Association of Recorded Sound Collections Awards for Excellence Best Research in Recorded Jazz Music–Certificate of Merit (2013) The coal fields of West Virginia would seem an unlikely market for big band jazz during the Great Depression. That a prosperous African American audience dominated by those involved with the coal industry was there for jazz tours would seem equally improbable. Big Band Jazz in Black West Virginia, 1930-1942 shows that, contrary to expectations, black Mountaineers flocked to dances by the hundreds, in many instances traveling considerable distances to hear bands led by Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Andy Kirk, Jimmie Lunceford, and Chick Webb, among numerous others. Indeed, as one musician who toured the state would recall, "All the bands were goin' to West Virginia." The comparative prosperity of the coal miners, thanks to New Deal industrial policies, was what attracted the bands to the state. This study discusses that prosperity as well as the larger political environment that provided black Mountaineers with a degree of autonomy not experienced further south. Author Christopher Wilkinson demonstrates the importance of radio and the black press both in introducing this music and in keeping black West Virginians up to date with its latest developments. The book explores connections between local entrepreneurs who staged the dances and the national management of the bands that played those engagements. In analyzing black audiences' aesthetic preferences, the author reveals that many black West Virginians preferred dancing to a variety of music, not just jazz. Finally, the book shows bands now associated almost exclusively with jazz were more than willing to satisfy those audience preferences with arrangements in other styles of dance music.

In the summer of 1928, William Alexander Scott began a small four-page weekly with the help of his brother Cornelius. In 1930 his Atlanta World became a semiweekly, and the following year W. A. began to implement his vision for a massive newspaper chain based out of Atlanta: the Southern Newspaper Syndicate, later dubbed the Scott Newspaper Syndicate. In April 1931 the World had become a triweekly, and its reach began drifting beyond the South. With The Grapevine of the Black South, Thomas Aiello offers the first critical history of this influential newspaper syndicate, from its roots in the 1930s through its end in the 1950s. At its heyday, more than 240 papers were associated with the Syndicate, making it one of the biggest organs of the black press during the period leading up to the classic civil rights era (1955-68). In the generation that followed, the Syndicate helped formalize knowledge among the African American population in the South. As the civil rights movement exploded throughout the region, black southerners found a collective identity in that struggle built on the commonality of the news and the subsequent interpretation of that news. Or as Gunnar Myrdal explained, the press was "the chief agency of group control. It [told] the individual how he should think and feel as an American Negro and create[d] a tremendous power of suggestion by implying that all other Negroes think and feel in this manner." It didn't create a complete homogeneity in black southern thinking, but it gave thinkers a similar set of tools from which to draw.

Contributions by Christina Baade, Candace Bailey, Paula J. Bishop, Maribeth Clark, Brittany Greening, Tammy Kernodle, Kendra Preston Leonard, April L. Prince, Travis D. Stimeling, and Kristen M. Turner For every star, there are hundreds of less-recognized women who contribute to musical communities, influencing their aesthetics and expanding opportunities available to women. Hidden Harmonies: Women and Music in Popular Entertainment focuses not on those whose names are best known nor most celebrated but on the women who had power in collective or subversive ways hidden from standard histories. Contributors to Hidden Harmonies reexamine primary sources using feminist and queer methodologies as well as critical race theory in order to overcome previous, biased readings. The scholarship that results from such reexaminations explores topics from songwriters to the music of the civil rights movement and from whistling schools to musical influencers. These wide-ranging essays create a diverse and novel view of women's contribution to music and its production. With intelligence and care, Hidden Harmonies uncovers the fascinating figures behind decades of popular music.

Behind the iconic jazz orchestras, vocalists, and stage productions of the Swing Era lay the talents of popular music's unsung heroes: the arrangers. John Wriggle takes you behind the scenes of New York City's vibrant entertainment industry of the 1930s and 1940s to uncover the lives and work of jazz arrangers, both black and white, who left an indelible mark on American music and culture. Blue Rhythm Fantasy traces the extraordinary career of arranger Chappie Willet--a collaborator of Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Gene Krupa, and many others--to revisit legendary Swing Era venues and performers from Harlem to Times Square. Wriggle's insightful music analyses of big band arranging techniques explore representations of cultural modernism, discourses on art and commercialism, conceptions of race and cultural identity, music industry marketing strategies, and stage entertainment variety genres. Drawing on archives, obscure recordings, untapped sources in the African American press, and interviews with participants, Blue Rhythm Fantasy is a long-overdue study of the arranger during this dynamic era of American music history.

From the 1920s through the 1960s, Pittsburgh’s Hill District was the heart of the city’s Black cultural life and home to a vibrant jazz scene. In Jazz in the Hill: Nightlife and Narratives of a Pittsburgh Neighborhood, Colter Harper looks at how jazz shaped the neighborhood and created a way of life. Beyond backdrops for remarkable careers, jazz clubs sparked the development of a self-determined African American community. In delving into the history of entrepreneurialism, placemaking, labor organizing, and critical listening in the Hill District, Harper forges connections to larger political contexts, processes of urban development, and civil rights struggles. Harper adopts a broad approach in thinking about jazz clubs, foregrounding the network of patrons, business owners, and musicians who were actively invested in community building. Jazz in the Hill provides a valuable case study detailing the intersections of music, political and cultural history, public policy, labor, and law. The book addresses distinctive eras and issues of twentieth century American urban history, including notions of “vice” during the Prohibition Era (1920–1934); “blight” during the mid-twentieth century boom in urban redevelopment (1946–1973); and workplace integration during the civil rights era (1954–1968). Throughout, Harper demonstrates how the clubs, as a nexus of music, politics, economy, labor, and social relations, supported the livelihood of residents and artists while developing cultures of listening and learning. Though the neighborhood has undergone an extensive socioeconomic transformation that has muted its nightlife, this musical legacy continues to guide current development visions for the Hill on the cusp of its remaking.

Rhythm Man: Chick Webb and the Beat that Changed America presents the first full-length biography of the Swing Era icon, restoring this pioneering virtuoso drummer and bandleader's primacy alongside other 20th century jazz giants.

A galvanizing history of how jazz and jazz musicians flourished despite rampant cultural exploitation The music we call “jazz” arose in late nineteenth century North America—most likely in New Orleans—based on the musical traditions of Africans, newly freed from slavery. Grounded in the music known as the “blues,” which expressed the pain, sufferings, and hopes of Black folk then pulverized by Jim Crow, this new music entered the world via the instruments that had been abandoned by departing military bands after the Civil War. Jazz and Justice examines the economic, social, and political forces that shaped this music into a phenomenal US—and Black American—contribution to global arts and culture. Horne assembles a galvanic story depicting what may have been the era’s most virulent economic—and racist—exploitation, as jazz musicians battled organized crime, the Ku Klux Klan, and other variously malignant forces dominating the nightclub scene where jazz became known. Horne pays particular attention to women artists, such as pianist Mary Lou Williams and trombonist Melba Liston, and limns the contributions of musicians with Native American roots. This is the story of a beautiful lotus, growing from the filth of the crassest form of human immiseration.

The Routledge Companion to Jazz Studies presents over forty articles from internationally renowned scholars and highlights the strengths of current jazz scholarship in a cross-disciplinary field of enquiry. Each chapter reflects on developments within jazz studies over the last twenty-five years, offering surveys and new insights into the major perspectives and approaches to jazz research. The collection provides an essential research resource for students, scholars, and enthusiasts, and will serve as the definitive survey of current jazz scholarship in the Anglophone world to-date. It extends the critical debates about jazz that were set in motion by formative texts in the 1990s, and sets the agenda for the future scholarship by focusing on key issues and providing a framework for new lines of enquiry. It is organized around six themes: I. Historical Perspectives, II. Methodologies, III. Core Issues and Topics, IV. Individuals, Collectives and Communities, V. Politics, Discourse and Ideology and VI. New Directions and Debates.

This book’s predecessor, The Grapevine of the Black South, emphasized the owners of the Atlanta Daily World and its operation of the Scott Newspaper Syndicate between 1931 and 1955. In a pragmatic effort to avoid racial confrontation developing from white fear, newspaper editors developed a practical radicalism that argued on the fringes of racial hegemony, saving their loudest vitriol for tyranny that was not local and thus left no stake in the game for would-be white saboteurs. Thomas Aiello reexamined historical thinking about the Depression-era Black South, the information flow of the Great Migration, the place of southern newspapers in the historiography of Black journalism, and even the ideological and philosophical underpinnings of the civil rights movement. With Practical Radicalism and the Great Migration, Aiello continues that analysis by tracing the development and trajectory of the individual newspapers of the Syndicate, evaluating those with surviving issues, and presenting them as they existed in proximity to their Atlanta hub. In so doing, he emphasizes the thread of practical radicalism that ran through Syndicate editorial policy. Practical Radicalism and the Great Migration is a supplement to The Grapevine of the Black South, providing a fuller picture of the Scott Newspaper Syndicate and the Black press in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s.