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

[Mullins, Bill AMRDEC]

Classification: UNCLASSIFIED
Caveats: NONE

Please forward these as appropriate to the interested members of the
SABR list.


> Secondly, Newspaper Archives show Telegraphic Brevities In
> Jazz for the New York Times, May 7, 1890. But when I checked the New
York Times
> Historical Index I did not find anything for the term jazz on this
date.

NYT 5/7/1890 p 5 has as an article headline at the bottom of col 5
entitled "Telegraphic Brevities".  At the top of the next column, a
subhead reads "In Jail Herself for Aiding her Scamp of a Husband to
Escape."

The OCR has skipped altogether the headline for the second article, and
misread "In Jail" for "In Jazz", and concatenated the two heads into one
"sentence".




> Thirdly, the Salt Lake Daily Tribune  (Utah) is said to contain SALT
> JAZZ for February 22, 1881, supposedly in the (somewhat jumbled)
> context:
>                  Ail of SUbic SALT JAZZ cmf j. Walker Brothers. [sic]
> When I pull up the relevant page, it seems to be various ads, with
print so
> tiny as to be illegible.  On the right are some adds with larger
print. =
> I see Walker Brothers there, and unless the accompanying few words in
> tiny print contain mention of jazz, this term is not present there.
In
> any case, what in the world would SALT JAZZ be?

The last 3 words at the bottom of col 8 are "Salt Lake City".  Searching
for "Jazz" on that page shows that the OCR has misread this phrase as
"Salt Jazz".  "Subic" is really "stables", and "Walker Brothers" appears
as the first words on top of the next column.



>      Fourthly, the Evening Telegram (Elyria, Ohio), April 10, 1909,
> supposedly talks about Ragtime Jazz and Syncopated Melody. Also: The
Original
> Jazz Quartet, The Sensation of Ziegfeld=B9s Midnight Frolics. ---- If
it
> really was the sensation of the Ziegfeld Midnight Frolics in 1909, why
do we
> not see mention of the Quartet in the New York City newspapers?  Btw,
this
> same newspaper supposedly mentions on May 9, 1909: Wilbur Sweatman
> Original Jazz Band.   But a check of Sweatman's recordings shows the
earliest
> ones were in 1918-1919.

The Elyria OH newspapers have more consistent date errors than just
about any other ones.


As has been pointed out many times previously on the ADS-L, you can't
take the metadata at Newspaperarchive.com or Proquest as gospel, and you
can't trust the OCR -- you've got to check the actual page images for
proper spelling, dates, and text recognition.
Classification: UNCLASSIFIED
Caveats: NONE

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