An Introduction to America’s Music

290 PART 3 | FROM WORLD WAR I THROUGH WORLD WAR II

In the years after World War I, jazz was seen in some circles as a symptom

of civilization’s decline. Many community leaders, both white and black, had

opposed ragtime, and now they made jazz a target. One complaint linked jazz

with the illegal liquor trade that sprang up after Prohibition became law in 1920.

With its eccentric sounds, earthy rhythms, and the encouragement of brazen

dance styles, jazz came to be linked with the moral drift that educators and the

clerg y had been deploring since the war’s end.

In wartime Americans had united against the common German foe. But

peace brought new complexity and social unrest. As African Americans migrated

in large numbers from the southern countryside into the cities of the North in

search of better jobs, they changed the culture of the areas where they settled.

And they met resistance from whites. The Ku Klux Klan—whose constitution

pledged “to unite white male persons, native-born Gentile citizens of the United

States of America”—was reorganized in 1915, and by 1924 its membership reached

4.5 million. It was hardly a coincidence that in 1924, the year of the Klan’s great-

est popularity, the denunciation of jazz was also at its peak.

Yet jazz, for some a symbol of moral decadence, shared with gospel music a

grounding in the blues (see chapter 14). Blues musicians tapped a vein of human

emotion deeper than the divisions between the sacred and the secular, the moral

and the immoral. And that depth of expression could be found as well in jazz.

FOUR GIANTS OF EARLY JAZZ

Within the fi rst decade of recorded jazz, the new music underwent a series of

transformations. The story of that rapid maturation can be told by tracing the

lives of a few of the key personalities in early jazz. In those years artists of the

highest caliber molded the music to refl ect their aesthetic goals, some emphasiz-

ing compositional intricacy, others improvisational freedom; some developing

the sound of the ensemble, others perfecting the soloist’s art.

JELLY ROLL MORTON: JAZZ COMPOSER

Born in 1890 in New Orleans of Creole parents, Ferdinand Joseph Lamothe,

better known as Jelly Roll Morton, received formal music lessons as a child and

began playing piano at age ten. While still in his teens he continued his informal

education in Story ville, where he also gained his fi rst professional experience

as a pianist. Called “the District” by locals, Story ville was a neighborhood where

legalized prostitution formed the center of an array of rough entertainment,

including saloons and gambling houses, that supported a lively demand for

music. Although jazz did not originate in the District, it fl ourished there. A fter

the federal government closed Story ville down in 1917, a decline in the number

of venues spurred many talented musicians to leave New Orleans. Morton him-

self, in fact, had traveled in black vaudeville and cabaret entertainment as early

as 1907, visiting many parts of the country, as far west as California.

Morton was employed for a time in Chicago during World War I. He returned

there in the spring of 1923, making his fi rst recordings and publishing his com-

positions through a Chicago fi rm. In 1926 he organized the Red Hot Peppers

for an epic set of Victor recordings. Record sessions could be haphazard affairs

in those days, but not when Morton was the leader. Baby Dodds, the group’s

denunciation of jazz

Storyville

Chicago

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