Girl Group

Journal of Popular Music Studies, Volume 19, Issue 3, Pages 293–308

REVIEWS

Magee, Jeffrey. The Uncrowned King of Swing: Fletcher Henderson and Big Band Jazz. New York: Oxford UP, 2005

Townsend, Peter. Pearl Harbor Jazz: Change in Popular Music in the Early 1940s. Oxford: UP of Mississippi, 2007

Reviewed by Edward Brunner Southern Illinois University, Carbondale

Both Peter Townsend and Jeffrey Magee offer their corrections to the po- sition staked out in 1970 by Martin Williams that defined a jazz tradition sharply opposed to commercial music. Williams’s The Jazz Tradition (1970, rev. 1983) presented a history characterized by quantum leaps. Jazz changed direction in response to the abrupt appearance of young artists with a ge- nius for improvising through novel rhythms and advanced harmonies. This explanation recalled other modernist avant-garde examples of “inventive rupture” in painting, literature, sculpture, photography, and classical music, and the piquant idea that Picasso, James Joyce, and Stravinsky had some- thing in common with Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker legitimized jazz studies in its formative years. But much as the “great man” theory of cultural change has been challenged by scholars who closely study the material conditions under which art and entertainment is produced and re- ceived, so these two scholars examine jazz within its cultural context, pa- tiently reconstructed either through examining musical passages (Magee) or provocatively juxtaposing anecdotes (Townsend). They do not view jazz as exclusively a soloist’s art that relegates composers and arrangers to a secondary role. They view it instead as responsive to its immediate sur- roundings (including those who are dancing to it, either as customers in a ballroom setting or professionals on a theatre stage), inflected by mecha- nisms of production and distribution (records, radio, and motion pictures, from shorts and tavern “soundies” to full-length musical films), and dis- torted by social pressures (Jim Crow laws, opposition to “mixing” the races even on the bandstand, and unequal business partnerships). For Magee and Townsend, jazz is an American vernacular music that is deeply and openly collaborative, with its performers picking up signals from every corner of their environment and musically transmuting them. Soloists are indeed

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central to the process, but they are embedded within an elaborate support structure.

Such a perspective only increases interest in the career of Fletcher Henderson (1897–1952). College-educated and musically trained, Hender- son left the South for New York, hoping to earn a degree in chemistry. To support himself, he accompanied blues singers on the piano in 1920s record- ings, then went on to a career as a recording artist fronting big bands from the 1920s to the 1940s that featured such important figures as Coleman Hawkins, Red Allen, Chu Berry and (briefly) Louis Armstrong. But his reputation was established by the orchestrations commissioned by Benny Goodman’s dance band from 1934 to the 1940s. By putting into annotated form the material that his own bands had been performing for years—or, in the case of collabo- rative “head arrangements” with section riffs contributed by band members, not just performing but inventing—Henderson became instrumental, even fundamental, in the formation of big-band swing. “Hendersonese” built the Goodman band’s success, Gunther Schuller averred in his influential 1989 study The Swing Era. But anything honorific in that coinage was undermined when Schuller also contended that Henderson’s effects were too simple, too easily recycled by lesser bands, and they furthered swing’s decline into the commercialism jazz was supposed to eschew.

Magee pays his respects to Schuller’s pioneer work but proceeds with an examination whose subtlety far outstrips Schuller’s few pages on Hen- derson. In centerpiece chapters that justify his title—in effect, dethroning Goodman as “king of swing”—Magee examines in detail the Henderson arrangements used by Goodman’s band (archived at Yale) to offer a sophis- ticated taxonomy of the components of big-band swing. But the impressive aspect of this study is the thoroughness with which Magee traces the ori- gins of those components, the basis of Hendersonese. In the process, he is essentially writing the prehistory of big-band swing.

To defend his contention that “Henderson built the kingdom of swing partly from recycled shards of earlier black jazz and dance music” (229) Magee examines the modification of stock arrangements (that music pub- lishers supplied to big bands in the hope of fostering their tune’s circulation) by Henderson’s arranger Don Redman in the 1920s that shift the melodic line from one band section to another, outdoing Paul Whiteman’s arranger’s efforts in this regard, and also developing settings that enhance band soloists. Redman begins formally notating passages for entire sections of the band that reproduce the air of “spontaneity” that soloists sought to purvey. (Magee’s scrutiny of alternate takes often reveals how extensively soloists, including

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Armstrong, had previously shaped and polished the solo moments that con- veyed a quality of the “ad-lib” [82–83]). One of the best chapters has Magee examining the Henderson band of the early 1930s and calculating perfor- mances that he convincingly argues are head arrangements, with sections of the band contributing background riffs for the occasion. All these ex- amples, of course, blur the line between original improvisation and group orchestrations as well as questioning the idea of single-person creativity. While making a strong case for the arranger as an artist, Magee also un- derstands that Henderson’s “genius” may have also involved sustaining the kind of rapport with band members that would encourage them to contribute freely to an overall performance. Readers comfortable with musical nota- tions will find Magee is helpful in what he transcribes from records, and always helpful in adroit supporting material, sometimes including portions of a stock arrangement, sometimes an original tune. But those who skip over musical examples will find that he is articulate and evocative in his verbal descriptions.

Acknowledging that his entire study rests upon “an uncomfortably familiar plotline” in which “white agents appropriate African American mu- sic and create a national (and international) phenomenon”—a statement that, he concedes, “may be the story of twentieth-century American vernacular music” (243)—Magee digresses for a few pages in many chapters to offer explanatory information crucial to the music’s milieu. Presented offhand- edly, almost as a byproduct of his larger musical discussion, these miniature essays are superb, detailed explanations that dramatically emphasize the realities of black musicians trying to find a commercial niche in a racist culture. Some of the most memorable include an examination of the mar- keting of race records in the early 1920s (the earliest success was with the Black Swan record label, acquired by Paramount in 1924), the limits of Paul Whiteman (who would have been Henderson’s rival in a non-racist cul- ture and who, in one ironic moment, solemnly records a song, “Whiteman Stomp,” using an arrangement that Henderson had constructed in a delib- erately parodic manner), the importance of two radio shows, Let’s Dance and the Camel Caravan, to Goodman’s fame (Henderson’s arrangements were first purchased by Goodman at $37.50 each), and the centrality of a powerful white manager to the success of a traveling black band (Irving Mills played this role for Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, and too briefly, Henderson).

Magee challenges Williams’s earlier view of jazz history in two ways: by revealing the components of swing as they complexly evolve through

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arrangements that support and echo the contributions of soloists, he reveals a jazz tradition that moves not by quantum leaps but by intricate modifica- tion, and by showing the importance of material realities in shaping the kind of jazz produced under certain conditions, he emphasizes the interplay be- tween musicians and surroundings dominated by technological change and social pressure. Townsend offers an even stronger challenge to jazz history as previously conceived (and embodied still in Ken Burns’s 1998 documen- tary series), in an approach that minimizes the musicological only to amplify the importance of material background and cultural production. Chronolog- ically, Townsend starts up where Magee’s swing era narrative begins to wind down. Pearl Harbor Jazz investigates the infrastructure of popular music in relation to jazz from December 1941 to the winter of 1942–1943, con- cluding with Ellington’s memorable Russian War Relief concert in Carnegie Hall on January 23, 1943, featuring Black, Brown and Beige, Ellington’s “Tone Parallel to the History of the American Negro.” Townsend charts the beginning of the balkanization of American vernacular music. He chooses a period marked by “precipitate change” (3), when “musical styles were both coming together and breaking apart” (7) and embraces Ellington as a “jazz musician par excellence” whose compositions sought to position jazz “as a serious art form” but who “also moved through contexts that were not those of the art composer-musicians” (10), playing high school prom dates, trav- eling frantically to numerous one-night appearances, and sharing the stage with entertainers to please the crowd. What especially interests Townsend is what he deems the neglected points of intersection between that music which eventually became “jazz” and that music which pleased many but has been little discussed because it was merely popular.

In the final chapter of his previous book, Jazz in American Culture (2000), Townsend argued that jazz studies suffered from a “tamed richness.” The “mythologizing” that produced a clear narrative for jazz was invented “to find a comfortable niche” for music that is in reality always “difficult to square,” enmeshed as it is, for one thing, in exchanges over racial lines. Jazz, then, is supposed to challenge “an orthodox model of culture” (161). But for Townsend, that moment of challenge occurs not through the acts of singu- lar individuals who stand astride the landscape and dominate all, but rather through ever-shifting musical events that scramble expectations, that es- cape categories. Pearl Harbor Jazz affirms unorthodoxy and adjusts against simplifying corrections by examining American music in a highly specific, intensely detailed historical context with a minimal explanatory framework. This means not just proceeding anecdotally but committing wholly to the

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anecdote as a luminous detail. Continually, one anecdote gives rise to an- other that has been chosen because it is surprising, even contradictory; it is almost always provocative.

This period lends itself to such a dramatic recounting. It is wracked by turmoil, rapid social change, increasing uncertainty, and an overall sense of disruption. To underscore this explosion, Townsend draws examples from ev- ery corner of the American musical infrastructure, from small-town singing societies to ballrooms and roadhouses and theaters that attract traveling shows to films of all kinds to hit-parade records on jukeboxes to remote radio broadcasts. In all these, elements of what has come to be called “jazz” exist unselfconsciously alongside cowboy songs, hillbilly numbers, senti- mental ballads, and novelty tunes. Townsend’s direct counter to Williams’s Jazz Tradition is his fifth chapter, an assembly of anecdotes that together reveal how jazz, around 1942, began to be regarded by some critics and teachers and pundits as “jazz, the great American art form.” Townsend un- earths the new social formations taking shape to install bebop as the musical equivalent of a revolutionary modernism that will eventually provide a van- tage point from which to identify precursors who will constitute a tradition. Townsend thus questions explanatory narratives not only by raising inconve- nient points—he notes Parker’s admiration for the highly commercial swing bandleader Jimmy Dorsey’s alto saxophone playing—but also by doubting certain legendary moments in jazz history and even showing how such mo- ments were constructed. Bop annals all mention Parker’s “inventing” bebop harmony one night while improvising on the upper levels of the chords in “Cherokee.” Townsend muddies the record by reminding us that this event, widely cited in jazz histories, was never a direct quote from Parker but pro- duced by “rewriting a third-person story by two Down Beat journalists in 1949” (142). And by asking a question no one had thought to ask (what drew Parker to that song?), he can explain that the Ray Noble ballad popularized as an uptempo jump tune by Charlie Barnet’s big band featured an uncon- ventional sixteen-bar bridge that drops a whole tone in four-bar segments, producing a “succession of new key centers” (142). Bebop harmonies, that is, already permeated popular music.

Appropriately, Townsend suspends this chapter with its insightful clarifying anecdotes about attempts to mythicize jazz in the middle of his book. He prefers to begin his study in medias res, not with a framework that stabilizes his work but just the opposite: a chapter packed with contradictory detail that describes the musical scene across America at the moment of December 1941. The chapter that follows presents an exhaustive list of the

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dislocations the war is about to cause, including massive demographic shifts as new industries expand in the north and west, transportation problems that will cripple touring bands, the loss of young men to the draft and enlistment, and the problems involved in shifting popular songs away from gendered romance tunes to patriotic war material. The next chapter investigates the role of the wartime popular song, with emphasis on Hollywood tunesmith Harry Warren (“At Last,” “Serenade in Blue,” “Chattanooga Choo-Choo”) and singer-lyricist Johnny Mercer (“Tangerine,” “Skylark,” “Blues in the Night”) to reveal that songs have become “increasingly sophisticated melodically and harmonically” (49) so that jazz musicians who played these were by no means “in a mode of operation completely divorced from the one they were in playing jazz” (51). While this chapter depends on musical knowledge to grasp some of its points (popular tunes now feature an increase in chromaticism, he argues), the next chapter is almost entirely historical. Longest in the book, it surveys in grim detail the hardships of life on the road for touring musicians. It not only presents the obvious hazards to black bands traveling in a Jim Crow south but effectively reveals other dangers not usually linked with music, such as the likelihood of contracting tuberculosis from living in close quarters (innovative guitarist Charlie Christian and bassist Jimmy Blanton, both close friends, died in their early twenties from this disease), and the firetrap quality of many roadhouses, as revealed in the 1942 Cocoanut Grove fire in Boston. When we arrive at Townsend’s fifth chapter—the one that details the effort in 1942 to legitimize jazz—it is understandable why many admirers of jazz might welcome the chance to find its musicians a “comfortable niche” (call it a “myth” if you want) that might provide them with a berth in “orthodox culture.”

Although two final chapters center on the west coast and the east coast, emphasizing counter-tendencies to jazz at the time (rhythm and blues in the west, the New Orleans jazz revival in the east), in both chapters the presence of the Ellington band suggests that popular music will no longer be consumed primarily according to region. Returning to the problem of writing the “popular song” in wartime, Townsend proposes that “Americanism” has begun to dominate, extending a “welcome” to “cowboy and country songs” (211) such as Tex Ritter’s “Deep in the Heart of Texas.” Yet here as through- out, Townsend is ready to demythologize and complicate every anecdote, noting on a nearby page that when Bunk Johnson was discovered by folk- lorists in the rural south and brought to a recording session, he wanted to play not the “classic New Orleans repertoire” but the Tex Ritter hit (195). And a few pages later, he notes that Agnes de Mille’s request for Aaron Copland to

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contribute a new piece to the Ballet Russe resulted in that “cowboy ballet,” Rodeo (211).

Townsend’s method at times verges on the overwhelming. His anec- dotes, especially when several are strung together, often resemble the provocative examples that scholars offer at the onset of an essay to locate a contradictory intersection of meanings that, of course, the essay will pro- ceed to untangle. But Townsend only enters the fray obliquely, and instead of elucidating he presents more anecdotes that generate further questions. For scholars of jazz and popular music, this book is a trove of fascinating dilemmas that await further research, even as other readers less interested in developing new concepts will be engaged by an array of tales that are variously delightful, ironic, or distressing. Ellington’s band’s adventures are so seamlessly woven into every chapter—over forty pages, all told, are de- voted to sometimes-minute descriptions of their touring life, including details about profit and loss, that this material alone offers a remarkable portrait of a band’s survival tactics in a difficult time. Listening now to Black, Brown and Beige after Townsend’s background detailing, certain parts of Ellington’s music—such as the “Come Sunday” melody that proceeds through a thicket of dissonant chords, ninths and flatted ninths and augmented fifths, before at last reaching the reassuring tonic—powerfully evoke Ellington’s struggle in a time of serious turmoil and rapid change.

Works Cited Schuller, Gunther. The Swing Era: The Development of Jazz, 1930–1945. New

York: Oxford UP, 1989.

Townsend, Peter. Jazz in American Culture. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2000.

Williams, Martin. The Jazz Tradition. 1970. Rev. Ed. New York: Oxford UP, 1983.

Warwick, Jacqueline. Girl Groups, Girl Cultures: Popular Music and Identity in the 1960s. New York: Routledge, 2007.

Reviewed by Patricia Juliana Smith Hofstra University

Despite the presence of the Supremes, Martha and the Vandellas, the Shirelles, and, most recently and much belatedly, the Ronettes in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, girl groups and the related female solo artists of the 1960s have never been accorded the critical respect accorded to their male

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peers. The argument goes that they were merely singers and not creative forces in and of themselves (i.e., songwriters or producers) and provided lit- tle more to the history of popular music than a bit of Top Forty commercial fluff. In Girl Groups, Girl Culture: Popular Music and Identity in the 1960s, Jacqueline Warwick debunks many such prevailing myths and stereotypes while offering what might well be the most theoretically sophisticated and intellectually astute study of the girl-group phenomenon as an entity unto itself.

As the title suggests, Warwick contextualizes her subject historically and sociologically, following the studies of “Girl Culture” pioneered by Angela MacRobbie and others, and specifically examining the conditions of adolescent female life peculiar to the 1960s, particularly in the United States. In explicating the lyrics of a wide selection of girl group hits, she delineates the intricate connections between the fantasies that the songs articulated and the very real desires and anxieties experienced by most girls during the decade before Women’s Liberation, when marriage was the ultimate goal of most girls, respectability predicated a girl’s “value” on the marriage market, and effective birth control was not readily available to minors.

The book is not, however, focused solely on the conditions of a ho- mosocial female adolescent microcosm; indeed, Warwick takes on some of the larger social issues of the sixties—racism and sexual inequality— honestly and directly. Girl group members were frequently exploited in both regards. The story of Phil Spector attributing Darlene Love and the Blos- soms’ quintessential recording of “He’s A Rebel” to the Crystals—for no better reason than to take advantage of the latter group’s name recognition while saving the cost of airfare to fly them from New York to the Los An- geles recording studio—is by now infamous. Yet even the Supremes, the best-selling girl group ever, were hardly immune from such objectification. Warwick recounts that when Florence Ballard was summarily dismissed from the group, “Motown was concerned above all with importance of find- ing a singer who would fit into Ballard’s gowns,” never minding that Cindy Birdsong, the chosen replacement, did not fit into Ballard’s vocal range (78). In effect, girl singers were expendable and interchangeable—much more so than the dresses they wore. As Warwick observes, such incidents “almost literally exemplif[y] Marx’s observations on estranged labor” (103).

In addition to her acute historical and social insights, Warwick stands apart from the journalistic critics who account for almost all of the previous books on this topic by bringing a musicologist’s perspective to the products of these estranged laborers. Choosing specific songs, she examines their

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musical components vis-à-vis their lyrics and vocal performances in order to demonstrate the various complex factors at work in what is too often dismissed as an overly simplistic art form. One of the most compelling examples is her deconstruction of the Crystals’ now-obscure “He Hit Me (and It Felt Like a Kiss),” a decided non-hit—it was banned from airplay as a result of parental complaints—that provides a chilling glimpse of the masochism that was too often expected of women in that period. Warwick’s analysis deftly demonstrates how the song’s musical components combine with the lyrics to create one truly ugly song.

In order to present its multifaceted exploration of its subject, Girl Groups, Girl Culture is divided into five parts, each entitled with a famil- iar phrase from girl group lyrics (e.g., “A Brand New Dance Now,” “Look Here, Girls, and Take This Advice”). Various chapters within these parts are devoted to such topics as the “girl group sound,” vocal technique, the condi- tion of “girlness,” violence, gender identity, the “politics of production,” the female songwriters (e.g., Carole King and Ellie Greenwich) responsible for many of the girl group hits, respectability as a mode of presentation, advice songs, the Motown phenomenon, and rebellious girls (e.g, the Shangri-Las), among others. Given the range of issues Warwick covers in this volume, it would be difficult to ask for more. One might want to see a bit more on the influence of girl groups on popular music since the 1960s, or the degree to which even the “gods” of the rock and roll pantheon are indebted to these women, but, in light of the all that the book does accomplish, that would seem petty indeed.

Girl Groups, Girl Culture should stand as the indispensable central text of girl group criticism for some time to come. Given its clearly articulated discussions, it should also appeal to a general readership beyond academe. One can only hope that Warwick’s work will mark the beginning of serious critical inquiry into the girl groups’ rich musical legacy.

Abbott, Lynn, and Doug Seroff, Ragged but Right: Black Traveling Shows, “Coon Songs,” and the Dark Pathway to Blues and Jazz. Oxford: UP of Mississippi, 2007.

Reviewed by W. T. Lhamon, Jr. Florida State University For more than a decade, Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff have been the go-to guys for the cauldron years when African-American music came to commer- cial audibility and visibility. They show the waves of commerce that flooded

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the folk blues so culminatingly researched by David Evans in his Big Road Blues. They have greatly expanded the research that Henry Sampson pio- neered with Blacks in Blackface: A Source Book on Early Black Musical Shows. They background the more interpretive and tightly focused work of Thomas Riis in Just before Jazz: Black Musical Theater in New York, 1890–1915. And they shade in the outline of later blackface performance that Robert Toll, Eric Lott, Dale Cockrell, William Mahar, and others began but gingerly stepped around in recent years. Many writers on blackface have shied from the later years if only because it seems so troubling to find blacks in blackface trucking in the debased rhetoric bequeathed them. This behest is vivid in the wake that followed on Ernest Hogan’s 1896 hit “All Coons Look Alike to Me.” It included “All Colored Folks Look Like Black Gnats to Me,” “All Guns Look Alike to Me,” and “All Chinks Look Alike to Me.” This book does not mention that Hogan composed his original song as “All Pimps Look Alike to Me,” but changed the title and lyrics to “coons” to grease its acceptance.

Like many others before them, Abbott and Seroff argue that the intention of late blackface was to move away from minstrel stereotypes to- ward black authenticity. One trouble with that thesis, however, is that no one can be sure what black authenticity in America is because its very con- struction has been knotted with white stereotypes. Even those attributes that seem most essential–say, improvisation and syncopation–became hall- marks of blackness because their positional relationship to characteristics of euroculture–say, planning and steadiness–articulate reciprocally with the fictions of blackness. A further problem is that much late minstrelsy per- formed by blacks, including those like George Walker who pushed racial uplift, still traffics in superstition, gambling, and proto bling bling (if not always razors and chicken suits). It thus simply moves the stereotypes over one click or two. So it goes, round and round.

Even before their 2003 book, Out of Sight, which Ragged but Right chronologically extends, Abbott and Seroff were writing arcane specifics about the interactions of ragtime and blues, jazz and music commerce. Their long piece about the emergence of Clarence Williams characterizes their ap- proach. “‘Brown Skin, Who You For?’ Another Look at Clarence Williams’s Early Career” appeared in The Jazz Archivist in 1993. I found it when I was thinking about Williams’s great early jazz song “Cake Walking Babies from Home,” conventionally famous because Sidney Bechet and Louis Arm- strong twice dueled improvisations in recorded sessions Williams organized. Bechet’s bobolink trills beat Armstrong the first time and then Armstrong

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roared back weeks later to create one of the most propulsively nuanced solos of his early career. These Clarence Williams Blues Five versions unmistak- ably hail a new public and give it attitude. They enact a vivid space of being, the musicians competing with the sense of the lyrics, and cock up a pride in performance that one immediately senses is inextinguishable. The “only way to beat them is to cheat them,”sings Eva Taylor, proclaiming her husband’s lyrics, “Brace yourself, boy.” We’ve been bracing since, well into the flow of the form.

The point here is not to reanimate evident aspects of Armstrong’s bril- liance, or Bechet’s, but to indicate how Abbott and Seroff excavate behind the strutting technique that serves the focus on jazz masterpieces. They dredge a buried history of entrepreneurial activity: Williams’s publishing enterprises that failed and partially succeeded, the further songs that Williams wrote to excite and consolidate a burgeoning black public, the clubs where they could play. These specifics render the difficulties that some black performers were able to convert into opportunity. Focusing on someone like Clarence Williams (rather than Louis Armstrong or Sidney Bechet), his business and marital partners, his songs that seem lesser now but sold better then—these angles lever up some of the journeyman world that underlies, prepares for, and overlaps with masterpieces. We see that jazz is not only the negation of commerciality, but crucially also an extension of tastes that all the business of bands focuses.

This second book covers the business of black vernacular perfor- mance from about 1896 closely through the first world war, then (depending on the activity of the shows they follow) sporadically up through the de- pression. Abbott and Seroff organize their book around three performance modes: the big shows that traveled from theater to theater, the black sideshows that traveled with mainstream circuses, and tented minstrelsy. They follow specific troupes rather than attempt a general history of each mode. Thus within vaudeville theater they trace Bert Williams and George Walker, Bob Cole and Billy Johnson and their product “A Trip to Coontown,” then Cole’s teaming with Rosamond and James Weldon Johnson. They follow exten- sively, too, the till now under-researched Smart Set companies of Salem Tutt Whitney, his brother Homer Tutt, and S. H. Dudley (Raspberry Snow in His Honor the Barber). These companies played loose musical comedies like A Southern Enchantment which reincarnated as George Washington Bullion and included singers then valued as “coon shouters,” like Mamie Gardner Smith, who became the famous blues singer of Perry Bradford’s “Crazy Blues” in 1920. She was married to a Smart Set comedian, Sam Gardner.

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One begins to see how tightly interwoven this performed world was–and also the impurity, or the complexity, of the blues. Histories like this complicate any naive idea that the purported rural root of blues was either pure or the initial strand of black music. However the blues concept arose, it developed and traveled everywhere in commercial scenes alert to profit. It may have been the voice of the people but it was not primarily the unsullied sound of rejection loping out of Texas on a mule, as Leadbelly famously sang. If any mule was involved, it had been taught to laugh by Billy Kersands, just as W. C. Handy said. It was sounds conservatory-trained musicians could write down and parade as they learned what roused customers. These mu- sic makers were traveling the South as well as the North, Ragged but Right proves, and they did especially good business in the Mississippi Delta during harvest time (when cotton pickers were flush) in the same years when the first inklings of primitive blues were surfacing.

The Smart Set company’s success spawned imitators, including Alexander Tolliver’s Smart Set, that focused energy in the South and partic- ularly hired singers who could belt blues. By 1915, Tolliver had employed William and Gertrude (Ma and Pa) Rainey, Trixie Smith, and Clara Smith. All these women recorded important blues songs half a decade later but had their training in ragtime, coonsongs, and cake walks. Tolliver also hired Evelyn White, who never recorded, but who teamed with Bessie Smith, later worked in the Silas Green from New Orleans show, and who cooked the gumbo that became the blues as much as the others. Evelyn White does not show up on the scratchy records that are our usual evidence. The counter-evidence that Abbott and Seroff deploy is the reports from the road that shows sent to black newspapers, mostly the Indianapolis Freeman. These accounts touted what was working for each show, where they were doing well (they hardly ever said they were failing), what dooms they were surviving (burned out Pullman cars or tents, riots or lynchings, segregation sheriffs), and how their featured performers had bested other shows’ competitors. I will return to the issue of this evidence.

Sideshow circus acts have not had full chronicles until now, so far as I know, but Abbott and Seroff demonstrate that the black bands that traveled with circuses helped incubate jazz. The key figure here was Perry George Lowery. A champion cornetist who had studied at the Boston Conservatory, he went on the road in 1899 with the Forepaugh-Sells Brothers Circus, training those he hired, spreading technique, displaying style. By 1910, black sideshow bands were handling the parades before the shows, accompanying the high wire acts, and playing concerts while roustabouts took down the

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tents every night for all the big circuses. By the 1920s, black sideshows were also traveling with wild west shows. These bands took ragtime tunes all over the country. They also carried emergent jazz–the circus bills were still spelling it “Jez” or “Jaz”–everywhere the jugglers and clowns worked, all through the teen years of the twentieth century.

Working this domain of segregated circus bands, the authors are able to make some of their most startling claims:

That [P. G.] Lowery and his band made no recordings has had a profound effect on the place he has been accorded in American mu- sic history. Old recordings are relatively easy to access, certainly a more convenient and enjoyable reference tool than old newspa- per accounts or oral histories. . . . It seems to be accepted . . . that mainstream America was introduced to blues through the medium of phonograph records. But long before blues records became avail- able, the compositions of W. C. Handy and other blues writers were repeatedly performed in street parades and circus lots in countless locations throughout every part of the United States and much of Canada. Generally speaking, white America was introduced to the blues by sideshow annex bands of the World War I decade.

But why limit the claim that these circus bands introduced blues only to whites? Their evidence indicates that the specific form–as opposed to the body of moves and gestures that we call black music–was new to all persons, whatever their color or class.

The third mode of transmission that Abbott and Seroff feature are the traveling tent shows. These came into existence, they argue, at the end of the nineteenth century when white theater owners in the South closed their venues to black minstrel troupes who were taking business away from blacked-up white performers. Blacks responded—at first with managerial and financial backing from other white producers—by taking large traveling shows on the road under canvas. Seating was segregated in these tents, but whites attended eagerly. In fact, the demand was so intense that these shows could often penetrate city limits that customarily proscribed blacks. The shows also profitably played Indian towns in Oklahoma. The white-backed Allen’s Minstrels, then the proudly black Rabbit’s Foot Minstrels and Silas Green from New Orleans went everywhere, always embellishing a picture of blackness, a sound of blackness, a set of gestures that probed and underwrote

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what blackness might be in America. They also constantly displayed and mocked the history of racial roles up and down America.

The reviews I have seen of Abbott and Seroff praise the rigor of their research and I will not cross that view. They have followed much further than others the newspaper reports that traveling band members—we might now call them embedded reporters—sent home from the front as they held up a mirror to blackness. From Tampa or Omaha, some band member with a knack for words and the will to put a good front on trouble would declare field conditions. Thomas Riis occasionally used these reports when he analyzed itinerant black theater at the turn to the twentieth century; however, Ragged but Right virtually anthologizes them. Its four chapters have 208, 273, 254, and 630 footnotes, respectively, nearly all citing the Indianapolis Freeman or similar accounts from the Chicago Defender (for the later years). These reports often seem objective–who was playing what with whom; who had married, caught sick, died; what fires, what wrecks, what lynchings occurred. Abbott and Seroff mine many of these facts twice, in their narration and again in appendices summarizing rosters and itineraries of shows changing seasonally. The embedded reports are, sometimes, little poems documenting stresses on their writers, distended into coded argot and doubletalk. But our two authors are from the “Just the Facts, M’am” school of detection. They are as disinterested in setting these gems as they remain uninterested in interpreting the scripts that Bob Cole, the Johnson brothers, and Williams and Walker played from the boondocks to Broadway, or, for that matter, giving meaning to the songs and skits in sideshows or vaudeville blackface.

Therefore, the evidence that Ragged but Right exploits works like a needle to pop the bubble of parti pris that claims the purity of a blues root for black music in America and the arty origins of jazz. Abbott and Seroff show how much more can be said about early black music beyond its masterful prowess, its stars, and their peak achievements. But they also highlight the narrowness of their evidence by doggedly refusing to speculate or play with ideas.

They have decided not to marshal broad commentary. They leave that for others. However, one wishes the skepticism that led them to round up all the road reports and rebuild the basis of early black music had also focused their dubiety on other shibboleths of the conventional history. The authors approve, for instance, the credo that nineteenth century white minstrelsy was unredeemedly racist. Recent work, however, indicates that white attraction to blackness was not in the beginning, or ever since, wholly to put it down. Rather, many whites (performers and their publics) turned to blackface as an

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alternative to despised conventional race and class attitudes. Had Abbott and Seroff tuned to that position, then, perhaps they would have escaped their before-and-after premise: before black minstrelsy there was inauthenticity; after it came the real thing. The truth is there were many windows in the edifice of vernacular black performance, many turns in its narratives, just as there are in all widely popular forms. If the authors had actually read the back- to-Africa plots they project as a rejection of America they would see that most American blacks were hardly doing a Du Bois or Stokely Carmichael. That is, they were not wanting either to move to or even celebrate Africa. To the contrary, the plots of the Williams and Walker shows In Dahomey (1902) and In Abyssinia (1906) took the singing comedians to Africa only to reject it as too violent, too primitive, too estranging for any westernized people. The black American visitors to Dahomey fled “King Eat Em All” (named in the song “Caboceers Entrance”), going home pronto. By the end of In Dahomey, “home” meant not Boston, not Africa, but Gatorville, Florida. Because Bert Williams refused to tour below the Mason-Dixon line, we can be sure he was asserting a poignant black homelessness.

At stake in the African American vernacular synthesis has always been whether a people can reinvent themselves (and if we are lucky, even their context) from profoundly corrupt or ruined sources. Nevertheless, loaded and coded images were what they inherited—they and the instruments they could use to sound blackness. Black Americans had to turn Euro-descended trombones and trumpets into slippery tools able to locate and amplify the sliding tones between the recognized ones so they could get right with audi- ences already “walking dogie.” I’m thinking here of one of those embedded reports back to the Indianapolis Freeman that Abbott and Seroff provide but do not develop. It’s just a short bit by an anonymous member of the Famous Georgia Minstrels, then playing North Carolina:

we give the gigs [sic, i.e., African Americans] all the blues they want and you can just see them walking dogie [sic] when our band is playing. O, my, how Mr. [Horace] Harrison can play that slippery horn when they play the “Baby Seal Blues.”

Two years later, Sheldon Brooks would publish one of the early dance craze hits, “Walking the Dog,” and we all know this topic kept jumping in blues-derived music (and culture) right up through Hoagy Carmichael and George Gershwin, Rufus Thomas and the Rolling Stones, Walter Mosley and more. You can still buy dozens of versions on iTunes.

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Always the most vital moments in the development of an art occur when correspondence is tight between its ongoing vernacular and profes- sional performance, when the pros are with the people. When pros stray far from vernacular connection, their achievement is inevitably solitary: pol- ished and peculiar, no longer “Ragged but Right.” This eponymous song also has a history flowing from vernacular performance through composed ragtime music, then multiple performances right down to George Jones. It is this longtime flow flushing the present that I find so compelling in the view that Abbott and Seroff enable.

Let’s finish with a comment by W. C. Handy, from early in his Father of the Blues. It’s a remark that summarizes the attitude of Abbott and Seroff even if it is outside their method: “minstrels were a disreputable lot in the eyes of a large section of upper-crust Negroes,” Handy wrote, “but it was also true that all the best talent of that generation came down the same drain.” That’s the drain that delivered the blues, delivered jazz, delivered alternatives we all still need.