The Original Dixieland Jazz Band and the Period Ear

 New York Sun, November 4 1917 (section 5, p. 2)

“Livery Stable Blues” by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, released in 1917, was the first jazz record. As such firsts go, there is a fair amount of consensus for this one. Usually, a “first” (like the “first rock and roll record” – no, Mom, not everyone thinks it is “Earth Angel”) is difficult to pin down, as styles evolved gradually over time rather than being suddenly invented by one person; and of course there is the matter of how one defines the type (rock, jazz, etc.). In this case, “Livery Stable Blues,” with its B-side “Dixie Jass Band One-Step,” was certainly the first record by a band calling itself a “jazz” band. Or “jass” band – the name was so new to most of the public at this point that no one could agree how to spell it; other spellings included jas, jaz, jasz, or even jad. It was also the first record released by a band from New Orleans, usually (but not always) thought to be the birthplace of jazz.

Whose Voices Are Missing from the Public Square?

If you have the time, I highly recommend taking a look at classicist Mary Beard's lecture on “The Public Voice of Women.” It is long, but you will be rewarded for your effort. Beard looks at the role of women in the public sphere from a diachronic perspective, looking not simply at the history of women speaking in public but the history of women being silenced, and the history of the language and tropes used by men to effect this silence. If women have wanted to avoid being silenced, they have a limited range of options; the most common is affecting traits of men, including deeper voices – essentially, adopting the role of the androgyne. But, at least in recent times, women have been allowed by men to speak publicly about at least one narrow set of issues, namely, women's issues.

A Southern Song (without A Mammy, A Mule, Or A Moon)

“No experienced writer would ever think of using Massachusetts in a song title, and yet this state is just as picturesque and romantic as New Hampshire.”

-- E.M. Wickes, Writing the Popular Song (1916)

As a follow-up to my previous essay, I've started reading Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues by Elijah Wald – another of the recent group of revisionist blues histories. Wald does a much better job, as far as I can see, of providing a proper historical and musical context for the “invention” of the blues. Along the way, Wald makes a fairly brief aside that struck me as interesting: he contrasts (pp. 31-32) the marketing of music in the 1920s to the African-American and country markets. He notes that African-American records were marketed as “race records”, and were sold as up-to-date music, while country records were marketed as “Old-Time Music.” Wald then proceeds to draw a line of nostalgia from 1920s “old time” music through country-and-western history up to “new country” stars today. 

I Thought I Heard James McKune Say: A Review of In Search of the Blues by Marybeth Hamilton

In the Beatles mockumentary “All You Need Is Cash” – tracing the story of the “prefab Four,” the Rutles – the narrator (played by Eric Idle) looks to discover the “black origins of Rutle music.”  To do so, he travels to the Mississippi River in Louisiana, “the cradle of the blues,” or, as he explains,  “black music sung mainly by whites”.  What he finds are the musicians Blind Lemon Pye, who it turns out only became a musician because of the Rutles; and Ruttling Orange Peel, who claims the Rutles visited him and stole his music – as did Frank Sinatra, the Everly Brothers, and Lawrence Welk.  The narrator can only conclude that “we seem to be rather wasting our time here . . . still, pretty, isn’t it?”

Marybeth Hamilton, in In Search of the Blues (2008), acknowledges this absurdity in the search for the origins of music like the blues.

In purporting to reveal a music’s beginnings – the moment of emergence, when we can see it in its pure, unadulterated, natural state – stories of musical origins are always social and political fables. (p. 188)

Certainly, with musical forms (like blues, or jazz, or rock ‘n’ roll) reflecting a gradual development rather than a sudden invention, fashioning an origin story out of a complex set of cultural systems is naturally selective, and purpose-driven.  In addition, with blues and jazz, the development lies largely or completely outside the popular recording industry, meaning documentation is limited.  

So it should not surprise us that recent scholarship on the blues has been characterized by revisionism, by the puncturing of myth (see a summary of these in Christian O’Connell, “The Color of the Blues: Considering Revisionist Blues Scholarship,” Spring 2013).  Deconstruction is by now a longstanding genre in scholarly writing, and the myths of the blues are ripe for deconstruction.  Along with Elijah Wald’s Escaping the Delta, Hamilton’s book is the most prominent of these works.  For Hamilton, the origins of the blues in the Mississippi Delta are a myth; instead, the origins – or, at least the origins of the myth, or the origins of our conception of the blues – are to be found in the song collectors, record collectors, critics, and enthusiasts of the blues and African-American music generally over the first two-thirds of the 20^th century.  But is Hamilton’s narrative correct?  How does she deal with the fact that, in her own words, “stories of musical origins are always social and political fables”?

Return of Old Fogey, or a Letter to Jon Keller

It seems Old Fogeyism and the generational issues associated with it are around us everywhere these days.  The 50^th anniversary of the Beatles’ coming to America, the start of the so-called British Invasion, and in particular their appearance on the Ed Sullivan show has kept them in the spotlight.  One particularly egregious example that was brought to my attention comes from Jon Keller, a popular political commentator on the Boston-area news station WBZ-AM and the CBS Boston website.  Keller’s latest editorial, titled “Beatles Show Public Craving For Songs That Aren’t Moronic,” was a brief piece that barely scratched the surface of these issues.  Its main point was a comparison of the timeless Beatles (epitomized by “She Loves You”) as “real songwriters” to “trashmen” and “trashwomen” like Miley Cyrus.  Here is my response:

Not Talkin' 'Bout My Generation

Burn down the disco, hang the blessed DJ
Because the music that they constantly play
It says nothing to me about my life

-- The Smiths, "Panic" (1986)

Watching the performances at the Grammys this year was a bit puzzling.  Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Chicago, Carole King, Stevie Wonder, Nile Rodgers, Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, Merle Haggard, in addition to the sight of duos like Smokey Robinson and Steven Tyler presenting awards . . . it was as if popular music had stood still for some 40 years.  (Thank goodness Metallica was there to keep things current.)  More than an odd sight, their presence raised the question: What was the purpose of trotting out so many old-timers of popular music?  Was it to confer legitimacy on contemporary music?  Or was it something else?  Who was the intended audience?  For instance, you would have to be in your late twenties (at least) to remember Paul McCartney’s last US Top 40 single (“My Brave Face”, 1989), and in your mid-thirties to remember his last number one (“Say Say Say”, with Michael Jackson, 1983); and even older to remember any hit by Ringo Starr.  Of course, the Beatles have managed to remain well-known during the intervening time, as shown by the impressive sales of the Anthology series, Live at the BBC, 1, Love, in addition to their back catalog.  But they have not maintained a presence on Top 40 radio in some time: justifying BBC Radio 1’s refusal to play “Real Love” in 1996, a spokesman said, “It's not what our listeners want to hear . . . We are a contemporary music station.”

Archaeology and the Arab Spring

An article in the Guardian featuring before and after pictures of Syrian monuments damaged by years of conflict has been making the rounds: on Sunday on Facebook, yesterday on the Agade mailing list (for scholars of the ancient Near Eastern and classical worlds).  It is simply the latest of a series of such articles published over the last couple of years; in fact, some of the pictures are recycled from a similar, much-circulated article from November 2013 (in PolicyMic, by Rachel Davidson).  These articles bring up a couple of significant issues.  One is the danger of sensationalism, present especially in the Davidson article.  From the title itself we are presented with exaggeration: “5 Historical Monuments Have Been Destroyed Forever During Syria’s Civil War”.  Upon reading the article, we discover that none of the monuments has been “destroyed”: while all have been damaged, some severely, they are all still standing (or, at least were at the time of writing) and could in theory be restored.  In fact, Davidson herself presents the problem in more sober terms within the text of the article (for instance, “five of the most significant sites and buildings that have been damaged or destroyed”).  We are also presented with slanted editorializing: “given Bashar al-Assad's willingness to ruthlessly slaughter tens of thousands of his own citizens, it's unlikely that he will show more respect for his country's historical monuments.”  In fact, given that the opposition forces have shown themselves to be just as willing to ruthlessly slaughter people, there is no need to lay the blame on one side only.  This is not meant as a defense of Assad, but simply as a statement of fact.  Even Davidson states elsewhere in the article that the two sides have been battling each other around some of these monuments.

But the circulation of a series of such articles by archaeologists and other academics leads to a more fundamental question: In all of these discussions of monuments and heritage, where are the people?