Jazz Chapter 3 Vocabulary

"Down Home Rag" musical structure

"Down Home Rag" has four strains. The first two (A and B) are nearly identical: they share a chord progression and end with the same fragment of melody. As we might expect, the trio (strain C) offers contrast by modulating to a nearby key; this trio, however, is the same length as the other strains. In between repetitions of C, the fourth strain (D) moves to the minor mode. Throughout this short, exuberant recording, Sweatman is the focus of attention, performing his composed melodies with unmistakable enthusiasm. But when repeating a strain, he is just as likely to take off in unpredictable directions. It may be too much to call what he does "improvising": as with many early jazz artists, his variations have a limited range. Still, the swooping blue notes and the piercing timbre of his clarinet suggest what many ragtime musicians may have been doing in live performance at that time.

"the buzzard lope" ("throw me anywhere lord")

"The Buzzard Lope" is a spiritual dance with African origins. At death, slaves were often thrown into a field, where their bodies were devoured by buzzards. In the dance, singers gathered in a circle, leaving a piece of cloth in the center to represent the body. As they danced, individual singers would enter the ring, imitating a circling buzzard and snatching the carrion. The text is defiant: the superior power of "King Jesus" will protect the slaves, even under the most horrific conditions. The song is done in call-and-response style. In the version by the Georgia Sea Island Singers, the venerable folk singer Bessie Jones takes the lead, answered by a chorus of seven men. Each separate call and response makes one cycle, with the refrain (the same words) recurring in several of them. The singers clap two rhythms: a backbeat and a polyrhythmic background (counted 3 + 3 + 2), underneath the chorus. But when Jones enters with her call slightly ahead of the beat, the clappers extend the polyrhythm (3 + 3 + 3 + 3 + 3). Through intense repetition and syncopation, the music moves irresistibly forward until the singers abruptly cut it off.

Jim Crow

A crippled stable hand known as Jim Crow morphed into a character so thoroughly identified with racial exploitation that the phrase "Jim Crow" became shorthand for the entire Southern legal system of post-Reconstruction segregation.

Black Minstrel Troupes

After the Civil War, something happened that caught white minstrel troupes unprepared. Major white producers organized black minstrel troupes, and white audiences soon began favoring the black troupes, which were judged more authentic—even though the black performers were obliged to play the same characters that the white imitators had created. By this point, minstrelsy was as rigorously structured as the circus, and audiences demanded the usual characters, including Tambo and Mr. Bones, the so-called endmen (men at each end of a line of performers) who made leering yet oddly impotent jokes. Blacks were pleased to get work and to travel the country, but they had to wear the burnt cork masks, wigs, and clothing, disguising their individual talents (and complexions) behind characters as fixed as the clowns in commedia dell'arte. In the late 1890s, black performers danced the cakewalk dressed in high fashion, encouraging white audiences to follow their step. Even under these conditions, black minstrelsy created genuine stars—like Billy Kersands, a comedian whose facial muscles were so malleable he could hold a cup and saucer in his mouth. James Bland, a Howard-educated performer and songwriter, wrote several standard minstrel songs (an area dominated by the great white melodist Stephen Foster), including "O Dem Golden Slippers" and the ballad "Carry Me Back to Old Virginny,"

early role of music in African American labor

After the Civil War, when blacks were pushed toward manual labor, music was one of the few skilled professions open to them. Like a butler, cook, or maid, a black musician hired to play tunes for dancing became a domestic servant, wearing livery (or the conventional black tuxedo) as a symbol of his role. His position in society was elegant and profitable, if clearly subservient. This situation held until a revolution shook the world of dance.

end of minstrel shows

As jazz made its first inroads into popular culture, the minstrel show was on its last legs. Stars like the immensely versatile comedian, mime, and songwriter Bert Williams and the majestic tap dancer Bill "Bojangles" Robinson moved their acts to the vaudeville stage.

brass bands instrumentation

As the dance craze gathered steam in the early decades of the twentieth century, brass bands thinned their ranks to small dance ensembles, often led by a violinist but featuring wind instruments central to jazz: cornet, clarinet, and trombone. Cymbals, bass drum, and snare drum were combined into the modern drum set. Duple-meter marches—sometimes in a straight 2/4, at other times in a jauntier meter (6/8) with the beat divided into threes—were easily adapted for dancing.

origins of the blues

At the dawn of the twentieth century, the blues began to emerge out of earlier African American folk music: a new poetic genre marked by its unusual three-line stanza. Earlier forms of folk poetry usually fell into stanzas of two or four lines, but the blues took the two-line couplet and repeated the first line. It became a musical form through its distinctive chord progression in the accompaniment to ballads such as "Frankie and Johnnie," a story of romantic betrayal from St. Louis that falls roughly into a twelve-bar pattern. The earliest blues melodies borrowed their rhythmic flexibility from the field holler, prompting some musicians to observe that the blues was "as old as the hills."

spread of African American musicians to piano

At the time of the Civil War, "ragged time" would have been heard chiefly on the banjo, the black instrument par excellence. But over the next half century, black performers were able to take up piano—the very symbol of middle-class gentility, and yet sturdy enough to find a home in the lower-class saloons on the fringe of every urban community, white or black. Musicians who stumbled onto this instrument found that the same polyrhythms that enlivened banjo playing fit naturally under a pianist's fingers. The left hand kept a steady, two-beat rhythmic foundation: low bass notes alternating with higher chords. Against this background, the right hand was free to add contrasting rhythms that contradicted the duple meter. To "rag" a piece meant to subject it to this process of rhythmic complication.

Bessie Smith

BESSIE SMITH (1894-1937) The most popular blues diva of the era, the "Empress of the Blues," Bessie Smith, possessed an extraordinarily powerful voice that she had learned to project in crowded halls long before microphones were introduced onstage. If her brassy attack was matched by a storming temperament, she also displayed a rare sensitivity in adapting her style to the demands of the recording studio. In a career that lasted only fourteen years, Smith made nearly two hundred records, beginning at OKeh Records in 1923 and establishing the standard by which other blues singers were measured. Some of her accompanists, most notably Louis Armstrong, were already familiar with the blues. For others, recording with Bessie amounted to a crash course in the music, with accompanists scurrying to match her nuances in phrasing and tone. Smith's career peaked in 1929, the same year she made her only film appearance, as a downhearted lover in the seventeen-minute short St. Louis Blues. Thereafter, the Depression curtailed her audience and her earnings. In the mid-1930s, she agreed to update her sound by recording pop tunes with younger up-and-coming jazzmen. But her attempt at a comeback was cut short, in 1937, as she rode to a gig on the back roads of the Mississippi Delta. She died after a train accident. Record producer John Hammond, who had launched his own career by producing her final recording session, angrily wrote an erroneous account claiming that Smith was taken first to a white hospital, where she died shortly after being refused admission. Actually, she was never taken to a white hospital- no one in Mississippi would have thought of taking a black woman to a white facility. Hammond may have invented the story, but the message—that her death was attributable to the casual violence that was the fabric of life for black musicians in the Deep South—rang true.

African American folk music

Beginning in the 1600s, African American folk culture established a musical identity that survived centuries of slavery, the tumultuous decades after the Civil War, and the transition from rural to urban centers in the early twentieth century. before advent of the blues at the turn of the century, it developed in several different forms: ballads, work songs, and spirituals

spread of blues and ragtime sets the stage for invention of jazz

By the time the United States was ready to enter World War I, the basic elements for jazz were in place. For several decades, popular entertainment had been deeply affected by the rhythms and sounds of African American music. Now, despite an abiding racism so onerous it spawned the reawakening of the Ku Klux Klan, the country was ready for a genuinely new phenomenon. It came by way of the remote, dilapidated, and exotic city of New Orleans.

blues and the guitar

Early blues were accompanied by the guitar, which became widely available for the first time in the rural South in the late nineteenth century. Musicians used guitars as a blank slate for their creativity: they tuned them in unexpected ways and pressed knives, bottlenecks, and other implements against the strings to create haunting blue notes and shivery slides.

African American musicians gain access to musical education and notation

Having learned during slavery that literacy meant power—why else would it be systematically denied to them?—musically inclined African Americans were drawn to the mysteries of notation and theory. In the all-black schools and universities that sprouted throughout the South after Emancipation, music became a central part of formal education. Children learned to play string instruments like the violin, and some—like Joseph Douglass, grandson of the abolitionist Frederick Douglass—became skilled performers. Frederick Douglass—became skilled performers. Musicians brought up in the concert tradition carried with them a social ambition, a dream of becoming something more in the world. If the symphony orchestra proved a remote goal for most of these classically trained youngsters, the brass band provided a more practical alternative.

brass bands

If the symphony orchestra proved a remote goal for most of these classically trained youngsters, the brass band provided a more practical alternative. An import from Britain, the brass band was originally a military institution that in peacetime became a local "people's" orchestra, with new brass instruments like the sousaphone designed for ease in marching. it was said that "a town without its brass band is as much in need of sympathy as a church without a choir." Staffed by townspeople who mastered as much notation as necessary, local bands played for dances, concerts, and parades. Towns with a significant African American population had their own brass bands, with black players just as keen to display their skills as their white counterparts.

early dance halls

In late nineteenth-century America, respectable people danced at balls restricted by invitation to a small, exclusive social circle. Their favorite dances, including the quadrille and the lancer, were formal and discouraged intimacy. All that began to change early in the new century. When restaurants and cabarets threw open their dance floors to middle-class couples, a slew of new dances entered the mainstream. Sometimes known as "animal dances" (the turkey trot, bunny hug, and grizzly bear were especially popular), they were, to some, shockingly uninhibited and physical, requiring vigorous movement from the hips and lower body. Women shed their corsets, finding dance a means of physical exercise and personal expression. The advent of the phonograph enabled people to learn these snappy new dances in the privacy of their living rooms. The most fashionable of the new steps were African American in origin, but these dances were introduced to middle-class audiences by white experts— While teachers transformed those "primitive" dances into cool, middle-class elegance, the subversively syncopated music was inescapably black, and derived from the contemporary piano (and eventually orchestral) style known as ragtime. "When a good orchestra plays a 'rag,'" Vernon Castle said, "one has simply got to move."

James Reese Europe

James Reese Europe (far left) was a stellar musician, conductor, arranger, and administrator. In World War I, he also proved to be a brave soldier, fighting in the trenches of France. He conducted his 369th Infantry Band, known as the Hellfighters, in Paris, 1919. James Reese Europe (1881-1919). Born in Alabama, Europe moved to New York at twenty-two to perform in and conduct black musical theater. He quickly shifted his focus to dance music. When the United States entered World War I, Europe enlisted, prepared to show that black men were willing to die for their country. He fought bravely in the trenches and formed the 369th Infantry Band, known as the "Hellfighters." Today, his long-neglected recordings seem startlingly prescient, if only because his military band instrumentation favored the brasses and reeds and allowed for short breaks. Europe also pointed to the future in devising bands of different sizes: a small combo ideally suited for jazz, and an orchestra—exemplified by Europe's Hellfighters and such rival bands as Will Marion Cook's Southern Syncopated Orchestra—ideally suited for ballrooms.

jazz as simultaneously an art form, a popular music, and a folk music

Jazz is a high art form, called "America's Classical Music". It is (mostly was) also popular music to dance to, with artists negotiation between their art and the need to sell albums and get famous. It is also folk music (not in the typical connotation of rural settings- jazz is distinctly urban) because a lot of its musical qualities come directly from African American folk traditions.

jazz, race, and ethnicity

Jazz is an African American music. Yet, anyone can play jazz, no matter what they look like. if they've got talent, they're accepted, no matter what they're wearing or look like. this has been an explicit value of jazz culture since its creation. "African American" indicates both race (unchangeable, based on appearance) and ethnicity (unconsciously acquired in youth through family). the musical grammar of jazz is clearly traced to W. Africa, but the particular iteration of this grammar in jazz is distinctly and specifically African American (the combination of blue notes, timbre variation, call and response, polyrhythm over a short rhythmic cycle, the twelve bar format, and brassy instrumentation, gives jazz its distinct sound)

ragtime pianists and the transition to jazz

Joplin was one of hundreds of ragtime pianists, most of them known to us only through oral history: Joe Jordan, Tom Turpin, Blind Boone, Louis Chauvin. The best of them could improvise confidently within the confines of ragtime harmony, and competed against each other in legendary contests of keyboard skill. A wealth of music that might have illuminated the transition from composed music to improvised jazz was lost, as few could or cared to notate those informal performances. But we can witness one facet of that transition by considering a friend of Joplin's, the clarinetist and saxophonist Wilbur Sweatman, whom Joplin named as executor of his will.

"Reckless Blues"- sung by Bessie Smith, accompanied by Louis Armstrong

Louis Armstrong was not Smith's favorite accompanist: she preferred the cornetist Joe Smith (no relation), who allowed that the great singer deserved a more subservient and discreet accompanist. But on "Reckless Blues," Armstrong shows how thoroughly the language of blues had expanded by 1925 under the influence of singers like Smith. "Reckless Blues" is a duet by two great artists, competing for our attention. Backed by Fred Longshaw's stolid chords on reed organ—as unswinging a setting as one could imagine—Smith is in command from 50the start, singing each line of the stanza with simplicity and control. As the "responder" to her "call," Armstrong is alert to every gesture, filling in even the smallest spaces she provides him. His timbre is modified by two mutes: a straight mute to reduce the sound and a plunger to produce wa-wa effects. With each stanza, their intensity grows. Smith's lines stick to the melodic outline, but grow more opulent in timbre and more unpredictable in rhythm.

minstrel performance style

Minstrels invented new and sadly lasting stereotypes of blackness, influencing the perception of blacks particularly in areas were there were none. As "Ethiopian delineators," their wigs were mops of unruly curls, wild and woolly, and their stage clothes tattered and outrageously loud in style and color. To be sure, one of the main minstrel stereotypes, Zip Coon, was an overdressed dandy whose foppish behavior savagely parodied upper-class whites. But the most memorable characterizations were based on a poisonous racial contempt. Happy-go-lucky plantation "darkies" combined savvy musical talent with foolish, childlike behavior that no adult could take 52seriously.

More about Ma Rainey and her contributions to blues

She was called the "Mother of the Blues" Rainey was a short woman with a commanding voice that could be heard in the back rows of crowded theaters or in the unfriendly acoustics of outdoor tent shows. In the hands of artists like Rainey and her ensembles, the blues became more codified, falling into strict twelve-bar stanzas with written harmonic progressions. Many soon-to-be jazz musicians entered show business as backup for singers like Rainey, learning through trial and error how best to match the sound of their instruments to the singer's bluesy strains.

"Animal" dances

Sometimes known as "animal dances" (the turkey trot, bunny hug, and grizzly bear were especially popular), they were, to some, shockingly uninhibited and physical, requiring vigorous movement from the hips and lower body.

blues becomes a popular music genre

Struck by how enthusiastically Southern audiences responded to these sounds, Handy—later known as the "Father of the Blues"—began publishing blues-related popular songs, including "Memphis Blues" (1912), "Beale Street Blues" (1917), and the smash hit "St. Louis Blues" (1914). Throughout the 1910s and early 1920s, the blues became a hot commercial property. Pop song publishers achieved major blues hits, and recording companies followed suit. By this time, blacks were crowding into Northern cities and were hungry for music from back home. The blues became their music. To satisfy their tastes (and to augment profits), record companies offered a new product: "race records," black music created for black people. The phrase sounds offensive today, as it did in the 1940s, when the trade magazine Billboard changed 49the name of its sales sheet of black recordings from "Race" to "Rhythm and Blues."

"Down Home Rag" by Wilbur Sweatman

Sweatman composed several rags, of which the most successful was "Down Home Rag" (1911), a multistrain piece in march/ragtime form built around a type of polyrhythm known as secondary ragtime. When Sweatman recorded his own version, in 1916, his performance included ad-lib embellishments that hinted at a new era of bluesy improvisation. Though rarely heard, his recording survives as a crucial link between ragtime and jazz.

Ma Rainey and the transition of blues from folk to pop

The blues began to cross the boundary line into popular music as soon as the country blues caught the ear of professional entertainers. Gertrude Pritchett, a black stage singer who later became better known as "Ma" Rainey (1886-1939), heard it from a young woman in St. Louis around 1904. Asked about her peculiar style of music, she told Rainey, "It's the blues." Rainey promptly adopted the new style, and went on to fame as one of the most popular singers of what became identified as vaudeville blues, or classic blues, in which female singers were accompanied by a small band on the stages of black theater circuits in the 1910s and 1920s.

brass bands musical structure- march form

The brass band's primary contribution to jazz turned out to be the structure of its music. The defining unit of a march is a sixteen-bar strain, which marries a distinctive melody to an equally identifiable chord progression. Marches are made up of a succession of strains, each usually repeated before passing on to the next. A typical march with four strains could be diagrammed as A A B B C C D D or A A B B A C C D D (with the returning A offering a hint of closure and transition). No attempt is made to round things off at the end by reprising the first strain.

Scott Joplin

The few photographs that survive of ragtime composer Scott Joplin show him as impeccably dressed and intently serious. The ragtime songs that have proved most durable were painstakingly notated by pianist-composers from the hinterland, none of whom was more celebrated or gifted than Scott Joplin. Joplin was born in the backwaters of East Texas, a child of Reconstruction who believed in the power of literacy to lift black people out of poverty. He left home as a teenager to become a professional pianist, touring up and down the Mississippi River. In 1894, Joplin settled in Sedalia, Missouri, a small but bustling railroad town. There he took a leading role in the musical affairs of 56the black community, organizing a brass band (he also played cornet) while studying music theory at the local black college. In 1899, he published the "Maple Leaf Rag" (named after a Sedalia saloon), a piece that wedded an irresistible polyrhythm to the harmonies and structure of a concert march. Joplin was shrewd enough to insist on royalty payments rather than the usual flat fee; the income from that one piece, which eventually sold hundreds of thousands of copies, supported him for the rest of his short-lived career. Spurred by his success, Joplin moved to St. Louis and then to New York City. He wrote more than fifty rags, some in collaboration with other pianist-composers, as well as a ballet and two operas. Joplin did not live to witness the Jazz Age. By the time he died (from syphilis), in 1917, recordings had displaced sheet music as the most effective way to market ragtime, and Joplin was largely forgotten. True recognition came much later. In 1970, he was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame; in 1976, he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. Most surprisingly, he reached No. 3 on the Billboard pop chart in 1974, after his melodious 1903 rag "The Entertainer" was featured in the movie The Sting.

evolution of ragtime

The first "rags," appearing in 1897, were translations of improvised piano techniques into written form. These pieces adopted the march form, fitting their rhythmic contrast into a succession of distinct melodic strains. (March form, as it applies to jazz, is perhaps better understood as march/ragtime form.) Over the next two decades, thousands of rags were published—many of them by piano virtuosos who tailored their extraordinary technique to the level of the ordinary pianist. Those that have proved most durable were painstakingly notated by pianist-composers from the hinterland, none of whom was more celebrated or gifted than Scott Joplin.

John Henry

The legendary steel driver John Henry has endured as the most frequently reimagined mythic figure in American history, a symbol not only of the brawny ethic of African Americans but of mankind's struggle with technology (competed with a machine to put in rail ties). The blasting of a railroad tunnel on the Virginia-West Virginia border inspired "John Henry" (a ballad), in which the hard-muscled, steel-driving hero fights a losing battle against modern machinery.

the Charlseton

The most fashionable of the new steps were African American in origin; the Charleston, for example, derived its name and syncopations from the highly Africanized islands of South Carolina. was introduced to middle and upper class white audiences in a toned down and more controlled version. however, the subversively syncopated music was inescapably black

John Phillip Sousa

The sousaphone was inspired by John Philip Sousa (1854-1932), a conductor and composer whose name was synonymous with brass band excellence. In 1892, Sousa formed his first ensemble, and for the next forty years the Sousa Band toured the world, bringing to brass band music the highest level of virtuosity and precision. He also inspired thousands of lesser ensembles, ranging in size from large professional bands (often led by former Sousa soloists) to small, local amateur groups. Sousa's indelible classic "The Stars and Stripes Forever." Thanks to America's entry into world affairs in the Spanish-American War in 1898, this march achieved immense and lasting success as a radiant display of patriotism.

the trio strain in march format

The third, or trio, strain (C) is particularly significant. For one thing, it modulates to a new key (the subdominant, or IV), sometimes with the aid of a short introductory passage, and is often twice as long, lasting thirty-two bars instead of sixteen. Composers used the trio to change the piece's dynamics, 55texture, or orchestration. Many marches concentrate on the trio at the end, repeating it several times after dramatic interludes—among them Sousa's indelible classic "The Stars and Stripes Forever."

country blues

This early style of blues (based on the field holler and accompanied by a single guitar), later called country blues, was performed chiefly by solitary male musicians throughout the rural South, from the Carolinas to the Mississippi Delta into Texas. The form was loose and improvisatory, suiting the needs of the moment. this was 100% folk, not popular music. A country bluesman, playing alone, could change the length of a 12-bar blues chorus if he wanted—to eleven bars, say, or thirteen and a half. at this point blues was not strictly codified as a musical format.

"Race Music"

To satisfy the tastes of a new class of free Black people with money to buy records (and to augment profits), record companies offered a new product: "race records," black music created for black people. The phrase sounds offensive today, as it did in the 1940s, when the trade magazine Billboard changed 49the name of its sales sheet of black recordings from "Race" to "Rhythm and Blues." But in the 1920s, the phrase was intended as respectful and accepted as such: African American newspapers frequently described their readers as "the race." The treatment of black performers, on the other hand, was far from respectful. They were paid a modest performing fee but denied a copyright royalty, and were pressured by executives to record only blues, locking them into a musical ghetto. Yet the discs sold, leaving us with a treasure of incomparable recordings.

difference between blues and ballads

Unlike the ballad, though, which is a chronological account of an event usually told in the third person, the blues is personal—a window into the singer's mind. This change in perspective matched the new mood of the time. As historian Lawrence Levin has observed, African American society had recently shifted from the communal confines of slave culture to the cold, terrifying realities of individualism. The blues was an apt and sobering metaphor for black people contemplating the true meanings of freedom.

origins of ragtime

While Sousa enjoyed international renown, another kind of music was coming to the fore, one that embodied—as jazz itself would—the collision of African American music with the white mainstream, absorbing and combining the disparate aspects of folk music, popular music, and art music. Ragtime probably got its name from the phrase "ragged time," a colorful description of African American polyrhythm. At the time of the Civil War, "ragged time" would have been heard chiefly on the banjo, the black instrument par excellence. However, the same principles from banjo could (and were) moved over to piano: The left hand kept a steady, two-beat rhythmic foundation: low bass notes alternating with higher chords. Against this background, the right hand was free to add contrasting rhythms that contradicted the duple meter. To "rag" a piece meant to subject it to this process of rhythmic complication. Ragtime could mean a type of song, a dance, or a piano style. These varied associations remind us how this genre saturated American music at the turn of the century.

Black performers and white audiences

While the black community reveled in its own music, a good many black musicians moved toward the larger and more affluent audience of white Americans. "Mighty seldom I played for colored," recalled one violinist. "They didn't have nothing to hire you with." The deep imbalance of power between the races made it difficult for black performers to succeed. Yet black music was gradually transforming what had previously been white culture. In the 1800's, attentive white performers were already studying their black counterparts, adopting their comedic and dance styles and accompanying themselves on banjo (an instrument with African lineage) and "the bones" (a primitive form of homemade percussion). In the process, they created the most popular and influential form of entertainment in nineteenth-century America, minstrelsy.

Thomas Dorsey aka "Georgia Tom"

Worked with Ma Rainey. By 1932, Dorsey had composed "Precious Lord" and turned his back on secular music, becoming the father of gospel music.

minstrel legacy

Yet even after full minstrel shows stopped being performed, the minstrel show's key stereotypes lingered on and on. Radio comics used "blackvoice" dialect to keep a new generation laughing at minstrel stereotypes—the most popular radio show of the 1930s was Amos 'n' Andy. Through the early 1950s, film actors such as Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland, Bing Crosby, and Joan Crawford were occasionally asked to put on cork. Minstrelsy had become a show-biz staple; entertainers felt they could indulge it without acknowledging its racial slurs. Perhaps the most unnerving aspect of minstrelsy was that it trained white audiences to expect all black entertainers, including those who came to fame long after minstrelsy's heyday, to enact characteristics of the performing fool. Louis Armstrong mugged his way through a notorious 1930s one-reeler, performing the minstrel song "Shine" in heaven, wearing a leopard skin and standing ankle-deep in soap bubbles. When Duke Ellington made his motion picture debut in a cameo appearance with Amos and Andy, however, minstrelsy was banished for three minutes; he is the same sophisticated Ellington who was seen at the Cotton Club and for the next forty years. Ironically, few whites saw these films. They were distributed almost exclusively to black theaters, where audiences were delighted to see geniuses like Ellington and Armstrong on the screen. Those audiences had no trouble getting beyond the masks, and laughed at Armstrong's inventive humor, knowing that the sound of his trumpet and the authority of his vocal delivery dispelled racist clichés, even turning them into an act of defiance. If stereotypes could not be dispelled, they could certainly be undermined.

wilbur sweatman

a friend of Joplin's, the clarinetist and saxophonist Wilbur Sweatman, whom Joplin named as executor of his will. Multi-instrumentalist Wilbur Sweatman was a star when he performed at the Lafayette Theater in Harlem in 1923. Accompanying him is the young Duke Ellington, who had recently moved to New York from his hometown, Washington, D.C. Sweatman's career 57parallels the tumultuous changes in the ragtime era as musicians began to favor recordings over sheet music. He began performing professionally in minstrel shows and circus bands, where his signature gimmick involved playing three clarinets simultaneously. Musicians admired his know-how and showmanship. Sweatman composed several rags, of which the most successful was "Down Home Rag" (1911)

work song

a style of African American folk music. a kind of secular music. thrived on railroads, levees, and anywhere else music was needed to pace manual labor.

ballad

a style of African American folk music: the retelling of local history through lengthy ballads. examples: The blasting of a railroad tunnel on the Virginia-West Virginia border, for example, inspired "John Henry," in which the hard-muscled, steel-driving hero fights a losing battle against modern machinery. Other ballads, like "Staggerlee" and "Railroad Bill," celebrated the exploits of bad men—heroes of resistance who shrugged off society's constraints through their disrespectful and violent behavior. The taste for braggadocio and exaggeration, with its emphasis on sexual exploits and one-upmanship, remains prominent today in hip-hop.

spirituals

a style of Black American folk tradition. transformed call-and-response songs into religious poetry. Beginning in 1871, the Fisk Jubilee Singers, a vocal group from a new and impoverished black college, performed a polished, carefully arranged version of spirituals before the general public. But this music was also passed on orally from parents to children and transmuted through performance in "sanctified" Pentecostal churches that were often nothing more than converted storefronts. By the 1920s, it had turned into gospel music, a rich and vibrant tradition that has never ceased to influence American music. When early jazz musicians say they learned music in the church, we may assume they acquired many of the basic skills of musical interaction from the oral tradition of the spiritual.

secondary ragtime and cross-rhythm

a type of polyrhythm known as secondary ragtime: while the meter is duple, the main melody insistently repeats a pattern of three notes, implying a cross-rhythm—a rhythmic layer that conflicts with the underlying meter. (This device, also called "novelty ragtime," was carried on by pianists such as George Gershwin.)

field holler

a type of work song. in the lonely corner of the field where the former slave continued to work, one could hear an unaccompanied field holler, a rhythmically loose vocal line that expressed his or her lonesome individuality. (we heard a beautiful example of this in class)

W. C. Handy

an elegant bandleader. he saw a ragged local black band makes tons of money from rhythmic stomping music "from the cane rows and levee camps". he realized that "primitive" music touched people, drove them to wild dancing, and was something that with a little "polishing" could drake tons of money. With purely commercial interested in mind, he started the project of recording and writing down (notate) blues, compose lyrics, and print sheet music. this contributed to the spread of blues as popular dance music and the creation of jazz. He encountered more of "the weirdest music I had ever heard" in a Mississippi railroad station: a guitarist repeating the same line of poetry endlessly ("goin' where the Southern cross' the dog") while scraping notes on the strings with a knife. Struck by how enthusiastically Southern audiences responded to these sounds, Handy—later known as the "Father of the Blues"—began publishing blues-related popular songs, including "Memphis Blues" (1912), "Beale Street Blues" (1917), and the smash hit "St. Louis Blues" (1914). He first encountered blues at around the same time as Ma Rainey.

backbeat

in 4/4, the beats that fall on 2 and 4 (rather than on 1 and 3)

Georgia Sea Islands

sea islands of Georgia. Here, slaves brought directly from rice-growing West Africa worked the rice and cotton plantations; during the summer, when white residents fled inland to avoid malaria, there were only a few white overseers in charge. After Emancipation, the slaves, known as Gullahs, were left to eke out a living on their own. The result was a culture rich in African traditions, isolated from the mainland by swamps and salt marshes. In the 1920s, bridges were built to the mainland, flooding Gullah culture with white capitalism. Lydia Parrish, a Philadelphia-bred Quaker who lived on St. Simons Island, studied the island's music closely and took it upon herself to save it from extinction. She published her findings in 1942, in Slave Songs of the Georgia Sea Islands. Earlier, she had used her resources to start a group eventually established as the Georgia Sea Island Singers. Zora Neale Hurston brought the folklorist Alan Lomax to hear the singers in 1935. Twenty-five years later, he returned to the island with recording equipment, determined to preserve their music.

Carry Me Back to Old Virginny

served as Virginia's state song until 1997, when the song's racial dialect ("There's where the old darkey's heart am long'd to go") finally prompted its removal. written by the Black songwriter James Bland, as a minstrel song

Minstrelsy

the most popular and influential form of entertainment in nineteenth-century America: minstrelsy. In 1843, a quartet of white musicians called the Virginia Minstrels presented New York audiences with an evening's amusement that claimed to depict the culture of plantation slaves. They performed in blackface—a mask of burnt cork, with grotesquely exaggerated eyes and mouths. Their success was astonishing, prompting numerous imitators. Within a decade, the "minstrel show" had become the most beloved theatrical production in the country, touring everywhere on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line.

Vernon and Irene Castle

these dances were introduced to middle-class audiences by white experts—most famously Vernon and Irene Castle, who offered graceful interpretations that carefully removed lower-class (and lower-body) excesses. While the Castles transformed those "primitive" dances into cool, middle-class elegance, the subversively syncopated music was inescapably black, and derived from the contemporary piano (and eventually orchestral) style known as ragtime. "When a good orchestra plays a 'rag,'" Vernon Castle said, "one has simply got to move." The Castles' ragtime was performed by a remarkable black bandleader, James Reese Europe

classic (vaudeville) blues

vaudeville blues, or classic blues, in which female singers were accompanied by a small band on the stages of black theater circuits in the 1910s and 1920s. Ma Rainey was one of the most famous and popular singers