The Music Downtown

THE MUSIC DOWNTOWN

Tin Pan Alley

In its early years during the late nineteenth century, Tin Pan Alley was literally an alley—West Twenty-eighth Street between Broadway and Sixth Avenue in New York City. Later, the phrase was used to identify the dozens of companies in the booming sheet-music business, most of them still based in Manhattan. By 1910 sheet music was so popular across America that the local Woolworth's store in any midsized city was likely to stock more than a thousand titles. Music stores employed pluggers—singers who would perform any song upon a customer's request. The price for the sheet music itself usually ranged from a penny to ten cents. Top songwriters included George M. Cohan, Irving Berlin (who wrote more than three hundred songs during the decade), Jerome Kern, brothers Harry and Albert Von Tilzer, Harry Ruby, Gus Kahn, Eddie Green, Richard Whiting, Harry Carroll, and Percy Wenrich. Between 1910 and 1919 Tin Pan Alley produced thousands of hits. Among the most popular were Berlin's "Alexander's Ragtime Band" (1911), Cohan's "Over There" (1917), Whitings "Till We Meet Again" (1917), and George Gershwin's "Swanee" (1919). "Over There" and "'Till We Meet Again" are just two of hundreds of tunes written about World War I. Though songs written in the early years of the European war, such as Al Piantadosi and Alfred Bryan's "I Didn't Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier" (1915), leaned toward neutrality—the prevailing attitude in the United States until early 1916—later songs of the war era were strongly pro-Ally, prowar, and anti-German. A few, such as Irving Berlin's 1918 hit "Oh! How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning," were about the soldier's life, but most expressed the sentiments of those on the home front.

African American Traditions Converge

Many of the Tin Pan AUey songs that achieved national popularity originated in one of two African American musical traditions, ragtime and the blues. Ragtime—whose black practitioners during the era included Scott Joplin, Scott Hayden, Eubie Blake, and James Scott—was the first of the two styles to be embraced fully by white composers and audiences. "Syncopation is the soul of every American/' said Irving Berlin, "and ragtime is a necessary element of American life." Several of Berlin's hit songs were inspired by the ragtime style—though "Alexander's Ragtime Band," ironically, is not one of them. (It is about a ragtime band.) Joplin wrote two complete ragtime operas, A Guest of Honor (1903) and Treemonisha (1911). The blues, made nationally popular by W. C. Handy, descended from two traditions of slavery days, the spiritual and the "field holler" (or work chant). Out of ragtime and the blues came a third form of music: jazz. Many early jazz numbers, played by pianists such as Jelly Roll Morton and James P. Johnson, were actually ragtime numbers played slowly. Jazz musicians also appropriated blues songs, adding instrumental improvisation. Ragtime, blues, and jazz are close musical cousins, and all three became popular with white Americans in the 1910s.

New Music on Tour

Throughout the decade "ragtime jazz bands" toured the United States, bringing what was essentially southern music to audiences in other parts of the country. Among them were several all-black groups—including the Superior Orchestra, the Onward Brass Band, and the Tuxedo Brass Band—as well as the all-white Reliance Brass Band. Blues singer Ma Rainey's Georgia Jazz Band (with a teenage Bessie Smith, who became famous as a blues recording artist in the 1920s)and other black musicians toured on the Negro Vaudeville Circuit. Leaving New Orleans for New York in 1911, Jelly Roll Morton traveled from the Northeast through Saint Louis, Kansas City, and Chicago, arriving in San Francisco in 1915. Cornetist Freddie Keppard and soprano saxophonist Sidney Bechet, both black jazz musicians, toured during the 1910s, with Keppard traveling to Los Angeles and Bechet to Chicago. By the time Bechet reached the Windy City, however, two all-white jazz bands had already been there (having arrived in 1914). In 1917 one of them, the Original Dixieland Jass Band, became the first band to record jazz.

The Migration North

Reacting to continuing segregation, racial violence, and poverty in the South, African Americans migrated northward in record numbers during the 1910s. The exodus of black musicians from southern states was already well under way by November 1917, when it was hastened by an unexpected turn of events: the closing of Storyville in New Orleans, after four enlisted men from a nearby naval base were killed in a fight in that well-known red-light district. Entertainers who performed in the Storyville sporting houses (brothels that also featured musical entertainment and gambling), almost all of them African Americans, were forced to leave New Orleans in search of work. Most went north along the Mississippi, taking jazz to Memphis, Kansas City, Saint Louis, and Chicago. Among the migrants was cornetist Joe "King" Oliver, who led the Creole Jazz Band in Chicago in 1918. (Four years later he hired the young Louis Armstrong, who had spent the last years of the 1910s playing the trumpet on a Mississippi riverboat.) All these musicians laid the groundwork for the Jazz Age of the 1920s.

A LOST RAGTIME OPERA

By the early twentieth century Scott Joplin was nationally known and celebrated for his ragtime compositions, especially his "Maple Leaf Rag" (1899), but in the 1910s he suffered a great disappointment. In 1903 he had written A Guest of Honor, a ragtime opera that was neither performed nor published. Undaunted, he began work in 1908 on another such composition, Treemonisha, a musical fable set in the post-Reconstruction South and stressing the importance of education for the advancement of African Americans, The three-act work (with twenty-seven musical numbers) became an obsession with Joplin, who published it at his own expense in 1911. Unable to find backing for a full production, he staged one performance—without sets and with only his piano playing as accompaniment—in 1915 at the Lincoln Theater in Harlem. The audience found Treemonisha too folksy for their modern, urban taste, and Joplin died in 1917 thinking his beloved opera was an utter failure. Treemonisha went unperformed until 1971, when a full-scale production was mounted in Atlanta and revived interest in the work. Since then African America opera stars such as Kathleen Battle have performed selections from the opera.

Sources:

Rudi Blesh and Harriet Janis, They All Played Ragtimi (New York: Knopf, 1950);

Susan Curtis, Dancing to a Black Man's Tune: A Life af Scott Joplin (Columbia & London: University of Missouri Press, 1994).

Sources:

Jack B. Buerkle and Danny Barker, Bourbon Street Black: The New Orleans Black Jazzman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973);

David A. Jasen, Tin Pan Alley: The Composers, the Songs, the Performers, and Their Times (New York: Donald I. Fine, 1988);

Paul Oliver, The Story of the Blues (Radnor, Pa.: Chilton, 1969);

Frank Tirro Jazz: A History (New York: Norton, 1977).