Subversive Sounds: Race and the Birth of Jazz in New Orleans

Front Cover
University of Chicago Press, Sep 15, 2008 - Music - 256 pages
0 Reviews
Reviews aren't verified, but Google checks for and removes fake content when it's identified

Subversive Sounds probes New Orleans’s history, uncovering a web of racial interconnections and animosities that was instrumental to the creation of a vital American art form—jazz. Drawing on oral histories, police reports, newspaper accounts, and vintage recordings, Charles Hersch brings to vivid life the neighborhoods and nightspots where jazz was born.

This volume shows how musicians such as Jelly Roll Morton, Nick La Rocca, and Louis Armstrong negotiated New Orleans’s complex racial rules to pursue their craft and how, in order to widen their audiences, they became fluent in a variety of musical traditions from diverse ethnic sources. These encounters with other music and races subverted their own racial identities and changed the way they played—a musical miscegenation that, in the shadow of Jim Crow, undermined the pursuit of racial purity and indelibly transformed American culture.

“More than timely . . . Hersch orchestrates voices of musicians on both sides of the racial divide in underscoring how porous the music made the boundaries of race and class.”—New Orleans Times-Picayune

 

What people are saying - Write a review

Reviews aren't verified, but Google checks for and removes fake content when it's identified

Subversive sounds: race and the birth of jazz in New Orleans

User Review  - Not Available - Book Verdict

Hersch (political science, Cleveland State Univ.; Democratic Artworks) explores turn-of-the-century New Orleans, when Jim Crow segregation laws were forcing America into a binary of races. At the same ... Read full review

Other editions - View all

Subversive Sounds: Race and the Birth of Jazz in New Orleans
Charles B. Hersch
No preview available - 2009
Subversive Sounds: Race and the Birth of Jazz in New Orleans
Charles B. Hersch
No preview available - 2008

Common terms and phrases

According African American African music African-based music Alphonse Picou audiences Baby Dodds band’s Barker Bechet black church black music black musicians blacks and Creoles blues brass bands Buddy Bolden called Caribbean city’s clarinet clubs Congo Square cornet cornetist created Creole musicians Creoles of Color dance halls District early jazz European featuring first Freddie Keppard HNOC hymns improvisation impure influence instruments Italians jazz musicians jazz’s Jelly Roll Jelly Roll Morton Jim Crow Johnny Johnny St Keppard kind King Oliver listeners Lomax Louis Armstrong Louisiana lower-class Manetta interview Manuel Manetta March melody Milneburg Mister Jelly Morton Negro officer Orleanians Orleans jazz Orleans musicians Orleans’s parades performance piano police polyphony Pops Foster popular quadrilles race racial identity racial purity racism ragtime ratty respectable rhythm Sanctified Church segregation Sidney Bechet signified signifying singing slaves social sometimes songs sounds Storyville style syncopation tradition transformed tune voodoo white musicians women WRHA

About the author (2008)

Charles Hersch is professor of political science at Cleveland State University and the author of Democratic Artworks: Politics and the Arts from Trilling to Dylan.

Bibliographic information

QR code for Subversive Sounds
TitleSubversive Sounds: Race and the Birth of Jazz in New Orleans
Studies in Communication, Media, and Public Opinion Series
AuthorCharles B. Hersch
Editionillustrated, reprint
PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press, 2008
ISBN0226328694, 9780226328690
Length256 pages
Subjects ›  › 

History / United States / General
Music / Ethnomusicology
Music / General
  
Export CitationBiBTeX EndNote RefMan