Johhny Dodds returned to N.O.

The best information we have on how Johnny Dodds began his professional
music career is from Pops Foster’s autobiography:
I got Johnny Dodds his first job around New Orleans with Ory about
1909. Johnny was working at the rice mill and at noon they’d stop for lunch.
He would come out on the road to sit and eat his lunch, and practice blowing
his clarinet. I’d be driving by on a wagon and I’d stop to listen to him play.
After I heard him several times out on the road, I asked him if he wanted a
job playing in a band. He said he did, so I met him that night and carried
him down to Globe’s Hall where Ory was playing. He played with the band
and Ory liked the way he did, so he hired him. Ory’s band was the only one
Johnny played with until he left New Orleans.33

The date of 1909 for Dodds’s first job is likely too early. Baby said his
brother received his first clarinet in 1909 and Dodds himself stated that his first
professional job began in 1912.

Johnny Dodds had a natural musical ability that revealed itself at an early
age. Influenced by his mother and father, who themselves were amateur musicians,
Dodds taught himself to play the clarinet. While growing up in New Orleans, a
focal point of early jazz music, Dodds was able to listen to and emulate some of the
greatest musicians of the period. He became proficient enough to gain the attention
of jazz bassist Pops Foster, who recommended him for his first job with Kid Ory’s
Creole Orchestra in 1909. From that point on, Dodds continued to play with a
variety of bands, including Papa Celestin’s Original Tuxedo Band, King Oliver’s
Creole Jazz Band, Jelly Roll Morton’s Red Hot Peppers, Louis Armstrong’s Hot
Five and Hot Seven, and various groups of his own, such as the Black Bottom
Stompers, the Chicago Footwarmers, the Dixieland Stompers, Johnny Dodds Hot
Six, the State Street Ramblers and the Washboard Band.