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This chapter examines the sociological congruence of identity sequences and adoption narratives of cultural products, with a particular focus on the identities of the individual jazz recordings and groups in concert with the identities of record companies and labels. It first considers the role of adoption narratives in understanding long-term appeal before discussing jazz as an adoption narrative, along with patterns of adoption and authenticity in cultural markets. It then explains which recordings were more likely to enter the discographical canon by analyzing the longer-run implications of the actions of Victorian-era firms. Finally, it asks whether a recording by black musicians or by jazz orchestras was received diffrently when we know that it was originally produced by a Victorian-era firm. The chapter shows that jazz was shaped by differences not only in what firms produced but also in how that production informed a “primitive-to-refined” narrative.

The chapter focuses on the relationship of jazz to the new hierarchical concept of culture that made its appearance in the United States at the turn of the last century. The increasing scholarly interest in jazz shows neglect by historians and their colleagues in many other disciplines of a central element in American culture. Jazz is an integral part of American culture. There is a dialectic between jazz and culture. The word “culture” became equated with the word “refinement”. The dual appearance is significant between the two—culture and jazz—. Jazz was the new product of a new age. For black musicians, jazz was a form of communal expression. Jazz tells much about what was original and dynamic in American culture even as it revealed to what extent cultural attitudes had not yet weaned themselves from the old colonial patterns of the past. Thus, jazz still has much to tell about history.

This chapter talks about the transformations that jazz went through during the 1980s when there was a resurgence of the classic jazz of the 1940s and 1950s. This era has been termed the neoclassical era, when Herman Leonard’s association with jazz was also reborn. This happened in 1988 after there was an exhibit of his work in London. It was Leonard’s photographic depictions of African American jazz musicians that not only created the visual image of a black musician of the 1950s, but also became the standard representation of the musical style of jazz from 1945 to 1959. At the same time, however, his photographs caused a dilemma, particularly among contemporary musicians. The chapter explains this dilemma. It thus traces the influence of the jazz image by explaining its relationship to the current cultural influence of jazz.

This chapter examines the development of jazz within the context of the Great Migration and the New Negro aesthetic by focusing on the political activism of black musicians in New Orleans and Chicago. Between 1915 and 1930, more than one million African Americans left the South for the urban North, an exodus that came to be known as the Great Migration. The net effect of this Great Migration was an explosion of African American culture and entrepreneurship concentrated in places like Chicago’s South Side and Harlem. The cabarets and theaters of Chicago’s black entertainment district, known as “the Stroll,” acted as incubators that nurtured jazz from its infancy to adolescence. Here the music matured into a distinct Chicago style that blended southern and northern influences, cultures, and personalities to create a national—and uniquely American—musical art form. This chapter shows that black musicians actively sought to “make the American dream work” through efforts ranging from fish fries and lawn parties to organizing efforts such as forming benevolent societies in New Orleans or unionization in Chicago.

This chapter describes Mississippi John Hurt's family background and early years. Topics covered include Hurt's slave ancestors; his birth on March 8, 1892, the last of ten children born to Isom and Mary Jane Hurt; his early musical influences; his childhood years; his first guitar; the music he played; his marriage to Gertrude in 1916; and the discovery of Mississippi John Hurt.

All-black units served in the historically segregated armed forces of the United States as late as the Korean War. No fewer than 3,000 black soldiers, freed from slavery, had fought in the army of the American Revolution. Others figured in the War of 1812 and the Battle of New Orleans of 1814, and as many as 200,000 served in the Union army and navy during the Civil War. During the Great War, there were four black regiments in the regular army. The role of black service musicians in maintaining high levels of morale was soon a matter of record among the Allies and Central Powers alike, and their musical contributions were destined to reverberate long after the Armistice. This chapter focuses on the so-called “hellfighters” of the 369th regiment, including John Philip Sousa and James Reese Europe; the continuous production of “coon songs,” some written by black musicians themselves; bandmasters and the birth of an American conservatory in Fontainebleau, France; and the idea of a readily identifiable “American Music.”.

This chapter describes events in Mississippi John Hurt's life from 1929–1962. These include Hurt's short-lived recording career; the impact of the Depression; the Avalon/Valley community; the continued oppression of blacks across Mississippi and the South; and the increase of white interest in black music.

This chapter looks at folk song collector John Lomax, who served as the FWP’s first folklore editor and directed the Ex-Slave Project. A master of self-promotion, Lomax popularized the image of white folklorists through his well-publicized relationship with folksinger Huddie Ledbetter (“Leadbelly”) and his autobiography, Adventures of a Ballad Hunter. Lomax frequently collected from black convicts in southern prisons. His representations of black folk informants relied heavily on “Negro dialect” and racial stereotypes. Analysis of field notes and correspondence he and his wife Ruby Terrill Lomax kept during their southern recording trips from 1937 to 1940 demonstrates how his interactions with black folk musicians and definition of what constituted “authentic” black folk culture shaped his direction of the Ex-Slave Project, affecting the ways ex-slaves and their narratives would be represented. Lomax was replaced as the FWP’s folklore editor by the appointment of the professional folklorist Benjamin Botkin.

For two decades, cultural ties of music and the literary and expressive arts held together two black communities on opposite sides of the Atlantic. Black Broadway in black Paris drew almost exclusively on the music and entertainment talent of itinerant African Americans from Harlem and other Bronzevilles. Yet the Americans' popularity and success in Parisian nightclubs was also, in part, their failure. Stephen Mougin, the sometimes firebrand music critic and talented pianist, decried the shallow “Negrophilia” that fostered racial posturing over good music in the jazz nightclubs in Montmartre and Montparnasse between the wars. Under the banner of the Harlem Renaissance, Charles Johnson and Alain Locke rallied black Manhattan's musicians to the cause of economic, social, and cultural equality with white Americans, perceiving arts in general to be a crack in racism.

This chapter describes the rediscovery of Mississippi John Hurt by aspiring young guitar player Tom Hoskins. It covers Hoskins' search for Mississippi John Hurt; the contract drawn up between Hurt and Music Research Incorporated, covering management and recording, and signed on March 15, 1963; Hurt and his wife's move to Washington D.C.; and Hurt's increased popularity during the winter of 1963–64.

The economic boom of the 1920s presented New Orleans’s black musicians opportunities to reach out to new audiences ready to dance to the current rhythms. As a result, their music found its way into record stores everywhere and onto mail-order lists in newspapers such as the Chicago Defender. The black musicians recorded songs from one end of the continent to the other. Three such musicians, Jelly Roll Morton and Reb and Johnny Spikes, set up recording sessions with the band called Kid Ory’s in Los Angeles in the summer of 1922. The Creole musician Peter Bocage, a member of the Superior Orchestra, moved easily between the ragtime music from Uptown and the legitimate music of Downtown. Morton, Freddie Keppard, and the King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band also had recording sessions in Chicago. Armand J. Piron, who made recordings in New York together with the New Orleans Orchestra, was one of the most influential figures in the history of New Orleans jazz.

In the 1920s, recordings answered many of the lingering questions about the first emerging sounds of New Orleans jazz. Some of these recordings document what the first generation of musicians might have sounded like. The jazz player Buddy Petit was considered one of the “kings” among the black musicians, along with Chris Kelly and Kid Rena. Other cornetists who came out of the Uptown musical scene—Mutt Carey, Freddie Keppard, and Joe Oliver—had recorded in studios outside of New Orleans due to the lack of recording facilities in the city. Another musician, Oscar Celestin, led an orchestra that was one of the most popular playing in the Metairie roadhouses when he recorded for OKeh in January 1925. He and his orchestra had been influenced by King Oliver’s Chicago recordings of two years before.

This chapter focuses on Harry T. Burleigh's music experience and training in Erie. Burleigh demonstrated his love for music and his gifts as a singer long before he left Erie to study at the National Conservatory of Music in New York City. Music education at home and in studios opened doors for Burleigh to a variety of performance venues that prepared him for his successful audition at the National Conservatory and the rigorous course of study he would pursue there. Along the way he earned the support of many of Erie's prominent citizens, who would contribute to a fund supporting the early months of his training in New York City. This chapter examines when and where Burleigh heard and sang spirituals and what exposure he had to black musicians who toured the country, including the Fisk Jubilee Singers, the Hampton Juiblee Singers, James Monroe Trotter, and the Hyers Sisters.

This chapter traces how, in the South and elsewhere, very early contact between black and Irish musicians on riverine and maritime frontiers served to innovate and energize an array of recognized American performance genres. It shows that riverine and maritime environments on the frontiers were precisely the contexts in which African Americans and Irish Americans came together in contact and cultural exchange. The degree, dispersal, and intensity of Caribbean cultural influence in all these environments were much wider and deeper than has been understood, and much more fundamental to minstrelsy’s creole synthesis. A “creolization” of American popular music was already occurring in these contexts well before the first theatrical blackface performances of the late 1830s.

In this chapter, the author examines prison labor and the relationship between imprisoned people and society more generally by focusing on the case of inmates of the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. Using his training as an ethnomusicologist and insight as an Afro-American, the author looks at the very real cultural work and broader social significance of imprisoned black musicians laboring in antebellum-like conditions on a former plantation in the first decade of the twenty-first century. The author encountered resistance from prison officials when he tried to investigate black vernacular responses to white supremacy through oral interviews and recording inmate music. His efforts to combine engaged scholarship and activism struck a nerve when his ethnographic efforts became “something resembling a twenty-first-century slave narrative.” The author highlights the ways in which his own cultural work as a scholar—while certainly not subject to the same brutalizing environment as the prisoners—was shaped by many of the same racialized power structures both within and outside its gates.

This chapter describes problems at Music Research Inc; Mississippi John Hurt and his family's return to Mississippi in 1966; the recording of three Vanguard studio albums, destined to become Mississippi John Hurt Today, The Immortal Mississippi John Hurt, and Last Sessions; Hurt's management and recording contract; and Hurt's death from a myocardial infarction on November 2, 1966 at the Grenada County Hospital.

This chapter describes events in Sweatman’s life in the 1940s and 1950s. The period marked a worldwide awakening of interest in early jazz, with many old players forced out of retirement to record, and a mini-industry emerging among writers anxious to tell the story of the birth of jazz. Throughout Sweatman maintained a stony silence, probably in response to the neglect shown by jazz writers toward his pioneering role in the development of ragtime and jazz. A car accident in the mid-1950s curtailed his playing career, but he continued his music publishing business and the handling of musicians’ estates. Sweatman died of a heart attack on March 9, 1961, after which he and his music faded into obscurity. However, a worldwide awakening of interest in early African American music in general in the last few years has started to question the received opinion of Sweatman, and of other pioneering black musicians and bandleaders working in the field of popular music.

This chapter describes a genre-based variety in Swing Era music programs, where commercial and artistic success depended on a musical fluency across a range of genres; including classics, jazz concertos, novelty songs, vocal ballads, jazz dance instrumentals, and exotic numbers. It provides case studies exploring the communicative power behind these negotiations of genre, performer identity, and arranging style. In addition to the celebration of artistic versatility, Chappie Willet's legacy as a commercially successful black musician working in a segregated entertainment industry that often invoked racialized conceptions of style and creativity suggests additional motivations behind some of these Swing Era arranging strategies. His work for the Jimmie Lunceford orchestra offers an example of “jazzing the classics” that highlights some of the commercial, political, and artistic forces at work behind these hybrid creations.

This chapter describes events following Mississippi John Hurt's death in 1966. These include Hurt's second wife Jessie's receipt of royalty checks from Vanguard and Tom Hoskins in late 1968; Hoskins' efforts to boost the recognition and sales of Hurt's music; Jessie's death on July 20, 1982; the death of Tom Hoskins on January 27, 2002; the establishment of the Mississippi John Hurt Blues Foundation in 1999; and tributes to Mississippi John Hurt.