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This chapter focuses on the dissemination of jazz from New Orleans outward. It shows how Jelly Roll Morton (Creole), Nick La Rocca (white), and Louis Armstrong (black) spread the carnivalesque values of the Crescent City, continuing the musical miscegenation that began there. In particular, each man's story illustrates the complex relationship between physiognomy, racial identity, musical style, and commercial success. With a focus on Armstrong, who thought of his music as a device for racial rapprochement, the chapter argues that the contrasting fates of the three men was influenced by their racial identities and their relationship to those identities. Though La Rocca and the Original Dixieland Jazz Band achieved mass success and Morton created innovative and influential compositions and recordings, only Armstrong reached a wide audience for the long haul. Using African devices to transform popular songs, Armstrong and his impure, subversive sounds challenged racial boundaries for decades.

Many modern critics insisted that the white musicians in New Orleans played no role in the development of the city’s ragtime idiom. This assertion upset many of New Orleans’s veteran musicians, including Nick La Rocca. La Rocca and the Original Dixieland Jass Band performed in Chicago, and in March 1917 released their first single, marking the beginning of a legacy of recordings that contain most of the elements of New Orleans jazz. While the story of early New Orleans jazz is often centered either in its Italian American or its African American musicians, the city’s ethnic blend was a broad spectrum, including someone like the trombonist Eddie Edwards. Another prominent musician of the period was clarinetist Harry Shields, one of the most talented apprentice musicians who came up through Jack Laine’s bands.

By the 1930s, New Orleans and the rest of the country had become a passive audience for a popular culture that was almost exclusively created somewhere else. Nationally syndicated radio and Hollywood movies conspired to alter the city’s unique jazz traditions. There was a new dance craze known as “jitterbugging.” Amid the stream of recordings and late-night broadcasts by orchestras playing in all of the new swing idioms, local musicians found it impossible to shut out the sounds of the music crowding around them. At the same time, however, the first generation of musicians who had shaped New Orleans’s first syncopated styles and developed them into jazz longed to turn back the clock—to go back to the old glories. Some of them made a successful, albeit brief, comeback in the midst of the Depression: Nick La Rocca and the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, and Jelly Roll Morton.