[Dixielandjazz] For those interested in "Pre-Jazz" History - bookreview update

[Mike C.]

Sounds very interesting. I'll be sure to buy it on payday. Thanks for the info.

Mike


>  -------Original Message-------
>  From: David Richoux <tubaman at tubatoast.com>
>  Subject: [Dixielandjazz] For those interested in "Pre-Jazz" History - book
	review update
>  Sent: 10 Oct '07 14:16
>  
>  This was posted on another list I am on - (currently reading the  
>  sequel to this book - "Ragged But Right" that I am finding quite  
>  interesting! )
>  
>  (forgot to mention that this was from Sing Out! magazine.)
>  Dave Richoux
>  ================================
>  
>  
>  [IN] Out of Sight: The Rise of African American Popular Music, 1889 -  
>  1895
>  By Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff
>  University of Mississippi Press (Jackson, MS), 2002, ISBN 1578064996,  
>  432
>  pages, hbk., $75.00
>  
>  Out of Sight is the first book to comprehensively examine the burgeoning
>  African American cultural milieu, emerging shortly after Reconstruction,
>  which resulted in nearly every American popular music genre. The years
>  encompassed were some of the worst ever as far as race relations
>  nationwide, but, somehow, the diversely tentacled development of black
>  music during this brief span of years engendered not only the birth of
>  vaudeville and the cross-racial ragtime craze but resulted in the  
>  emergence
>  of an entire African American entertainment industry. Such
>  taken-for-granteds as barbershop quartets, brass and cornet bands,
>  burlesque, mandolin clubs, stand-up comedians and circus sideshow
>  performers all had their origins during this fin de seicle period.
>  Clever authors Abbott and Seroff have assembled, in diary with  
>  commentary
>  style, a cornerstone study based on thousands of contemporaneous, music
>  locused press commentaries. These are preponderantly from such colorful
>  African American community newspapers as Indianapolis’s Freeman, New
>  Orleans’s Weekly Pelican and the long lived Detroit Plaindealer. They  
>  offer
>  not only eye-witness accounts but attach faces and personalities to the
>  superstars of the day: the various concert diva Black Patti’s, sightless
>  pre-ragtime pianists Blind Tom and Blind Boone, Frederick Loudin and his
>  influential Fisk sanctified singers and pioneering circus carnival owner
>  Eph Williams all come to life.
>  This heretofore totally neglected slice of history (presented in
>  year-by-year overview) reveals, often in caricature-driven fashion, the
>  origins of everything from jubilee singing, cakewalkers and coon  
>  shows to
>  pickaninny or kid groups and street singers to string bands and
>  “exotic”dances like the hully gully.
>  The uproar caused by the extravagant 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, with its
>  controversial “Colored Folks Day,” and 1895’s sensational “Black  
>  America”
>  (an outdoor theme-park in Brooklyn, New York comprised of “500 Southern
>  Colored People in a typical plantation village of 150 cabins” along with
>  the saga of the genesis of black Gospel music make for particularly
>  fascinating reading.
>  Likewise, the tale of the permutation of African American minstrel  
>  troupes
>  into more modern, “authentic” aggregations such as the Rabbit Foot
>  Minstrels and “Silas Green from New Orleans” that actually traversed the
>  South into the 1950s. They presented a wide variety of pre-ragtime  
>  sounds
>  that morphed into vaudeville, musical comedy, rural blues, “folk” music
>  and, eventually, the Jazz Age. Accompanying the text are 168 halftone
>  photos, offering visual snapshots that further open the door into the  
>  roots
>  of Twentieth century black music.
>  Incidentally, the book’s title refers not only to the actual 1890  
>  origin of
>  that presumed bebop generated expression (when sheet music publisher  
>  Will
>  Rossiter introduced his latest bid for fame, “It’s ‘Way Out of  
>  Sight”) but,
>  more importantly, to the buried history, with attendant cultural
>  surroundings, that Abbott and Seroff explicate so well.  
>  Indispensable. — GvonT
>  
>  (posted by Sule Greg Wilson - the reviewer is "GvonT" - both of Sing  
>  Out!)
>  
>  
>  
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