American Cultural History: a Very Short Introduction by Avila Eric;

Author:Avila, Eric;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2018-05-21T16:00:00+00:00

Black Americans found other means of cultural expression during the period between the world wars. The Harlem Renaissance, that explosion of arts and letters from upper Manhattan between World War I and the mid-1930s, brought black artists—writers, painters, scholars, photographers, poets, and musicians—into a vortex of cultural creativity, fueled by a thriving urban economy that made New York the capital of the 1920s. Zora Neal Hurston, Jean Toomer, Arna Bontemps, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and others made up a pantheon of gifted artists and writers who explored the black experience in America. Many of these men and women had come from the South, fleeing a repressive racial caste system and seeking a freer environment in which to express talent, ideas, opinions, and experiences. Much of their work appeared in The Crisis, a magazine that gained the height of its renown during the 1920s under the editorship of W. E. B. DuBois, the historian, philosopher, and activist of race in America. This periodical and its featured writers drew white praise and recognition, but it also cemented a foundation for black racial activism, an expression of the “New Negro” from outside of the South, demanding civil and political rights through cutting-edge literary work and setting the stage for a racial revolution.

Black musical traditions, in fact, define a lasting interpretation of America in the 1920s. Novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald dubbed the decade the “Jazz Age,” describing it as a cultural revolution, a period marked by a rebellion against sexual and moral conventions, when men and women flaunted the laws, indulging in drink, celebrity, flapping, slumming, and bootlegging in pushing the boundaries of youthful innocence. For many white Americans of the middle and upper classes, these were the characteristics of the time, though not everyone could indulge in the moment. Farmers and low-skilled workers saw a net decline in their wages, while consumers racked up credit debt and occupied overvalued real estate.

Many black Americans remained trapped in structures of poverty and segregation, but their cultural voice resonated across the decade—through the musical talents of Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Jelly Roll Morton, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, and Count Basie, the pioneers of jazz who drew upon the musical traditions of minstrelsy, ragtime, and the sounds of the brass bands of New Orleans. With no written score, jazz musicians improvised, embellishing the melody as they went along. This new sound flourished in the illicit environment of urban speakeasies, often ruled by Italian American gangsters who put black musicians on their payrolls and paid them a decent wage. “Hot jazz” won broad appeal among urban audiences, white and black, American and non-American alike. While the executives of record companies were reluctant to sign on, convinced that white listeners preferred white musicians, jazz found its place in history as a uniquely American invention, a hybrid of traditional African and urban American influences.

Jazz enthralled European audiences as well, especially in cosmopolitan capitals like Paris and Berlin. At the same time, Europeans reciprocated as part of a widening pattern of transatlantic cultural exchange.

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