A system for labeling left us out of the limelight
By Kevin Belford
For the St. Louis American
Interest in the birth of American music came decades after it emerged and had evolved into a number of popular styles. The roots of jazz and blues grew out of older styles of music in a number of places across the country, but since the first recordings that became favorites of latter generations were made by artists in New Orleans and the Mississippi Delta, those areas were focused upon.
Definitions, musical preferences and the semi-scientific method used to research the music were factors that contributed to the myth of jazz and blues musical history. Scholars forensically studied the music that had originally
been classified as blues or jazz and analyzed specific styles and particular artists. Sometimes they used the recording companies’ marketing categories and sometimes they defined music by its geographical origin, the musician’s ancestry or the “musical language” they identified within the notated structure of the mostly ad-libbed and often unwritten music.
A generation or so after the music was first recorded, they began by looking in New Orleans and traveled north to Chicago where the music was thriving at the time, resulting in an model of musical influence moving from South to North like killer bees.
With a concept of an isolated and unprecedented birth of the music in the South, cross-influencing could only occur when a Southern musician physically left the South and played his music elsewhere. Their theory did not acknowledge that the music was already in St. Louis and many areas of the country and that cross-influences had occurred for many years before the Great Migration.
With the popularity of the phonograph, recorded sounds were spread and heard nationally. But nevertheless cultural influence was charted like an epidemic and music was segregated into classifications as precise as plant species. The first books were honest attempts at research and since those first noble efforts, most all research and thinking has only piled onto that pile.
“St. Louis” was never a marketing category to the record companies like New Orleans jazz or Chicago blues. It could have helped if the city had promoted itself, and there were a couple of good chances to do so. While the label “Dixieland” got hung on the South and Chicago made the most of the song “Sweet Home Chicago,” St. Louis was honored by many songs, like the pre-ragtime “St Louis Tickle” and the world-wide hit “The St. Louis Blues.” Yet she never capitalized on it the way the other cities exploited their tributes.
Also unfortunately, no author identified a regional sound from St. Louis, which was for some reason, a significant factor to the researchers. But in the big picture of American music, distinctive for its mixing and blending, musical similarity within a region isn’t a sign of progressiveness. St. Louis is a pool of creativity and more significant to the evolution than the places where music was stagnant and akin.
Researchers in the South found unheralded teachers of band music, the tradition of marching funeral bands and playing on the steamboats by musicians to be significant to the development of jazz and blues. The common jazz story would have one believe that only Louis Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton grew up within this unique combination of influences, but without any help from New Orleans or the plantations of the South, St. Louisans were formulating the new music on their own.
Legendary figures in the historical fog of St. Louis include W.M. Blue’s Concert Band that played lodge society parties and steamboat excursions. In 1924 the Mound City Blues Blowers blasted onto the national scene with a million seller called “Arkansaw Blues.”
That same year, a trumpet player launched his career and an elegant style of jazz with his recording “Market Street Blues.” But Charlie Creath is rarely mentioned in music history books, and his city is never a description of his style.
A year before that first jazz band recorded in New Orleans, a St. Louis group recorded “Sunset Medley,” an unlikely piece of pre-jazz but solid evidence of what was happening in the city. Uninfluenced by the Southern sounds, the inspiration came from the dives in St. Louis where local piano professors played. Blues recordings as well sprang from St. Louis’ environs. The first guitar blues was recorded here in the early 1920s, beginning a legacy of music that drove the next eight or so decades of popular music.
Belford’s history of St. Louis music will conclude in next week’s Black History Month section.