Performing Primitivism: Disarming the

Social Threat of Jazz in Narrative Fiction of

the Early Twenties

PA U L M C C A N N

If Jazz originated in the dance rhythms of the Negro, it was at least

interesting as the self-expression of a primitive race. When jazz was
adopted by the ‘‘highly civilized’’ white race, it tended to degenerate
it towards primitivity. When a savage distorts his features and
paints his face so as to reproduce startling effects, we smile at his
childishness; but when a civilized man imitates him, not as a joke
but in all seriousness, we turn away in disgust. (Damrosch 44)

C
RITICS IN THE POPULAR PRESS PRESENTED MANY REASONS FOR
condemning jazz music but these comments in the August
1924 issue of The Etude by Frank Damrosch, director of the
Institute of Musical Art,1 are perhaps the most illuminating. Not only
is jazz associated with the broader modernist movement of Primitiv-
ism, but also jazz and Primitivism both are defined by racial rather
than formal characteristics. Moreover, the status of the primitive re-
mains unchanged despite his development within an ostensibly civ-
ilized American culture. Many critics viewed the music as a vulgar
artifact of the African American musical tradition and its increasing
popularity among white youth was a cause for some concern.2 As a
result, the criticisms of jazz in the editorials of the popular press were
often vaguely dismissive and based on unstated, racist assumptions
regarding the intellectual capacity of African Americans. The fictional
literature of the period offers a valuable alternative for insights into the
cultural resistance to jazz. Early representations of jazz in narrative

The Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 41, No. 4, 2008

r 2008, Copyright the Authors
Journal compilation r 2008, Blackwell Publishing, Inc.

658
Performing Primitivism 659

fiction demonstrate that the critical contempt for the music was deeply
rooted in the ideological conflicts of the time. The purpose of this
study is to examine two of the earliest instances of jazz fiction, ‘‘The
Jazz Baby’’ by Julian Street and ‘‘Music Hath Charms’’ by Octavus Roy
Cohen, in order to demonstrate that for many critics jazz represented a
threat to an existing social order maintained and legitimized by Eu-
ropean cultural traditions.
Before the twenties, jazz remained virtually unmentioned in nar-
rative fiction. This omission was partly due to the word itself lacking
common usage. However, the popularity of recordings by white jazz
ensembles like the Original Dixieland Jass Band, the Louisianna Five,
and the New Orleans Rhythm Kings propelled many writers to adopt
jazz as a topic of narrative fiction in the early twenties. Like Dr. Dam-
rosch, these writers associated jazz strongly with African primitives and
objected to the degree to which jazz was acquiring credibility and
acceptance within the white community. For many, the increasing
popularity of jazz reflected a wider decay of the natural social and moral
order—an order maintained by European aesthetic values that governed
the previous century. This view is most clearly expressed in ‘‘The Jazz
Baby’’ by Julian Street. Street depicted jazz music as an expression of an
agitated, unruly, and socially/sexually deviant underclass opposed to
Christianity and intent on corrupting the artistic achievements of Eu-
ropean culture.
Published in the July 15, 1922 issue of the Saturday Evening Post,
‘‘The Jazz Baby’’ tells the story of Elsa Merriam’s relationship with her
college student son, Lindsey. The tension between Elsa’s eurocentric
cultural values and her son’s new aesthetic sensibilities is central to the
narrative. Lindsey is returning home for Easter vacation with his friend
Chet Pollard, whose family, Lindsey informs us in an early dialogue
with his mother, is ‘‘in Europe or some place’’ (6). This exchange
between Elsa and her son hints at the larger ethical and ideological
flaws that Elsa sees forming in her son’s character. The abandonment of
Chet by his parents who are both figuratively and literally in Europe
and Lindsey’s flippant and vague reference to the continent suggest
very early in the story that Elsa’s son is losing touch with his European
roots. This problem is further illustrated when Lindsey and Chet are
unwilling to attend the symphony concert Elsa had planned and in-
stead choose to attend a dance with two local girls. In addition, Lindsey
has failed to bring home his cello and instead has brought home a
660 Paul McCann

saxophone that is ‘‘quadruple gold plate over triple silver plate’’ (7)—a
description that is repeated often throughout the story.
The saxophone, of course, is an instrument often associated with jazz
and figures prominently in the recordings of James Europe and others.3
The description is highly symbolic, for the more precious metal is
located on the outside and the instrument is described by its plating.
The material underneath the plating remains unrevealed, suggesting
that both the instrument and the music are insubstantial. Criticism in
the popular press depicted jazz as a musical form that relied heavily on
ornamentation that seemed outwardly appealing but lacked true mu-
sical value. The Etude, in advising its readers how to keep their children
away from what is considered the malicious influence of jazz, is quick
to admit that ‘‘Many of the jazz pieces [young students] have played are
infinitely more difficult than the somber music their teachers have
given them’’ (42). Julian Street, like the editors of The Etude, saw jazz
primarily as a threat to the artistic development of young musicians
who, unchallenged by more traditional music pedagogy, were seduced
by its outward, superficial beauty.
Although Lindsey claims to have purchased the instrument at a
substantial discount, the sum of one hundred and fifty dollars would
have seemed excessive in 1922. His parents do not even recognize the
instrument, and when he first plays the saxophone, ‘‘he [begins] to
shuffle, undulating his body in a negroid manner’’ (73). Although the
saxophone is the product of a Belgian inventor and Lindsey is white,
the instrument, and the music and dance associated with it, are im-
mediately associated with African Americans. Like Damrosch, Street
assumes that a non-European influence on the musical form ultimately
detracts from the music’s artistic value.
The conflict in the story is outlined very early. College has separated
Elsa from her son and the brief vacation he spends at home provides the
opportunity for Elsa to strengthen their relationship. In one weekend,
the mother is forced to struggle with the corrupting influence of jazz in
her son’s life and reestablish the primacy of European culture in her
son’s musical development. The mother repeatedly attempts to per-
suade Lindsey and Chet to attend cultural events she considers more
edifying—a ‘‘Shaw play’’ or ‘‘a little operetta’’ (73). The boys instead
continue to stay out late at dance halls with young women, who are
unchaperoned, and Lindsey borrows and spends large amounts of his
mother’s money. Despite her protests, they even attend one show at the
Performing Primitivism 661

Apollo, the famous nightclub in Harlem that had recently been closed
by the local police. For Elsa, her son’s acceptance and embrace of jazz
music represents a rejection not only of his mother’s musical training,
but her moral training as well: ‘‘She thought of her incessant efforts to
develop in him a fastidiousness not only in music but in other things
which should be his aesthetic and moral safeguards’’ (74).
The story takes place over the Easter holiday and while Elsa never
directly claims that jazz is inconsistent with Christian values, such a
claim is implied. That art and morality should be linked is hardly a
twentieth-century concept. Since Plato, critics of the arts have sug-
gested that art ought to provide some moral instruction, and jazz is
hardly the first artistic form to be condemned because it was corrupting
the young. This charge has been repeated frequently in contemporary
debates regarding Hollywood and the music industry. For Elsa Mer-
riam, however, the fundamental morality of music is locked forever
within the confines of European aesthetic structures. The girls who
attend classical concerts like Elsa Merriam and Dorothy Hallock are
wholesome and morally virtuous. The girls who attend jazz concerts
lack strong parental guidance and are suspected of being sexually pro-
miscuous. In the spirit of Easter, Elsa seeks redemption for her son’s
aesthetic and spiritual sins.
Sinzenheimer is the name of the piano player Lindsey appreciates
most, ‘‘Sinzy’’ for short—a name that is not only sin-full but also
vaguely Jewish. The story ultimately concludes with Lindsey’s figu-
rative resurrection as he abandons the artistic and social influences of
jazz and returns to the musical values his mother instilled in him. For
much of the story, Elsa never adequately voices her reasons for rejecting
jazz as a legitimate musical tradition. The causal relationship between
her son’s behavior and the music he enjoys is assumed, and the cor-
rupting influence of the music is tacitly associated with its non-Eu-
ropean roots. Only after listening to a performance of ‘‘You Gorilla-
Man’’ does she finally make the effort to present her argument.
The title of the piece alone suggests that jazz found its creative focus
by moving down the evolutionary ladder. The depiction of African
Americans, along with several other minorities, as simians who are less
advanced within a Darwinian framework was common in the popular
press and helped to perpetuate the racism prevalent during the period.
This title suggests that much of Elsa’s condemnation is based on an
implied racism that never gets stated directly but is an inherent com-
662 Paul McCann

ponent of her view of the world as a highly structured hierarchy with

Europe at its head and with the wealthy stationed just below God. Her
first clearly stated objection to jazz connects her fears of the music’s
reliance on the cultural contribution of American primitives to larger,
more global concerns regarding the perceived social decay of Western
civilization:

Overwhelmed at first by the mere volume of barbaric sound she

found herself after a time trying to analyze jazz. It seemed to her to
be musical Bolshevism—a revolt against law and order in music.
Apparently, too, the jazz Bolsheviks were looters, pillaging the
treasure houses of music’s aristocracy. One piece was based on a
Chopin waltz, another was a distortion of an aria from Tosca . . . Was
there a connection between the various disturbing elements—free
verse, futuristic painting, radicalism, crime waves, obstreperous
youth, jazz music, jazz dancing, jazz thinking? (76)

Elsa has enough money to send her son to college, go on elaborate

vacations, and attend concerts, plays, and other cultural events, as well as
lend money to her son to engage in activities of which she disapproves.
She is a wealthy traditionalist who fears the potential threat posed by
Communism to her standard of living and way of life. Jazz becomes
associated with that fear because she fails to understand the structural
complexity of the music and accepts the popular condemnation of jazz
provided by many journalists and educators. In addition, the dancing of
the jazz audience is, on several occasions, associated with African Amer-
ican mannerisms—a group that Elsa does not discredit directly but
tacitly assumes their cultural and moral inferiority. The irony of course
is that all the characters in the story who perform jazz or participate in
the activities surrounding jazz are wealthy, white children of the aris-
tocracy. The revolutionary underclass, which Elsa fears with such gravity,
has no fictional representation within the narrative but exists only as a
figment of her paranoid imagination. The final rhetorical question con-
demns jazz along with several other artistic movements often associated
with twentieth-century modernism. Julian Street, at least marginally
aware of the influence of primitivism on modern movements, avoids any
seeming paradox by condemning modernism altogether. A cursory ex-
amination of the text, however, reveals that the connections Elsa presents
regarding jazz and an array of other social ills has no source in the formal
structures of the music, or modernism in general, but in the discourse
Performing Primitivism 663

that surrounds it. The narrative operates as a poorly constructed argu-

ment for the causal relationship between primitivism/modernism/jazz
and the moral corruption of the larger society.
Given contemporary sensitivities regarding issues of race and class,
it is difficult to realize that a character such as Elsa (whose traditionalist
views of art are based on racist principles) can be presented not only in
a favorable light but also as the heroine of the story. By any standard,
her narrative has to be seen as expressly polemical and an attack on the
cultural legitimacy of non-Europeans and non-European artistic forms.
Not surprisingly, her view of jazz is not given an adequate rebuttal
within the narrow ideological confines of the narrative because Street so
clearly wants us to sympathize with his central character.
In the debate over the artistic merit of jazz, Lindsey is the fictional
equivalent of a straw man. He praises Sinzy because, like Nick La-
Rocca, the head of the Original Dixieland Jass Band, he is an uned-
ucated working-class hero who is not schooled in any classical
tradition. He cannot read music and has no grasp of any recognizable
music theory. Lindsey is portrayed as a disobedient youth who is re-
belling against the rigid discipline of his studies in favor of a musical
tradition that he romantically associates with the untapped brilliance
of an uneducated working class. As a white jazz musician, Lindsey is
acting as a kind of Tarzan rejecting civilization to play in the jungles of
a new musical idiom. Paul Berliner in his landmark study Thinking In
Jazz showed the flaws in this popular view of jazz. Jazz musicians of the
twenties may not have had access to higher education, but their mu-
sical training, most often carried out within the jazz community itself,
was quite comprehensive and equally rigorous. Yet Lindsey, the ed-
ucated child of a wealthy New England family, is hopelessly divorced
from this educational model and his views of jazz, as well as that of his
equally wealthy, equally educated friends, are naı̈ve. His experience
with jazz music is based largely on those areas where his social world
and that of the jazz community overlap, namely, at the moment of
performance rather than the moment of training. His praise of jazz is
poorly founded because it does not spring from a true love of the music
but from a rejection of the discipline and training required by his
parents and by his school. His character will become a familiar ste-
reotype in later literary representations of jazz by more sympathetic
authors as the ‘‘square’’ jazz fan who never really understands the music
he embraces and therefore cheapens the value of the art. The more
664 Paul McCann

compelling character is Sinzy, the folk hero Lindsey embraces and the
one character who might adequately represent the jazz tradition. Un-
fortunately, Sinzy never appears as a character, but only as a reference.
His absence as an argumentative counterpoint to Elsa’s condemnation
of jazz assures her ultimate triumph in regaining control over her son’s
musical and moral development.
Elsa exposes her son’s misconceptions of jazz by dressing as a flapper
and performing jazz piano at one of the concerts her son Lindsey
attends. This action is in defiance of her son’s earlier claim that classical
musicians are not able to perform jazz because ‘‘it’s a trick by itself’’
(43). This claim underscores Lindsey’s romantic delusion that jazz is a
raw artistic expression that exists outside the bounds of formal
structure. Jazz enthusiasts will note the clear contradiction—jazz
is both praised and condemned because it represents a sort of
musical chaos, but is ultimately undermined once the protagonist
demonstrates that it can be reproduced. The mother’s ability to
imitate the style and idiomatic gestures of jazz music and jazz
culture demystifies the music for her son. Thankfully there have
been seven decades of scholarship that demonstrate jazz is far
more complex than this reductive narrative allows. Elsa’s ability
to deliver a virtuoso jazz performance with no training or background
in the musical tradition has no more basis in reality than Lindsey’s
naı̈ve assertion that it cannot be reproduced by classical musicians at
all. However, because the story is so dominated by Elsa’s world-view
that the reader has little ground to question the narrative her character
presents us.
Once Elsa is able to perform jazz successfully, she can dismiss it, and
Lindsey, who never had an adequate understanding of the music any-
way, rejects jazz as an artistic tradition. He rejects the flappers he has
been dating as well and leaves the theater with the graceful Dorothy
Hallock, a woman Elsa considers to be a more appropriate and tra-
ditional romantic partner for her son. At the beginning of the story,
Dorothy Hallock is considered unsophisticated because she was igno-
rant of the jazz community despite her classical training. After his
mother’s performance, he decides that Dorothy is no longer unsophis-
ticated, ‘‘Not since Paris’’ (47). Once again, Europe becomes the marker
of cultural sophistication, whereas before it was a marker of Dorothy’s
lack of cultural understanding. The story ends with his decision to sell
his saxophone to a musician in Sinzy’s band.
Performing Primitivism 665

However, it is not merely Elsa’s ability to perform jazz that forces

Lindsey to reject jazz music in addition to the jazz lifestyle, but it is
also her ability to perform as a jazz musician—to cast aside the cos-
tumes of her class, her presumed gender role, and her social function in
order to adopt the persona of flapper. It is this performance with the
outward markers of her own identity that ultimately leads to the
transformation of her son, rather than her ability to imitate the formal
structures of the music. Confronted by the horror of seeing his own
mother as a sexual object, Lindsey is forced to abandon the social type
of flapper as a meaningful and realistic romantic partner. Judith Butler
notes that the taboo of incest is often used to police gender and ‘‘enforce
discrete and internally coherent gender identities within a heterosexual
frame’’ (Butler xxx). While she hesitates to apply the same method-
ologies to issues of racial identity, a careful664
examination of ‘‘The Jazz Baby’’ reveals some startling similarities. Elsa
believes that by presenting herself as a sexual object to her son she is
both acting within the jazz tradition and subverting its parodic nature:

. . . but the members of the Westfield Country Club were much too
astute to be deceived by the names upon the cards or the disguises
worn by the performers. They recognized Ellen Niles dressed in her
brother’s clothes, which were much too large for her . . . Bud Smith
in blackface, feigning to hoe the stage while he gossiped humorously
in Negro dialect . . . Almost at once the Painted Jazzabel strolled on
. . . Her face had a look of unreality, suggesting a carved mask, very
pretty and almost human in expression. ‘‘Gosh!’’ gasped Lindsey.
‘‘It’s mother!’’ (79)

The first two figures before Elsa enters the stage are ‘‘performing’’
both gender and race. A woman performing as a man and a white man
performing as an African American upset and resist the typology that is
used in part to create the hierarchies that provide Elsa with her social
power. Butler notes that ‘‘drag is an example that is meant to establish
that ‘reality’ is not as fixed as we generally assume it to be’’ (xxiv – xxv).
Elsa is aware of the potentially subversive nature of burlesque perfor-
mances, and her own performance presents the taboo of incest to re-
establish the gender and race norms rather than mock them. The
narrative, decidedly not in the burlesque tradition, operates in a similar
manner.
666 Paul McCann

The narrative, which is never allowed fully to escape Elsa’s point of

view, suggests the crowd is not tricked or deceived by the masks the
various performers adopt in the burlesque. This correction has the
effect of undermining the burlesque performance that follows and
demonstrating the futility of any attempt to separate identity and
appearance in a manner that threatens the white/black dichotomy that
is created in the very early stages of the story. Likewise, Elsa’s per-
formance does not succeed in deceiving Lindsey, who instantly recog-
nizes his mother. Her performance has the argumentative effect of a
reductio ad absurdum. She finds the performance of gender and race in a
manner that subverts social expectation regarding such categories to be
equivalent to the abandonment of her role as mother and the adoption
of the role of lover.
To Street’s credit, he prepares the reader well for Elsa’s final per-
formance. The very first line—‘‘Had a stranger seen Elsa Merriam he
might have guessed her ten years younger than her actual age’’—
suggests that the role of mother is a loose fit and Elsa does not look the
part she willingly plays. The early portions of the narrative are filled
with moments where Elsa confuses her son for her husband. She mis-
takes her husband’s footsteps for Lindsey’s and she confesses that ‘‘good
and kind though Hobart was, her real companion was her son’’ (7). Her
confession is revealed only when she explains that her own music
studies were abandoned in order to marry and have children. She ceases
to be a musician to adopt the role of wife and mother—a role that she
considers to be as much a part of personal responsibility as personal
desire. It is her personal history and sacrifice that makes her son’s
behavior all the more vexing. Elsa understands and accepts the social
expectations of her gender in a manner that is not liberating but
confining. This understanding does not make her more sympathetic to
the position adopted by her son but more committed to the value
system that organizes society in a manner that compels her to abandon
any professional study of music because the ideology behind it justifies
her own decision. Lindsey, on the other hand, rejects the expectations of
his class and race, and embraces a culture outside of his own. These
lines underscore the sexual and ideological tensions that will dominate
the rest of the story.
Elsa is forced repeatedly to remind herself that she is Lindsey’s
mother, not his wife, and the tension between her role as mother and
her emotional attachment to her son transcend the typical Freudian
Performing Primitivism 667

implications a critic would expect. The relationship between Elsa and

Lindsey is not merely an illustration of the oedipal impulse, in part
because the feelings seem to come more from the mother than from the
son. Moreover, the juxtaposition of these family roles with the roles
regarding race, gender, and class suggests that they are similar in their
social necessity. The parody of burlesque is intended to undermine the
seriousness with which we embrace gender and racial identities by
distancing the subject from the performance. Elsa has spent much of
her life making a performance out of motherhood in addition to an
array of other gender, class, and racial markers. When these roles are
abandoned, as Lindsey has abandoned his, the taboo of a mother – son
relationship forces Lindsey into a psychological retreat. He can no
longer enjoy the parody and immediately adopts a more traditional
understanding of his own identity. Lindsey’s dramatic reversal at the
end of the story stems both from his mother’s mastery of jazz, which
happens in the absence of any understanding of the jazz tradition, but
also from the demonstration of the importance of all such socially
defined roles—mother, son, wife, white, man, woman. Jazz, along with
other elements of the burlesque in Street’s narrative, mock these roles
in a manner that is meant to suggest that they are divorced from any
natural Darwinian arrangement and are therefore unnecessary and can
be discarded. By both discrediting jazz and demonstrating its inherent
perversion, Elsa affirms the primacy of European culture.
The lack of an adequate fictional representative of the jazz commu-
nity is what makes ‘‘The Jazz Baby’’ a short story that is not only racist,
elitist, and Eurocentric but ultimately hollow and unsatisfying. How-
ever, the story is so polemical and its fears regarding jazz music are so
similar to those voiced in the editorials of the popular press that it
makes for a fascinating cultural artifact. The story helps to explain why
the treatments of jazz by later writers are so agonizingly apologetic,
and more importantly, the story outlines the reservations critics present
regarding jazz music that later writers who attempt to celebrate jazz
will have to address.
‘‘The Jazz Baby’’ demonstrates that as early as 1922, the portrayal of
jazz in narrative fiction was mired in the larger ideological and aes-
thetic conflicts of the period. Elsa associates jazz with other modernist
movements at a time when many Western artists, most notably
Gauguin, Matisse, and Picasso, were embracing primitivism as a valu-
able artistic model and not merely as an object of exotic fascination
668 Paul McCann

(Torgovnick 85). Within Julian Street’s fictive world, the granting of

any cultural authority to primitives upsets the existing social order,
which is founded ultimately on the European’s claim to civilization.
When whites relinquish control of the cultural discourse to other races,
the primitive is neither romanticized nor internalized but presented
merely as a threat. The reader, like Lindsey, is expected to turn away in
disgust as Frank Damrosch suggested. In this debate over modernism,
The Saturday Evening Post catered to the anxieties of a readership re-
sisting change. The efforts by critics to undermine and discredit the
artistic value of jazz are linked to a larger cultural effort to resist the
influences of cultural products that are not of strictly European origin.
More importantly, ‘‘The Jazz Baby’’ demonstrates that the earliest
public understanding of jazz and its ideological connections was to be
shaped not by enthusiasts but by detractors. Not surprisingly, another
regular contributor to The Saturday Evening Post would portray jazz in a
similar manner while using a radically different approach.
If Street’s narrative was intended to invoke disgust, Octavus Roy Co-
hen invoked patronizing ridicule. His work is grounded in racist car-
icatures of the African American community and if he is mentioned at all
by critics, writers, and historians, it is usually with scorn. There is a
passing reference to him in Home to Harlem by Claude McKay when the
protagonist Jake muses: ‘‘You might live your life in many black belts and
arrive at the conclusion that there is no such thing as a typical Negro—no
minstrel coon off the stage, no Octavus Roy Cohen’s porter, no lineal
descendent of Uncle Tom’’ (63 – 64). George Schuyler mentions him in
his 1926 article ‘‘Negro Art-Hokum’’: ‘‘Now the work of [Henry Ossawa
Tanner and Meta Warwick Fuller] is no more ‘expressive of the Negro
soul’—as the gushers put it—than are the scribblings of Octavus Cohen
or Hugh Wiley’’ (664). Both these references demonstrate that at least in
his own time, despite the shallowness of his work, Cohen’s depictions of
African Americans were well-known both in the community at large and
(albeit contemptuously) among African American intellectuals.
Cohen’s 1923 collection, Dark Days and Black Knights, features a
short story entitled ‘‘Music Hath Charms,’’ which tells the story of a
con man who arrives in the African American community of Bir-
mingham to bilk the local population out of enough money to buy a
barbershop in Atlanta. The story is one of the first to narrate jazz from
the perspective of the jazz community and jazz musicians—a dramatic
stylistic shift from Julian Street who tells the story from the white,
Performing Primitivism 669

elitist perspective of Elsa Merriam. However, the result is more satirical

of that community than appreciative. While the story stops short of
glorifying European music, its racist caricature of the African American
community and its anxieties regarding a subversive underclass succeed
in denigrating jazz music in a very similar manner.
The protagonist, Roscoe Griggers, uses the town’s love of jazz music
as a means of exploitation, and the method by which he dupes the local
population reinforces the popular conception of jazz as a music that
relies on outward grace but lacks any true formal integrity. When he
arrives, he announces himself with a business card that reads: ‘‘Professor
Roscoe Griggers/World’s Most Greatest Colored Musician and Or-
kestra Leader/My Mottoe:/‘What I Plays Is Music.’/Also expert at re-
pairing and tuning organs/umbrellers fixed’’ (3). The card moves down
the social ladder from professor to musician to tunesmith to carpenter,
with each title appearing in decreasing font sizes. Here, the purpose of
the last two lines is to expose to the reader that Griggers is a charlatan
duping a gullible African American community, while including his
victims as an object of ridicule. The card is designed both to fool the
recipient, but reveals the truth. Griggers is clearly not a professor in
any traditional understanding of the word but a carpenter, even though
the card, as well as his suitcase of medals, impresses the characters that
receive it. It is ironic that Cohen, a white son of Jewish immigrants,
should seek his creative source material in the language of African
Americans. In doing so, his motivations were similar to Julian Street—
to discredit the aesthetic validity of jazz and with it, the primitive’s
claims to cultural authority.
Despite similar goals, Cohen and Street employ very different
strategies. In ‘‘The Jazz Baby,’’ the primitives are made all the more
menacing by their absence from the text. The adoption of primitive
identity by Lindsey and Chet within the contexts of their white,
Eurocentric upbringing occurs indirectly through jazz. As enthusiasts,
the boys are presented appropriately as misguided youths seeking an
escape from the discipline required by their studies. In defending Eu-
ropean aesthetic and moral value systems, Elsa never confronts the
primitives she fears. She triumphs by presenting her son with an out-
rage that she feels reflects his own behavior. However, ‘‘Music Hath
Charms’’ has no characters that operate outside the African American
community and so any potential threat to European cultural hegemony
is disarmed. The primitive is presented simply as an object of ridicule.
670 Paul McCann

Gene Bluestein argues that a common theme in folk literature is

‘‘ ‘The Arkansas Traveler’ strategy of humor’’ where the American faces
his critics by ‘‘pretending to be even dumber than he is expected to be,
all the while undercutting his opponent by a play of witty double-
entendre’’ (602). Often critics are willing to excuse seemingly racist
caricatures of African Americans by recourse to this motif. One might
suggest that Cohen’s work operates in this fashion, but such a claim
would be difficult to support because Cohen himself is not a member of
the community he describes. Roscoe and his principal antagonist,
Aleck Champagne, do not operate in this manner either, but boast of
their awards and talents whenever faced with potential criticism. Be-
cause the white community is not represented, these characters employ
racial stereotypes to outwit one another. Cohen is not presenting a
stratagem but reinforcing preexisting prejudices within the white
community and what follows is an unsettling criticism of jazz music
grounded in vicious stereotypes regarding the intellectual capacity of
African Americans.
The central struggle in the story is an economic one. Griggers, who
cannot play a musical instrument, has to raise $500.00 without playing
a note. He begins to hire musicians away from a rival orchestra led by
Aleck Champagne. The musicians of Aleck Champagne’s band are ea-
ger to leave because Champagne has paid them poorly in the past and
continues to cut their wages as there is no competing orchestra in
town. Griggers sets up an alternative economic model he refers to as a
‘‘cooperative’’ wherein he keeps 25% of the proceeds and the remaining
funds are split between the band members. However, because there is
now more than one band in town, the two competitors are forced to
price competitively and the overall revenue dwindles. Despite Grig-
gers’s effort to adopt an economic model that might succeed in break-
ing Champagne’s jazz monopoly, he only succeeds in decreasing the
wealth of the musicians in the community.

His logic was unanswerable. He made it clear that mere salaries were
unjust to the recipients thereof. ‘‘We make a hun’ed dollars one
night,’’ he said, ‘‘an I jes’ on’y gits twen’y-five dollars of the same.
You all splits the rest betwixt you. Does that suit?’’ (14)

While there is no direct mention of the Bolsheviks or communist

insurgency, the language here is couched in socialist terms. Salaries
Performing Primitivism 671

represent a fraction of an employee’s value to the company and a goal of

many economic reformers, most notably socialist candidate Eugene V.
Debs, was to abandon a wage system in favor of one committed to
shared ownership. However, because Roscoe has also succeeded in
breaking Champagne’s monopoly by stealing his players, he can no
longer fix prices and acquire a steady revenue stream. As a result, Sam
Gin and Willy Trout have only traded in one form of exploitation for
another. In a decade dominated by large corporate monopolies and a
heated struggle between a policy of laissez-faire economics and the
potential liberation offered by socialist reform, ‘‘Music Hath Charms’’
supported the existing models of labor – management relations. While
wages might be inherently exploitative, they at least represent a guar-
anteed source of income for employees. Monopolies, at least within the
confines of Cohen’s narrative, succeed in generating wealth and pro-
viding a source of employment for the working classes.
Griggers himself is a false leader who seeks to become an owner and
only uses the rhetoric of socialism to exploit his workers to that end. At
the same time, his goal is ultimately to move ‘‘down’’ the social ladder
from professor to barber: ‘‘as the possibility of acquiring the Atlanta
barber shop became more remote, the more desirable grew the con-
templated return to barberism’’ (22). The play on words ‘‘barberism’’
and ‘‘barbarism’’ here is hardly accidental and emphasized by the sim-
ple fact that Griggers was never a barber in the first place. The slur is
that Griggers was a ‘‘barbar’’ and the narrative derives its creative force
by exposing the pretensions of Griggers and other characters in the
story. Eventually the jazz performance gradually descends from art to
violence as Griggers beats Champagne with his cornet. If the audience
roots for Griggers, it is only because he of all the characters seeks to
both abandon his claim to civilization and seek modest material success
as a shop owner.
In a scene that shares many similarities with the climax of ‘‘The Jazz
Baby,’’ jazz is revealed as music devoid of artistic value by the ability of
someone outside the jazz community to successfully pass as a jazz
virtuoso in front of an appreciative audience. Griggers organizes a
clever ruse wherein he will fake his performance on stage while Willy
Trout plays cornet offstage. As in ‘‘The Jazz Baby,’’ the ability to
perform the role rather than the music undermines the music’s claim to
formal integrity and value by emphasizing its reliance on outward
appearance. His scheme is disrupted by Champagne, who locks Willy
672 Paul McCann

in a woodshed where he is ‘‘trapped as ever was a wild animal’’ (36).

Even this early in the history of jazz, ‘‘woodshedding’’ was a slang term
for practicing. Given the issues regarding education that are empha-
sized by the title of ‘‘professor’’ adopted by both Roscoe Griggers and
Aleck Champagne, the woodshed becomes an example of the critic’s
contempt for jazz music. None of the performers have access to the
formal training and traditional pedagogy offered by European civili-
zation and so the music remains forever unrefined. For Cohen, Willy’s
demise symbolizes the condition of jazz music as a whole—an aesthetic
dead-end handicapped by its own customs and traditions. Cohen never
accepts a legitimate cultural tradition within the African American
community, and so Willy, like Griggers, is a wild animal once his
claims to civilization are stripped away.
Sam Gin learns of Willy’s dilemma and is forced to play saxophone
instead of cornet underneath the stage. When the solo is over, Griggers
exclaims: ‘‘Any fool corneter can make cornet music come out of a
cornet . . . on’y the greatest corneter in the world—which him is I—
can git saxophone music out of one’’ (41). The audience reacts with
applause and enthusiasm for Griggers’s explanation. When Champagne
rushes on stage in anger to expose Griggers, he is beaten unconscious
with the cornet—an act that both ends Griggers’s jazz career and gains
him even more acclaim from his audience.
The theme here is clear. The artistic merit of jazz music is based on
the ignorance of an audience that is unable to even distinguish cornet
music from saxophone music, much less good music from bad, and that
reacts with equal enthusiasm to fake performance and real violence—
the aesthetic equivalent of a professional wrestling match. The false
titles and exaggerated abilities of the lead character, coupled with his
false medals, parallel the common criticism of jazz music as mere
ornamentation that lacks any inward beauty. As in Julian Street’s ‘‘The
Jazz Baby,’’ jazz music is here depicted as an elaborate con game based
primarily on the musician’s ability to manipulate and play off the
ignorance of the community. In ‘‘The Jazz Baby’’ the con game is
exposed by the performance of Elsa Merriam, whereas here, the like-
able, though nevertheless deceitful, protagonist is allowed to succeed.
The delivery and style employed by Cohen differs dramatically from
Julian Street’s, but the depiction of jazz in both stories varies little. Jazz
is depicted as a vulgar, primitive, artistically valueless music performed
by a vulgar and primitive people aping the conventions of white high
Performing Primitivism 673

society. The one tune mentioned by name is ‘‘The William Tell Over-
ture,’’ and while Cohen does not criticize the use of this piece directly,
he does not give the audience or the musicians credit for understanding
the difference between the classical original and the jazz rendition. The
jazz performers are blissfully unaware of the musical tradition they
borrow from, and the interpretation is not based on any overarching
tradition or aesthetic model, but rather on the lack of education of the
performers. Roscoe’s performance at the end does not discredit jazz in
the manner that Elsa’s performance convinces her son to abandon the
jazz community because there is no character within the story who is
being converted. However, the performance does discredit jazz for the
reader because once again someone with no musical knowledge of the
tradition is able to deceive an appreciative audience.
Cohen’s appropriation of an ostensibly authentic African American
dialect as well as his portrait of one southern black community would
outrage a contemporary audience as it did Claude McKay and George
Schuyler. His characters are devoid of any critical or evaluative skills and
the jazz audience is easily manipulated. For the most part, Cohen has
stripped the characters of any ideological or political enterprise in an
effort to make them more sympathetic to his white audience. His black
characters isolated in a segregated south act out of ignorance rather than
subversion. Griggers’s pseudo-socialist approach to management is
mitigated by his desire to join the ranks of the bourgeoisie, as well as
his desire not to migrate north but to move to another southern town.
The work’s implicit critique of both socialism and the deceptive strat-
egy employed by the master marketer Griggers is a thematic tension in
the story that is never resolved, leaving a modern critic with many of
the same concerns raised by ‘‘The Jazz Baby.’’ How can Griggers be a
protagonist with whom anyone would be expected to sympathize?
Elsa Merriam is a cultural elitist whose concerns mirror that of the
larger racist, classist, and cultural elitist community. In a similar
manner, Griggers is a character who fulfills the expectations of race for
Cohen’s racist readership. The name itself is a truncation of the words
‘‘gregarious niggers.’’ When Griggers’s behavior is stripped of any
revolutionary political ideology and he is exposed at the end to be
merely a capitalist operating in a decidedly American fashion, he jus-
tifies the status quo in regards to both race and economy. He has social
mobility within the narrow confines afforded him that is based in large
part on his ability to change job titles and occupations regardless of his
674 Paul McCann

talents or experience. His ultimate success comes when he abandons his

claim to civilization and, like ‘‘The Jazz Baby,’’ ‘‘Music Hath Charms’’
ends with a central character’s abandonment of jazz music. Although
these two early portrayals of jazz were openly racist, they reveal much
about the development of early jazz discourse.
That jazz was a uniquely American music and not an African import
seemed not to bother its early critics, and the primitive status of the
music was linked to racial identity rather than formal structures or
national origin. Writers used jazz to reinforce common racial stereo-
types and, as a result, the portrayal of the primitive in these early
narratives was only indirectly linked to issues of colonialism. After all,
the United States had no significant imperial commitments in Africa.
Denying the cultural contribution of jazz music, and with it the Af-
rican American’s claim to civilization, was a way of justifying the
existing social and economic order at home. Elsa Merriam sees jazz as
musical Bolshevism and within her fictive world, art, morality, and
wealth are interconnected within Western value systems. For Elsa,
whites rule because they have cultural authority and with it, a better
sense of morality. Likewise, Roscoe Griggers abandons his claim to
civilization and uses the community’s enthusiasm for jazz music as a
lever to acquire social agency. In both cases, the primitive is neither
romanticized nor internalized. Instead, the primitive is viewed as a
threat whose role as a subject race without claim to culture had to be
policed and maintained.
In gauging the popular understanding of jazz as it moved by degrees
from low art to high art in the hierarchy of American cultural artifacts,
these early narratives reveal much regarding the early jazz discourse.
Jazz was not so much an artifact of popular culture so much as it was an
artifact of populist culture. The praise or condemnation directed at this
new musical tradition was linked to a larger debate regarding national
identity. Many critics seemed to fear the emerging cultural authority of
African Americans and felt the existing social and economic order
resulted naturally from the superiority of Anglo American aesthetic
conventions. As the culture of the United States grew increasingly
more diverse and more distant from European traditions, jazz became a
forum in which notions of race, class, and gender were questioned and
either reinforced or disrupted. As such, the development of American
cultural identity in the twentieth century owed much to the popular
discourse on jazz music.
Performing Primitivism 675

NOTES
1. Later known as the Julliard School of Music.
2. Damrosch is only one of many examples. Edwin Stringham saw jazz as an educational problem
that allowed musicians an escape from the rigorous demands of more serious music (Porter 2).
Likewise, the editorial staff of The Etude considered the ‘‘chief evil of jazz in musical education’’
to be the effect it had on young musicians who were encouraged to play ‘‘carelessly’’ and
‘‘sloppily’’ (42).
3. The importance of the saxophone in the early history of jazz is mentioned by many critics,
most notably Theodor Adorno in his 1936 essay ‘‘On Jazz’’ (44).

Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor. ‘‘On Jazz.’’ Discourse 12.1 (1989): 44 – 69.

Berliner, Paul. Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation. Chi-
cago: U of Chicago P, 1993.
Bluestein, Gene. ‘‘The Blues as a Literary Type.’’ Massachusetts Review
8.4 (1967): 593 – 617.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.
New York: Routledge, 1990.
Cohen, Octavus. ‘‘Music Hath Charms.’’ Dark Days and Black Knights.
New York: Dodd, Mead, 1923. 1 – 44.
Damrosch, Frank. ‘‘Where is Jazz Leading America?’’ The Etude (1924):
5171. Keeping Time: Readings in Jazz History. Ed. Robert Walser.
Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. 44.
McKay, Claude. Home to Harlem. New York: Harper, 1928.
Schuyler, George. ‘‘The Negro-Art Hokum.’’ Nation 61 (1926): 663 –
65.
Street, Julian. ‘‘The Jazz Baby.’’ Saturday Evening Post 15 July 1922:
61.
Torgovnick, Marianne. Gone Primitive. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989.

Paul McCann was born in College Station, TX, where he recently received
his PhD from Texas A&M University. He is currently an Assistant Professor in
English at Del Mar College. As a graduate student, he was awarded the
Gordone Award for both poetry and drama. He has written several articles on
jazz and American literature and his poetry and scholarship have appeared in
Bayou, The Explicator, Studies in American Culture, and the Berkeley Poetry
Review. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press is publishing his book, Race,
Music, and National Identity. He now lives and writes in Corpus Christi, TX.