Ragged but Right (pt. 1)

[George Thompson]

I looked at the following book, to see whether it at all undermined the
seeming fact that black musicians of the 1900s and early-mid 1910s did not
call the music they played "jazz".  I wound up reading it with more
attention than I planned.



Lynn Abbott & Doug Seroff. * Ragged but Right: Black Traveling Shows, "Coon
Songs," and the Dark Pathway to Blues and Jazz*.  University Press of
Mississippi, 2007


Indeed, nothing in it suggests that the musicians with these minstrel shows
used the word "jazz" until after the jazz craze had started in Chicago and
had been taken up by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band.

As to whether the bands were playing jazz, whatever they may have called
it, the authors are of the opinion that they were, but since none of the
bands were recorded, we will never know.

Most of the documentation of the book is from reports in the *Indianapolis
Freeman* newspaper, that were supplied to the paper by someone who was
travelling with the shows.  The reports indicate when shows were formed and
when they folded.  It seems that the musicians in the show bands were not
often named; when Abbott & Seroff do give names, I occasionally recognize
someone who was a sideman in a group in the 1920s, but most of the names I
do not know.   One show, Tolliver's, wintered in New Orleans,
1915-1916.  Ragged
but Right, p. 134, col. 1  Otherwise, the reports are pretty danged
general: our comedian has them hooting with laughter, our dancers are
tearing it up, our singers earn thunderous applause: no jokes quoted or
sketches described, no hint as to the nature of the dancing, or of the
songs or music.



Searching digitized newspapers for early occurrences of the word "jazz" is
a tiresome business, since the word was spelled several different ways, and
most of the spellings are easily confused with some other word by an addled
OCR.

It has just gotten even more tiresome, with a new way of spelling it:

     "Jez Band", Philadelphia Tribune, February 3, 1917  *Ragged but Right,
p. 174*

GAT

--
George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern
Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much since then.

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