Dude, Where’s My Van? Part 14: High Society Rags

After World War I, the cities of the US found themselves at a new peak of consumerism and escapist decadence.

This was the Roaring Twenties.

It may in fact have encouraged more people to drink, in defiance of the law. People with a thirst for booze simply went to speakeasies run by the mafia, instead of establishment saloons or bars.

This was the time of the flappers, with their stylish new bobs and their open embrace of sexuality.

It was also a time of major artistic fruition among black communities. 

In the 1920s, there was no more significant cultural capital for black Americans than New York City.

Particularly the neighborhood of Harlem in Manhattan.

In the early and mid 1900s, once southern states started to adopt Jim Crow laws to reverse rights that blacks had been granted after the Civil War, there was a mass exodus of black families out of the South, in search of a better life. Northern cities were common destinations, with the most popular being New York City and Chicago. 

Even more, it was a major center of black political, intellectual, and artistic life. Harlem was home to black literary journals that published new works by James Weldon Johnson and Claude McKay, and by promising young talents such as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston.

Harlem was the original home of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or NAACP, a civil rights advocacy group founded by the cultural titan W.E.B. Dubois.

In short, Harlem was the center of what we now call the Harlem Renaissance.

Though back then it was referred to as “the New Negro Movement.” It was a movement dedicated to help black Americans find their own sense of self worth.

So, what about the music of the Harlem Renaissance?

What was this community listening to at this time in history…which, you know, was also dubbed by F. Scott Fitzgerald as “the Jazz Age?”

It’s a bit complicated, though. I’ll explain. But first, let me go back a bit:

In the final decades of the 19th century, several black American musical traditions were forming, mixing, and evolving together. 

One was the jubilant music of the cakewalk competitions from slave plantations, later called “ragtime” after its syncopated, or ragged time. This had originally been inspired by marching band music, but was mainly made for piano.

There was also the development of songs with specific 12-bar chord progressions that were labeled as “blues” numbers. Some of these were rollicking marches or lively dance numbers, but a growing number of blues tunes from the rural South began to conjure a feeling of melancholy.

Some such piano blues tunes were on the bawdy side, but they nevertheless also gave voice to the raw feeling, pain, and heartbreak that we all now associated with someone “playing the blues.”

And then, there was “jazz.”

A musical gumbo of various black styles that first simmered together in New Orleans.

Jazz bands descended from marching bands, but also included banjos and piano. Other than the steady, stomping four-four rhythm, the musicians played in ragged time, and they often played blues progressions.

Sometimes the players would chime in with improvised melodies for added excitement. Sometimes they’d throw in Afro-Cuban rhythms and stop-start dynamics for extra flavor. There was no one recipe for jazz. What was most important was the collective effort of the players in the band to make the liveliest party music anyone had ever heard.

Thanks to jazz bands being booked to play on riverboats and on trains, the hot new music of black New Orleans spread to the major cities in the 1910s.

It also spread as blacks migrated North to escape the stranglehold of Jim Crow, as previously mentioned.

By the time of the 1920s, musicians from New Orleans could find easy work in Chicago or New York City, playing in one or more of the countless speakeasies that had popped up in the wake of Prohibition. The players thus began to develop their own variations of the style that suited each locality.

It was fun novelty music, sure, rooted in ragtime piano music. But the top stride players were formidable talents, having to stand out in a city known far and wide for its classical musical elite. They honed their skills together via “cutting” contests to determine who was best.

However impressive their playing may have been, some audiences could not be swayed. This unfortunately included many pioneers of the Harlem Renaissance, who felt that ragtime, stride, blues, and jazz music were an embarrassment for black America.

These folk novelty tunes and dance fads were leftover echoes from the minstrel shows. They were not a music befitting the dignity of the New Negro. 

Quoth a black journalist on the growing jazz craze:

“It is probably here to stay, in order to appease the exotic period which recreation seems to demand nowadays.

It is the “chop-suey” of the musical world – but the world seems to want more and more of it, sad though that fact be;

and it is a blessing that Schumann, Mozart and Mendelssohn are not present to hear it,

for they would think, indeed, that they had lived in vain.”

New Amsterdam News, October, 1926

To us, this sounds like standard class snobbery. And that certainly was a factor in black distaste for the entertainment styles of the time. Harlem was, after all, home to a large concentration of black wealth in America—and class contempt is one thing that unites all races, unfortunately. 

But it’s more complicated than that. Following the re-emergence of the Ku Klux Klan in the mid-1910s, anti-black violence once again began to increase across the nation.

They were unsuccessful, and the film did indeed incite anti-black violence. 

While figures such as Marcus Garvey saw such violence as more evidence that blacks needed to separate themselves permanently from white society, integrationist leaders like W.E.B. Dubois longed to counteract such hate mongering with their own cultural counter-programming;

with art that could move hearts and minds to the humanity of black people, and to the common humanity of us all.

“Thus all Art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists.

I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy.

I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda.

But I do care when propaganda is confined to one side while the other is stripped and silent.”

The Crisis, October, 1926

But like Antonin Dvorak, Dubois’ dream took place in the elite sphere of composition in the European classical tradition. He could not fathom how his dream of black dignity and common humanity could possibly come from the entertainment world, where musicians shamelessly pandered to their patrons for a few extra bucks. 

The revolution of the New Negro simply could not come from below.

…Or couldn’t it?

(To be continued…)

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