King Oliver, Jelly Roll, and Satchmo 14 3 Bix, Austin High, and Chicago Style 31 4 Pops and Smack 41
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THE JAZZ AGE This page intentionally left blank ARNOLD SHAW THE JAZZ AGE Popular Music in the 1920's Oxford University Press New York Oxford OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Oxford New York Toronto Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi Petaling Jaya Singapore Hong Kong Tokyo Nairobi Dar es Salaam Cape Town Melbourne Auckland and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Copyright © 1987 by Ghita Milgrom Shaw First published in 1987 by Oxford University Press, Inc., 200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback, 1989 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Shaw, Arnold. The Jazz Age. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Music, Popular (Songs, etc.)—United States—History and criticism. 2. Jazz music—United States. 3. Musical revue, comedy, etc.— United States. 4. United States—History—1919-1933. I. Title. ML3477.S475 1987 780'.42'0973 86-33234 ISBN 0-19-503891-6 ISBN 0-19-506082-2 (pbk.) Lyrics from "Night and Day" by Cole Porter © 1921 Warner Bros. Inc. (Renewed). All Rights Reserved. Used by permission. "I've Come to Wive it Wealthily in Padua" by Cole Porter, Copyright © 1948 by Cole Porter. Copyright Renewed & Assigned to John F. Wharton, as Trustee of the Cole Porter Musical & Literary Property Trusts. Chappell & Co., Inc., owner of publication and allied rights throughout the world. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission. 24681097531 Printed in the United States of America To my beloved wife Ghita with love and admiration This page intentionally left blank Preface The 1920s have been the subject of a considerable number of sur- veys, beginning with the brilliantly analytical and anecdotal Only Yesterday by Frederick Lewis Allen. But these studies, including Allen's panoramic view, paid scant attention to the popular music of the time, perhaps because that music was escapist, avoiding seri- ous issues and controversial subjects. But the twenties were a crucial period in the history of popular music, as significant musically as the fifties were with the advent of the "rock revolution." It was in the Roaring Twenties that a group of new tonalities entered the mainstream, fixing the sound and the forms of our popular music for the next thirty years. Jazz, hot and hybrid, came booming out of the South to prompt the crea- tion of a new-styled dance music and new dances. The blues, also originating with blacks and for a long time transmitted orally, first made their way onto disk and paper, and influenced the songs being written in Tin Pan Alley. Black pianists of the Harlem scene trans- formed ragtime into stride piano, motivating the creation of bravura pieces known as "piano novelties." The Broadway theater was flooded with revues that were contemporary in theme and, inspired by the heightened tempi and rhythms of jazz, severed its European ties and moved toward the Golden Era of the thirties and forties. In sum, the twenties were a period when elements of black and white music first achieved a rich and permanent fusion. This book viii PREFACE is an attempt to delineate these vast changes, to view them in the climate of the era, and to acquaint the reader with the men and women responsible for them. Las Vegas, Nevada Arnold Shaw September 20,1986 P.S. It is perhaps not inappropriate to mention here the sheer, last- ing appeal of some of the decade's hit songs. If any evidence is re- quired to demonstrate this, Bob Fosse's musical Big Deal, which opened on Broadway in April 1986, provides eloquent testimony. After considering a number of eminent show composers, Fosse set- tled on a group of tunes that were first heard in the twenties: "I'm Just Wild About Harry," "Ain't She Sweet," "Button Up Your Overcoat," and "Happy Days Are Here Again." "These tunes had been in my head for years," Fosse explained. "So I ended using old songs that I loved and grew up with. ."* * New York Times (April 6, 1986), "Arts & Leisure," 1. Contents I THE JAZZ AGE 1 "Flappers Are We" 3 2 King Oliver, Jelly Roll, and Satchmo 14 3 Bix, Austin High, and Chicago Style 31 4 Pops and Smack 41 II THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE 5 Duke, Ethel, and the Harlem Scene 57 6 "The Birth of the Blues" 67 7 "Kitten on the Keys" 80 8 Shuffle Along 88 III TIN PAN ALLEY 9 "Dardanella" 95 10 "The Sheik of Araby" 111 11 "Three O'Clock in the Morning" 120 12 "Yes! We Have No Bananas"/"Charleston" 132 13 "Rhapsody and Romance in Blue" 142 14 "Tea for Two" 157 x CONTENTS 15 "The Black Bottom" 170 16 "Talkies" and Theme Songs 184 17 "The Singing Fool" 200 18 California Gold Rush 213 IV THE MUSICAL THEATRE 19 The Musical Revue 231 20 The Golden Coterie 250 21 The Operetta Revival 271 22 Song Laureate of the Roaring Twenties 275 Epilogue 285 Notes 289 Bibliography 303 Discography 311 Variety's "Golden 100 Tin Pan Alley Songs" 319 Index 321 Song Index 339 I The Jazz Age This page intentionally left blank 1 "Flappers Are We" "Vincent Youmans wrote the music for those twilights just after the war," exulted Zelda Fitzgerald. "They were wonderful. They hung above the city like an indigo wash."1 And they possessed that aura of darkness and romance, gaiety and melancholy, that seems a special mark of the Jazz Age. Riding down Fifth Avenue one day in the 1920s, F. Scott Fitzgerald "bawled" be- cause, he later said, "I had everything I wanted and knew I would never be so happy again."2 That ambivalent sense of exhilaration and foreboding permeates the novels as well as the songs of the era. A Fifth Avenue bus was the venue also of other emotional displays. Jazz trombonist Miff Mole tells about a day when he and several col- leagues gave an impromptu concert on a bus. "Vic Berton, Arthur Schutt, Bix Beiderbecke, Jimmy Dorsey and I," he recalls, "decided that we were going to make the greatest record ever made. We took along two quarts of gin and went up to the Gennett studios. Well, we drank for an hour and a half, played about half an hour, and were told, not too politely, to leave. We hadn't cut any records but we didn't mind. We climbed to the top of a Fifth Avenue bus and played there, all the way home!"3 Vincent Youmans, whose music was an expressive accompaniment to those twilights, wrote No, No Nanette, creating one of the most popular and imperishable melodies of the twentieth century, "Tea for Two." Moments after the curtain rose on the hit musical of 1925, 3 4 THE JAZZ AGE a bevy of light-limbed girls bounded down to the footlights and chirped airily: Flappers are we Flappers are we Flappers and fly and free. Never too slow All on the go Petting parties with the smarties. Dizzy with dangerous glee Puritans knock us Because the way we're clad. Preachers all mock us Because we're not bad. Most flippant young flappers are we!4 "The postwar world came in," wrote songwriter and actor Hoagy Carmichael, "with a bang of bad booze, flappers with bare legs, jangled morals and wild weekends."0 It came in with Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, who were, in biog- rapher Nancy Milford's words, "the apotheosis of the twenties,"6 and in poet and anthologist Louis Untermeyer's words, "flaming youth per- sonified."7 The Princeton dropout and his blue-eyed Alabama belle were married in the rectory of Manhattan's St. Patrick Cathedral in April 1920, just one month after the publication of his seminal novel This Side of Paradise. Overnight, Paradise became "the un- dergraduate's bible and its author the acknowledged leader of the Torrid Twenties, laureate of the Jazz Age and its excessive accent on youth."8 Scott having become a celebrity, the Fitzgeralds went on a roller coaster ride of glamorous Long Island partying, trips to Paris, unbuttoned high jinks, lavish entertaining, and notorious debaucher- ies that kept Scott emotionally and financially strapped. Scott undressed at a performance of the Scandals, Nancy Milford tells us, "Zelda completely sober dove into the fountain at Union Square,"9 and when they moved from their honeymoon suite at the Biltmore Hotel to the Commodore, they celebrated by spinning THE JAZZ AGE 5 around in the revolving doors for half an hour. They danced the Charleston on restaurant tables and recklessly rang fire alarms. When the firemen arrived and searched for the blaze, Zelda pointed to her breasts and screamed, "Here!" Dorothy Parker recalled first meeting the Fitzgeralds when Zelda was sitting astride the hood of a taxi and Scott was perched on its roof. The reckless exuberance manifested by the Fitzgeralds was typical of a young, affluent generation react- ing not only to the tensions of the war just ended but to the emo- tional reserve of their elders. Physical pranks were outside the realm in which Dorothy Parker moved, but the verbal prank—the bon mot, the epigram, the wise- crack, and the gag—were integral to her set and to the creative intel- lectual world of the 1920s. They flourished at the celebrated Algon- quin Round Table, widely publicized by, if not actually the creation of, the press agents of the day.