May 2000
Texan Jazz
Many types of nineteenth-century American music entered into the making of jazz, and a number of these originated in West Africa and from that region were brought by slaves to the New World. Among the African, antebellum traditions of southern blacks was the music of their everyday lives: work songs, play songs, story songs, satirical songs, field and street cries, and spirituals. All of these forms of black music contributed to the development of jazz, especially such practices as flatting the sixth and seventh tones of melodies in major scales, syncopating melodies against an established, repeated beat, establishing a calland-response pattern between a soloist and a group, and adding improvised, spontaneous phrases to a song or instrumental part. Out of these various traditions came two of the predominant elements in early jazz: ragtime, with it's syncopated rhythms, and the blues, with their use of improvisation. Both of these vital elements, combined with European forms of music and instrumentation, account fundamentally for the beginnings of jazz in the American South and Southwest.
Although most histories of jazz have credited New Orleans and the Mississippi Delta region with being the source of the first srirrings of jazz-related musical practice, the Piney Woods region of East Texas has also received recognition as the origin for this twentieth-century music that began among the black minority and eventually spread to the white majority in the United States and abroad. Among the principal features associated with early jazz are its references to life in the cotton fields, along the railroad, and in lumber camps, jails, and prisons. The theme of separation from loved ones and of mistreatment by overseers and employers is allied with the joy of shared labor and the hope of better times. Such social and interpersonal motifs were characteristic of the way of life of blacks in East Texas and carried over into their music making. Crucially important to the experience of black East Texans was the fact that while their existence there was subject to the same hardships and cruelties common to their lives in the South before and after the Civil War, there was nonetheless the possibility of greater freedom and mobility. The theme of movement and its reproduction through sound is clearly present in such early jazz-related forms as the blues and boogie-woogie, and can be heard as well in the driving syncopated rhythms of ragtime.P>
Texan Jazz: Dave Oliphant, published by University of Texas Press.
