Pop Culture Text - St. Dominic High School

Popular Culture and Middle-Class Respectability 207Jazz was a musical hybrid, but its origins were African American, andthe continuing African American influence was profound. As the youngWilliam Dixon observed in his Harlem neighborhood: “It did seem, to alittle boy, that . . . white people really owned everything. But that wasn’tentirely true. They didn’t own the music that I played.” 78In one way, of course, Dixon was correct, but, in another way, hewas not. As the popularity of jazz increased, the music industry grew moreinterested in capitalizing on and controlling it. Initially, businesses such asthe Victor Talking Machine Company refused to record black artists; theassumption was that black performers would sully Victor’s prestige andthat white customers would shun them. In 1917, when Victor made thefirst jazz record ever, it featured the all-white Original Dixieland Jazz Band.When, a few months later, the band performed in England, the LondonDaily News emphasized that the musicians were “all white—as white asthey can be.” The bandleader, Nick LaRocca, went on to insist that whiteshad created jazz. “Our music is strictly white man’s music,” he maintained.“My contention is that the Negroes learned to play this rhythm and musicfrom the whites. . . . The Negro did not play any kind of music equal towhite men at the time.” 79By the 1920s, the so-called King of Jazz was a white bandleader fromDenver’s middle class, Paul Whiteman, who also insisted that jazz hadnothing to do with African Americans. Whiteman was a classical musicianwho admitted that he initially found it difficult to “jazz it up” because hefelt “too tight inside,” unable “to sway and pat and enjoy myself.” He firstused jazz in 1914 as a lark. While performing in New York City, his bandset out to poke fun at a jazz hit, “Livery Stable Blues.” To his surprise, theaudience responded enthusiastically. “They hadn’t realized the attempt atburlesque,” he recalled. “They were ignorantly applauding the thing on itsmerits.” Thereafter, he increasingly added his arrangements of blackrhythms to his band’s playlist, but he was determined to tame the musicwith refined symphonic sounds—to make “a lady of jazz.” The members ofWhiteman’s Ambassador Orchestra could all read music, unlike a numberof black musicians (or Tin Pan Alley composers such as Irving Berlin), who,through lack of opportunity, had received no formal training. “I didn’tneed the schooling,” Louis Armstrong insisted. “I had the horn.” Accordingto Armstrong, the singer Bessie Smith “always just had her blues in herhead; sometimes made them right up in the studio.” Whiteman, however,did not hire black musicians no matter how talented, remarking once to thebrilliant African American pianist Earl Hines: “If you were only white.”Racism certainly influenced Whiteman’s hiring decisions, but so did his desireto elevate the music’s status and make it less culturally threatening.One result was that his 1926 autobiography, Jazz, incredibly ignored the