Blues Music
This Golden Age is also the era of legendary women blues singers like Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Mamie Smith, Alberta Hunter and Bessie Smith. Mamie Smith is acknowledged as the first Black woman to record a song and her 1920 recording of Perry Bradford's "Crazy Blues" started the national blues craze. "Crazy Blues" eventually sold more than 800,000 records.
The blues was big business and the star names were often the ones who booked their shows, paid the salaries of the musicians, arranged for the transportation and kept their recording careers on track. It was difficult for Black performers to book theaters in most White communities. The Theater Owner's Booking Association (T.O.B.A.) was founded to give Black performers public spaces in which to perform.
Blues Characteristics
Of the many identifiable traits of blues music none is more heralded than the famous "blues scale". This scale is claimed to have African origins, though it is not fully substantiated. What is important is to understand that many non-western cultures have pitches that lie outside of the twelve tempered notes of western music and the expressivity of these pitches, when especially applied to the third and seventh scale degree, creates the blues feel.
The blues have a fairly standardized harmonic plan. One popular blues form is the 12-bar blues. When listening to the blues try to focus on the chord producing instrument (like the piano or guitar) and notice how they lock onto the harmonies.
| Measure | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 |
| Harmony | Ⅰ | Ⅳ | Ⅰ | Ⅴ | Ⅳ | Ⅰ | ||||||
Blues lyrics are typically comments of relationships and can often be quite suggestive. These lyrics are often sung in two bar trades with instrumental breaks. For example, the lyric will be heard over measures 1 and 2 and measures 3 and 4 will be traded with an instrument (typically a guitar).
The blues then really refers to a combination of things: a special kind of scale, a sequence of relatively fixed harmonies, a standardized lyrical pattern, a type of performance style and even a state of mind.
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5-10-15 Hours
Ruth Brown
High Society and Hot Jazz
Paul Whiteman and his orchestra in 1921
High Society jazz is best exemplified by Paul Whiteman, the self-proclaimed "King of Jazz." Whiteman was a classically trained violinist and thought that jazz could be "improved" by creating professional arrangements of tunes played by a dance orchestra. Whiteman is responsible for commissioning "Rhapsody in Blue" from George Gershwin in 1924 for a famed Experiment in Modern Music concert held in New York's Aeolian Hall. Commercially popular, Whiteman's recording of "Whisperings" is said to have sold nearly one million copies by 1928, but many feel that the music he created isn't "really jazz."
With a virtuosic style of trumpet playing, a delightful stage presence and unorthodox singing voice, the undisputed champion of early jazz is Louis Armstrong.
Born in 1901, Armstrong made jazz "hot." "Hot jazz" mirrored the youthful exuberance of the times: it was fast, with brilliant improvisations and had an energy that the "high society" dance bands lacked. Jazz had finally moved from its beginnings New Orleans, up the Mississippi into St. Louis and Chicago and was now in full light of American popular music.
Listen to Armstrong and His Hot Five play "Struttin' with Some Barbeque", a tune written by Armstrong's wife Lil Hardin. Notice the influence of the Whitemanesque dance orchestration along with the "hot" solos of Armstrong and his band.
♫ Struttin' With Some Barbecue
Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five
In October of 1929 the New York stock market crashed and its impact lasted well into the 1930s. This began a period called the Great Depression and the lifestyles of the Roaring Twenties came to a screeching halt. A night on the town turned to a night in front of your home radio listening to broadcasts of drama and comedy programs.
Technology for mass producing music was improving as well as this 1931 advertisement for the new Tele-Focal radio demonstrates. How does this ad reinforce the idea that, however humble it may be, there's no place like home?
By mid-decade big band music dominated the airwaves. For the first time, jazz was mainstream popular music in America. Performers and bandleaders like Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, Duke Ellington, Glenn Miller, and others were idolized by the American public. And when the United States joined World War II, the big bands enlisted and went them.
"Duke Ellington wrote over 1,000 compositions in his lifetime as a Jazz band-leader, composer and pianist, including Jazz standards, film scores and classical works."
