under Vaughn’s tutelage and went on to play professionally include Overton Owens, Preston Conant, Emile Dickson, John L. Lewis, Arthur Welch, and L. C. Cox, who recalled:
I was with what we used to call the Sensational Serenaders. Now that was with the Alcee Vaughn, Preston Conant, Emile Dixon, J. W. Antee and … Freddie Harris. I guess they picked me up because as a kid, any way to make a dime I would try it. So, the fellas kept urging me on one night over at, I think it was a place called Elton Burton’s Playhouse over in east Natchitoches. [They] said, ‘Why don’t you go up there and sing?’ And, well, I guess if you coerce a fellow right, you know, he thinks that there’s gold at the end of the rainbow.… Everybody in there had a few drinks anyway, so they wouldn’t have known the difference. So I goes up on the stage and I commence to try to sing the blues.
And … [they] hired me that night to travel with the Serenaders…. I was just a kid … and a nickel was a nickel to me, you know, so we played a nickel gig, dime gig, and that kept some moola in my pocket.
Urbach Collection, Box 8, 1958, CHRC