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

[Mark Mandel]

Maybe we should call it OCX, where X = the unknown.

m a m

On Mon, Jul 13, 2009 at 10:57 AM, Mullins, Bill AMRDEC <
Bill.Mullins at us.army.mil> wrote:

> 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
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>



--
Mark Mandel

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org