How Jazz and Blues Became “America’s Music”
African American-derived music, in the form of jazz and blues, exploded into mainstream American culture one hundred years ago. Using original recordings as examples, author Tim Brooks will trace how and why, during a relatively short period of time, the relatively staid, Victorian sounds of the 19th and early 20th centuries era gave way to a multiplicity of musical currents that became truly “America’s music.”
Tim Brooks is the author of nine books on media history, including Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry: 1890-1919, which lays the groundwork for this era, and The Blackface Minstrel Show in Mass Media: 20th Century Performances on Radio, Records, Film and Television. His books have won many awards, including the American Book Award and the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for best book on music. He has also produced a number of reissue CDs, is a three-time Grammy nominee and won a Grammy Award for Best Historical Reissue for the companion CD to Lost Sounds. He is the current president of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections, a national organization of recording scholars and archivists.
Speaker Summary
Music historian Tim Brooks took us through the evolution of jazz and blues on the American music scene, how it impacted American culture, and the cultural and musical roles of blacks in America due to the jazz and blues movements. He began (and ended) with a perspective by Anton Dvorak regarding “Negro music” as core to the American musical identity and how, through jazz and blues, this grew and evolved to become “America’s music”. Using original recordings from as early as the 1910’s, Brooks traced the rapid evolution of both forms in the 1920’s and beyond.
Tim talked about the role of early musical recording technology and the dominance of 3 companies/labels (largely protected by patents) that largely created a middle class white recorded music industry. This was done purely from the perspective of economics since that’s who could afford to buy the equipment and recordings. He discussed how the emergence of the first jazz recording in 1917 – coincident with the expiration of these patents – created the opportunity for smaller labels to enter the jazz scene. This opened the door for the emergence of many performers, including many blacks, in this new musical genre. He talked about the splintering of jazz into multiple styles (he noted at least 6), each contributing stars and now “classic” songs that helped further the growth of jazz and its different styles. These included Louis Armstrong (Dixieland), George Gershwin (Symphonic) and Duke Ellington (Sophisticated Big Band), among others. It also fed the emergence of jazz “personalities” and many popular songs that are often identified with jazz even when they weren’t written for jazz.
Tim then pivoted to discuss how the blues evolved simultaneously with jazz as the other arm of black-inspired music that helped define America’s music identity. It’s turning point was the 1st blues recording by a small label in 1920 that sold well among black consumers and helped drive the emergence of blues to attract/appeal to this new market opportunity. Other labels jumped into the market and many black, and female, singers emerged and dominated this space. As with jazz, blues also began to splinter but less so than jazz with 3 primary styles emerging – Delta, Urban and Country Music.
Brooks noted that, by the 30’s and 40’s, both jazz and blues had become a core part of American music and how black musicians /performers had become core along with them. He showed how each genre further evolved into additional musical styles (including rock & roll from blues).
Tim ended by musing back on Dvorak’s comment about “Negro music”, how African-American derived music had become the folk music of America, and how the integration of black music into the mainstream contributed to the integration of black performers (and blacks, in general) further into the American cultural mainstream.