[Dixielandjazz] Mixed Race Recording/Jamming

[Mike]

Hi Randy,

   I think you have to consider the attitudes towards race and 
"interracial mingling" at the times of the 1920s & 1930s. Blacks 
were still considered to be below second class citizens. 
Acceptable contact with blacks at that time was limited mostly 
to employer/employee(which also included Father/Nanny) 
relations. Anything more intimate than that had severe physical, 
sometimes legal and social consequences.

   Musicians on the other hand, from what I have read and heard, 
did associate with one another. The limits were stretched a 
little beyond what would have been acceptable in normal society, 
but not very much.

Mike






Randy Fendrick wrote:

> 
> It is hard for me to believe that whites and blacks, in the US were 
> able to develop the music that we call jazz without contact.  Bix was 
> raised in Davenport, Iowa, which just happened to be the place on the 
> Mississippi where the river boats were sheltered from the ice pressures 
> during the winter months, I think a person would be hard pressed to say 
> that there was not contact between he and the river boat musicians.