to manipulate workers by dispensing intoxicants; apparently there were those who felt that Negro servants worked harder under the influence of cocaine.)70
There was a “long association of jazz with alcohol,” according to one scholar, meaning “many musicians suffered from alcoholism.” Musicians often ran up a tab as they grabbed drinks from the bar—or were plied with same—that could consume their paycheck. The unusual late-night working hours sapped energy, disrupting circadian rhythms, and often led to unusual musical rhythms. Unscrupulous club owners were not averse to “paying” musicians with alcohol. They were also not above closing their establishment every thirty days, issuing a new lease to a dummy lessee, and reopening under a new name, thereby cheating the artists and, perhaps, driving them to drown their sorrows in drink.71
Louis Armstrong once told Buck Clayton “how many people he knew had been killed in little clubs while listening to jazz by somebody that was either jealous or drunk. Louie once told me that even he had once been cut.”72 In some ways, this renowned trumpeter and vocalist can be viewed as the shining embodiment of the new music. After all, the erudite scholar, Dr. Allison Davis, was said to have remarked that this musician’s rendition of “‘West End Blues’ may be the greatest thing American civilization has ever produced,” a statement that is hardly exaggerated and thus casts into bold relief his own hardscrabble existence in Louisiana.73 For Armstrong’s own experience in New Orleans provides a glimpse of the atmosphere in which the new music was incubated. As a youngster, he was playing in the streets “when all of a sudden a guy on the opposite side of the street pulled out a little old six shooter pistol and fired it..” Without hesitating, the budding trumpeter “pulled out my stepfather’s revolver from my bosom and raised my arm into the air and let her go..” In a transformative episode, he was arrested and jailed. “I was scared,” he confessed, “more scared than I was the day Jack Johnson knocked out Jim Jeffries,” a reference to the tumultuous day when the ebony heavyweight champion defeated his white challenger, leading to racist pogroms nationally. Armstrong was sent to the “Colored Waifs’ Home” for boys, which fortunately did not derail his career.74
Alcohol at times loosened the tongues of those in the audience, often not in a good way. Danny Barker has said that “in the Negro joints we played relaxed, at home; but in the white joints were all eyes and ears, and anything could happen … there were descriptive slurs,” he said, including “niggers, darkies, Zulus, piccaninnies … monkeys, gorillas, Ubangis … tar babies, ink spots.” At times, these musicians crossed an actual—and metaphorical—border: “Mississippi. Just the mention of the word … amongst a group of New Orleans people would cause complete silence and attention. The word was so very powerful that it carried the impact of catastrophes, destruction, hell, earthquakes, cyclones, murder, hangings, lynchings, all sorts of slaughter….” But it was not just the Magnolia State since tales of “Alabama, Florida, Texas and Georgia were equally fearsome.”75
The climate in which this music was forged was also unhealthy in terms of the violence often inflicted upon denizens. African Americans were a frequent target but indicative of the hostile climate that spilled over to ensnare others, Italian Americans, too, were targeted at times. It was in 1891 that this latter group was subjected to what has been described as the “largest lynching in American history,” referring to almost a dozen men who were murdered in one fell swoop in response to allegations concerning their presumed attack on local law enforcement. As noted, these Italian Americans were primarily of Sicilian origin, “some 70 percent” of the total according to one estimate, and, it was said, they were “unconsciously … tolerant” of Negroes, “even friendly with them,” displaying an “indifference to American racism,” a blatant violation of dominant norms that was bound to spark retaliation. The “White League,” known to torment African Americans, was also accused of “waging war against Italians.” Reputedly “50 percent of the major American papers in every section of the country … approved” of the lynching. Theodore Roosevelt called it “a rather good thing.” Opinions began to shift when it was reported that a substantial Italian fleet was making its way across the Atlantic with the aim of attacking U.S. coastal cities. The fact that African Americans had no such patron to intervene on their behalf helped to spur a “Pan African” Congress to cure this defect with the aim of strengthening the ancestral continent. Also, Negro musicians began at this juncture to migrate abroad where they were in a position to lobby on behalf of those left behind.76
Retrospectively, the attack on Sicilians and Sicilian Americans and Italians and Italian Americans seems to have been designed to drive a wedge between them and their African-American neighbors and co-workers, at a time when one contemporary scholar has spoken of a “General Strike” in the Crescent City in 1892, “the first inter-racial strike in the country.”77
As noted, anti-Italian pogroms were an extension of what was befalling Africans. New Orleans had one of the largest concentrations of Negroes in North America, which impelled the rowdiest of their antagonists to seek to bludgeon them.78 At the time of the most significant anti-Negro explosions of this era, in New Orleans in 1900, “Big Eye” Louis Nelson Delisle, a multi-instrumentalist, was playing bass at a club, accompanying Buddy Bolden, when his father was killed and himself nearly so. He was prompted to make the strategic decision to give up on the cumbersome bass and focus on the clarinet; as one analyst put it, this smaller instrument “would be easier to run with if another mob was chasing him”—yet another example of how racism and the political economy shaped the music. Whatever the case, Bolden’s cornet was smashed during the riot, sending a contrary message. Likewise, a staggered Lorenzo Tio left the city altogether.79
The crucible in which this new music emerged was often rife with dangers of various sorts—cheating employers not least—which in turn shaped the art form. Taking risks and improvisation nestled near the heart of the music.
Ineluctably, an increasingly popular music identified with African American men was designed to incur wrath in a racist society. At the same time, the perhaps not coincidental arrival of jazz with the rise of U.S. imperialism at the turn of the twentieth century contributed to seeing this new music, as one astringent critic put it, as the “natural accompaniment to the death march of Western civilization as a whole.”80 It was an unwelcome trend in the United States, exacerbating the preexisting Negrophobia.
On the other hand, there was the proliferation of electricity, feeding the popularity of the phonograph and recorded music. Thomas Edison’s device marked the onset of the modern music industry and allowed musicians to reach into the most obscure corners of the planet.81 The critic Leonard Feather argued that Kid Ory’s “Sunshine Blues” and his “Creole Trombone” were the first genuine recordings of “black jazz,” recorded, interestingly enough, in Los Angeles rather than New Orleans.82 Ironically, recorded music simultaneously opened an income stream and yet another opportunity for exploitation. Electricity also facilitated the popularity of certain musical instruments—for example, the electric guitar—which transformed the music. The rise of electricity also dovetailed with the rise of radio, yet another device that propelled the new music.83 But these technological advances also buoyed the increasingly strident critics alarmed by the popularity of music produced mostly by Negro men.
The critic identified as Mrs. Marx E. Oberndofer of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs asked plaintively, “Does jazz put the sin in syncopation?” The answer was an emphatic yes. This music, it was said accusingly, was that “expression of protest against law and order, that Bolshevik element of license, striving for expression in music.” Concurring, Fenton T. Bott found that “jazz is the very foundation and essence of salacious dancing.” This alarmism grew as the sales of phonographs surged to 158 million by 1919, allowing for further dissemination of the music. One poster blared ominously, “STOP HELP SAVE THE YOUTH OF AMERICA DON’T BUY NEGRO RECORDS.” “If you don’t want to serve Negroes in your place of business,” it was advised, then “do not have Negro records on your juke box or listen to Negro records
