William Howland Kenney

The story of jazzmen traveling up the Mississippi river from New Orleans to Chicago, and thus spreading the new music in the early decades of the 20th Century has often been talked and written about. And just as often it has been criticized as a myth. This excellent work of scholarship shows just what is the truth in that tale and sets the record straight as to the importance of river boat jazz in the spread and development of the music. The Mississippi river system, including the Tennessee, Ohio, Illinois, and Missouri, in addition to the Mississippi proper, constitutes a huge transportation network crossing the United States north-south, and has New Orleans at its southern root. At the end of the 19th and early 20th Centuries it was no longer used to transport people and goods over long distances, having long been superseeded by the train. It was, however, in that era before air-conditioned, the place where the pleasure boat short day trip was developed by a number of private entrepreneurs, notable among then the Streckfus family. Those boats needed to entertain their guests, and for that they required dance music, jazz included. A number of early jazzmen established their name un the excursion boats based on St. Louis, Davenport, or Memphis. Most important among them was Fate Marable, whose bands included (at different occasions) Jimmy Blanton, Clark Terry, Earl Bostic, and, of course, Louis Armstrong. Marable, like so many of these early riverboat jazzmen, never recorded, so the sound of his several bands will remain forever unknown. The author of this book argues they must have sounded somewhere between the contemporary New Orleans sound and what would become the big band sound in the thirties. This work is the first book entirely dedicated to the exploration of this aspect of jazz history. It is well written, with chapters on the Streckfus family company, on Fate Marable and the Great Migration, on Louis Armstrong on the Mississippi (between 1919 and 1921), on the music scene in Memphis, St. Louis, and Pittsburgh, on Bix Beiderbecke and Jess Stacey, ending with the decline and fall of the excursion boat business in the years following the end of World War II, due to the invention of other forms of mass entertainment (such as TV) and of air conditioned, as well as changes implied by the onset of the civil rights movements. Here we have a wonderful and indispensable addition to our understanding of the history of Jazz in the 20th Century.… (more)