Sights and Sounds in the History of Black American Music (Part 2)
Part 2: Louis Armstrong and the Great Migration
Only a few years separate the founding of the first fledgling English colony in America (Jamestown) from the arrival of African slaves in 1619. Since that moment, the historical record demonstrates a longstanding history of cultural exchange and appropriation between Africans in America and Europeans in America.
In last week’s post, we saw some of the deep fascination and deep racism at the heart of White engagement with Black music during the nineteenth century. After the Civil War, there was some promise for a more equitable future for freed slaves, but by the 1890s, Jim Crow laws passed in many Southern states marked a retrenchment of legally instituted racism, which would remain strong into the 1950s.
During World War I, labor shortages in Northern cities enticed many Blacks to leave the South to find better-paying jobs and a relief from some of the worst effects of Jim Crow racism. During the ensuing Great Migration, millions of Blacks moved from Southern states to Northern cities, deeply reshaping the American musical landscape.
1900 Census map of U.S. Black population.
During the Great Migration, people brought their musical practices with them. The blues and jazz have aesthetic roots in various African cultures, but they developed in majority-Black regions in the United States like the Mississippi Delta and New Orleans. Musicians from these regions who migrated to industrial cities in the North established jazz and blues as nationally popular styles of recorded music. Soon these styles began to appeal to audiences across racial boundaries. Today, from country to rock to EDM to indie, there is virtually no genre of American popular music that does not owe something to this cultural moment and the Black people at the center of it.
The biography of trumpeter Louis Armstrong is a microcosm of the Great Migration’s cultural impact. Armstrong was born in 1901 in New Orleans, and learned to play cornet under the mentorship of King Oliver. In 1918, Oliver left for Chicago, establishing a band there, and in 1922, Armstrong joined Oliver’s band in Chicago.
A-side label of Heebie Jeebies/Muskrat Ramble (Okeh, 1926). This was the era before cover art.
B-side label of Heebie Jeebies/Muskrat Ramble (Okeh, 1926)
In Chicago Armstrong became famous in his own right through his recordings. Armstrong’s Hot Five and Hot Seven released records on the OKeh label between 1925 and 1927. OKeh was the first label to establish a record series of music by Black performers marketed to Black audiences. Other labels soon recognized the growing market for recorded music for and by Black performers. These recordings came to be known collectively as “race records,” and their marketing reflected the segregated society of the time.
Armstrong’s appeal extended beyond the race records market, however. Below you see an image of Armstrong and his Hot Five. There is an interesting mixture of unified formal dress and heterogeneous postures in this image. This visual heterogeneity reflected the musical heterogeneity inherent in New Orleans jazz. Each instrument had a different role to play, and rarely did they line up in a uniform way.
In some racist White perspectives, jazz music would have been “noisy”, perhaps even “incomprehensible”—evidence of the supposed inferiority of Black culture and people. But the sense of many different things happening at the same time was also what made the music exciting. Other more musically open White audiences probably heard this music as novel, modern, and maybe even excitingly transgressive. The high-class formal attire that we see in this image helped distance the group from negative White stereotypes of Black culture, maximizing the marketability of Armstrong’s music. Despite segregated market and social structures, jazz and swing (increasingly played by White performers as well) would become the most popular styles of the 1930s.
Armstrong proved to be a master of making jazz marketable to a wide audience, in part by avoiding discussions of racial politics. By his death in 1971, Armstrong had achieved fame and wealth and was one of the most recognizable performers in the United States (of any race). But his onstage demeanor sometimes drew criticism from Black performers and critics. Miles Davis, for instance, wrote in his 1989 autobiography:
“I loved the way Louis played trumpet. Man, but I hated the way he had to grin in order to get over with some tired white folks. Man, I just hated when I saw him doing that, because Louis was hip, had a consciousness about black people, and was a real nice man. But the only image people have of him is that grinning image off TV.”
Did the wide-smiling charm of Louis Armstrong play right into Minstrel stereotypes for the pleasure of White audiences? Whatever our assessment, it’s important to understand that American racism left Armstrong with a choice that no White performer had to make—to appeal to the White majority and have a shot at a lucrative career or risk obscurity and career death.
