'Jazz" discussed in baseball research group -- supposed musical antedatings in Newspaper Archives

[Douglas G. Wilson]

Gerald Cohen wrote:
> ....
>>> found various prior mentions of the term jazz  in reference to music.  But are these references reliable?
No. They are generally (I think all) bogus.

I have done the same search myself, as have others (I suppose many
others); maybe we've missed something, but it is obviously unbelievable
that ALL of us simply overlooked ALL of these readily available "early
citations"!

Of course N'archive is no more reliable than other digitized stuff, and
many of the papers are wrongly dated. One must always seek internal
evidence of the date if it's important. One must also examine the actual
image to be sure that there is not an OCR error (these are very frequent).

Note too that one must be able to date the relevant page imaged (not
just the issue) since sometimes pages are mixed.

-- Doug Wilson

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