Thank you everyone who read last week’s introductory post in this series on Jazz and took the time to offer tidbits of wisdom and words of encouragement. Your support and advice are most appreciated. Since last week, I have spent a fair bit of time mapping out the timeline of the history of Jazz. In doing so, I have been attempting to figure out when the various main players came on the scene, during which decades various stylistic innovations occurred and so on. In doing so, I discovered that before I go forward with the history of Jazz, I first have to go backward in time in order to give as complete and accurate a picture as possible of how the cultural and historical conditions came to be that allowed Jazz to become the unique musical genre it has over time. Consequently, I am going to travel a few decades back to an era before the first Jazz notes had yet to be played. It was a moment in history when America was still coming to terms with the seismic impact of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 that ended slavery in the whole of America, causing a civil war to erupt between the northern and the southern states. While the intent of this post is not to re-examine the politics of that moment, the fact remains that much of the music in America in the late 1800s was highly influenced by the Civil War and by the freeing of African American slaves. For the purposes of this post, I am going to focus on two of the more prominent genres of music that flourished toward the end of the century: classical marches and ragtime.
John Philip Sousa was an American composer whose specialty was composing military marches. His most famous composition is “The Stars and Stripes Forever”. Sousa, like his father before him, joined the United States Marine Corps Band as soon as he was able to enlist, in his teens. His rank upon enlistment was simply that of “boy”. John Philip Sousa began to conduct and compose his own marches as a young man in his twenties. The patriotic fervor that his compositions inspired made Sousa a favourite of military leaders and of U.S. presidents of all stripes. What connects a military march such as “The Stars and Stripes Forever” to the Jazz offerings of Louis Arnstrong has less to do with commonalities in musical style and more to do with the fact that both genres of music involved the inducement of rhythmic movement. For Sousa, his music was used to help facilitate uniformity of movement by soldiers while marching. What helped the soldiers to keep in step with each other was the beat, metre or rhythm of the composition. There was no improvisation in Sousa’s military marches. The rhythm inherent in each composition remained constant whenever they were played. Soldiers learned to rely on the predictability of the beat to help them stay in step with their peers. With the Civil War having ended, John Philip Sousa’s patriotic marches were just the ticket to instill a sense of nationhood and unity in those fortunate enough to hear his music.
While Sousa was composing and conducting his marches, freed slaves were attempting to integrate themselves into the fabric of the society into which they had been freed. In a perfect world, the enactment of the Emancipation Proclamation and the end of the Civil War that followed would have resulted in a society in which white landowners and people of colour could co-exist in harmony and adopt peaceful, neighbourly relations. But, as we all know, that was not at all the case. There was no utopian dream being realized in America between the races, particularly in the defeated southern states. It wasn’t even the case of the races being “separate but equal”. The races were separate alright, but there was not much in the way of equality in how whites tended to view Blacks, how laws were enacted to discriminate against those freed slaves or how limited their future prospects tended to be. There was always the need for mobility inherent in the lives of those newly freed people. Sometimes they attempted to settle in a certain tract of land only to be forced out by threats of violence from white neighbours and their supporters. It is somewhat simplistic to say that Black communities took root where they did because those pieces of land were the only ones on which they were allowed to establish permanent homes, but there is also a fair bit of truth to that as well. Thus, places like the perimeter of New Orleans and the Mississippi Delta became home to people of colour. As that first generation of freed people became family-oriented, a second generation grew up hearing the tales of their fathers and mothers. Many of those tales were told through music. Because physical movement had always been such a part of pre- and post-slavery existence, the influence of military marches came into play, albeit with a dramatic twist. Music that possesses a good, steady beat will inspire people to move. In places like New Orleans, military-style marches became commonplace in the form of what is now referred to as “Jazz Funerals” or “Jazz Weddings”. Instead of soldiers marching to a steady beat, mourners/revelers would parade through the streets of town to celebrate the life of someone recently departed or to help a newly married couple start their new life together in a joyous manner. In addition to that, a new generation of Black composers began writing their own music that combined the structure of classical marches with the joy and spontaneity of what was happening in Black communities throughout the deep south. This hybrid of musical styles gave birth to a new genre of music called Ragtime.
Ragtime was a style of music that was primarily played on the piano. It was the precursor to Jazz. Like classical marches, Ragtime was played without improvisation. The songs created during this period from 1890-1910 were called “rags” and were most often performed exactly the same way, again and again, each time they were played. What made Ragtime different from any other form of music in existence anywhere in the world was that those who composed such music introduced a change in the way a song creates rhythm or beat. This change was called syncopation, and it revolutionized American music. As you may recall from my posts about classical music, for several centuries almost all classical music followed a rigid set of rules. There was a compositional form that was meant to be followed. It was only when the likes of Mozart and Beethoven came along that composers had enough confidence to create symphonies that altered the standard symphonic form in some way. Additionally, as you may recall, it was around this same time in history (1900) that a composer named Igor Stravinsky was premiering “The Rite of Spring” in Paris, which caused riots to take place because of how he had tossed musical convention on its ear. Change was in the air all over the world, so why not in a place like New Orleans or the Mississippi Delta or in Missouri, too? The change that was introduced by those early practitioners of Ragtime such as Jelly Roll Morton involved the way that rhythm was played. In Ragtime, a piano player would use their hands to do different things at the same time. As a wise friend said to me, the left hand would maintain a constant rhythm while the right hand played a different melody over top of the regular beat in the same way that patting your head while rubbing your stomach which, as you know, takes great concentration. Thus, just like the rhythmic structure of waltzes being unique to that form of music gave us “waltz time”, “rag time” became the term that was used to describe the musical timing created using the competing rhythms used in each composition. Thus, the genre came to be simply known as Ragtime.
Because music played in the Ragtime style electrified local audiences, two distinct things ended up happening. All of the early Ragtime composers were people of colour. Thus, Ragtime was regarded derisively at first by white audiences as being simply “Black music”. However, in time, those same white audiences, who enjoyed the musical inspiration that came from the likes of John Philip Sousa and his military marches, began to notice that Ragtime musical structures were starting to appear during Jazz Funerals and Wedding Marches. It was not long before Ragtime began to be incorporated into the repertoire of the orchestras that they were watching in concert. It was while orchestras started including Ragtime in with their other musical offerings that its popularity grew. In time, improvisational techniques by orchestra members led to variations in Ragtime that caused the development of Swing and Big Band music a few decades later. Additionally, the improvisational antics of these orchestras created the musical connection to the form of music that would simply become known as Jazz, itself.
While March-loving white audiences were getting their introduction to Ragtime through orchestras, the genre of Ragtime tended to remain the purview of Black musicians. While pianists such as Jelly Roll Morton were the first to introduce the style of music that became known as Ragtime, it was a man called Scott Joplin who made it famous. Joplin was a young Black man who was a classically trained pianist. It was his dream to create his own symphonies and operas. However, the opportunities available for Black musicians were not as plentiful as they were for white musicians and composers. So the classically trained Joplin found himself relegated to playing mostly in saloons and brothels. He composed some of the most famous rags of all time including “The Maple Leaf Rag” and “The Entertainer”. Because money was hard to come by for a traveling musician like Joplin, he always took time to record his compositions on piano rolls. You may have seen pianos that were called “player pianos” in which music was pre-recorded on cylinders which were then installed directly into the piano. Once the power to the cylinder was activated, the piano would play the pre-recorded song on its own. At the time when he was alive, Scott Joplin was not famous. In fact, he died penniless and unknown and was buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave in New Jersey. It was not until the early 1970s and the release of the Academy Award winning movie “The Sting” starring Paul Newman, Robert Redford and Robert Shaw that Scott Joplin got his due. The movie itself was set at the turn of the century and featured many of the same settings, such as gambling dens and saloons, that Joplin’s music would have been played at. Thus, when it came time to create a soundtrack for the movie, composer Marvin Hamlisch chose to highlight the work of fellow composer Scott Joplin. Joplin’s song “The Entertainer” became the theme for the movie. It was wildly popular and caused the world to take note of the man who originally composed it, Scott Joplin. Mr. Joplin’s body was located after much searching and there now exists a memorial plaque that highlights his contribution to the culture of American music. In fact, there is also an annual Scott Joplin Ragtime music festival held in his honour.
As you can see, it was necessary to take a step back from the Jazz timeline and pay homage to the many people who came before it and helped to create the environment that allowed Jazz to eventually happen. It was the interconnectedness of historical events such as the Emancipation Proclamation and the US Civil War, the ability of freed slaves to retain their cultural heritage in the face of unrelenting adversity, the willingness of classically trained composers such as Scott Joplin to swallow their pride by performing in seedy establishments in order to promote a new form of composition called a rag that was played in a style that became known as ragtime, from which there eventually came the improvisational innovations by the likes of King Oliver and Louis Arnstrong that resulted in a newer genre of music called Jazz. Simple as that, right? Lol! Nothing simple about it at all, actually. But it helps to bring us to where we need to be to proceed and move forward with our story. Thanks for reading my words today. I know that this is a long post, but the history of the genre requires it. To not discuss the story of how Jazz is steeped in the history of the experiences of Black people is to be disrespectful. Thus, we discuss. The genre of Jazz and all those who helped to create, promote and innovate within it deserve nothing less.
The link to the official website for Scott Joplin can be found here.
The link to the video for the song “The Maple Leaf Rag” by Scott Joplin can be found here.
The link to the official website for John Philip Sousa can be found here.
The link to the video for the song “The Stars and Stripes Forever” by John Philip Sousa can be found here.
The link to the video for the trailer for the movie The Sting can be found here.
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How lovely to start my day humming “Rags to Riches” as I dove into this Musi history.
Glad you liked it. Thanks for sharing the post on FB.