Playboy's History of Jazz and Rock

Part One: The Devil's Music

The history of jazz and rock is the history of American popular culture in the 20th Century. Over 100 years ago, the cornerstones of blues, ragtime and jazz were laid by the first generation of African Americans born out of slavery. The new music introduced African-style syncopation into popular American music and breathed a spirit of boundless human creativity into a stale and sexually repressive Victorian culture.

Jazz and its antecedents provided a new paradigm of an idealized democratic culture that allowed for the maximum creative participation of the individual within a group, no matter how sharply focused or remarkably disciplined. And it proposed an ecstatic union of body and soul, mind and spirit, carnal knowledge and eternal truth for the first time in a uniquely American synthesis.

It sprang from wide-ranging Southern roots: field hollers, arhoolies, work songs, ring shouts, "Sankeys" and "ballits," Baptist spirituals, Choctaw chants, plantation entertainments, minstrel shows, marching bands, the cries of street vendors, the songs of Mardi Gras Indians, the rhythms of country preachers and the crude string improvisations of rural bluesmen. Added to those were European techniques and the carefully structured compositions of popular ragtime pianists. Jazz emerged full-blown circa the 1890s in the rough-and-tumble saloons and dance halls of uptown New Orleans and soon was carried Northward in the hands and horns of its practitioners. By 1917, when the first jazz recordings were made in New York City, the music had spread from coast to coast and had invaded the cultural capitals of Europe, where it was celebrated as an expression of the American genius for synthesis and innovation. After three centuries of development, African-American music took its place on the world stage and popular music was forever changed.

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Jazz's roots actually spring far from the American South. Such basic jazz elements as blue tonalities, polyrhythms, improvisation, call-and-response patterns, the bass line and the shuffle at the bottom of the beat came from Africa with the ebony-hued people who were delivered here in chains from 1619 on.

In addition to their music, those involuntary emigrants of West Africa brought a cultural belief that music was a function of daily life that could address concerns both mortal and godly. Music and religion and every other part of life were all intertwined. Fundamentally, West African religions were not crusading. When weaker communities were defeated in battle, their more powerful neighbors characteristically enslaved them but allowed them to retain their own beliefs and rituals. In fact, conquering nations frequently adopted religious practices from their captives. Later, when their captors traded them to European slavers, however, the prisoners discovered the far less ecumenical world of Christianity. North American Christian masters regarded the Africans' religious practices as heretical and morally degenerate. Their music and other art forms, so integral to their spiritual life, were antithetical to the Anglo-European world view. Therefore, slaveowners persisted in stripping the former Africans of their traditions. Slave music, because it served as such a basic means of communication among Africans, was regarded with extreme suspicion. Its inspirational and unifying effect on slave communities made its suppression even more essential: The risk of slave insurrection was no small matter.

There was an economic factor, too. Religious rites in the isolation of the slave quarters were likely to go on with strenuous dancing and singing all night long, rendering entire work crews useless the next day. An aged former slave, George Blisset, told WPA researchers in the Thirties, "If they catched us, we got whipped. We couldn't look tired next day, either. First thing of driver say was that we was up late the night before, and he sure lay that bullwhip on our nekkid skin."

Hence, the slaveowners were bent on eradicating African culture. The playing of the drum, the dance in celebration of the gods of fertility and life, the open use of African systems of language and worship were banned throughout the South for more than 200 years.

The music of the slaves found only two acceptable outlets on the Southern plantations before the Civil War: work songs and church songs, which included ring and shuffle shouts, chants and spirituals adapted by slaves from African and European forms to express their tentative embrace of Christianity.

A close examination of early Negro Christianity reveals its West African underpinnings. Many of the celebrated Negro spirituals of the slave Baptists and Methodists were simply African concepts, musical constructs and existent compositions rendered into Creolized English and reconciled to the reigning orthodoxy. One Anglican churchman, traveling in Central Africa during the 1800s, reported hearing natives sing "a melody so closely resembling Swing Low, Sweet Chariot that he felt that he had found it in its original form," adding that the song's content was based on a local religious myth of long standing.

The slaves also infused the pallid Protestant hymns and psalms introduced to them through the popular Moody and Sankey songbooks with patent Africanisms, reshaping the English forms in their own image and fitting them to their own circumstances and concerns. Syncopation, multiple rhythms and various characteristic West African vocal effects transformed them into the stomping, swinging, emotionally charged anthems of the black church.

That is how African-American music stayed alive for two and a half centuries. While its makers learned the English tongue and bent it musically to their will, the music, under cover of the church, overcame every attempt to eliminate it and, in turn, provided African Americans with a potent weapon in their long struggle against oppression.

Only after emancipation did the religious mask fall, revealing the ancestral music of West Africa. And in the one place where the ancestral forms had remained most intact, New Orleans, a new music was brought to life by the sons and daughters of the slaves.

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Sunday mornings it was different. He'd wake up and start to be a slave.... And then he'd hear drums from the square. First one drum, then another one answering it. Then a lot of drums. Then a voice, one voice. And then a refrain, a lot of voices joining and coming into each other. And all of it having to be heard. The music being born right inside itself, not knowing how it was getting to be music, one thing being responsible for another. Improvisation ... that's what it was. It was primitive and it was crude, but down at the bottom of it ... it had the same thing there is at the bottom of ragtime. It was already born in the music they played at Congo Square.

—Sidney Bechet

New Orleans has always been different from the rest of the South and, as poet Kalamu ya Salaam puts it, "Our music is no accident." Founded by French Catholic explorers in 1718 and operated as a major North American outpost of Catholic civilization until its annexation by the United States (via the Louisiana Purchase) in 1803, New Orleans stood apart from the Protestant South in several important ways. As a major New World seaport connected to the West Indies, Africa and Europe, the city enjoyed a constant influx of people and cultures from all over the world, including free blacks from Haiti and San Domingo, as well as thousands of slaves brought directly from West Africa.

As a Roman Catholic stronghold under French and, from 1763 to 1803, Spanish rule, New Orleans developed a distinctive cultural milieu that stood in sharp relief against the Protestant backdrop of the British colonies. The infamous Louisiana "Black Codes of 1724," which mandated death to slaves who committed certain (continued on page 134)History of Jazz and Rock(continued from page 101) offenses against their masters, also explicitly guaranteed them human rights not granted elsewhere in the South.

The urban environment and the nature of the work performed by slaves in New Orleans also accorded them considerable freedom. Slaves served the shipping industry, merchants and traders, politicians and professionals, households and businesses, as well as plantation owners. As early as the 1720s, free blacks in New Orleans had become tradesmen and merchants, many owning slaves themselves. Education and training in the trades, arts and professions, as well as the possibility of manumission, were within the reach of many black New Orleanians, certainly to a far greater extent than anywhere else in the antebellum South.

Religion was at the root of the profound differences between Louisiana and the rest of the South. Unlike the Southern Protestants, who considered their slaves subhuman primitives, the Louisiana Catholic Church seriously regarded the Africans as souls to be saved and made every effort to convert them without demanding in return the obliteration of their African heritage. As a result, the Africans in New Orleans found that they could maintain their ancestral system of beliefs by subverting Catholicism to their own religious purposes. They discovered acceptable parallels between their gods and the many saints of the Catholics, their own commitment to ritual and the formal obsessions of the French and the Spanish. Worship of Ogun, Elegba and the myriad West African deities continued under the guise of entreaties to the Catholic saints who most resembled their African counterparts; candles continued to be lit, incense burned, icons cherished and rituals performed according to the ancient precepts on the holy days that coincided with those on the Roman Catholic calendar.

Importantly, many blacks continued to worship in the traditional ways, both privately and publicly, gathering regularly outside the ramparts of the old city (the area now known as the French Quarter) in a large swampy tract called Congo Plains (later Back of Town and now the old Sixth Ward) to socialize and celebrate their gods. Here the slaves assembled along Old World tribal lines. They searched for long-lost relatives and exchanged personal news and cultural information.

On the Congo Plains, hundreds of slaves formed a series of concentric circles around ceremonial percussionists and conducted African religious rites centered on ecstatic drumming, dancing and spirit possession that lasted for hours at a time. These mass ceremonies, unlike the heavily censored religious services of their counterparts on the rural Protestant plantations, took place without any mandate to mask or suppress the ancestral cultural forms. Free of interference by their Catholic masters, the African culture-bearers in New Orleans continued to develop their music in accordance with an artistic continuum that stretched directly back to the Congo.

The French and then the Spanish rulers of New Orleans had no apparent interest in curtailing the extracurricular activities of their slave population, as long as these practices posed no threat to the basic security of the established system. But when the Americans took charge of New Orleans in 1805, the city council quickly moved to limit the gatherings on the Congo Plains to Sunday afternoons and banned any other form of slave gatherings. By the 1820s, these activities were confined to a smaller area at Rampart and Orleans called Congo Square, where the police could keep a closer eye on things. Still, these unadulterated African-based cultural activities continued with little interruption until the enactment of the segregation laws after 1877, which, among other things, banned blacks from gathering in the city parks and drove the remaining Africanisms underground.

Congo Plains and Congo Square kept the music of Africa alive in New Orleans for 150 years. It remained for the Civil War, emancipation and, ironically, more Jim Crow laws to produce the extraordinary circumstances that molded that African music into a new sound that ultimately was called jazz.

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After emancipation, the former slaves were finally free to travel. Many moved from plantation country into Southern cities. Others remained where they were, now working the land as sharecroppers and tenant farmers bound to their former owners through a new form of economic servitude.

Especially in the rural South, the Negro church had been a sanctuary during slavery. With freedom, the ex-slaves were delivered, in a sense, to the land of promise that had loomed so large in the lyrics of their spirituals. Now the secular world demanded their attention. Now came the potential for music outside the carefully circumscribed world of the church.

The new secular music of the ex-slaves emerged as the uniquely African-American construct we know as the blues, termed "the Devil's music" by the legions of God-fearing black Protestants who resented its propensity to lead their people away from the church. Formally inspired by the spiritual, the blues also drew breath from work songs. But now it could speak eloquently of other earthly concerns, from the struggle to find and keep a home or a lover to the adventures experienced along the road in the bluesman's eternal quest to avoid regular employment.

The blues as a form of personal expression perfectly suited the new social circumstances of the African American. Through the temporal subject matter of its lyrics, the blues helped the ex-slaves explore their new freedom. While its lyrics were growing in sophistication, so were its musical arrangements, thanks to the Civil War armies, whose military marching units had left their beat-up horns and woodwinds behind in pawnshops throughout the South. That sudden treasure of abandoned musical instruments put trumpets and trombones, clarinets and tubas, snare drums, bass drums and cymbals into the hands of African Americans for the first time.

Musical training was rare in the rural areas, but after emancipation, New Orleans' large population of "free persons of color"—part French Negroes (the offspring of French gentlemen and American women of color under that peculiar local institution called plaçage) and high-placed slaves who served the French households and businesses of the Vieux Carré—produced a generation of well-schooled, technically expert musicians who contributed to the evolving musical mix that would become jazz. Long exempt from the problems and conditions of their less fortunately placed fellow African Americans, those "Creoles of color" had developed refined musical skills through European-style training and direct exposure to the standard musical literature. They snapped up the abandoned band instruments, mastered their intricacies and began to form little marching units and society bands of their own. By the early 1880s, there existed, at the very least, 12 such bands in New Orleans.

The sound of jazz started to take shape within the black New Orleans marching bands as the players injected syncopation and melodic variation into the clipped, militaristic charts popular with brass bands throughout America. Those same musicians also played at picnics, dance (continued on page 156)History of Jazz and Rock(continued from page 134) halls and social gatherings as small society orchestras and pushed the music ahead another step when they started livening up their dance material with the beat of their marching units.

The new music gained inspiration from a postwar influx of back-country black preachers and their congregations, who brought their emotional, rhythmically charged spirituals, shouts and sermons to the rough uptown districts. The Mardi Gras Indians—blacks of mixed African, French and Choctaw ancestry who masked as "wild" Indians during Mardi Gras—preserved the remaining traces of their African heritage through their ritualistic chants and cries, wild street moves and regular Sunday "Indian practices." They added an Afro-Caribbean-Choctaw rhythmic twist to the music of the brass bands that survives today as an essential ingredient of all New Orleans music.

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Blues in the country, brass bands in the city—here were the two strains of African-American music that would dominate and inform all American popular music for the next century. Both gave voice to the evolving culture of ex-slaves in new circumstances. Both served the emerging needs for self-expression and homespun entertainment among the communities that produced them. But emancipation also made possible the emergence of an entirely new force in American show business: the professional Negro entertainer.

The first black entertainers to pursue a living in the music business were the genuine Negro minstrels who surfaced after emancipation to introduce African syncopation and phrasing to white audiences throughout America and Europe. A pale approximation of their music had been popular with the general public since the 1840s, performed by troupes of white entertainers originating in New York who aped the early inventions of actual plantation minstrels. They formed troupes dressed in raggedy formalwear, blackened their faces and hands with burnt cork and offered awkward versions of Negro songs, dances and comedy routines in the guise of blackface minstrels.

Once blacks were free to seek a living, show business offered an opportunity for African Americans finally to compete with their imitators. And such early "Negro" touring shows as the Georgia Minstrels, Pringle Minstrels and McCabe and Young Minstrels gained wide exposure throughout the country.

The genuine Negro minstrels ultimately contributed a radical new musical form called ragtime, a relentlessly polyrhythmic music that appeared on the American entertainment scene in the late 1880s. Ragtime developed as soon as black musicians gained regular access to that quintessential European instrument, the piano, and began to bend its keys to their own purposes. Adapting their ancestral musical concepts and practices to its expressive properties, the early ragtime pianists whipped together light classics, popular marches and show tunes, folk ditties and traditional dance tunes of both races into a thrilling synthesis that flashed into the national limelight at the World's Columbian Exposition at Chicago in 1893. The first published rags—Tom Turpin's Harlem Rag and W. H. Krell's The Mississippi Rag—appeared in 1897 and were instantly snatched up by millions of American households to be studied and played on parlor pianos.

Ragtime was a strong force in New Orleans, where the Creoles of color enjoyed early access to the piano. Ragtime soon colored the attack of the brass bands, as well as the approach of the "piano professors" who provided popular entertainment for the city's wide-open red-light district. Untutored uptown blacks began ragging their blues and spirituals, infusing their country-bred concoctions with the spirit and drive of ragtime.

Popular ragtime compositions by Midwestern pianists published by New York music firms found their way onto the music stands of the Creoles of color, who prided themselves on their hard-won ability to read and perform every sort of written material. Syncopation reared its tempting head and these stiff, well-schooled musicians who had moved so far away from the ancestral polyrhythms of Africa were suddenly propelled right back under their spell. The Creoles' mastery of the lugubrious rhythms and dragging tempos of European music stood for nought in the face of the ragtime invasion, which demanded the destruction of regular meter by the unrelenting offbeats and cross-accents that characterized the new popular music of the Nineties.

At that point was added the last ingredient in the development of jazz—racism with a new twist. However strong the Creole musicians' loyalty to European forms and however strong their stand against the music of darker-skinned blacks, the relative status of the Creole musicians was about to crumble. With the amended Jim Crow laws of 1892 came a new legal basis for strict racial segregation and all people of color were thrown together into a single outcast class barred from equal participation in all walks of life.

The new laws erased in one stroke the decades of effort exerted by the Creoles to distance themselves from their fellow citizens of African descent. Overnight, the haughty Creoles were reduced to the level of the lowliest blacks just in from the country, forced to compete with their rough, dark-skinned counterparts for jobs and sustenance. While some took this disaster in stride, others cursed the day they had been born with whatever fractional amount of African blood still ran through their veins. All had to cope somehow, for better or for worse, with the new Jim Crow definition of negritude and the limited opportunities it afforded every person of African descent.

The most resourceful of the Creoles read the handwriting on the wall and began preparing at once to mingle in the economic sphere with the blacks their people had shunned for generations. Among the Creole musicians, that meant accepting the crowd-pleasing validity of the gut-bucket blues and the Baptist spirituals the rough uptown players used to entertain their crowds. Enterprising Creoles turned their considerable prowess toward the task of meeting the low-down mark set by the raggedy musicians of ignoble birth.

It was at this point that jazz was born. The Jim Crow amendments, intended to hold back the progress of the African race, ironically facilitated the commingling of the distinct African-American cultural strains. And out of unity came the musical form that would take over the world of popular music for decades to come. In a matter of months, the first identifiable jazz group, Buddy Bolden's Eagle Band, would strut onto the stage of history from the disreputable precincts of uptown New Orleans, laying down a sound that would reverberate around the globe.

The Inventors

Sidney Bechet, Eubie Blake, Buddy Bolden, W. C. Handy, Alberta Hunter, Scott Joplin, Freddy Keppard, Fate Marable, Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver, Kid Ory, Ma Rainey

Recommended Reading

Sidney Bechet, Treat It Gentle (Da Capo)

Rudi Blesh, Harriet Janis, They All Played Ragtime (Grove)

Amiri Baraka, Blues People (Morrow)

Don M. Marquis, In Search of Buddy Bolden: First Man of Jazz (Da Capo)

Gunther Schuller, Early Jazz (Oxford University)

Good Listening

West African Music: Musique Kongo (Disques Ocora)

Spirituals: Negro Church Music (Southern Folk Heritage Series/Atlantic)

Georgia Sea-Island Songs (New World Records)

Roots of Blues and Jazz: Riverside's History of Classic Jazz, Volume 1 (Riverside)

Ragtime: Scott Joplin Piano Rolls (Biograph)

New Orleans Brass Bands: The Eureka Brass Band of New Orleans (Jazz at Preservation Hall, Volume 1) (Atlantic)

"The Africans in New Orleans developed music in a continuum that stretched back to the Congo."

This is the first in a series of articles that will appear from time to time.