Why Jazz Happened is the first comprehensive social history of jazz. It provides an intimate
and compelling look at the many forces that shaped this most American of art forms and the …

West Side Story and The Music Man, the two biggest hits among Broadway musicals of the
195758 season, yield an odd sort of couple wildly mis-matched yet interconnected …

Ranging across genres from the popular to the scholarly, this selection of John Szwed's
published essays abides in the intersection of race and art, jazz and rap: crossovers inside …

Staging Race casts a spotlight on the generation of black artists who came of age between
1890 and World War I in an era of Jim Crow segregation and heightened racial tensions. As …

Most pop songs are short-lived. They appear suddenly and, if they catch on, seem to be
everywhere at once before disappearing again into obscurity. Yet some songs resonate …

Page 1 "HE JAZZ SCENE W. Royal Stokes Page 2 THE JAZZ SCENE Page 3 Page 4 THE
JAZZ SCENE An Informal History from New Orleans to 1990 W. Royal Stokes OXFORD …

This essay situates hipness within a broader range of African American history and moral
debate than is generally presented in accounts of jazz history. The perspectives of Amiri …

Many jazz fans and critics--and even some jazz musicians--contend that white players have
contributed little of substance to the music; that even, with every white musician removed …

As the United States transitioned from a rural nation to an urbanized, industrial giant
between the War of 1812 and the early twentieth century, ordinary people struggled over the …

The purpose here is at once simple and complex–to show that both academic and popular
perceptions of the origins of jazz are wide of the mark, though still sustained by both …