Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-l7hp2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T18:03:37.300Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Moral Outrage and Musical Corruption: White Educators’ Responses to the “Jazz Problem”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Jacob Hardesty*
Affiliation:
Rockford University ([email protected])
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

More than a musical genre, jazz in the 1920s was viewed by critics and supporters alike as a type of lifestyle, one that frequently led to drinking, dancing, and “petting.” Much to the horror of older generations, white young people were particularly drawn to jazz and its “hot rhythms.” Secondary school teachers and administrators took up the formidable task of persuading youth of jazz's morally corrupting influences. I argue that, in the first half of the decade, such educators instituted curricular and various informal policies designed to replace jazz, universally associated with black musicians, with more “wholesome” European-originated alternatives. By the latter part of the decade, however, most educators admitted a grudging acceptance of jazz's permanence and abandoned their efforts to convince students of its iniquity.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © 2016 History of Education Society 

References

1 John R. McMahon, “Unspeakable Jazz Must Go!” Ladies Home Journal 34 (December 1921): 115.Google Scholar

2 Frederick Neil Innes, “The Musical Possibilities of the Wind Band,” Music Supervisors’ Journal 10, no. 5 (May 1, 1924): 42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 At its heart, Victorianism rested on various identifying characteristics: a clear conception of whiteness, a near obsession for maintaining the clearly defined social order, female modesty in dress and deportment, and the centrality of Christianity in people's lives. Jazz was, in many ways, the opposite: a justification for female “immodest dress,” plainly sexualized dance steps, unabashedly secular, and regularly alcohol-fueled. Court Carney correctly argues in his history of early jazz, “The shift from Victorianism to Modernism formed the context in which Americans reacted to jazz music. In general, Victorianism created a dichotomy separating controlled human instincts from natural impulses, and modernism strove to reunite these two forces.” Court Carney, Cuttin’ Up: How Early Jazz Got America's Ear (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2009), 129. See also Stanley Coben, Rebellion against Victorianism: The Impetus for Cultural Change in 1920s America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).Google Scholar

4 Paula S. Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 301.Google Scholar

5 Steven Mintz, Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004), 213–33; Kelly Schrum, Some Wore Bobby Sox: The Emergence of Teenage Girls’ Culture, 1920–1945 (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004), 24–43, 98–117; Joseph M. Hawes, Children between the Wars: American Childhood, 1920–1940 (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1997); and Joseph F. Kett, Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America, 1790 to Present (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 254–64.Google Scholar

6 For instance, see Adam Laats, “Red Schoolhouse, Burning Cross: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and Educational Reform,” History of Education Quarterly 52, no. 3 (August 2012), 323–50; Joseph Moreau, Schoolbook Nation: Conflicts over American History Textbooks from the Civil War to the Present (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 137–74. The phrase “acids of modernity” comes from Lynn Dumenil, The Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995), 148.Google Scholar

7 As various historians have pointed out, by the early 1920s, many academics were in outright opposition to Victorianism's unquestioned social order. However, this increase of anti-Victorianist thinking was not synonymous with condoning “modern” behavior with young people. See B. Edward McClellan, Moral Education in America: Schools and the Shaping of Character from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Teachers College Press, 1999), 57; Roderick Nash, The Nervous Generation: American Thought, 1917–1930 (Chicago, IL: Rand McNally, 1970). For examples of increasingly recognizable differences between young people and adults on matters of dating, dance, and fashion in the 1920s, see Lawrence J. Nelson, Rumors of Indiscretion: The University of Missouri “Sex Questionnaire” Scandal in the Jazz Age (Columbia, SC: University of Missouri Press, 2003); Jeffrey P. Moran, Teaching Sex: The Shaping of Adolescence in the 20th Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 68–97; Beth L. Bailey, From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 13–27, 77–81; Ann Louise Wagner, Adversaries of Dance: From the Puritans to the Present (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 261–312; Valerie Steele, Fashion and Eroticism: Ideals of Feminine Beauty from the Victorian Era to the Jazz Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 186–241; and Lewis A. Erenberg, Steppin’ Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture, 1890–1930 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 233–66.Google Scholar

8 I borrow the phrase “jazz problem” from a 1924 issue of the music education magazine The Etude. The full title read, “The Jazz Problem: Opinions of Prominent Men and Musicians.” The magazine's editor wrote that the music had been an “accursed annoyance to teachers for years,” before promising neutrality in his reporting. James F. Cooke, “Where the Etude Stands on Jazz,” The Etude, 42, no. 8 (August 1924), 1.Google Scholar

9 John R. McMahon, “Our Jazz-Spotted Middle West,” Ladies Home Journal 39 (February 1922): 38.Google Scholar

10 Mortensen was prominent among superintendents and other educational bureaucrats who historians David B. Tyack and Elisabeth Hansot referred to as the “Managers of Virtue.” David B. Tyack and Elisabeth Hansot, Managers of Virtue: Public School Leadership in America, 1820–1980 (New York: Basic Books, 1982). One observer in the National School Digest noted, “Mortensen belongs to school men this year. He is the official host of the big meeting of superintendents next month. More correctly speaking, he is the spokesman for the city of Chicago, which will play host. The kind of man he is will influence all of us, and affects the benefits which the country will gain from the largest gathering of … educators … the world has ever seen.” “What Manner of Man Is Mortenson?” National School Digest 42, no. 5 (January 1922), 271.Google Scholar

11 A small number of observers attributed the music to other groups. Perhaps most prominently, the music journalist and one-time Harvard Music Review editor Gilbert Elliot Jr. believed jazz had Spanish origins. He wrote, “In looking over some of this modern Spanish music one would be inclined to think that its authors were intimately acquainted with the intricacies of our rhythms … of which more … have also in some unknown fashion strongly influenced our jazz.” Still, such views existed very much in the minority. Gilbert Elliot Jr., “Our Musical Kinship with the Spaniards,” Musical Quarterly 8, no. 3 (July 1922): 414.Google Scholar

12 In his famous history of early jazz, Gunther Schuller acknowledges that “the African and European lineages will become somewhat entangled.” Gunther Schuller, Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 4. For a more updated treatment, see Paul Berliner, Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994).Google Scholar

13 The first commercial radio station, KDKA in Pittsburgh, went on air in 1920. Eighteen months later, the number of commercial stations had risen to 220. By 1930, over 900 stations existed nationwide and over 40 percent of households owned radios. In 1928, when jazz's permanence had been established, one reader wrote the Sunday School Times, “We hate jazz and often it is hard to get much else but that” on the radio. Douglas Carl Abrams, Selling the Old-Time Religion: American Fundamentalists and Mass Culture, 1920–1940 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001), 100. Statistics come from Schrum, Some Wore Bobby Sox, 103; and William Barlow, Voice Over: The Making of Black Radio (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1998), 19.Google Scholar

14 Among these immigrant musicians, “Jelly Roll” Morton and Louis Armstrong famously went to Chicago while the trombonist “Kid” Orymoved west to Los Angeles in 1919, three years later making what was likely the first instrumental black jazz recording at a studio on Santa Monica Boulevard. Nat Shapiro and Nat Hentoff, eds., Hear Me Talkin’ to Ya: The Story of Jazz as Told by the Men Who Made It (New York: Dover Publications, 1955); and Burton W. Peretti, The Creation of Jazz: Music, Race, and Culture in Urban America (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1992).Google Scholar

15 James R. Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago: Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 262, 178; Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: the Epic Story of America's Great Migration (New York: Random House, 2010); Ira Berlin, The Making of African America: The Four Great Migrations (New York: Penguin Books, 2010). Eileen Southern similarly refers to Chicago in the 1920s as the “capital of classic jazz in the New Orleans tradition.” Eileen Southern, The Music of Black Americans: A History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 378. Similarly, an early jazz history text suggested “Many [whites] detected in its carefree melodies a symbolic language of satire in which the embittered Negro was expressing his dislike for his white neighbors.” Winthrop Sargeant, Jazz: Hot and Hybrid (New York: Da Capo Press, 1974), 26.Google Scholar

16 Kathy J. Ogren, The Jazz Revolution: Twenties America and the Meaning of Jazz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 11, 53. For discussion of white Broadway dancers appropriating dance steps from black teachers, see Danielle Robinson, “‘Oh You Black Bottom’: Appropriation, Authenticity, and Opportunity in the Jazz Dance Teaching of 1920s New York,” Dance Research Journal 38, no. 1/2 (Summer–Winter 2006), 19–42.Google Scholar

17 Hoagy Carmichael, John Edward Hasse, and Stephen Longstreet, The Stardust Road and Sometimes I Wonder: The Autobiography of Hoagy Carmichael (New York: Da Capo Press, 1999), 16–29. For analysis of the influence of black musicians on Carmichael's compositions, see Roger Hewitt, “Black through White: Hoagy Carmichael and the Cultural Reproduction of Racism,” Popular Music 3, no. 1 (1983): 33–50. For analysis of the influence of black performers on young white jazz musicians, see William Howland Kenney, Chicago Jazz: A Cultural History, 1904–1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 3–116; and William Howland Kenney, Jazz on the River (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 115–40.Google Scholar

18 Carmichael, Hasse, and Longstreet, The Stardust Road, 29.Google Scholar

19 Wagner, Adversaries of Dance, 302.Google Scholar

20 Barlow, Voice Over: The Making of Black Radio, 21–22.Google Scholar

21 Genevieve Forbes, “Copyright Bar Stirs Radio Fans’ Static,” Chicago Daily Tribune, April 15, 1923, 17.Google Scholar

22 Larry Rue, “Trieste Has Guaranteed Cure for Jazz Habit,” Chicago Sunday Tribune, April 9, 1922, sec. 8, 17.Google Scholar

23 Ralph G. Giordano, Satan in the Dance Hall: Rev. John Roach Straton, Social Dancing, and Morality in 1920s New York City (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2008), 55.Google Scholar

24 Thomas, William I. The Unadjusted Girl: With Cases and Standpoint for Behavior Analysis. Criminal Science Monographs. Vol. 4 (Boston, MA: Little, Brown & Company, 1923).Google Scholar

25 Moran, Teaching Sex, 85.Google Scholar

26 Ocean Howell, “Play Pays: Urban Land Politics and Playgrounds in the United States, 1900–1930,” Journal of Urban History 34, no. 6 (September 2008): 961–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

27 For an excellent discussion on the coexistence of primitivism and modernity, see Nancy Nenno, “Femininity, the Primitive, and Modern Urban Space: Josephine Baker in Berlin,” in Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture, ed. Katharina von Ankum (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997), 145–61.Google Scholar

28 Neil Leonard, Jazz and the White Americans: The Acceptance of a New Art Form (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 39.Google Scholar

29 “Folk Dancing Versus Jazz,” Oregonian (Portland, OR), June 28, 1920, 6; Leonard, Jazz and the White Americans, 39.Google Scholar

30 Mary E. Odom, Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1885–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 104.Google Scholar

31 As cited in Wagner, Adversaries of Dance, 273.Google Scholar

32 Southern, The Music of Black Americans, 227–43.Google Scholar

33 Olive Coleman Thomas, “How to Create an Appreciation for Good Music in the Public Schools,” Mississippi Educational Journal for Teachers in Colored Schools 3, no. 4 (February 1927): 89.Google Scholar

34 Willis Charles Patterson, “A History of the National Association of Negro Musicians (NANM): The First Quarter Century, 1919–1943” (PhD dissertation, Wayne State University, 1993), 188.Google Scholar

35 In his book on music and racial uplift, Lawrence Schenbeck points out another criticism unique to black jazz critics: “Many in the black intelligentsia maintained a wary distance from black popular music, in part because of its distasteful proximity to the minstrel legacy.” Lawrence Schenbeck, Racial Uplift and American Music, 1878–1943 (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2012), 131.Google Scholar

36 Coe would have the last word, of sorts. In the mid-1980s, after a successful touring career, Coe served as Jazz Artist in Residence for the Indianapolis Public Schools. Lissa Felming May, “Early Musical Development of Selected African-American Jazz Musicians in Indianapolis in the 1930s and 1940s,” Journal of Historical Research in Music Education 27, no. 1 (October 2005), 21–32.Google Scholar

37 Madge R. Cayton, “The Origin of Jazz,” Cayton's Monthly (Seattle), February 1, 1921, 10.Google Scholar

38 Quintard Taylor, The Forging of a Black Community: Seattle's Central District from 1870 through the Civil Rights Era (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1994), 135–56.Google Scholar

39 William G. Nunn, “Has the Negro Church Been Weighed in the Balance and Found Wanting?” The Pittsburgh Courier, October 2, 1926, 1.Google Scholar

40 On the importance of community, see James Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1988); Vanessa Siddle Walker, Their Highest Potential: An African American School Community in the Segregated South (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).Google Scholar

41 Terminology here is inconsistent and somewhat problematic. While music and dance historians generally tend to prefer the term Victorian to describe critics of 1920s cultural changes, scholars focusing on emergent youth culture are more likely to use terms like traditionalists or conservatives. Examples of the former include Peretti, The Creation of Jazz, and Wagner, Adversaries of Dance, 261–312. One notable counterexample is Ogren, The Jazz Revolution. Such discrepancies are reminiscent of Henry May's famous 1956 essay, “Shifting Perspectives of the 1920s.” That is, historians with differing interpretations about the decade can easily find adequate case studies to support their views. Henry F. May, “Shifting Perspectives on the 1920s,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 43, no. 3 (December 1956), 405–27.Google Scholar

42 “Jazz morals” comes from Innes, “The Musical Possibilities of the Wind Band,” 40, 42–45, 62–64.Google Scholar

43 Edith L. Hilderbrant, “Music Memory Contests,” School Review 30, no. 4 (April 1922), 300.Google Scholar

44 Lawrence W. Levine, “Jazz and American Culture,” Journal of American Folklore 102, no. 403 (January–March 1989): 15; Mary Herron Dupree, “‘Jazz,’ the Critics, and American Art Music in the 1920s,” American Music 4, no. 3 (1986): 287; Peretti, The Creation of Jazz, 2.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

45 “Educator Says Movies and Jazz Retard Student,” Chicago Daily Tribune, April 8, 1922, sec. 2, 15.Google Scholar

46 Examples include the following: M. V. O'Shea and John Harvey Kellogg, Health Habits (New York: MacMillan, 1924); M. V. O'Shea, First Steps in Child Training (Chicago, IL: F. J. Drake, 1920); and M. V. O'Shea, Dynamic Factors in Education (New York: MacMillan, 1917).Google Scholar

47 M. V. O'Shea, The Trend of the Teens (Chicago, IL: F. J. Drake, 1920), 63, 153.Google Scholar

48 Hilderbrant, “Music Memory Contests,” 300.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

49 Ibid., 300–1.Google Scholar

50 Peter Mortenson, “Chicago's Superintendent on the Los Angeles Salary Issue,” Los Angeles School Journal 3, no. 36 (May 10, 1920): 10.Google Scholar

51 “What Manner of Man Is Mortenson?”Google Scholar

52 Mortenson, “Chicago's Superintendent on the Los Angeles Salary Issue.”Google Scholar

53 “School Board Bans Teaching Language of Hun: Favors Superintendent's Idea Regarding German in Elementary Work,” Chicago Daily Tribune, September 7, 1918, 1. See also Jeffrey Mirel, Patriotic Pluralism: Americanization, Education, and European Immigrants (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 59–60, 109–10; and Paul Ramsey, Bilingual Public Schooling in the United States: A History of America's “Polyglot Boardinghouse” (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 142–61.Google Scholar

54 “Educational Sanity,” Journal of Education 91, no. 3 (Jan. 15, 1920): 71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

55 Tyack and Hansot, Managers of Virtue, 127, 69, 204.Google Scholar

56 Louis S. Wilk, “Board Meeting Minutes of January 25, 1922,” Chicago Board of Education Archives, Unboxed Reference File.Google Scholar

57 Genevieve Forbes, “Mortenson Asks Parents to Curb Student Revels,” Chicago Daily Tribune, January 26, 1922, 15.Google Scholar

58 Louis S. Wilk, “Board Meeting Minutes of January 25, 1922.”Google Scholar

59 Ibid.Google Scholar

60 Forbes, “Mortenson Asks Parents to Curb Student Revels.” The precise number of fliers printed up is debated. Another contemporary source, one perhaps prone to exaggeration, placed the number at fifty-eight thousand. Phillip Yarrow, ed., Fighting the Debauchery of Our Girls and Boys (Chicago, IL: self-published, 1923), 169.Google Scholar

61 “Plan ‘Sings’ as Jazz Antidote among Youth,” Chicago Daily Tribune, June 9, 1924, 5.Google Scholar

62 Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House: with Autobiographical Notes (New York: Signet Classics, 1999), 229.Google Scholar

63 Saul Alinsky and Constance Weinberger, “The Public Dance Hall,” 1928, Ernest W. Burgess Papers, box 126, folder 10, University of Chicago Special Collections.Google Scholar

64 Forbes, “Mortenson Asks Parents to Curb Student Revels.”Google Scholar

65 Wilk, “Board Meeting Minutes of January 25, 1922.”Google Scholar

66 Genevieve Forbes, “98% of School Children Good, Mortenson Says,” Chicago Daily Tribune, January 27 1922, 2.Google Scholar

67 Hawes, Children between the Wars, 26.Google Scholar

68 Schrum, Some Wore Bobby Sox, 25.Google Scholar

69 Coben, Rebellion against Victorianism, 15.Google Scholar

70 Steele, Fashion and Eroticism, 218–41.Google Scholar

71 “Students in Arms against Jazz,” Literary Digest 72, no. 11 (March 18, 1922), 35.Google Scholar

72 “News of the Day through the Eye of the Camera,” Chicago Daily Tribune, January 27, 1922, 26.Google Scholar

73 B. B. Cobb, “Music as an Essential,” Music Supervisors’ Journal 9, no. 4 (March 1923), 20.Google Scholar

74 W. F. Webster, “Music and the Sacred Seven,” Music Superisors’ Journal 13, no. 5 (May 1927), 35, 43, 45.Google Scholar

75 “Parents Back Mortenson in Fight on ‘Petting,’” Chicago Daily Tribune, March 21, 1922, 1. Mortenson could also be quite critical of less-than-attentive parents. Speaking to the Journal of Education, he said, “Mothers and fathers who are unable to handle their children at home shove the moral responsibility upon the teacher's shoulders.” “Who's Who and What They Do,” Journal of Education 95, no. 9 (March 2, 1922), 239.Google Scholar

76 “Parents Back Mortenson in Fight on ‘Petting.’”Google Scholar

77 “Parents Back Mortenson in Jazz Crusade,” Chicago Sunday Tribune, January 29, 1922, 5. For a broader discussion of educators using music as a tool for moral development in the early twentieth century—including Mortenson—see Philip Hash, “Character Development and Social Reconstruction in Music Education at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” Visions of Research in Music Education 11 (2008), 1–30.Google Scholar

78 “For More but Smaller High Schools,” Chicago Daily Tribune, February 2, 1922, 8.Google Scholar

79 The city's William Dever, fired Mortenson over tensions that arose after mistreatments of students were made public at a school for orphaned boys. Mortenson felt strongly the matter could be handled internally and spoke out forcefully about mayoral involvement. Dever responded to such claims by firing Mortenson, though claimed politics played no role in his decision. Mortenson's termination had little, if anything, to do with his efforts against jazz. “Mortenson to Quit Schools,” Chicago Daily Tribune, August 29, 1923, 1; and “Mayor Disputes Politics Charge of Mortenson,” Chicago Daily Tribune, August 30, 1923, 3.Google Scholar

80 “School Official Says He Hears Too Much Jazz,” Chicago Daily Tribune, February 11, 1927, 16.Google Scholar

81 For discussion on jazz's spread and its cultural significance, see Ogren, The Jazz Revolution; William Howland Kenney, Recorded Music in American Life: the Phonograph and Popular Memory, 1890–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 3–22; and Dumenil, The Modern Temper, 145–200.Google Scholar

82 The American Folk Dancing Society was organized in 1905 with the assistance of New York City physical education supervisor Dr. Luther Gulick. Dr. Gulick enthusiastically supported folk dancing, thinking it could teach “large body movement” as well as help students understand individual and group dynamics. Linda J. Tomko, “Fete Accompli: gender, ‘folk-dance,’ and Progressive-era political ideals in New York City,” in Corporealities: Dancing knowledge, culture and power, ed. Susan Leigh Foster (London: Routledge, 1996), 162, 64.Google Scholar

83 As various scholars have pointed out, such immigrant groups themselves were in the process of being whitened and amalgamated in American culture. See David R. Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness: How America's Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs (New York: Basic Books, 2005); and Matthew Frye Jacobsen, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).Google Scholar

84 Elizabeth Burchenal, “Folk Dancing,” Journal of Proceedings of the Eleventh Annual Meeting of the Music Supervisor's National Conference Volume 11 (1918): 38–41.Google Scholar

85 As cited in Giordano, Satan in the Dance Hall, 89.Google Scholar

86 Luther H. Gulick, preface to Folk-Dances and Singing Games, ed. Elizabeth Burchenal (New York: G. Schirmer, 1909).Google Scholar

87 Wagner, Adversaries of Dance, 236–91.Google Scholar

88 “Folk Dancing versus Jazz.”Google Scholar

89 Lara Putnam, Radical Moves: Caribbean Migrants and the Politics of Race in the Jazz Age (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 153.Google Scholar

90 Elizabeth Burchenal, “Reviving the Folk Dance,” National Education Association Journal 15 (November 1926), 241.Google Scholar

91 “Current Topics,” Music Supervisors’ Journal 9, no. 3 (February 1923), 40.Google Scholar

92 Margaret M. Sleezer, “Student Citizenship at the Senn High School,” School Review 32, no. 7 (September 1924), 518.Google Scholar

93 “‘Old Question,’ Says Symphony Director, Branding Jazz Music as Temporary Craze,” Indiana Daily Student, February 6, 1925, 1.Google Scholar

94 “Is Music Related to School Life?” Music Supervisors’ Journal 8, no. 2 (December 1921), 26.Google Scholar

95 Clara Ellen Starr, “Music Appreciation in the Junior High School of Detroit,” Music Supervisors’ Journal 12, no. 2 (December 1925), 52–56.Google Scholar

96 James A. Keene, A History of Music Education in the United States (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1987), 265.Google Scholar

97 Otto Graham, “The Development of Instrumental Music,” The Proceedings of the High School Conference of November 17, 18, and 19, 1922 (Urbana, University of Illinois, 1922), 333.Google Scholar

98 Percy Scholes, Music: The Child and the Masterpiece: A Comprehensive Handbook of Aims and Methods in All That Is Usually Called “Muscial Appreciation” (London: Oxford University Press, H. Milford, 1935), 178; and Michael L. Mark and Charles L. Gary, A History of American Music Education (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Education, 2007), 319–23.Google Scholar

99 “Jazz Music in High School Class in Typewriting,” Ogden Standard, November 18, 1919, 7.Google Scholar

100 Louise Freer, “Modern Tendencies in Physical Education” The Proceedings of the High School Conference of November 17, 18, and 19, 1921 (Urbana, University of Illinois, 1921), 345–48.Google Scholar

101 “Teaches ‘Jazz’ in Newark High School,” New York Tribune, March 21, 1919, 11.Google Scholar

102 Mark Katz, “Making America More Musical through the Phonograph, 1900–1930,” American Music 16, no. 4 (Winter 1998): 467.Google Scholar

103 Famed jazz clarinetist Benny Goodman was known to complain such bands did not play “real [hot] jazz.” Ralph G. Giordano, Social Dancing in America: A History and Reference (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2007), 51–52.Google Scholar

104 Levine, “Jazz and American Culture,” 16.Google Scholar

105 Richard Crawford, America's Musical Life: A History (New York: Norton, 2001), 574–75; and Scott DeVeaux, “The Emergence of the Jazz Concert, 1935–1945,” American Music 7, no. 1 (Spring 1989): 6–29.Google Scholar

106 For discussion of whites’ appropriation of jazz, see Gerald Early, “Three Notes toward a Cultural Definition of the Harlem Renaissance,” Callaloo: A Journal of African American and African Arts and Letters 14, no. 1 (Winter 1991), 136–49; Carney, Cuttin’ Up, 57–77. Google Scholar

107 “Opera Manager Urges Students to Hear ‘Aida’,” Marshall News (Chicago), December 9, 1924.Google Scholar

108 Edward P. Rutledge, “Ascertaining Attitudes in Music,” Music Supervisors’ Journal 15, no. 2 (December 1928), 73–81.Google Scholar