The history of modern American popular music is in large measure the story of jazz, a music whose origins have long been the subject of intense controversy. Jazz is thought to have emerged in nascent form around the turn of the 20th century; by the time it was first documented on phonograph records in 1917, it had already taken recognizable shape. But what happened in between?

Not until much later did researchers begin to investigate the early development of jazz, and only in recent years has it become the subject of serious academic scholarship. Unfortunately, however, most of the key first-generation jazzmen were dead by 1940, and though a number of second-generation figures lived into the 70’s and beyond, relatively few of them published memoirs or were interviewed by oral historians competent to question them in close detail about their life and work.

It says much about the problematic historiography of jazz that so much of what we know—or think we know—about it can be traced back to a single source: Jazzmen: The Story of Hot Jazz Told in the Lives of the Men Who Created It. This collection of historical and biographical essays, published in 1939, was the first book of its kind to be based on primary-source material, including interviews with musicians who worked in New Orleans, one of the principal birthplaces of jazz, prior to World War I. But Jazzmen also contained a not-inconsiderable amount of romanticized misinformation, in part because it was written by a group of young men passionately in love with an art form that was then mostly unknown to the public at large.

For most Americans, “jazz” in 1939 meant the big, polished swing bands that crisscrossed the country playing written-out arrangements of dance music, not the hot combos that improvised in big-city nightclubs. As for the rougher-edged music of blues singers like Bessie Smith and boogie-woogie pianists like Jimmy Yancey, this was even less familiar to the average record buyer. Hence the sometimes overripe flavor of Jazzmen, captured in the prose poem about New Orleans—“the silver and copper laugh of the prostitute, and the toothless chuckle of the old man who remembers Buddy Bolden at Bogalusa”—with which the book opens. The reader is left in little doubt of what is to follow: not a coolly realistic, fact-based account but a starry-eyed myth that tells of a group of supermen who battled poverty and racial prejudice to build an art form of their own.

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Needless to say, there is more than a grain of truth in the creation myth of jazz first promulgated in the pages of Jazzmen. But a myth it remains, and one that unfortunately has exerted a powerful influence on successive generations of journalists and scholars.¹

Much of the power of the myth arises from the fact that it is so racially charged. Because music was one of the few professions open to blacks prior to World War II, some writers, black and white alike, became so emotionally vested in the myth and its reception that at times they simply refused to give due credit to the achievements of white jazz musicians in nearly any period. While this extreme point of view never won general acceptance, the notion persists that New Orleans blacks were the sole creators of jazz, and that white musicians made no major contributions to its early development. Not only is this widely believed in the black community, but a considerable number of whites also continue to accept it as true—even when presented with compelling evidence to the contrary.

The critical reception of Richard M. Sudhalter’s Lost Chords: White Musicians and Their Contribution to Jazz, 1915-1945 (1999) illustrates the persistent strength of the creation myth. In addition to chronicling the achievements of such noted white artists and ensembles as Bix Beiderbecke, Bunny Berigan, the Boswell Sisters, Bud Freeman, Bobby Hackett, Benny Goodman, Miff Mole, Red Norvo, Pee Wee Russell, Artie Shaw, and Jack Teagarden, Sudhalter documented the influence they had on their black contemporaries—most of whom unhesitatingly acknowledged that, in the words of the black trumpeter Doc Cheatham, “if musicians were good, we learned from them, and they learned from us.”

Yet although Lost Chords did win respect as an important addition to the literature of jazz, Sudhalter was savaged by certain well-placed but ill-informed critics unwilling to admit that the creation myth might be in need of radical revision. For the rest of his life—he died in September of this year—these critics treated him as an unperson. An obituary in the Washington Post accurately describes the reception of Lost Chords:

Many critics and musicians were incensed at Sudhalter and called him the Pat Buchanan of jazz. . . . Saxophonist Branford Marsalis said the book “does not deserve the dignity of a response. It’s not an argument I’m prepared to devote five minutes to.”²

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But things have changed since 1999, and the creation myth is coming under assault by scholars, many of them young, who take an unromantic view of their subject and are prepared to test the conventional wisdom against the historical record. A prime example of this new realism is Samuel Charters’s A Trumpet Around the Corner: The Story of New Orleans Jazz.³

As it happens, this is not a young man’s book but the summation of the life’s work of a distinguished scholar whose first book, Jazz: New Orleans 1885-1957 (1958, rev. 1963), sought to set down all that was then known about the early years of New Orleans jazz. Charters started interviewing New Orleans musicians in 1950, at a time when it was still possible to talk to players who had been active in the first years of the 20th century. Why, then, has he returned to the subject now? As he tells us in the very first paragraph of A Trumpet Around the Corner, the impetus came by way of an offer from an academic press to reprint Jazz: New Orleans. He declined:

I responded that . . . there had been nearly as much music in New Orleans since the book was published as in the years that the book dealt with. I also explained that in the early book I hadn’t included the city’s white musicians, and they had certainly played as important a role in the development of New Orleans music.

The straightforwardness of this declaration disguises its heretical nature—but not for long. Charters had indeed come to the conclusion that the white dance musicians of turn-of-the-century New Orleans contributed no less significantly to the emergence of jazz than did the black musicians who populate the creation myth, and it was in part to demonstrate this that he chose to write a wholly new book. As he explains in the introduction:

Every musician in New Orleans in 1900, white, black, and Creole, was drawing from the same sources: the syncopated cakewalks and walk-around pieces of the minstrel-show bands, the newly popular syncopated melodies of ragtime, the disciplined music of the ever-present marching bands, the popular songs that drifted into town like seeds in the wind with the traveling vaudeville shows, and the sheet music that was found in nearly every home in each of the city’s social and ethnic groups. . . . [E]ach of the musical worlds in New Orleans needed the others to create the city’s distinctive musical style.

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As a result of Jim Crow laws passed in the late 19th century, black and white dance musicians active in New Orleans in and after 1900 were blocked from playing together or socializing. Consequently, two different jazz dialects, one black and one white, emerged out of the musical ferment that led to the music now known as jazz.

The majority of modern-day critics judge the music of such early white ensembles as the Original Dixieland Jazz Band to be derivative of and inferior to the playing of their black contemporaries. By contrast, Charters has come to regard these groups as fully the equals of their black counterparts. For him—as well as for many early black jazzmen, prominently including Louis Armstrong—the music performed by white New Orleans players was distinct in character but comparable in both quality and influence to that played by blacks.

Why did Charters not discuss these white musicians in Jazz: New Orleans? His answer is again admirably straightforward: “In the 1950’s many of us writing about jazz and blues reacted against the institutionalized racism we experienced in the South by placing special emphasis on the African American musical achievement.”

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Charters is well aware of the controversial nature of his change of heart. “I am conscious,” he remarks in his introduction, “that anything I write will be considered first for its relevance to the present assumptions as to the nature and history of jazz as solely an expression of African American culture.” But while the publication of Sudhalter’s Lost Chords provoked a furious debate in the mainstream press, A Trumpet Around the Corner has gone all but unnoticed since it came out in April.

No doubt this is in part owing to the fact that the book was published by a small university press. But I also suspect that true believers in the old creation myth are deeply disquieted by the spectacle of so well-regarded a historian—and one whose early work contributed greatly to the consolidation of that myth—opting to break with the consensus.

Tellingly, the only review of Charters’s book that I have been able to find is a cautiously skeptical notice by Jason Berry that appeared in Gambit Weekly, one of New Orleans’s “alternative” newspapers. Berry, however, is not an academic historian but a journalist and amateur jazz scholar who is best known for his writings about sexually abusive Roman Catholic priests—and who, as it happens, also wrote skeptically about Lost Chords in the New York Times Book Review nine years ago. Unsurprisingly, his recent review contends that in challenging “the consensus of jazz as an African-American art form, [Charters] falls well short of making his case.”

It remains to be seen whether others will engage with Charters’s detailed claims. But even if his book is ignored in the short run, my guess is that in time its publication will come to be regarded as a key moment in the acceptance of a clearer, more nuanced narrative of jazz’s early years. The ardent romanticism—and, in some cases, racial politics—of the first generation of jazz historians will give way at last to the kind of unsentimental realism that distinguishes between matters of verifiable fact and mere wishful thinking.

1 See my “All that Jazz” (COMMENTARY, March 2007).

2 For an example of Sudhalter’s work, see his calmly authoritative review of Alyn Shipton’s A New History of Jazz in the March 2002 COMMENTARY.

3 University Press of Mississippi, 380 pp., $40.00.