Stomp and Swerve: American Music Gets Hot, 1843a1924: American Music Gets Hot, 1843-1924 - Softcover

Wondrich, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 155652496X ISBN 13: 9781556524967

Verlag: A Cappella Books, 2003

Inhaltsangabe

"The early decades of American popular musicùStephen Foster, Scott Joplin, John Philip Sousa, Enrico Carusoùare, for most listeners, the dark ages. It wasnÆt until the mid-1920s that the full spectrum of this musicùblack and white, urban and rural, sophisticated and crudeùmade it onto records for all to hear. This book brings a forgotten music, hot music, to life by describing how it became the dominant American musicùhow it outlasted sentimental waltzes and parlor ballads, symphonic marches and Tin Pan Alley novelty numbersùand how it became rock ÆnÆ roll. It reveals that the young men and women of that bygone era had the same musical instincts as their descendants Louis Armstrong, Elvis Presley, James Brown, Jimi Hendrix, and even Ozzy Osbourne. In minstrelsy, ragtime, brass bands, early jazz and blues, fiddle music, and many other forms, there was as much stomping and swerving as can be found in the most exciting performances of hot jazz, funk, and rock. Along the way, it explains how the strange combination of African with Scotch and Irish influences made music in the United States vastly different from other African and Caribbean musics; shares terrific stories about minstrel shows, ôcoonö songs, whorehouses, knife fights, and other low-life phenomena; and showcases a motley collection of performers heretofore unknown to all but the most avid musicologists and collectors."

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

David Wondrich is the author of Esquire Drinks and writes about music and cocktails for The New York Times, Esquire, and The Village Voice. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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Stomp and Swerve

American Music Gets Hot, 1843-1924

By David Wondrich

Chicago Review Press Incorporated

Copyright © 2003 David Wondrich
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-55652-496-7

Contents

PREFACE, 
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, 
INTRODUCTION Love and Strife, 
Drive and Swerve, 
Afro-Celtic Fusion, 
PART I Minstrelsy, or Get Out de Way, 
America's First Music Craze, 
The Horrors and Delights of Blackface Entertainment, 
PART II Ragtime, or All Coons Alike, 
Ragtime's Buried Roots: Brass Bands and the Birth of the Record Industry, 
Banjos, Coon Songs, and Vocal Groups, 
PART III Black Folks' Opera, 
Blues into Jazz, 
The Pathology of an Infection: The Blues in New Orleans and New York, 
Two Crazes: Jazz, 1917-1921; The Blues, 1920-1924, 
Birth of a New Art: Enrico Caruso, a Whole Bunch of Other Guys, and Louis Armstrong, 
CODA Emmett's Children, or Hillbilly Music, 
RECORDS, 
BOOKS, 
INDEX, 

CHAPTER 1

PART I

Minstrelsy, or Get Out De Way

[Ministrallorum] sunt duo genera. Quidam enim frequentant publicas potationes et lasciuas congregationes, et cantant ibi diuersas cantilenas ut moueant homines ad lasciuiam, et tales sunt damnabiles. Sunt autem alii qui cantant gesta principum et uita sanctorum et non faciunt innumerabiles turpitudines.

There are two kinds of minstrels: some frequent public drinking-places and indecent gatherings, where they sing all sorts of popular songs in order to move people to indecency; such minstrels are damnable. There are others, however, who sing about the deeds of princes and the lives of the saints and don't do those countless filthy things.

— THOMAS DE CABHAM (OB. 1313)

America's First Music Craze

In late January 1843, Daniel Decatur Emmett hosted an impromptu jam session in his room in Mrs. Brooke's boarding house at 37 Catherine Street, in New York's impressively unsavory Fourth Ward. (The tenement that's been camping out on the site for the last century or so now holds a Chinese beauty parlor and no plaque.) Emmett fiddled and Billy Whitlock picked on a banjo that Emmett had lying around, while Dick Pelham and Frank Brower kept time on tambourine and bones (nothing more than a pair of cattle ribs that you rattled together like musical spoons). The young men — Emmett, the oldest, was twenty-eight — played "Old Dan Tucker" (words by Emmett, tune by ... somebody else), and it was good. Better yet, it was hot. Within hours, they had a gig at Bartlett's Billiard-Room in the Branch Hotel, a couple of blocks away at 36 Bowery (no plaque). Or maybe they secured the gig first and jammed later; memories, as always in revolutions, differ. In any case, they were overnight stars. They began calling themselves the Virginia Minstrels, evidently playing off a quartet of yodeling Tyrolese Minstrels that were touring at the time; we'll get to the Virginia part in a moment.

The Virginia Minstrels were the first truly American band, playing American music — or at least the first to be publicly recognized as such. When Billy Whitlock added his percussive banjo to Dan Emmett's fiddle, he was doing something new and dangerous, at least for white folks. Before the Virginia Minstrels, white performers kept the (white) fiddle and its music segregated from the black banjo and its music. One doesn't hear of white banjo players much at all before the Virginian Joel Walker Sweeney, who began touring with the instrument in 1836; he was Whitlock's teacher (he's also credited with changing the body of the instrument from a gourd to a proper European drum shell). If the Virginia Minstrels were merely presenting something to the larger ofay public that had been going on quietly for ages back in the hood, the fact remains that this particular lineup, and especially the conjunction of the banjo and the fiddle, doesn't seem to have been attempted before on the stage, at least in New York (and then, as now, if it ain't in New York, it's out of town). Billy Whitlock himself had played one night with a fiddler in Philly, a couple of years before Mrs. Brooke's, but he remembered it only as a "novel idea," a freak.

What did they sound like? The songs are basically "Turkey in the Straw" (Emmett's name for it; before him, it was "Zip Coon") and the like — lightly syncopated variants of English/Scots/Irish fiddle tunes; repetitive melodies with rough, usually satirical lyrics often chanted in unison. But, as a witness to their antics observed, "it could be very difficult to describe [their performance] in libretto, and musical score would not do it justice." Pelham, for instance, "seemed animated by a savage energy," and, in an age where real musicians were supposed to sit still, his frenzied tambourine-bashing "nearly wrung him off his seat." Whitlock frailed away at his gut-stringed banjo with "complete abandon," Emmett furiously hacked a fiddle held backwoods-style at his chest, and Brower kept popping up from his chair to stomp around the stage in his boots while rapidly rattling a pair of rib bones in each hand, putting the whole arm into it. How can you notate that? Fortissimo doesn't quite cut it; allo Negro might be more appropriate.

For — as you may have surmised — Emmett, Brower, Pelham, and Whitlock were all well-established professional "darkies," or "Ethiopian delineators," which were the contemporary terms of art (it should go without saying that the bulk of white America at the time, North and South, slaver and abolitionist, was casually, thoroughly, and institutionally racist in speech and deed). They were white men who spent the greater part of the working day in loud, tattered clothes, with nappy wigs on their heads and large quantities of burnt cork besmirching their pasty Anglo-Irish complexions. Thus decked out, they would present themselves before their equals — mostly deracinated rustics newly come to the metropolis and recent immigrants from the various islands and mains of northern Europe, with a stiffening of the established petite bourgeoisie and even the occasional slumming swell — and pretend (albeit not very hard) that they were real African slaves on one of the great Southern plantations (hence the "Virginia"). And thus they would dance and sing, pick the banjo and rock the bow, give mangled speeches and tell corny jokes. Always tell jokes. Before the Virginia Minstrels, they did it in ones and twos, as part of someone else's act or variety show. After, they were the show. If there were other, earlier, white musicians who turned imitating black ones into a musical genre, rather than a one-off novelty, their names have fallen into the cracks of history.

The music of the minstrel show, as codified by Emmett and his boys, was the first recognized, fully documented eruption of American music. Although many have tried and oft, none has yet found a way beyond the mere assertion of tain't so to escape the plain fact that all that is American in American music, and all that is good, traces its bloodlines through the minstrel show — an institution through which white America stole, plundered, colonized; raped, prostituted, and pimped; contaminated and diluted; misinterpreted and misunderstood; ridiculed, patronized, bucked, scorned and — in some strange way — passionately loved the music and the culture of black America.

In the past few years, minstrelsy has become something of a hot topic among academics. A lot of convoluted sentences have been...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: A Cappella Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2003
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 155652496X
• ISBN 13: 9781556524967
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 256
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar