An Introduction to America’s Music

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

of the greatest African American singers of opera, art songs, and spirituals. Her

recording and concert performances of the spiritual “My Soul’s Been Anchored

in the Lord” added considerably to Price’s renown as an arranger.

CONCERT WORKS BY JAZZ MUSICIANS

William Grant Still and Florence Price were primarily classical musicians who

also worked in the popular sphere, partly from inclination and partly because

racial discrimination limited their concert-hall careers. In contrast are individu-

als remembered today as jazz musicians who also wrote concert works. W hile their

compositions, like those of Still and Price, refl ect the values of the Harlem Renais-

sance, they also reveal the infl uence of Gershwin, whose Rhapsody in Blue paved the

way for other popular artists who aspired to cross the cultural boundaries that sep-

arated composers’ music from performers’ music. Like Gershwin, they produced

concert works based on materials drawn from the popular sphere.

James P. Johnson (1894–1955) was one of the creators of stride, a virtuosic style

of jazz piano that descended from ragtime. Along with Willie “The Lion” Smith,

Luckey Roberts, and other pianists, Johnson developed stride in the adversarial

cutting contests that attracted spectators to Harlem’s rent parties, social events

in which each guest contributed a small fee to help the hosts pay their rent. In

addition to fl ashy piano pieces like “Carolina Shout” (1921), which quickly became

a standard in the stride repertory (and whose title refers to the traditional ring

shout; see chapter 4), Johnson also wrote successful popular songs, including the

1923 dance hit “The Charleston.”

Just as Gershwin’s visits to Harlem to hear Johnson and other stride pianists

contributed to the musical language of Rhapsody in Blue, the success of that path-

breaking work inspired Johnson to try his hand at writing for the concert hall.

Yamekraw: A Negro Rhapsody, composed by Johnson and orchestrated by William

Grant Still, received its premiere at Carnegie Hall in 1927 with the solo piano

part taken by Johnson’s protégé Thomas “Fats” Waller, soon to become one of

the most popular performers and songwriters of the Swing Era. Although Ya me-

kraw was followed by two symphonies, a piano concerto, and a one-act opera

(De Organizer, 1940, to a libretto by Langston Hughes), none of Johnson’s concert

music enjoyed critical or popular success during his lifetime, nor has it since.

The loss of many of the unpublished scores makes a reassessment diffi cult today,

but recent reconstructions of Ya me kraw and De Organizer show Johnson to have

been an inventive composer, if an unschooled one, capable of genuine power

and depth of expression.

A musician who found greater success in merging jazz and concert music was

Duke Ellington, whose 1943 concert suite (or “tone parallel,” as he called it) Black,

Brown, and Beige was mentioned in chapter 12. Long before that piece reached

Carnegie Hall, however, Ellington had been experimenting with extended musi-

cal compositions on phonograph records. Until the long-playing 33^1 ⁄ 3 -r pm disc

became common in the 1950s, classical works, much longer than popular songs,

often required two or more record sides for a single movement. In that respect,

if no other, Gershwin and the W hiteman band’s recording of Rhapsody in Blue

would have given a listener the feeling of classical music. Likewise, Ellington’s

Creole Rhapsody (1931), by fi lling both sides of a ten-inch 78-rpm disc, announced

James P. Johnson

Duke Ellington

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