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The coal fields of West Virginia would seem an unlikely market for big band jazz during the Great Depression. That a prosperous African American audience, dominated by those involved with the coal industry, was there for jazz tours would seem equally improbable. This book shows that, contrary to expectations, black Mountaineers flocked to dances by the hundreds, in many instances traveling considerable distances to hear bands led by Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Andy Kirk, Jimmie Lunceford, and Chick Webb, among numerous others. Indeed, as one musician who toured the state would recall, “All the bands were goin’ to West Virginia.” The comparative prosperity of the coal miners, thanks to New Deal industrial policies, was what attracted the bands to the state. This study discusses that prosperity, as well as the larger political environment that provided black Mountaineers with a degree of autonomy not experienced further south. The author demonstrates the importance of radio and the black press both in introducing this music and in keeping black West Virginians up to date with its latest developments. The book explores connections between local entrepreneurs who staged the dances and the national management of the bands that played those engagements. In analyzing black audiences’ aesthetic preferences, the author reveals that many black West Virginians preferred dancing to a variety of music, not just jazz. Finally, the book shows that bands now associated almost exclusively with jazz were more than willing to satisfy those audience preferences with arrangements in other styles of dance music.

When record men first traveled from Chicago or invited musicians to studios in New York, these entrepreneurs had no conception how their technology would change the dynamics of what constituted a musical performance. This book covers a revolution in artist performance and audience perception through close examination of hundreds of key “hillbilly” and “race” records released between the 1920s and World War II. In the postwar period, regional strains recorded on pioneering 78 r.p.m. discs exploded into urban blues and R&B, honky-tonk and western swing, gospel, soul, and rock ‘n’ roll. These old-time records preserve the work of some of America’s greatest musical geniuses, such as Jimmie Rodgers, Robert Johnson, Charlie Poole, and Blind Lemon Jefferson. They are also crucial mile markers in the course of American popular music and the growth of the modern recording industry. When these records first circulated, the very notion of recorded music was still a novelty. All music had been created live and tied to particular, intimate occasions. How were listeners to understand an impersonal technology such as the phonograph record as a musical event? How could they reconcile firsthand interactions and traditional customs with technological innovations and mass media? The records themselves, several hundred of which are explored fully in this book, offer answers in scores of spoken commentaries and skits, in song lyrics and monologues, or other more subtle means.

This book stands as both a remarkable biography of J. Frank G. Boom (1920–1953) and a recovery of his incredible contribution to blues scholarship originally titled The Blues: Satirical Songs of the North American Negro. The book tells how and when the Netherlands was introduced to African American blues music and describes the equally dramatic and peculiar friendship that existed between Boom and jazz critic and musicologist Will Gilbert, who worked for the Kultuurkamer during World War II and had been charged with the task of formulating the Nazi's Jazzverbod, the decree prohibiting the public performance of jazz. The book ends with the annotated and complete text of Boom's The Blues, providing the international world at last with an English version of the first book-length study of the blues. At the end of the 1960s, a series of 13 blues paperbacks edited by Paul Oliver for the London publisher November Books began appearing. One manuscript landed on his desk that had been written in 1943 by a then 23-year-old Frank (Frans) Boom. Its publication was announced on the back jacket of the last three Blues Paperbacks in 1971 and 1972. Yet it never was published and the manuscript once more disappeared. In October 1996, Dutch blues expert and publicist Verbei went in search of the presumably lost manuscript and the story behind its author. It only took him a couple of months to track down the manuscript, but it took another ten years to glean the full story behind the extraordinary Frans Boom, who passed away in 1953 in Indonesia.

This book explores how the blues became a part of New Orleans jazz. In so doing it demonstrates how the principles of barbershop harmony were applied to the instrumentation of a jazz band to produce jazz counterpoint. Using unpublished archive material and existing scholarship this book discuses the role that Buddy Bolden and Bunk Johnson played in the early years of jazz. It also clarifies the role that the white musicians and Creole musicians played both historically and musically in the development of jazz, the blues, and ragtime, in New Orleans.

Edward “Kid” Ory (1886–1973) was a trombonist, composer, recording artist, and early New Orleans jazz band leader. This book tells his story from birth on a rural sugar cane plantation in a French-speaking, ethnically mixed family, to his emergence in New Orleans as the city’s hottest band leader. The Ory band featured such future jazz stars as Louis Armstrong and King Oliver, and was widely considered New Orleans’s top “hot” band. Ory’s career took him from New Orleans to California, where he and his band created the first African American New Orleans jazz recordings ever made. In 1925 Ory moved to Chicago, where he made records with Oliver, Armstrong, and Jelly Roll Morton, and captured the spirit of the jazz age. His most famous composition from that period, “Muskrat Ramble,” is a jazz standard. Retired from music during the Depression, Ory returned in the 1940s and enjoyed a reignited career. Drawing on oral history and Ory’s unpublished autobiography, the book is a story that is told in large measure by Ory himself. The author reveals Ory’s personality to the reader and shares remarkable stories of incredible innovations of the jazz pioneer. The book also features unpublished Ory compositions, photographs, and a selected discography of Ory’s most significant recordings.

This book explores sacred music and spiritual activism in a little-known region of the South, the Wiregrass Country of Georgia, Alabama, and North Florida. It examines African American sacred music outside of Sunday church-related activities, showing that singing conventions and anniversary programs fortify spiritual as well as social needs. In this region African Americans maintain a social world of their own creation. Their cultural performances embrace some of the most pervasive forms of African American sacred music—spirituals, common meter, Sacred Harp, shape-note, traditional, and contemporary gospel. Moreover, the contexts in which African Americans sing include present-day observations such as the Twentieth of May (Emancipation Day), Burial League Turnouts, and Fifth Sunday. Rather than tracing the evolution of African American sacred music, this ethnographic study focuses on contemporary cultural performances, almost all by women, which embrace all forms. These women promote a female-centered theology to ensure the survival of their communities and personal networks, and function in leadership roles that withstand the test of time. Their spiritual activism presents itself as a way of life. In Wiregrass Country, “You don’t have to sing like an angel” is a frequently expressed sentiment. To these women, “good” music is God’s music regardless of the manner delivered.

Free Jazz/Black Power is a treatise on the racial and political implications of jazz and jazz criticism published in 1971 by two French jazz critics, Philippe Carles and Jean-Louis Comolli. The goal of the book was to show that the strong and mostly negative reactions provoked by free jazz among classic jazz critics on both sides of the Atlantic could be better understood by analyzing the social, cultural and political origins of jazz itself, exposing its ties to African American culture, history, and the political struggle that was still raging in early 1970s USA. The authors analyze the circumstances of the production of jazz criticism as discourse, a work of cultural studies in a time and place where the practice as such was completely unknown. The book owes much to African American cultural and political thought. Carles and Comolli suggest that the African American struggle had to be seen as a singular branch of a worldwide class struggle, echoing more famous figures of the French Left of the time, such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, or Jean Genêt. Yet few were those that had articulated this de rigueur political backing with an in-depth cultural critique and analysis of the condition of African Americans informed by African Americans themselves.

This ethnography examines songwriters Bill and Gloria Gaithers’ Homecoming video and concert series. The Homecomings re-present the “southern gospel” subgenre of gospel music—a musical style popular among white evangelical Christians in the American South and Midwest. The book explores how the Gaithers negotiate the tension between preservation and modification of community norms as they seek simultaneously to maintain and expand their audience, and to initiate and respond to ideological shifts within their fan base’s culture. Using data he collected from his immersion in the Homecoming catalogue, his attendance of numerous concerts and tapings, and his extensive conversations with Homecoming fans and the Gaithers themselves, Harper reveals the Homecomings to be a crucible of American religious, racial, sexual and regional identity formation.

George P. Knauff's Virginia Reels (1839) was the first collection of southern fiddle tunes and the only substantial one published in the nineteenth century. Knauff's activity could not anticipate our modern contest-driven fiddle subcultures. But the fate of the Virginia Reels pointed in that direction, suggesting that southern fiddling, after his time, would happen outside of commercial popular culture even though it would sporadically engage that culture. This book uses this seminal collection as the springboard for a fresh exploration of fiddling in America, past and present. It first discusses the life of the arranger. Then it explains how this collection was meant to fit into the broad stream of early nineteenth-century music publishing. The book describes the character of these fiddle tunes' names (and such titles in general), what we can learn about antebellum oral tradition from this collection, and how fiddling relates to blackface minstrelsy. Throughout, the book connects the evidence concerning both repertoire and practice found in the Virginia Reels with current southern fiddling, encompassing styles ranging from straightforward to fancy—old-time styles of the Upper South, exuberant West Virginia styles, and the melodic improvisations of modern contest fiddling. Twenty-six song sheets assist in this discovery. The book incorporates performance descriptions and music terminology into his accessible, engaging prose. The book presents an extended look at the history of southern fiddling and a close examination of current practices.

This book offers a history of the guitar from America’s late Victorian period to the Jazz Age. The narrative traces America’s BMG (banjo, mandolin, and guitar) community, a late nineteenth-century musical and commercial movement dedicated to introducing these instruments into America’s elite musical establishments. Using surviving BMG magazines, the author details an almost unknown history of the guitar during the movement’s heyday, tracing the guitar’s transformation from a refined parlor instrument to a mainstay in jazz and popular music. In the process, he not only introduces musicians (including numerous women guitarists) who led the movement, but also examines new techniques and instruments. Chapters consider the BMG movement’s impact on jazz and popular music, the use of the guitar to promote attitudes toward women and minorities, and the challenges foreign guitarists such as Miguel Llobet and Andres Segovia presented to America’s musicians. The book opens a new chapter on the guitar in America, considering its cultivated past and documenting how banjoists and mandolinists aligned their instruments to it in an effort to raise social and cultural standing. At the same time, it considers the BMG community within America’s larger musical scene, examining its efforts as manifestations of this country’s uneasy coupling of musical art and commerce.

Jazz as an instrument of global diplomacy transformed superpower relations in the Cold War era and reshaped democracy’s image worldwide. This book tells the story of America’s program of jazz diplomacy practiced in the Soviet Union and other regions of the world from 1954 to 1968. Jazz music and jazz musicians seemed an ideal card to play in diminishing the credibility and appeal of Soviet communism in the Eastern bloc and beyond. Government-funded musical junkets by such jazz masters as Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, and Benny Goodman dramatically influenced perceptions of the United States and its capitalist brand of democracy while easing political tensions in the midst of critical Cold War crises. The book shows how, when coping with foreign questions about desegregation, the dispute over the Berlin Wall, the Cuban missile crisis, Vietnam, and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, jazz players and their handlers wrestled with the inequalities of race and the emergence of class conflict while promoting America in a global context. And, as jazz musicians are wont to do, many of these ambassadors riffed off-script when the opportunity arose. The book argues that this musical method of winning hearts and minds often transcended economic and strategic priorities. Even so, the goal of containing communism remained paramount, and prevailed over America’s policy of redefining relations with emerging new nations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

Typically, a photograph of a jazz musician has several formal prerequisites: black and white film, an urban setting in the mid-twentieth century, and a black man standing, playing, or sitting next to his instrument. That’s the jazz archetype that photography created. This book reveals how such a steadfast script developed visually and what this convention meant for the music. Album covers, magazines, books, documentaries, art photographs, posters, and various other visual extensions of popular culture formed the commonly held image of the jazz player. Through assimilation, there emerged a generalized composite of how mainstream jazz looked and sounded. The book evaluates representations of jazz musicians from 1945 to 1959, concentrating on the seminal role played by Herman Leonard (b. 1923). Leonard’s photographic depictions of African American jazz musicians in New York not only created a visual template of a black musician of the 1950s, but also became the standard configuration of the music’s neoclassical sound today. To discover how the image of the musician affected mainstream jazz, the book examines readings from critics, musicians, and educators, as well as interviews, musical scores, recordings, transcriptions, liner notes, and oral narratives.

When Bitches Brew was released, it was not just another jazz album, but a major single event, with ramifications rippling over the next forty-plus years. Not only did Miles Davis change the face of jazz once again by launching the entire jazz-fusion movement, he changed all of modern music. Listen to This looks in detail at the making of Bitches Brew, exploring the inner workings of Davis at his creative peak, and provides resolution to many of the controversies that have plagued this record since its inception. It revisits the mysteries surrounding the album and places it into both a historical and musical context using new interviews, original analysis, recently found recordings, unearthed session data sheets, letters, musical transcriptions, scores, and other associated data. Listen to This is not just the story of Bitches Brew. It reveals the legend of Miles Davis, his attitude, his relationship to the masses, his business and personal etiquette, and his response to extraordinary social conditions determined to bring him down. Listen to This unveils this iconic figure’s complex psyche and his impact on both the fine arts and popular culture through one of the greatest recordings ever made.

Joe Davis, the focus of this book, enjoyed a 50-year career in the music industry, which covered nearly every aspect of the business. He hustled sheet music in the 1920s; copyrighted compositions by artists as diverse as Fats Waller, Carson Robison, Otis Blackwell, and Rudy Vallee; oversaw hundreds of recording sessions; and operated several record companies, beginning in the 1940s. Davis also worked fearlessly to help insure that black recording artists and song writers gained equal treatment for their work. Much more than a biography, this book is an investigation of the role played by music publishers during much of the twentieth century. Davis was not a music “great,” but he was one of those individuals who enabled “greats” to emerge. A musician, manager, and publisher, his long career reveals much about the nature of the music industry and offers insight into how the industry changed from the 1920s to the 1970s. By the summer of 1924, when Davis was handling the “Race talent” for Ajax records, he had already worked in the music business for nearly a decade and there was more than five decades of musical career ahead of him. The fact that his life has gone so long under-appreciated is remedied by the publication of Never Sell A Copyright. Originally published in England, in 1990, Never Sell a Copyright: Joe Davis and His Role in the New York Music Scene, 1916–1978 was never released in the United States.

When Mississippi John Hurt (1892–1966) was “rediscovered” by blues revivalists in 1963, his musicianship and recordings transformed popular notions of prewar country blues. At seventy-one he moved to Washington, D.C., from Avalon, Mississippi, and became a live-wire connection to a powerful, authentic past. Hurt's intricate and lively style made him the most sought-after musician among the many talents the revival brought to light. This book provides this legendary creator's life story. The author traces Hurt's roots to the moment his mother Mary Jane McCain and his father Isom Hurt were freed from slavery. Anecdotes from Hurt's childhood and teenage years include the destiny-making moment when his mother purchased his first guitar for $1.50, when he was only nine years old. Stories from his neighbors and friends, from both of his wives, and from his extended family round out the community picture of Avalon. U.S. census records, Hurt's first marriage record in 1916, images of his first autographed LP record, and excerpts from personal letters written in his own hand provide treasures for fans. The author details Hurt's musical influences, and the origins of his style and repertoire. He also relates numerous stories from the time of Hurt's success, drawing on published sources and many hours of interviews with people who knew Hurt well, including the late Jerry Ricks, Pat Sky, Stefan Grossman and Max Ochs, Dick Spottswood, and the late Mike Stewart. In addition, some of the last photographs taken of the legendary musician are featured.

This book offers historical and theoretical readings of Caribbean and African American interaction from the 1700s to the present. By analyzing travel narratives, histories, creative collaborations, and political exchanges, it traces the development of African American/Caribbean dialogue through the lives and works of four key individuals: historian Arthur Schomburg, writer/archivist Zora Neale Hurston, poet Jayne Cortez, and politician Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The book examines how these influential figures have reevaluated popular culture, revised the relationship between intellectuals and everyday people, and transformed practices ranging from librarianship and anthropology to poetry and broadcast journalism. This discourse, the book notes, is not free of contradictions, and misunderstandings arise on both sides. In addition to noting dialogues of unity, the book focuses on instances of intellectual elitism, sexism, color prejudice, imperialism, national chauvinism, and other forms of mutual disdain that continue to limit African American and Caribbean solidarity.

This book traces the career of racial uplift ideology as a factor in elite African Americans’ embrace of classical music around the turn of the previous century, from the collapse of Reconstruction to the death of composer/conductor R. Nathaniel Dett, whose music epitomized “uplift.” After Reconstruction, many black leaders had retreated from emphasizing “inalienable rights” to a narrower rationale for equality and inclusion: they now sought to rehabilitate the Race’s image by stressing class distinctions, respectable middle-class behavior, and service to the masses. Musically, the black intelligentsia resorted to European models as vehicles for cultural vindication. Their response to racism was to create and promote morally positive, politically inoffensive art that represented the Race in idealized terms. By incorporating black folk elements into the dignified genres of art song, symphony, and opera, “uplifters” demonstrated worthiness through high achievement in acknowledged arenas. Their efforts were variously opposed, tolerated, or supported by a range of white elites with their own notions about black culture. The resulting conversation—more a stew of arguments than a dialogue—occupied the pages of black newspapers and informed the work of white philanthropists. Women also played crucial roles. The book examines the lives and thought of personalities central to musical uplift—Dett, Sears CEO Julius Rosenwald, author James Monroe Trotter, sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois, journalist Nora Douglas Holt, and others—with an eye to recognizing their contributions and restoring their stature.

To borrow words from Stan “The Record Man” Lewis, Shreveport, Louisiana, is one of America’s most important “regional-sound cities.” Its musical distinctiveness has been shaped by individuals and ensembles, record label and radio station owners, announcers and disc jockeys, club owners and sound engineers, music journalists and musicians. The area’s output cannot be described by a single genre or style. Rather, its music is a kaleidoscope of country, blues, R&B, rockabilly, and rock. This book presents that evolution in a collection of scholarly and popular writing that covers institutions and people who nurtured the musical life of the city and its surroundings. The contributions of icons such as Leadbelly and Hank Williams, and such lesser-known names as Taylor-Griggs Melody Makers and Eddie Giles, come to light. New writing explores the famed Louisiana Hay-ride, musicians Jimmie Davis and Dale Hawkins, local disc jockey “Dandy Don” Logan, and KWKH studio sound engineer Bob Sullivan. With glimpses into the lives of original creators, the book reveals the mix that emerges from the ongoing interaction between the city’s black and white musicians.

This book explores the phenomenon of American fiddle contests, which now have replaced dances as the main public event where American fiddlers get together. It studies this change and what it means for audiences, musicians, traditions, and the future of southern fiddle music. The book traces fiddling and fiddle contests from mid-eighteenth-century Scotland to the modern United States. It takes the reader on journeys to the important large contests, such as those in Hallettville, Texas; Galax, Virginia; Weiser, Idaho; and also to smaller ones, including his favorite in Athens, Alabama. The book reveals what happens on stage and during such off-stage activities as camping, jamming, and socializing, which many fiddlers consider much more important than the competition. Through multiple interviews, the book also reveals the fiddlers’ lives as told in their own words. The reader learns how and in what environments these fiddlers started playing, where they perform today, how they teach, what they think of contests, and what values they believe fiddling supports. The book shows how such contests have become living embodiments of American nostalgia.

Wilbur C. Sweatman (1882–1961) is one of the most important, yet unheralded, African American musicians involved in the transition of ragtime into jazz in the early twentieth century. This book tracks this energetic pioneer over a seven-decade career. Sweatman’s talent transformed every genre of black music before the advent of rock and roll: “pickaninny” bands, minstrelsy, circus sideshows, vaudeville (both black and white), night clubs, and cabarets. Sweatman was the first African American musician to be offered a long-term recording contract, and he dazzled listeners with jazz clarinet solos before the Original Dixieland Jazz Band’s so-called “first jazz records.” He toured the vaudeville circuit for over twenty years and presented African American music to white music lovers without resorting to the hitherto obligatory “plantation” costumes and blackface makeup. Sweatman’s bands were a fertile breeding ground of young jazz talent, featuring such future stars as Duke Ellington, Coleman Hawkins, and Jimmie Lunceford. Sweatman subsequently played pioneering roles in radio and recording production. His high profile and sterling reputation in both the black and white entertainment communities made him a natural choice for administering the estate of Scott Joplin and other notable black performers and composers. This book is a full-length biography of this pivotal figure in black popular culture, providing an account of his life and times.