Cowboys and Indies: The Epic History of the Record Industry by Gareth Murphy

own brass bands for festivals, weddings, and funerals. The new rag style evolved as cheap surplus instruments, decommissioned in New Orleans after the 1898 Spanish-American War, entered civilian circulation. Because black marching bands learned pieces by ear and played offbeat rhythms passed down from their African tradition, the upright um-pah of Victorian marching bands took on a woozier, four-legged groove. The term ragtime evolved from this loose, unwritten, ragged style.
    Handy was the first to study the mechanics of this “three-chord basic harmonic structure.” He realized that a warbling effect later referred to as the blue note was the hallmark of “Negro roustabouts, honky-tonk piano players, wanderers and others of the underprivileged but undaunted class … The primitive Southern Negro, as he sang, was sure to bear down on the third and seventh tone of the scale, slurring between major and minor. Whether in the cotton field of the Delta or on the Levee up St. Louis way, it was always the same.”
    In 1912, Handy wrote his first hit for the sheet-music market, a tune called “Memphis Blues”—the first widely distributed 12-bar blues, credited as the inspiration for the invention of the foxtrot in 1914 by a New York dance duo, Vernon and Irene Castle. Handy was a bandleader in the big city in the summer of 1914, when “the tango was in vogue,” and he recalled that one night “I tricked the dancers by arranging a tango introduction, breaking abruptly into a low-down blues. My eyes swept the floor anxiously, then suddenly I saw lightning strike. The dancers seemed electrified. Something within them came suddenly to life. An instinct that wanted so much to live, to fling its arms to spread joy, took them by the heels.”
    As the old expression goes, it takes two to tango. Change wasn’t limited to Southern blacks pouring into the Northern cities. Marking the waning of Victorian ideals of femininity, the period also brought seismic sociological shifts for women. Although the term flapper has become synonymous with the Roaring Twenties, the process of women’s liberation took a giant leap during the war.
    The wave was strongest in Britain’s four-year war effort, where an estimated 2 million women replaced men in factories. When America joined the war in 1917, Teddy Roosevelt endorsed American writer Harriot Stanton Blatch’s public appeal to “mobilize woman-power.” Voicing a stirring tribute, Blatch claimed the British war effort had made women “capable … bright-eyed, happy.” The political world was stirring also. Between 1913 and 1920 women won the right to vote in Norway, Denmark, Australia, Russia, Poland, Germany, Britain, Holland, and America.
    All these migrations and upheavals in black and female culture explain why suddenly in 1917, the year America joined the war, a new dance craze exploded in Chicago and New York—jazz, the first organically grown musical wave to rise from the street and change the face of the record business.
    Before the war, the word jazz , meaning spirit or fizziness , was popular in California, where, according to one dubious theory, it had sexual connotations derived from the nineteenth-century word jism . A more plausible explanation is that the word originated from a Gaelic word, spelled “teas” but pronounced “ tchass ,” meaning heat, excitement, vigor, or the passion of spirit. It was also the name of an Irish superstitious cult surrounding St. Bridget’s tomb, where a fire was kept burning, and as such it had long been invoked by gamblers. The Irish imported the term into American gambling halls, from whence it spread to other domains, first sport, then music. The fact that Gaelic is an ancient language whose artificial spelling in Latin letters differs greatly from its true pronunciation might explain why at least four spellings of the Americanized word—jass, jas, jazz, and jaz—appeared between 1913 and 1918.
    In 1913, an Irish American sports