Disease Is Unrhythmical

'Disease Is Unrhythmical': Jazz, Health, and Disability in 1920s America
Author(s): Russell L. Johnson

Source: Health and History , Vol. 13, No. 2, Special Feature: Health and Disability (2011), pp.
13-42
Published by: Australian and New Zealand Society of the History of Medicine, Inc
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5401/healthhist.13.2.0013
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‘Disease Is Unrhythmical’:
Jazz, Health, and Disability in 1920s
America
Russell L. Johnson
The 1920s in the United States are commonly

remembered as the Jazz Age. Although historians
have focused on the African American origins of the
music, another theme was also prominent in the public
discourse surrounding jazz: disability. Critics saw jazz
and its associated dances as defective, causing both
mental and physical impairments in their devotees.
In other words, jazz music and dance were disabled
and disabling. Proponents of jazz responded in kind,
asserting that jazz did not cause impairments, it cured
them; similarly, jazz was not defective music or dance,
but a revitalisation of the art forms. On the one hand,
these reactions might have been expected, given the
long history of belief in a relationship between music
and health. However, the importance of health issues
such as eugenics and rehabilitation in the 1920s also
clearly influenced the responses of opinion leaders,
politicians, academics, music professionals, and others
to jazz music and dance.
We are organized vibrations. The object of all cures is to change

discordant vibrations to harmonious ones. Disease is unrhythmical,
health is rhythmical, for rhythm is a fundamental law of the
universe.
—Eva Augusta Vescelius (d. 1917),

founder and president of the National
Therapeutic Society1
In early 1926, the Salvation Army in Cincinnati, Ohio sued to prevent

the construction of a movie theatre adjacent to its maternity hospital
for unwed mothers in the city. In its legal brief, the Salvation Army
indicated that it did not object to the movies that would be shown at the
Health & History, 2011. 13/2 13

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14 RUSSELL L. JOHNSON
theatre, but rather to the jazz music that would accompany the films.
Though referred to as ‘silent’ films, early movies were anything but
silent. Music was played to set the mood for film scenes, to punctuate
the action, or simply to fill the silence. As jazz’s popularity grew
after World War I, a lot of this musical accompaniment was jazz or
jazzed versions of classical compositions.2 As a result, the Cincinnati
Salvation Army struggled to distinguish the proposed movie theatre
from a ‘jazz palace’.3 ‘We recognize’, its court brief argued, ‘that we
are living in a jazz age, but we object to imperiling the happiness
of future generations by inculcating in them before they are even
born, the madness that now rules the country’. The court agreed and
stopped the theatre construction.4
This essay focuses on health and disability related themes that
emerge from the critical commentary surrounding jazz in the 1920s.
On the one hand, as the Salvation Army’s lawsuit suggests, many
people saw jazz music and dance threatening the health of individuals
and the nation. From this perspective, jazz was disabling. The idea
that some music could be disabling had a long history prior to the
1920s. Around the turn of the nineteenth century, under the influence
of modernisation and the professionalisation of medicine, a secondary
‘discourse of pathological music’ emerged to complicate the belief in
music’s positive contributions to individual health that dated back
to the ancient world.5 Music, argues historian James Kennaway,
increasingly came to be understood as ‘a form of direct nervous
stimulation’, and as such physicians and others concluded it could
have either positive or negative health effects.6 The idea that some
music was pathological or disabling would remain prominent in the
fields of medicine, psychiatry, and music for the next 150 years and
clearly influenced discussions of jazz in the 1920s. Critics used words
like ‘pathological’, ‘infection’, ‘virus’, ‘epidemic’, and ‘cancer’ to
describe jazz, and the Cincinnati Salvation Army’s lawsuit indicates
the fear in many quarters that jazz madness was undermining the
nation’s physical, mental, and moral health in the 1920s.7
On the other hand, in addition to its disabling effects critics saw
jazz music and dance as themselves disabled. If the idea of some music
as pathological had a long history, a comparable history defined some
music as disabled. Classical music, according to historian Joseph N.
Straus, has a tradition of distorting or ‘deforming’ musical works.8
For example, a rhythmic pattern used in some classical compositions,
involving accenting the ‘second quaver in a bar of 2/4 time’, is known
as alla zoppa, or ‘in a limping manner’.9 Similarly, certain effects are

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‘Disease is Unrhythmical’: Jazz, Health, and Disability in 1920s America 15
said to introduce paralysis into a piece of music, and tonal effects
suggesting deafness and madness can be found in the compositions
of Beethoven and Schubert.10 For critics in the 1920s, however, jazz
went far beyond anything seen in classical music. Jazz violated basic
norms of music and dance and, as music specifically, was little more
than ‘noise’.11 Thus, if humans really were ‘organized vibrations’ and
rhythm was ‘a fundamental law of the universe’, as Eva Vescelius
asserted during World War I, then abnormal, unrhythmical, diseased,
and disabled jazz could contribute nothing to the betterment of the
human race and had no place in modern civilisation.12
Jazz historians mostly have ignored the health and disability
arguments surrounding jazz in the early years of its history, usually
stressing issues of race instead. As disability historian Douglas C.
Baynton notes, however, ‘The attribution of disease or disability to
racial minorities has a long history’.13 Accordingly, although it does
not deny that race is an essential theme in jazz history, this essay
argues that understanding health and disability arguments related to
jazz in the 1920s deepens our understanding of the music, the period,
and the place of health and disability in history. The attribution
of disease and disability to jazz by critics in the 1920s required
defenders and fans of the music to respond with similar language.
Jazz proponents in the decade dismissed the notion of jazz as disabled
and argued that rather than being disabling, jazz music and dance
could improve people’s physical and mental health.14 The arguments
on both sides fed into larger health and disability related themes in
the decade: attempts to understand shell shock cases from World War
I, the prominence of eugenics as a popular scientific fad, the belief
in some quarters that immigration was a public health issue, and the
emergence of rehabilitation as the preferred approach for treating
people with disabilities.
The jazz of the Jazz Age

The decade of the 1920s in the United States is often remembered as the
Jazz Age. The music that gave the era its name derived from African
American musical traditions, particularly in the city of New Orleans
prior to World War I. The war then acted as a catalyst, encouraging
the spread of jazz to other parts of the country. It began with the
migration of African Americans to northern cities during and after
the war—Chicago emerged as the second great jazz centre, followed
by New York. A proliferation of jazz bands, the development of radio,

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and the widespread availability of phonographs and records allowed

people throughout the nation to experience jazz readily, and jazz
soon achieved a broad, national audience of white and black, young
and old, urban and rural.15 In 1923, for instance, mezzo-soprano Eva
Gauthier justified mixing several jazz songs into a classical concert at
New York’s Aeolian Hall by saying ‘90 per cent of the people of this
country—and foreign countries, too—are crazy about jazz’.16 More
concrete data came from a 1926 survey of lighthouse keepers, which
found that nearly four-fifths wanted to hear only jazz on the radio,17
and from a 1929 study of twenty ‘typical’ radio stations, which
indicated that jazz occupied over two-thirds of radio air time.18 As
jazz increasingly seemed to assault the senses from every direction,
however, more and more voices were raised against it. Even some
northern, urban blacks—among them intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois,
novelist and poet James Weldon Johnson, and David Peyton,
the music critic for Chicago’s African American newspaper The
Defender—joined those criticising jazz.19
Both fans and critics generally agreed upon one thing: 1920s jazz
was, in composer Edwin J. Stringham’s words, ‘both indicative and
resultant of the present day social conditions in these United States’.20
On the one hand, conductor Leopold Stokowski could praise jazz as
‘an expression of … the breathless, energetic, superactive times in
which we are living’.21 Others condemned jazz as ‘an outgrowth of
abnormality’ in a period of war and social upheaval, as ‘A.H.’ of
New York City wrote to the publication Musical America.22 From
either perspective, though, jazz moved ‘beyond the dance and the
music and is now an attitude toward life in general’, as the Rev. A.W.
Beaven of Rochester, New York insisted in 1922.23 On the lighter
side, people joked about an American culture of ‘jazz politics and
jazz architecture’,24 as well as ‘jazz poetry … jazz theology … jazz
education … [and] jazz drama’.25 Other sources referred to ‘jazz
… furniture designs’ for homes, 26 ‘“jazzing up” grammar’ in the
schools, 27 ‘jazz management and jazz productivity’ in industry,28 and
a ‘jazz snowstorm’ that struck in 1924.29 More seriously, some people
indicted jazz for all the evils of modern life: rising rates of divorce30
and of suicide,31 for instance, and the growing crime rate.32 Even an
apparent decline in the quality of college football was blamed on
jazz.33 Finally, a number of people, it must be added, found ‘Nothing
… so absurd’ as blaming jazz for everything bad in the 1920s.34
Musically speaking, two features distinguished jazz music in

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the 1920s. First, it was syncopated: jazz musicians removed the
musical accent from its traditional place on the first note of the
bar and allowed it to ‘occur anywhere in the bar’.35 Second, it was
polyrhythmic: jazz ‘superimposed [an] accompanying rhythm’36—a
one, two, three—‘on top of the underlying tempo’ of one, two, three,
four.37 The differences between jazz and its ancestors, especially
ragtime and the blues, came in its greater complexity, deepened
harmonies, and emphasis on wind and percussion instruments.38 Jazz
scholarship typically further distinguishes two types of jazz in the
1920s, ‘sweet’ and ‘hot’. Played mostly by white musicians for mainly
white audiences, sweet or ‘symphonic’ jazz was tightly controlled,
technically correct, and commercially profitable. Hot jazz, in contrast,
was the jazz closest to the music’s roots in the African American
community. Played primarily by African American musicians, hot
jazz stressed improvisation, spontaneity, and ‘freak [tonal] effects’
over strict adherence to a written score and, because of these factors,
often struggled commercially.39
The sweet versus hot distinction matters, as will be suggested
below, but for the most part this essay uses the term jazz as
contemporaries used it. Americans in the Jazz Age applied the term
to a broad swathe of popular music, everything from the hottest jazz
produced by Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and others, to the
sweetest symphonic jazz from orchestras led by Paul Whiteman—
dubbed the ‘King of Jazz’—and others.40 Continuing contributions
in the ragtime and blues genres also fell under the all-encompassing
umbrella of jazz in the 1920s.41
Jazz: Disabled as music and disabling in its effects

The health and disability argument against jazz started from the
critics’ reaction to the fact that due to syncopation and polyrhythms,
the music failed to follow ‘“normal” rhythms’.42 It was unrhythmical,
discordant, and ultimately ‘defective’ music.43 Writing in the Ladies’
Home Journal¸ for example, Anne Shaw Faulkner of the General
Federation of Women’s Clubs described jazz as putting ‘the three
simple elements of music—rhythm, melody and harmony … out
of tune with each other’.44 The result, according to jazz critics, was
‘not real music’,45 but rather a series of ‘epileptic fragments’.46 Or, as
noted soprano Amelita Galli-Curci put it, ‘Music is music and jazz
is jazz, and there isn’t the remotest resemblance between them’.47

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Other voices within the music industry echoed Galli-Curci’s view.

Walter Damrosch, conductor of the New York Symphony Orchestra,
asserted that jazz ‘stifles the true musical instinct’.48 For Daniel
Gregory Mason, professor of music at Columbia University, jazz was
‘the doggerel of music’.49 David Peyton, The Defender newspaper’s
music critic and himself a skilled musician, added that jazz fans ‘have
no consciousness of what real music is’.50 In short, for critics like
these jazz was ‘simply goofy’51 and bore ‘the same relationship to
music as does the limerick to poetry’52 or ‘whitewashing … to art’.53
Critics similarly assailed jazz dances for having ‘no relation to
real dancing’.54 In other words, the dances, like the music that inspired
them, were defective. According to Mrs W.L. Keep, a dance teacher
in Omaha, Nebraska, the popular dance known as the Charleston
violated the ‘three established rules’ of dance: ‘Knees never turned
in’, ‘Toes always stretched and pointed’, and ‘Grace, grace, grace’.55
Further, although ‘real dancing’ could be ‘an aid to health’, declared
Dr Eugene Lyman Fisk of the Life Extension Institute in New
York City, jazz dancing was ‘a mere walk, with gyrations that are
primitive, barbaric and monotonous’.56 Indeed, far from healthful,
the ‘bizarre movements’,57 ‘jerky’,58 spasmodic motions, and ‘violent
acrobatics’59 common in such popular jazz dances as the Charleston,
reminded critics of the movements of people with epilepsy or nervous
disorders.60 To a newspaper in Sheboygan, Wisconsin the Charleston
resembled a ‘hoof-shaking modification of St. Vitus dance’, a nervous
disorder most common among children and named for the patron saint
of epileptics and dancers in the Roman Catholic religion.61 Writing a
history of the 1920s from the vantage point of 1930, the University
of Michigan’s Preston William Slosson similarly concluded that ‘all
the nation paid homage to Saint Vitus’ during the 1920s.62 Defective
music and dancing could lead only to impaired health in a jazz-mad
nation. Or worse: according to the public health commissioner in the
city of Cleveland jazz was ‘fatal’.63
By making these arguments, jazz critics participated in a
discussion on the relationship between music and health dating
back to ancient times. The ancient Greeks and Romans made Apollo
god of both medicine and music, and some of the earliest recorded
medical treatments involved music.64 The Bible tells of David curing
King Saul’s madness using harp and song; Cicero, Plato, Aristotle,
and Pythagoras all testified ‘to the power of music to cure many
kinds of diseases’; and the Roman physician Galen, considered the

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father of modern medicine, as well as Greek physician Asclepiades
in the first century BCE, both used music vibrations to treat afflicted
body parts. As knowledge of the nervous system developed during
the nineteenth century, the medical profession became increasingly
interested in both the health-promoting aspects and possible dangers
of stimulating the nerves with music.65
Nevertheless, before World War I little systematic research
existed on the specific uses of music to promote health. Lamenting
the state of the field during the war, Eva Augusta Vescelius, founder
and president of the National Therapeutic Society based in New
York City, asserted that ‘When the therapeutic value of music is
understood and appreciated, it will be considered as necessary in
the treatment of disease as air, water and food’.66 The war increased
interest in exploring the therapeutic value of music. Some physicians,
for instance, studied the effect of soothing music on men with shell
shock, the misleading label attached to war neuroses in the war.67
Leading postwar ‘musicotherapists’ in the United States, such as Dr
Willem van de Wall and registered nurse Isa Maud Ilsen, developed
their ideas while working with sick, wounded, and disabled soldiers
during the war.68
During the 1920s, under the influence of professionals like van de
Wall, Ilsen, and others, interest in the therapeutic uses of music grew
in the United States. Workers in the field published learned treatises
on music’s health-giving effects, and several states and communities
instituted programmes of musicotherapy.69 The State of Pennsylvania
appointed van de Wall the field representative for its Bureau of Mental
Health after the war, and he circulated among the state’s hospitals,
asylums, prisons, and other institutions putting musicotherapy into
practice.70 In New York City, Ilsen helped establish the National
Association for Music in Hospitals (NAMH) in December 1925,
and less than a year later the NAMH had a presence in ‘over thirty
institutions’ in New York and nearby states and had received inquiries
from several more distant locations.71 Some of these individuals and
organisations recognised limitations to the power of music therapy.
Van de Wall, for instance, cautioned that music was not a ‘cure-all’,
noting that not ‘a single cure … can be credited to it’.72 Others were
less circumspect. Highlighting the importance of the ‘right music
rightly presented’, Ilsen claimed to have worked out a programme
of music therapy ‘almost as precise as any existing medicine or
surgery’.73 Likewise, by 1935 a spokeswoman for the Russell Sage
Foundation was touting the possibilities for ‘the “vaccination” of

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mental sufferers with beautiful music’.74

Qualifiers such as ‘right music rightly presented’ and ‘beautiful
music’, however, indicate an important point. Most physicians
and others interested in musicotherapy in the 1920s stressed the
importance of choosing appropriate music. Most importantly, music
must be rhythmic to be therapeutic.75 Echoing Eva Vescelius’ wartime
comment that ‘Disease is unrhythmical, health is rhythmical’,76 Ilsen
argued that ‘The vital functions of the body are all rhythmic when
in a perfect state of health’. Accordingly, Ilsen saw no place for
jazz—even in moderation—in music therapy. Jazz was ‘absolutely
taboo’, she argued, because it was ‘too jerky’ to restore normal bodily
rhythms.77 Similarly, music teacher and therapy proponent Harriet
Ayer Seymour asserted that the ‘irregular pulse and lack of form [in
jazz] are more disturbing than healing’.78 Another musicotherapist,
Dr Agnes Savill, a British physician who garnered attention in the
United States with the publication of her book Music, Health and
Character in 1923, stressed that in any music therapy ‘the factor of
prime importance is that the sound must be of regular rhythm’. To
Savill, ‘modern music’ with its ‘irregular’ and ‘defective’ rhythms
‘disturbs the tranquillity of the circulation’.79
Ideas about neurasthenia, the so-called ‘American disease’,
clearly influenced the arguments of musicotherapists and others
interested in the negative impact of jazz on the human nervous
system.80 Most famously George M. Beard, but other physicians
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as well, argued
that civilisation, especially the ‘modern civilization’ of the United
States, consumed people’s store of ‘nerve-force’.81 An insufficient
store of nerve-force, likened to a battery drained of power, caused
illness, physical and mental collapse, and in extreme cases death.82
According to historian F.G. Gosling, physicians used neurasthenia
into the early twentieth century ‘to characterize practically every
nonspecific emotional disorder short of outright insanity, from
simple stress to severe neuroses’.83 Most relevantly here, among the
many unhealthy elements of modern American civilisation causing
neurasthenia Beard included the ‘unrhythmical’ noises produced by
the ‘appliances and accompaniments of civilization’. These noises
are ‘harmful or liable to be harmful’, he argued, because ‘they
cause severe molecular disturbance’. The noises of nature, on the
other hand, were ‘mostly rhythmical’. Anticipating the arguments of
twentieth century musicotherapists, Beard noted that ‘Rhythmical
… sounds are not only agreeable, but … may be ranked among our

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therapeutical agencies’.84
Historians commonly see the heyday of neurasthenia passing
around the time of World War I, but people in the 1920s still
invoked nervousness or analogous conditions to describe American
civilisation.85 In 1925 alone, for example, University of Wisconsin
psychologist Michael V. O’Shea called ‘nervous instability’ a
characteristic feature of American life;86 University of Chicago
sociologist Robert E. Park indicted American life as a ‘restless
search for excitement’;87 and physician Maximilian Kern, a noted
expert on human glandular systems, saw ‘hyper-excitation’ as a
key American problem.88 Two years later, an unnamed ‘neuropath’
quoted in the Musical Courier contributed his opinion that ‘a purely
pathological nervous condition—a general state of nervous fatigue’
afflicted ‘the present generation’.89 Each of these experts cited jazz as
an undesirable element behind the new American nervousness. Jazz,
added Will Earhart of the Pittsburgh public school system, ‘certainly
proves that Americans possess nervous energy’, but it ‘does not prove
they are safe with it’.90 Invoking another idea central to diagnoses
of neurasthenia—that individuals were born with a finite store of
nerve-force meant to be expended over the course of a lifetime—the
Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch asserted that a jazz-inflected life ‘cannot
fail to burn out in a few years the physical and mental powers that are
intended for a normal lifetime’.91
Though ideas about neurasthenia were undoubtedly influential,
the arguments of the anti-jazz contingent in the 1920s also related
directly to the appearance of shell shock during World War I.
Originally called ‘shell shock’ because physicians thought the
condition resulted from the effects of exploding shells on the human
brain and nervous system, doctors soon realised that many cases
had no concussive event in their histories. Accordingly, physicians
modified their diagnosis to stress fear and cited the fear-inducing
noises of the battlefield as important causes in shell shock cases.92
On the battlefield, a wide range of noises assaulted the nervous
system: the ‘ear-splitting cracks’ or ‘thunder’ of the big guns that
caused the air to vibrate and shudder; the ‘shriek’, ‘howl’, and ‘roar’
of approaching bullets and artillery shells; then, finally, ‘the rending
crump of the explosion’.93 Similarly, critics regularly described
jazz as ‘noise’.94 One contemporary encyclopaedia even defined
jazz as ‘dance music’ whose ‘characteristic feature … is noise’.95
Other, more colourful, descriptions of jazz echoed the noises of the

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battlefield. Examples included ‘a riot of discord’,96 a combination

of ‘weird wailings and wild shrieks’,97 and ‘raucous and inarticulate
shouting … [a] fantastic cacophony’.98 After the war, it required just
a short step to an argument that noise such as jazz caused nervous
tension and instability, ending—if unchecked—in nervous collapse
and eventually death.
Moreover, if the noises of the battlefield could be compared
to jazz, so, too, the symptoms of ‘jazz maniacs’99 suffering from
jazz-induced ‘civilization shock’ mirrored those of soldiers with
shell shock.100 According to one British physician, cases of war
neuroses or shell shock could be recognised by the patients’ ‘general
tremulousness, nervousness, and “jumpiness” varying in degree’,101
and wartime physicians and psychologists identified a wide range of
contortions, convulsions, twitches, and tremors as markers of shell
shock.102 Likewise, President Edward C. Elliott of Purdue University
considered jazz devotees to be ‘generally nervous and fidgety and
want[ing] to be on the go all the time’,103 a fact reflected, as Columbia’s
Daniel Gregory Mason put it, in the fans’ ‘perpetually jerking jaws’,
constantly in motion ‘champing chicle’ (chewing gum).104 The
public health commissioner in the city of Milwaukee believed that
jazz excited ‘the nervous system until a veritable hysterical frenzy
is reached. It is easy to see that such a frenzy is damaging to the
nervous system and will undermine health in no time’.105 Comparing
jazz to the war more directly, critic Paul Fritz Laubenstein argued in
the journal Musical Quarterly that as war tried ‘to kill men’s bodies’,
so jazz ‘not so swiftly but none the less surely, wrecks the bodies
of youth’.106 The courts also weighed in on the issue of jazz, noise,
and nervousness. Ruling in a case similar to the Cincinnati Salvation
Army’s later lawsuit, the Illinois Supreme Court in 1923 declared
that ‘disagreeable’ jazz ‘noise … wears upon the nervous system’.
The court concluded it was ‘beyond all doubt’ that ‘the subjection of
a human being to a continued hearing of loud noises tends to shorten
life’.107
It also seemed beyond doubt that jazz ruined people’s minds.
Jazz, ‘the drivel of morons’ according to automaker Henry Ford,108
prevented individuals from reaching their full intellectual potential,
or so its critics believed. The president of Harvard University, Charles
W. Eliot, once said that ‘Music is the best mind trainer’,109 but many
observers during the 1920s doubted that fact when it came to jazz.
The Canadian Bureau for the Advancement of Music, for instance,

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noted that music ‘has the same mind training value as Latin, Greek
and the higher forms of mathematics’—unless the music was jazz. As
music played ‘for amusement or in a perfunctory way’, jazz required
no ‘mental concentration’ and no ‘real constructive mechanical
[or] artistic work’.110 W.F. Webster, superintendent of schools in
Minneapolis, made a similar point. Music ‘worked with’, he argued,
‘makes a real contribution to mental strength’, but jazz was music
merely ‘played with’, requiring no mental strength or discipline.111
Playing jazz, according to other critics, did not even require enough
mental discipline to learn to read music or to play accurately. In jazz,
‘a mistake can be counted as a “trick figure”’, noted the Defender’s
David Peyton,112 making jazz, in the words of the New York Times,
the product of ‘incompetents’.113
Others went further still. Jazz not only failed to improve the
intellect, as real music should, it degraded what intelligence a
person possessed. In 1929, Purdue’s President Elliott contended
that ‘persons who frequent dance halls twice a week or more may
be mentally deficient’ and ‘excessive jazz dancing is the cause’.114
In her Ladies’ Home Journal article, Anne Shaw Faulkner asserted
scientific backing for claims like Elliott’s. ‘[M]any scientists’, she
wrote, had demonstrated that ‘the effect of jazz on the normal brain
produces an atrophied condition on the brain cells’.115 Faulkner’s
scientists may have included the Canadian physician who said he
had compiled data showing that ‘jazz has doubled insanity in the
United States’,116 and the staff member at California’s Napa State
Insane Hospital who declared that ‘about fifty percent’ of patients
in the asylum aged 16–25, male and female, were ‘jazz crazy dope
fiends and jazz hall patrons’.117 Overall, the music journal The Etude
described the ‘sociological significance’ of jazz as ‘horrific’: ‘Jazz
is doing a vast amount of harm to young minds and bodies not yet
developed’.118
Perhaps inevitably, the damaging effects attributed to jazz led
many to contemplate banning the music altogether. Comparing jazz
to the prohibition of alcohol and asserting that jazz ‘had done more
harm’ to the American people and society ‘than drink ever did’, for
instance, the mayor of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania tried to ban jazz
in his city in 1924.119 The proposed Wilkes-Barre ban failed to pass,120
but other cities across the country did enact jazz prohibitions, mostly
focused on public dance halls.121 The city of Pasadena, California
attempted one of the broadest prohibitions. A city ordinance passed in

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1920 made dancing or playing dance music of any kind, anywhere—

including private homes—between the hours of ten at night and
eight in the morning punishable with a five hundred dollar fine, six
months in prison, or both. The ordinance had a short life, however,
being struck down in the California Court of Appeals within a year of
passing. In his written opinion, Appellate Judge Frank G. Finlayson
expressed his sympathy with the obvious intention of the ordinance,
whose broad prohibition on dancing clearly targeted jazz. The
demise of ‘muscle-tickling jazz’ with its ‘bizarre extremes and freak
abnormalities’, he agreed, was something ‘devoutly to be wished’.122
Nevertheless, the right of people to enjoy popular amusements—or
even unpopular but ultimately harmless ones—in their own homes
could not be abridged by the law.123
Although Justice Finlayson failed to see the harm in jazz,
newspapers, popular and academic periodicals, church sermons, and
other sources of opinion from the 1920s contained mostly negative
comments stressing the harmful health effects of unrhythmical jazz
music and its associated dances. Surprising numbers of people,
many highly educated, believed that an epidemic of defective jazz
music and dance was threatening to produce a restless, ‘nervously
debilitated’, physically ruined, and mentally impaired nation.124
Jazz revitalises music and reinvigorates the body

The critics’ reactions to jazz as disabled music and disabling to
its audiences naturally frustrated jazz musicians. Clarinetist Frank
Teschemacher complained: ‘You knock yourself out making a great
new music for the people, and they treat you like … you were offering
them leprosy instead of art’.125 More generally, jazz proponents
met the charge that jazz destroyed mental and physical health with
assertions that, if physical and mental disabilities were increasing
in the nation, modern life—not jazz—was responsible. As orchestra
leader and ‘King of Jazz’ Paul Whiteman put it, ‘all the tendencies
of modern living—of machine civilization—are to make crippled,
perverted things of human beings’. Far from disabled or disabling,
according to Whiteman, jazz was the cure for modern life. Jazz
restored the ‘joy in being alive’, as well as rhythm and emotion to
life, and after listening to jazz, people were ‘refreshed and ready for
work and difficulties’.126 In short, defenders of jazz actively rejected
the notions that as music and dance it was defective or disabled and
that it was disabling or damaging to people’s physical and mental

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health.
Turning first to the question of whether jazz was defective music,
if jazz critics could tap into a long history of distinguishing between
healthful and pathological music, jazz proponents in the 1920s noted
that classical composers such as Mahler and Richard Strauss were
‘fond of jazzy effects’ in their compositions.127 Rudolph Ganz, the
conductor of the St Louis Symphony Orchestra, even touted Johan
Sebastian Bach as ‘one of the greatest users of syncopation’ ever.128
Yet these things did not provoke music critics in the 1920s into
wholesale denunciations of the music of Mahler, Strauss, or Bach.
Furthermore, Paul Whiteman challenged the alleged incompetence of
jazz musicians, noting that musicians in his and similar orchestras had
‘to know at least half-a-dozen times as much about their instruments
as a symphony orchestra player’, and many had to be virtuosos on
more than one instrument.129 Far from unskilled, then, jazz musicians
needed to possess great skill, and those who could not read music
were certainly more rare than the detractors alleged.130
Evidence of the intelligence present in jazz can be seen in the
clever ways jazz musicians and composers incorporated some of
the key criticisms into their performances and their music. If, for
instance, critics were going to dismiss jazz dancing with comments
about St Vitus, then jazz bands like Ferdinand ‘Jelly Roll’ Morton’s
Red Hot Peppers would advertise their shows offering a ‘Quaking,
Quivering, Shaking, Shivering’ good time.131 Similarly, a number of
popular jazz songs celebrated the music’s violation of musical—and
other—norms. Representative titles include: ‘Jazz Convulsions’,132
‘Goin’ Nuts’,133 and ‘Crazy Words, Crazy Tune’.134 In ‘Crazy Blues’,
Mamie Smith’s multi-million selling record from 1921, clarinets
wail discordantly and trombones punctuate the mood unpredictably
as Smith sings about losing her man, considering suicide, but instead
deciding to try to find him and win him back.135 The 1928 song ‘Crazy
Rhythm’ featured lyrics that ironically celebrated ‘low-brow’ jazz’s
supposed tendency to ruin a person’s appreciation of better music:
When a high-brow
Meets a low-brow
Walkin’ along Broadway
Soon the high-brow
He has no brow
Ain’t it a shame?
And you [jazz] are to blame.136

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In reality, jazz proponents believed that people’s interest in jazz

could be exploited to create a greater understanding and appreciation
of classical compositions. In short ‘low-brow’ jazz would generate
interest in ‘high-brow’ music.137
Other songs played off the notion that jazz was simply noise.
Frequently titles alone evoked the idea of noise. A few examples
include: ‘The Wang Wang Blues’, first recorded by Paul Whiteman’s
orchestra in 1921 and subsequently by many others, including Duke
Ellington;138 Zez Confrey’s novelty hit ‘Kitten on the Keys’;139 ‘Oogie
Oogie Wa Wa’ composed by Archie Gottler;140 the Elmer Schoebel
composition ‘Prince of Wails’;141 and Ellington’s similarly titled
‘Wall Street Wail’.142 Other times the idea was conveyed through
nonsense syllables in song lyrics—‘voe-doe-doe-dee-o’ in the 1927
hit ‘Crazy Words, Crazy Tune’,143 for instance, or ‘jimbo-jambo’,144
and ‘doo wacka doo’ in the songs of the same names.145 In his 1926
hit, ‘Heebie Jeebies’, Louis Armstrong encouraged listeners to ‘do
the heebie jeebies dance’ with extended runs of nonsense syllables
such as ‘Geef-gaf, gee-bap-be-da-de-do, d-da-do’.146 Perhaps not all
of these tunes would live up to historian Charles Fox’s description of
Ellington’s ‘Echoes of the Jungle’ as ‘“paradoxically an extremely
sophisticated” piece of music’, but that was not the point.147 Whether
conveyed through musical arrangements, lyrics, or titles, undoubtedly
part of the popular enjoyment of jazz derived from thumbing one’s
nose at convention, cultural norms, and musical experts.
In terms of physical health, Paul Whiteman argued that, far
from being disabling or debilitating, jazz actually promoted beauty.
‘[S]haking a wicked shoulder is the best beauty exercise in the
world’, he asserted in 1923, adding that jazz dancing had ‘improved
the appearance of [the] whole nation’.148 Bee Jackson agreed with
Whiteman. ‘If every man, woman and child in the United States would
Charleston every day’, declared the ‘World’s champ Charlestoner’,
‘we would have the most beautiful race of human beings that ever
walked on two legs’. ‘The Charleston’, she added, ‘is the modern
fountain of youth and eternal health, to say nought of everlasting
beauty’.149 On other occasions, Whiteman noted jazz’s mental as
well as physical benefits. ‘The exercise of dancing to jazz music’, he
argued in 1925, ‘buoys up the mind as well as the body’,150 adding
a year later that he believed jazz would eventually be used to cure
insanity.151 Echoing Whiteman, jazz band leader and popular radio
personality Vincent Lopez, sometimes called the ‘Prince of Jazz’,152

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contended that the ‘vibratory effect’ of jazz on the human body helped
keep ‘the city dweller and others leading hectic lives from bursting
mentally’.153 Others outside the jazz community similarly rejected
the idea that the music posed a mental or physical threat to the nation,
asserting that, in fact, it could be ‘rejuvenating’ and ‘therapeutic’ for
individuals.154 Dr Alexander Lambert, who worked at New York
City’s Bellevue Hospital, even used jazz to treat some people with
mental illness, contrary to the opinions of most musicotherapists.155
In other words, many people considered jazz the perfect tonic for
modern life.
When proponents defended jazz on the grounds that it promoted
health and beauty, they were making a eugenic argument. Eugenics,
the science of improving the human race by encouraging more
reproduction among those considered genetically ‘fit’ and less—
ideally none—among those deemed ‘unfit’, became a popular
scientific fad in the United States during the 1920s.156 As more
than one advocate put it, eugenics aimed to produce ‘a society
where the overwhelming majority of the population possessed
sound minds in sound bodies’.157 Although many possibilities
for deciding the eugenic fitness of individuals existed, in practice
American eugenicists typically relied on aesthetic judgments of
physical appearance.158 Albert E. Wiggam, who distilled eugenics for
a general audience in numerous mass-circulation magazine articles
and several books, asserted that contrary to popular belief, beauty
was not only skin deep: ‘Beauty is … as deep as evolution itself’.
According to Wiggam, beauty went hand-in-hand with and was
the outward sign of intelligence, vigour, energy, morality, and ‘all
the other good qualities of the race’.159 Although eugenicists in the
1920s rejected the strict Lamarckism of the past—which asserted
that characteristics acquired during the parents’ lifetimes would be
passed on to their offspring—that did not mean steps should not be
taken to improve individuals, where possible.160 Hence jazz music
and dance, as Whiteman, Jackson, Lopez, and others presented them,
became positive eugenic measures, maximising beauty, physical and
mental health, vigour, and energy—in short, all the good qualities of
the race—in individuals. Indeed, to improve the nation jazz should
be encouraged.
The origins of jazz complicated the question of whether the
music and its associated dances could have positive eugenic results,
however. Jazz, of course, originated primarily in African American
culture, in a community that—eugenically speaking—was not highly

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valued. Since the advent of Africans in America, white Americans,

particularly those who owned slaves, commonly considered blacks an
inferior species in terms of physical health, beauty, and intelligence.161
Such views were an important part of the justification for slavery, but
the end of slavery did little to correct this view of African Americans.162
Other contributing elements to the development of jazz were likewise
eugenically tainted. A number of observers noted the important
contributions of Jewish and Slavic composers and musicians to 1920s
jazz.163 Like African Americans, these groups also were categorised
as inferior races according to the expansive notions of ‘race’ used in
the early twentieth century.164 Although declining in significance in
academic circles, the racial view of Europeans remained influential
in popular thought, and many people considered eastern, as well
as southern, Europeans to be races apart and inferior to northern
European races.165 Eastern and southern Europeans were ‘devoid of
beauty’,166 ‘intellectually decadent’,167 ‘socially inadequate’,168 and
ultimately unable to become truly American by virtue of their ‘blood,
ideals and history’.169 Indeed, they were fit only to fill the nation’s
prisons, poorhouses, hospitals, and asylums.170
The origins of jazz thus opened two lines of criticism from a health
perspective. First, critics could deride jazz as ‘music of the jungle’171
and dismiss the music and associated dances as ‘primitive’172 and
‘savage’.173 Jazz represented ‘demoralization’ of music and a threat to
civilisation as a whole.174 Extrapolating from jazz’s disregard for the
rules of music and dance, for instance, Anne Shaw Faulkner insisted
that ‘jazz disorganizes all regular laws and order; it stimulates to
extreme deeds, to a breaking away from all rules and conventions’.175
‘When jazz was adopted by the “highly civilized” white race’, added
Dr Frank Damrosch of the Institute of Musical Art, the music ‘tended
to degenerate [the race] towards primitivity’.176 The Rev Percy
Stickney Grant of New York’s Episcopal Church of the Ascension
put it more colourfully in a 1922 sermon. The effect of jazz, Grant
declared, ‘is to make you … want to go on all-fours and whisk your
tail around a tree. It is a savage crash and bang. It rings the bell for
full steam astern’.177
A second line of eugenically based criticism of jazz pointed to
its mixture of divergent African and European musical traditions.
Jazz was, in a word, a hybrid. Indeed, according to the University
of Wisconsin’s Michael F. Guyer, author of the eugenics textbook
Being Well-Born (1916), the quintessential jazz instrument, the

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saxophone—invented by Belgian Antoine (a.k.a. Adolphe) Sax in
the early 1840s—was itself a ‘hybrid of reed and brass’.178 From
this perspective, jazz becomes a kind of ‘musical miscegenation’,179
and miscegenation, argued Charles B. Davenport, head of one of the
nation’s top eugenic research institutions, ‘spells disharmony’.180
The ‘rhythm is the only African thing about jazz’, noted Nicholas
George Julius Ballanta, a music scholar from Sierra Leone. The
rest, he declared, was ‘purely Western’, adding: ‘The two forms do
not go together’.181 The resulting hybrid, insisted an editorial in the
Galveston (TX) Daily News, was ‘neither art by the white man’s
standard nor by the black man’s’.182 Either way then—whether jazz
was primitive or a disharmonious hybrid—critics could use eugenics
to argue that jazz and its associated dances had no value for a strong,
healthy, civilised society.
Jazz proponents naturally disagreed and found eugenic support
for their contentions, too. First, as with the criticism that jazz was
defective music, little more than noise, jazz musicians embraced the
charge their music was savage and turned it back on the critics. Jungle
themes frequently featured in jazz numbers. In the late-1920s, for
instance, Duke Ellington with different orchestral combinations—
including one called ‘The Jungle Band’—performed and recorded
songs with titles like ‘Jungle Blues’ and ‘Jungle Nights in Harlem’, both
co-written by Ellington, and ‘Jungle Jamboree’, a Fats Waller tune.183
If jazz was jungle music, moreover, that also made it ‘fundamental’,
coming ‘from the soil, where all music has its beginning’, argued
Serge Koussevitzky, Boston Symphony conductor.184
On the question of hybridity, secondly, a number of anthropologists
and sociologists in the early twentieth century challenged the view that
race mixing, broadly construed, spelled racial and—more relevantly
here—cultural degeneration. University of Iowa sociologist E.B.
Reuter, for example, considered hybridity, or ‘racial amalgamation’,
desirable because ‘disorganization’ was the true source of cultural
progress while racial purity yielded ‘uniformity’, ‘suppression’, and
ultimately ‘cultural stagnation’.185 Accordingly, jazz exponents saw
the music and dance as elevating American culture and civilisation.
Leopold Stokowski, director and conductor for the Philadelphia
Symphony Orchestra, noted the ‘revivifying effect’ of jazz on
music, comparing it to ‘the injection of new … blood into a dying
aristocracy’.186 Novelist Arthur B. Reeve argued jazz did the same for
dance, ‘sav[ing] the modern dance from decay’.187 Lending scientific
credibility to the beliefs of Stokowski, Reeve, and other advocates,

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anthropologist Franz Boas, one of the leading voices challenging

the notion of culture having a biological (or racial) basis, testified
to hybrid jazz’s revivifying effect on modern civilisation more
generally.188
Jazz rehabilitation
Despite the music’s popularity, defenders of jazz comprised a
distinct minority in published sources during the 1920s, and a certain
ambiguity entered into defences of jazz.189 In 1927, even Jazz King
Paul Whiteman admitted that after twelve years of playing the music
he did not know if jazz was ‘art’ or ‘a disease’.190 On another occasion
Whiteman called jazz ‘the great American noise’, and he compared
the first jazz club he ever visited to ‘a mad house’.191 One of the best
contemporary analyses of jazz, Joel Augustus Rogers’ article ‘Jazz
at Home’ in the journal Survey Graphic in 1925, reflects the same
uncertainty. On the one hand, Rogers argued that because jazz was
‘a thing of the jungles’—not the jungles of Africa, but ‘modern man-
made jungles’, or cities—it represented a cure, ‘a balm for modern
ennui’.192 On the other hand, Rogers also called jazz an ‘epidemic’
which in its ‘uncontrolled’ state threatened society.193 Moreover,
for Rogers, jazz dance resembled nothing so much as ‘a fit of
rhythmic ague’ or severe chills.194 In the end, Rogers reconciled his
conflicting positions—was it a disease or the cure?—by concluding
that, although jazz could be ‘a tonic for the strong’, it was also ‘a
poison for the weak’.195 Others offered similar assessments. Carl
Engel, the chief of the music division of the Library or Congress,
for instance, generally favoured jazz and considered it important to
‘save and cherish’ the best elements in it. At the same time, however,
he advocated ‘abolishing’ noisy jazz as well as ‘the silly wriggling of
neurotic simps’ that passed for dancing.196
In sum, although a proponent might assert that jazz could ‘make
an aged cripple forget he ever had the gout’, 197 defenders of jazz
frequently met the critics halfway, allowing that not all jazz was
good for all people, either as music or for their physical and mental
health. Even many defenders, in other words, thought jazz required
rehabilitation. Rehabilitation, which emerged as one of the important
consequences of World War I, represented a ‘new way, both cultural
and social, of addressing disability’, according to French disability
scholar Henri-Jacques Stiker.198 In contrast to the pre-war emphasis

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on curing, fixing, or removing disabilities through medical or
surgical means, rehabilitation focused on restoring or establishing
impaired individuals as participants in the economy and thus as self-
supporting, productive members of society. European, American,
and other western cultures embraced the promise of rehabilitation
and soon extended programmes for disabled war veterans to cover
the civilian disabled as well.199
Rehabilitation ultimately failed to live up to its promise for people
with disabilities, but the broad belief in rehabilitation in the 1920s
can be applied to the analysis of jazz music in the period.200 Indeed,
the historiographic distinction between sweet and hot jazz also points
in the direction of rehabilitation, though jazz scholars have failed to
notice. Most proponents of jazz in the 1920s agreed that sweet or
symphonic jazz was ‘good jazz’ and ‘can be a wholesome tonic’.
Many of the same people, however, believed that hot jazz—the form
of the music closest to its African American roots—was ‘bad jazz’
and ‘always a dangerous drug’.201 Or as Edwin J. Stringham argued,
mixing the metaphor somewhat, ‘What we need now is the proper
guidance of the jazz germ’.202 Thus although Jazz King Paul Whiteman
energetically defended jazz, only his own (and comparable) ‘carefully
orchestrated harmonizations’ met his approval.203 Likewise, historian
Joel Augustus Rogers reserved his greatest praise for organisations
such as the Paul Whiteman, Vincent Lopez, and Fletcher Henderson
orchestras, which played mainly sweet jazz. These orchestras, he
argued, ‘demonstrat[ed] the finer possibilities of jazz music’ without
‘the vulgarities and crudities’ found in jazz of ‘lower origin’.204 Even
some of the critics agreed. Those who criticised jazz in general yet
accepted certain jazz products included band leader John Philip
Sousa, critic Sigmund Spaeth, and composer Henry F. Gilbert, among
others.205 The Chicago Defender’s David Peyton also approved of the
Whiteman, Lopez, Henderson, and similar orchestras, all of which
offered ‘beautiful melodies, garnished with eccentric figurations
propelled by strict rhythm’.206 Overall, then, for Whiteman, Rogers,
other proponents, and even some critics, disabled jazz music needed
to be and—more importantly—could be rehabilitated.
Conclusion
Jazz in 1920s America brought to the forefront debates about disease,
disability, noise, and rhythm. Attempting to de-legitimise jazz,
newspapers, popular and academic magazines, church pulpits, lecture

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halls, and books were filled with descriptions of jazz as defective

or disabled music likely to cause physical and mental disabilities in
anyone who listened to it. Although the popularity of jazz suggests
that proponents greatly outnumbered the critics, their voices were
heard less often in opinion forums. When heard, however, proponents
argued that jazz was not disabled as music and that it boosted the
physical and mental health of its listeners. Some critics in the 1920s
eventually agreed, concluding that jazz’s musical abnormality could
be normalised, making it safer, healthier, and more appropriate for
American civilisation.
Beyond the broad question of whether jazz was disabled music
with disabling effects, the discussion of jazz inevitably reflected
other important health and disability issues of the 1920s. These
issues included the use of music as part of medical treatment or
therapy, eugenics, the impact of immigration and race-mixing,
and the rehabilitation of people with disabilities. For critics, the
divergence of jazz from accepted musical standards represented
musical abnormality, and many of the arguments against jazz echoed
the ideas of eugenicists, immigration restrictionists, and racial purists
addressing perceived human abnormality. In short, whether jazz was
a product solely derived from African American sources, or a mix of
African American, European, and other musical influences, it was
dangerous to Americans descended from superior northern European
stock, the preferred people of racial ideologues and many, if not most,
eugenicists in the 1920s. The defenders of jazz disputed the critics’
eugenic and racial ideas. They argued that jazz improved health and
beauty and that, whether purely African American or comprising a
mix of influences, jazz relieved the tensions of modern life; it restored
the humanity often lacking in an increasingly mechanised world. In
their view, jazz was sound eugenically and safe—even desirable—
from a racial perspective.
But not without rehabilitation. Those proponents of jazz who
were most often heard in opinion forums generally favoured sweet or
symphonic jazz—what might be called rehabilitated jazz. Some of the
critics agreed, allowing that some jazz could be normalised or made
acceptable as music. Arguments from both sides thus suggested the
rehabilitation of jazz from ‘discordant vibrations’ to a new harmony,
mirroring the hope for the recuperation of wider society from the
disturbances created by the war and modern life.207
University of Otago

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Acknowledgements
Earlier versions of this article were presented to the biennial conference of the
Australia and New Zealand American Studies Association (July 2008), the University
of Otago Department of History and Art History’s Work in Progress Seminar
(May 2010), and the Otago Disability Symposium (August 2010). The comments
received on those occasions are gratefully acknowledged. Special thanks go to
Professor Barbara Brookes of the University of Otago and the anonymous referee
for Health and History for their close readings of, and suggestions for improving,
the argument.
1. Eva Augusta Vescelius, “Music and Health”, Musical Quarterly 4 (July 1918): 378.
2. For silent film music see, e.g., Rick Altman, Silent Film Sound (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2004), esp. 77–93; Richard Koszarski, An Evening’s Entertainment: The Age
of the Silent Feature Picture, 1915–1928 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1990), esp.
30–1, 41–5; James Wierzbicki, Film Music: A History (New York: Routledge, 2009), esp. 48,
116–20.
3. “Newborn Spared ‘Jazz Emotion’”, Ogden (UT) Standard-Examiner, 4 February 1926,
4.
4. “Oppose Jazz Near Hospital”, Portsmouth (OH) Daily Times, 5 February 1926, 18.
5. James Kennaway, “From Sensibility to Pathology: The Origins of the Idea of Nervous
Music around 1800”, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 65 (July 2010):
396–426 [quote from 397].
6. Ibid., 398.
7. This will be developed further below, but for examples of the various terms quoted in
the text, see: Harry O. Brunn, The Story of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1960), 173 [‘pathological’, quoting the Illinois Vigilance
Association from 1922]; Henry Osborne Osgood, So This Is Jazz (Boston: Little, Brown, and
Company, 1926), 11 [‘infected … virus’, quoting journalist Walter Kingsley]; “Where Is Jazz
Leading America?” (Part II), The Etude 42 (September 1924): 595 [‘epidemic’, in comments
from composer Robert M. Stults]; Neil Leonard, “Traditionalist Opposition to Jazz”, in The
Social and Cultural Life of the 1920s, edited by Ronald L. Davis (New York: Holt, Rinehart
and Winston, 1972), 91 [‘cancer’, quoting the Federal Social Hygiene Board].
8. Joseph N. Straus, “Normalizing the Abnormal: Disability in Music and Music Theory”,
Journal of the American Musicological Society 59 (Spring 2006): 126.
9. Ibid., 148, n. 85.
10. Ibid., 141–9, 155–75.
11. “Jazz Called Tragedy by New York Actor”, Fresno (CA) Bee, 19 July 1924, 7. The issue
of jazz as ‘noise’ which violated the norms of music and dance will be elaborated on later in the
essay.
12. Vescelius, “Music and Health”, 378.
13. Douglas C. Baynton, “Disability and the Justification for Inequality in American
History”, in The New Disability History: American Perspectives, edited by Paul K. Longmore
and Lauri Umansky (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 41. Kathy J. Ogren, The
Jazz Revolution: Twenties America and the Meaning of Jazz (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1989), 141, comes closest to a health or disability interpretation of jazz, noting that
‘virus … was a common and usually pejorative metaphor’ for jazz in the 1920s, but she does
nothing more with the idea.
14. The arguments of proponents will be developed further below, but for jazz defenders
using health and disability language see, e.g., J.A. Rogers, “Jazz at Home”, Survey Graphic—
Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro (March 1925): 665–7, 712, online at University of Virginia
Electronic Text Center, http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/harlem/RogJazzF.html (accessed 9 September
2006), 665 [‘epidemic’]; Paul Whiteman, “In Defense of Jazz and Its Makers”, New York

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Times, 13 March 1927, sect. 4, p. 4 [‘disease’]; Edwin J. Stringham, “‘Jazz’—An Educational

Problem”, Musical Quarterly 12 (April 1926): 195 [jazz as ‘germ’].
15. For the early historical development of jazz see, e.g., Chadwick Hansen, “Social
Influences on Jazz Style: Chicago, 1920–30”, American Quarterly 12 (Winter 1960): 494–
507; J.S. Slotkin, “Jazz and Its Forerunners as an Example of Acculturation”, American
Sociological Review 8 (October 1943): 571–5; Gunther Schuller, Early Jazz: Its Roots and
Musical Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), esp. 63–88, 242–3; Court
Carney, Cuttin’ Up: How Early Jazz Got America’s Ear (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas,
2009), 31–99.
16. As quoted in Marian Hale (NEA), “Sings Jazz at Concert”, Ogden (UT) Standard-
Examiner, 25 November 1923, sect. 2, p. 10.
17. “Staccato Notes”, Logansport (IN) Pharos-Tribune, 11 December 1926, 9.
18. Preston William Slosson, The Great Crusade and After, 1914–1928 (New York: The
Macmillan Company, 1930), 283–4 [citing 1929 study by Charles Merz; ‘typical’ is Slosson’s
word]. For other assertions of jazz’s broad popularity see, e.g., Hansen, “Social Influences”,
504; William J. Shultz, “Jazz”, Nation, 25 October 1922, 438.
19. Other scholars have discussed the African American criticism of jazz in the 1920s,
generally concluding that the problem Du Bois and others had with jazz was its association with
rural black culture; they considered that culture primitive and association with it inappropriate
for a race seeking equality of rights and opportunities. Ogren, The Jazz Revolution, esp. 115–25,
covers the opinions of Du Bois, Johnson, and Peyton. For other analyses of African American
criticism of jazz in the 1920s see, e.g., Morroe Berger, “Jazz: Resistance to the Diffusion of a
Culture-Pattern”, Journal of Negro History 32 (October 1947): 464–7, 479–84; Nicholas M.
Evans, Writing Jazz: Race, Nationalism, and Modern Culture in the 1920s (New York: Garland
Publishing, 2000), 98–129.
20. Stringham, “‘Jazz’—An Educational Problem”, 190.
21. Stokowski quoted in “Why They Say Jazz is Here to Stay”, Atchison (KS) Daily Globe,
18 May 1924, 8.
22. A.H., “Is Jazz ‘The American Soul’?” [letter to editor], Musical America, 24 November
1923, 10.
23. Beaven quoted in Leonard, “Traditionalist Opposition”, 87.
24. “Institute Officers are Re-Elected”, Portsmouth (OH) Daily Times, 1 September 1927,
15.
25. ‘R.B.’, in Life magazine, quoted in Hamburg (IA) Reporter, 26 June 1919, 8.
26. “Home of Future to Compete with Night Life of the Age”, Portsmouth (OH) Daily
Times, 31 March 1927, 1, 3.
27. Jeanette M. Collins, “‘Jazzing Up’ Grammar”, The English Journal 14 (March 1925):
235–8.
28. H.S. Person, “Man and the Machine: The Engineer’s Point of View”, Annals of the
American Academy of Political and Social Science 149 (May 1930): 91.
29. “Winter Stages Rough Dance with the Spring”, Bradford (PA) Era, 2 April 1924, 12.
30. For example, Paul Whiteman and Mary Margaret McBride, Jazz (1926; New York:
Arno Press, 1974), 140–1; “Morale among Homes Is Now in Jazz State”, Muskogee (OK)
Times-Democrat, 19 May 1923, 1.
31. For example, “Murders and Suicides Increase”, World’s Work 48 (August 1924): 362–3;
“Disturbing Discoveries about Boston’s Students”, Galveston (TX) News, 28 December 1924,
12.
32. William G. Shepard, “What’s Wrong with Our Children”, Collier’s Weekly, 20
September 1924, 17.
33. “Grid Evils Blamed to Jazz by Brooke”, Corsicana (TX) Daily Sun, 7 November 1922,
4. See also Frederick Palmer, “A Personal Page”, American Legion Weekly, 29 January 1926,
11, for a range of other modern problems, nationally and internationally, for which Palmer
indicted jazz.
34. Stringham, “‘Jazz’—An Educational Problem”, 190. For similar views see, e.g., “Jazz
and Suicide”, Modesto (CA) Evening News, 23 April 1924, 4; “The Better Half”, Oakland
Tribune, 16 July 1925, 22; “Where Is Jazz Leading America?” (Part I), The Etude 42 (August
1924): 519 [comment from composer John Alden Carpenter]; Osgood, So This Is Jazz, 247–8

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[quoting Rev. Charles Stelzle of New York City].
35. Gilbert Seldes, “Toujours Jazz” [1923], in Seldes, The Seven Lively Arts (1924; Mineola,
NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 2001), 84–5. See also Schuller, Early Jazz, 13–16.
36. Slosson, Great Crusade, 283.
37. Don Knowlton, “The Anatomy of Jazz” [1926], in Contemporary Thought, edited by
Kendall B. Taft, John Francis McDermott, and Dana O. Jensen (Cambridge, MA: The Riverside
Press, 1929), esp. 482–6 [quote from 484]. Aaron Copland, “Jazz Structure and Influence”,
Modern Music 4 (January–February 1927): 9–14, also stresses polyrhythms as the defining
element of jazz.
38. For jazz versus ragtime and the blues see, e.g., Winthrop Sargeant, Jazz, Hot and Hybrid
(1938; New York: Da Capo Press, Inc., 1975), 141–6; Slotkin, “Jazz and Its Forerunners”,
571–4. For more detailed looks at early jazz as music, see Schuller, Early Jazz, 6–62; Sargeant,
Jazz, Hot and Hybrid, 81–146.
39. For jazz historiography as it relates to the 1920s, see Brian Harker, “Louis Armstrong,
Eccentric Dance, and the Evolution of Jazz on the Eve of Swing”, Journal of the American
Musicological Society 61 (Spring 2008): esp. 70–1 [‘freak effects’ from 71], 73–5; Scott
DeVeaux, “Constructing the Jazz Tradition: Jazz Historiography”, Black American Literature
Forum 25 (Autumn 1991): 525–37; Jeffrey Magee, “Before Louis: When Fletcher Henderson
was the ‘Paul Whiteman of the Race’”, American Music 18 (Winter 2000): 391–3, 399–406.
For early uses of sweet vs hot distinction see, e.g., Osgood, So This Is Jazz, 107–8; Hugues
Panassié, Hot Jazz: The Guide to Swing Music [France, 1934] (New York: M. Witmark,
1936).
40. See Joshua Berrett, Louis Armstrong and Paul Whiteman: Two Kings of Jazz (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004). For the significance of Whiteman—who was white
in skin colour as well as name—in the development of jazz see, e.g., Osgood, So This Is Jazz,
123; also the film The King of Jazz, directed by John Murray Anderson (Universal Pictures,
1930), featuring Whiteman and his orchestra in a revue-style format; and Carney, Cuttin’ Up,
139–42, for analysis of the film.
41. For expansive applications of the term jazz in the 1920s see, e.g., Copland, “Jazz
Structure”, 12; Osgood, So This Is Jazz, 32, 74; “Rudolph Ganz Again Expresses Personal
Opinions Regarding Jazz”, Metronome 38 (March 1922): 34–5; Isham Jones, “American Dance
Music Is Not Jazz”, The Etude 42 (August 1924): 526; Whiteman and McBride, Jazz, 19. In the
secondary literature see, e.g., DeVeaux, “Constructing the Jazz Tradition”, esp. 531–7; Jeffrey
Magee, “‘Everybody Step’: Irving Berlin, Jazz, and Broadway in the 1920s”, Journal of the
American Musicological Society 59 (Fall 2006): 697–732.
42. Virgil Thomson, “Jazz”, American Mercury 2 (August 1924): 466.
43. Agnes Savill, “Music and Medicine”, Music & Letters 4 (July 1923): 287.
44. Anne Shaw Faulkner, “Does Jazz Put the Sin in Syncopation?” Ladies’ Home Journal
38 (August 1921), 16, 34, http://faculty.pittstate.edu/~knichols/syncopate.html (accessed 12 June
2007).
45. “Real Music”, Reno (NV) Evening Gazette, 25 February 1925, 4.
46. Paul Fritz Laubenstein, “Jazz—Debit and Credit”, Musical Quarterly 15 (October
1929): 621.
47. “Noted Soprano Fails to See Possibilities of Jazz Opera”, Galveston (TX) Daily News,
6 February 1922, 1.
48. “Damrosch Assails Jazz”, New York Times, 17 April 1928, 26.
49. Daniel Gregory Mason, “Stravinsky as a Symptom”, American Mercury 4 (April 1925):
465.
50. As quoted in Ogren, Jazz Revolution, 115.
51. Alfred V. Frankenstein, Syncopating Saxophones (Chicago: Robert O. Ballou, 1925),
40.
52. Knowlton, “Anatomy of Jazz”, 478.
53. Bert Moses, “Sap and Salt”, Rushville (IN) Daily Republican, 29 March 1929, 3.
54. William Parker, “Sees End of Real Dancing”, Olean (NY) Evening Times, 30 December
1924, 11 [quoting Stefano Mascagno of the American National Association of Dancing
Masters].
55. “No—And Then Again Yes”, Sheboygan (WI) Press, 7 January 1926, 6.

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56. Eugene Lyman Fisk, “College Girl, 1922 Model, Improvement on 1890”, Lima (OH)
News, 7 May 1922, 32.
57. “Where Is Jazz Leading” (Part I), 518 [quoting composer Felix Borowski].
58. Thomson, “Jazz”, 466.
60. For other comments on the jerky, spasmodic motions of jazz dancing and its lack of
healthy value see, e.g., Faulkner, “Does Jazz Put”, n.p.; Osgood, So This Is Jazz, 11; Ogren,
Jazz Revolution, 141 [quoting Walter Kingsley]; Daniel Gregory Mason, “Satan in the Dance-
Hall”, American Mercury 2 (June 1924): 181; G.T.W. Patrick, “The Play of a Nation”, Scientific
Monthly 13 (October 1921): 357–8; John R. McMahon, “Toddling to the Pit by the Jazz Route”,
Ladies’ Home Journal 38 (November 1921): 13.
61. “Permit Charleston”, Sheboygan (WI) Press, 10 November 1926, 8. For background
on St Vitus and his ‘dance’ (known formally as Sydenham’s chorea), see John Waller, The
Dancing Plague: The Strange, True Story of an Extraordinary Illness [2008] (Naperville, IL:
Sourcebooks, Inc., 2009), esp. 88–93, 184–5.
63. “Jazz is Fatal”, Piqua (OH) Daily Call and Piqua Press-Dispatch, 2 January 1925, 1.
64. Emily C. Davis, “Modern ‘David’ Treats Ills with Music”, Science News-Letter, 2
November 1929, 271.
65. Examples and quote from Vescelius, “Music and Health”, 376. For more on the early
links between music and medicine, see Kennaway, “From Sensibility to Pathology”, esp. 397,
399–405; also Agnes Savill, Music, Health and Character (London: John Lane the Bodley
Head Limited, 1923), 150–8.
66. Vescelius, “Music and Health”, 376. See also Isa Maud Ilsen, “Music’s New Vocation”,
American Journal of Nursing 25 (December 1925): 981–2, for lack of systematic research;
Savill, “Music and Medicine”, 285–7, for some examples of what research was being done.
The closest scholar of the development of music therapy in the United States, William B. Davis,
found just nine articles on music therapy in American medical journals during the nineteenth
century, for example, and only a couple of those were based on any actual experimentation;
see William B. Davis, “Music Therapy in 19th Century America”, Journal of Music Therapy
24 (Spring 1987): 76–87. For more on the early history of music therapy see William B. Davis
and Kate E. Gfeller, “Music Therapy: An Historical Perspective”, in An Introduction to Music
Therapy: Theory and Practice, 2nd ed., edited by Davis, Gfeller, and Michael H. Thaut (New
York: McGraw-Hill, 1999), 17–34.
67. For music therapy and shell shock see, e.g., William B. Davis, “Keeping the Dream
Alive: Profiles of Three Early Twentieth Century Music Therapists”, Journal of Music Therapy
30 (Spring 1993): 41; also Fred W. Mott, “Music Therapy” in Correspondence, British Medical
Journal 2, no. 3065 (27 September 1919): 424 [citing his own and similar research at Columbia
University].
68. “Fiddle and Banjo to Replace Pills”, Ironwood (MI) Daily Globe, 30 April 1920, 16;
“Experiments Show Music as Healer”, Ogden (UT) Standard-Examiner, 16 November 1924,
sect. 2, p. 4; Davis, “Keeping the Dream Alive”, 37–9.
69. Important books on the health-giving aspects of music published during the 1920s
include: Harriet Ayer Seymour, What Music Can Do for You (New York: Harper & Brothers,
1920); Savill, Music, Health and Character (1923); Willem van de Wall, The Utilization of
Music in Prisons and Mental Hospitals (New York: National Bureau for the Advancement of
Music, 1924).
70. “Experiments Show Music as Healer”, Ogden (UT) Standard-Examiner, 16 November
1924, sect. 2, p. 4; van de Wall, Utilization of Music, esp. 13–58; van de Wall, “Music in
the Treatment of Retarded Children”, Music Supervisors’ Journal 14 (May 1928): 49; Davis,
“Modern ‘David’”, 269–71; “Music as Aid in Welfare Institutions”, Titusville (PA) Herald, 13
January 1932, 8.
71. “‘Organized Music’ Urged as Cure”, New York Times, 19 September 1926, sect. 9, p. 10
[quote]; Ilsen, “Music’s New Vocation”, 982–4; “Fiddle and Banjo to Replace Pills”, Ironwood
(MI) Daily Globe, 30 April 1920, 16; “More of Music’s Charms”, Waterloo (IA) Evening
Courier, 6 November 1926, 4; “Says Music is Cure for Sickness”, Bakersfield Californian, 3
August 1928, 7; also Davis, “Keeping the Dream Alive”, 37–40.

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72. Van de Wall, Utilization of Music, 19.
73. “‘Organized Music’ Urged as Cure”, New York Times, 19 September 1926, sect. 9, p.
10.
74. Steve Richards (UP), “‘Vaccination’ by Music Held Cure for Crime”, Oakland Tribune,
26 June 1935, 4.
75. Willem van de Wall was an exception. After years of deflecting questions about the
therapeutic possibilities of jazz, in the mid 1930s he allowed that jazz had ‘a legitimate place’ in
music therapy—but only if other invigorating music had failed to produce a result and if proper
supervision was provided. Willem van de Wall, Music in Institutions (New York: Russell Sage
Foundation, 1936), 179.
77. Quotes from “‘Organized Music’, Urged as Cure”, New York Times, 19 September
1926, sect. 9, p. 10; see also Ilsen, “Music’s New Vocation”, 982.
78. As quoted in Davis, “Keeping the Dream Alive”, 43.
79. For quotes, Savill, “Music and Medicine”, 287–8 [emphasis in original]; see also Savill,
Music, Health and Character, esp. 168–9, 204. For notice of Savill in the United States see,
e.g., “Music as Remedy for Diseases and Poison”, New Castle (PA) News, 16 May 1924, 10;
R.H.D., “On Musical Themes”, Oakland Tribune, 16 November 1924, 4-W.
80. F.G. Gosling, Before Freud: Neurasthenia and the American Medical Community,
1870–1910 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 83.
81. George M. Beard, American Nervousness: Its Causes and Consequences (New York:
G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1881), quotes from 96 and 9, but see also 13–14, 176, 193, 299.
82. Ibid., 10–11.
83. Gosling, Before Freud, 9. Other useful secondary literature on neurasthenia includes,
Tom Lutz, American Nervousness, 1903: An Anecdotal History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1991), esp. 3–7, 31–7, and, for a link to music (pre-jazz), 267–73; Gail Bederman,
Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–
1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), esp. 84–94.
84. Beard, American Nervousness, 106–12 [quotes from 106–7].
85. Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 85, argues neurasthenia was not taken seriously
in the medical community after about 1915; Gosling, Before Freud, 13, states that ‘By the
1920s it had been all but forgotten’.
86. “‘Girls Are Standing Jazz Age Better Than Boys’, Says Psychologist”, Albuquerque
Morning Journal, 15 May 1925, 8.
87. Robert E. Park, “Community Organization and the Romantic Temper”, Journal of
Social Forces 3, n. 4 (May 1925): 675.
88. “Expert Declares Glands to Blame for Delinquency”, Fresno (CA) Bee, 31 March 1925,
7.
89. Item from Musical Courier reprinted as “The Doctor Looks at Jazz”, Literary Digest, 3
September 1927, 29.
90. “Where Is Jazz Leading” (Part I), 520.
91. Columbus (OH) Dispatch quoted in “In the News Lanes”, Syracuse (NY) Herald, 20
February 1924, 8; for a similar comment from Agnes Savill, see Charles A. Smith, “Says
Modern Society Girl ‘All In’ at 20”, Sandusky (OH) Register, 10 December 1922, sect. 2, p.
10. For the supposed finite nature of nerve-force see, e.g., Beard, American Nervousness, 9–11,
98–9; also Gosling, Before Freud, 85–9.
92. For evolving understandings of shell shock see F.W. Mott, “The Chadwick Lecture
on Mental Hygiene and Shell Shock During and After the War”, British Medical Journal 2,
no. 2950 (14 July 1917): 39–42; G. Stanley Hall, “Some Relations Between the War and
Psychology”, American Journal of Psychology 30 (April 1919): 218; Sándor Ferenczi, et al.,
Psycho-Analysis and the War Neuroses (London: The International Psycho-Analytical Press,
1921), esp. 47, 52, 54, 56–8; Frederick Dillon, “Neuroses Among Combatant Troops in the
Great War”, British Medical Journal 2, no. 4096 (8 July 1939): 63–6; Eric Leed, “Fateful
Memories: Industrialized War and Traumatic Neuroses”, Journal of Contemporary History 35
(January 2000): 85–100.
93. Sources on battlefield noise include: T.J. Salmon and F.J. Salmon, “The Voice of the
Guns”, Lotus Magazine 8 (November 1916): 55–8 [uses all the terms quoted in the text, except

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‘thunder’]; Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front (1929; New York: Fawcett
Crest Books, 1975), esp. 53–54 [‘vibrating, shuddering air’] and 57 [‘thunder’] but also 52,
58–9, 100–2 for similar descriptions; “Badgers in the Great Adventure”, Wisconsin Magazine
of History 2 (December 1918): 190 [‘shriek’], 191 [‘noise’].
94. For ‘noise’ description see, e.g., “What’s the Matter with Jazz?” The Etude 41 (January
1924): 6; “Jazz Music Now is Passing, Wisconsin Music Expert Says”, Capital Times (Madison,
WI), 16 February 1923, 11; “Now We Like Hawaii”, Lima (OH) News, 30 July 1925, 6.
95. Quoted in Henry Osborne Osgood, “Jazz”, American Speech 1 (July 1926): 513–14.
96. “What’s the Matter with Jazz”, 6.
97. “Jazz Music Now is Passing, Wisconsin Music Expert Says”, Capital Times (Madison,
WI), 16 February 1923, 11.
98. Leonard, “Traditionalist Opposition”, 85 [quoting music critic Sigmund Spaeth].
99. “Hip Pocket Gin Blamed”, Nebraska State Journal (Lincoln), 19 January 1925, 3; “Safe
Rules for Modern Girl”, Jefferson City (MO) Post-Tribune, 5 November 1931, 4.
100. “Civilization Shock”, Saturday Evening Post, 11 June 1921, 20.
101. Dillon, “Neuroses Among Combatant Troops”, 65.
102. See, e.g., Ferenczi, et al., Psycho-Analysis, esp. 14–16, 18–20, 38–9; George L.
Mosse, “Shell-Shock as a Social Disease”, Journal of Contemporary History 35 (January
2000): 106.
103. Elliott quoted in “Too Much Dancing May Be Hard on Nerves”, Monessen (PA)
Independent, 5 July 1929, 4.
104. Mason, “Satan in the Dance-Hall”, 179.
105. Leonard, “Traditionalist Opposition”, 90 [Milwaukee health commissioner].
106. Laubenstein, “Jazz—Debit and Credit”, 614.
107. Amy Leigh Wilson, “A Unifying Anthem or Path to Degradation?: The Jazz Influence
in American Property Law”, Alabama Law Review 55 (Winter 2004): 439 [quotes Illinois
Supreme Court in Phelps v. Winch].
108. Ford (from 1921) quoted in Roderick W. Nash, The Nervous Generation: American
Thought, 1917–1930 (1970; Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks, 1990), 162.
109. Eliot quoted in W.F. Webster, “Music and the Sacred Seven”, Music Supervisors’
Journal 13 (May 1927): 39.
110. Canadian Bureau quoted in “Mind Trained by Musical Study”, Ogden (UT) Standard-
Examiner, 18 November 1923, sect. 2, p. 8.
111. Webster, “Music and the Sacred Seven”, 39. For more on mind training and music,
see Vescelius, “Music and Health”, 394–9.
112. Quoted in Ogren, Jazz Revolution, 157.
113. Leonard, “Traditionalist Opposition”, 89. For more on jazz not boosting intelligence
and jazz musicians not needing to read music see, e.g., Clive Bell, “Plus de Jazz”, New
Republic, 21 September 1921, 93; “Where Jazz Differs from Grand Opera”, Modesto (CA)
News-Herald, 15 May 1927, 20; Walter Spry, “What Effect Has Jazz Upon Present Day Music
and Composers?” The Etude 45 (June 1927): 420.
114. “Too Much Dancing May Be Hard on Nerves”, Monessen (PA) Independent, 5 July
1929, 4.
115. Faulkner, “Does Jazz Put”, n.p.
116. Cited in Whiteman and McBride, Jazz, 140.
117. Leonard, “Traditionalist Opposition”, 88 [quoted from 1923].
118. “Is Jazz the Pilot of Disaster?” The Etude 42 (January 1925): 6–7.
119. “Mayor of Wilkes-Barre Would Put Ban on Jazz”, Wisconsin Rapids Daily Tribune,
27 August 1924, 8.
120. “Tired of Intolerance”, Coshocton (OH) Tribune, 25 September 1924, 6.
121. “Jazzy Dancing Less Popular”, Ogden (UT) Standard-Examiner, 17 August 1923, 2,
asserts that ‘virtually every dance hall in America’ had banned jazz. For specific examples, see
Mason, “Satan in the Dance-Hall”, 181–2; Leonard, “Traditionalist Opposition”, 91.
122. “Comment on Recent Cases”, California Law Review 9 (May 1921): 343–5.
123. Ibid.; “Blue Laws at Pasadena”, Perry (IA) Daily Chief, 23 April 1920, 1.
124. Quote from “A Doctor on Jazz”, Helena (MT) Daily Independent, 8 September 1927,
4.

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125. As quoted in Milton ‘Mezz’ Mezzrow and Bernard Wolfe, Really the Blues (1946;
New York: New American Library, 1964), 100.
126. Whiteman and McBride, Jazz, 153.
127. See, e.g., Henry T. Finck, “Jazz—Lowbrow and Highbrow”, The Etude 42 (August
1924): 528.
128. “Rudolph Ganz Again”, 34. See Straus, “Normalizing the Abnormal”, 113–84, for a
more complete discussion of disability in classical compositions.
129. As quoted in Finck, “Jazz—Lowbrow and Highbrow”, 528; see also Whiteman and
McBride, Jazz, 210.
130. See also Paul Whiteman, “What Is Jazz Doing to American Music?” The Etude 42
(August 1924): 524; Schuller, Early Jazz, 192, n. 21, for Whiteman’s talented musicians. For
more on the skill and sophistication to be found in jazz, see two articles by Edmonton music
teacher Ronald Cunliffe: “The Jazz-Mad Pupil—II”, Music Teacher 8 (July 1929): 383–4; and
“The Jazz-Mad Pupil—III”, Music Teacher 8 (August 1929): 433–5.
131. ‘Jelly Roll’ Morton advertisement, Uniontown (PA) Morning Herald, 15 July 1927,
1.
132. Duke Ellington, “Jazz Convulsions”, 1929, performed by The Duke Ellington
Orchestra (as The Jungle Band) on Early Ellington: The Complete Brunswick and Vocalion
Recordings of Duke Ellington, 1926–1931, disk 2 (New York: Verve Music Group, 1994).
133. Johnny Hodges, “Goin’ Nuts”, 1929, performed by The Duke Ellington Orchestra (as
The Six Jolly Jesters), with Harold Randolph (vocal) on Ibid.
134. Milton Ager, Jack Yellen, and Paul F. Van Loan, “Crazy Words, Crazy Tune”, 1927,
performed by Fred Rich and his Hotel Astor Orchestra, with Johnny Marvin (vocal) on The
Charleston Era, AJA 5342 (London: ASV Ltd, 2000).
135. Perry Bradford, “Crazy Blues”, 1920, performed by Mamie Smith and her Jazz
Hounds on Hits of ’21: Ain’t We Got Fun? AJA 5521 (London: ASV Ltd, 2003)—see liner
notes with Hits of ’21 for sales of “Crazy Blues”.
136. Irving Caesar, Joseph Meyer, and Roger Wolfe Kahn, “Crazy Rhythm”, 1928,
performed by Carroll Gibbons and the New Mayfair Dance Orchestra, with Whispering Jack
Smith (vocal) on The Charleston Era.
137. For the positive influence of jazz on music appreciation see, e.g., Whiteman, “What
Is Jazz Doing”, 524; Finck, “Jazz—Lowbrow and Highbrow”, 528; Ronald Cunliffe, “The
Jazz-Mad Pupil—I”, Music Teacher 8 (June 1929): 331–2. For a discussion of jazz within the
high-brow/low-brow split, see Lawrence W. Levine, “Jazz and American Culture”, Journal of
American Folklore 102 (January–March 1989): 6–22.
138. Henry Busse, Buster Johnson, and Gus Mueller, “The Wang Wang Blues”, 1920,
performed by Paul Whiteman and his Ambassador Orchestra on Hits of ’21; Busse, Johnson,
Mueller, “The Wang Wang Blues”, 1930, performed by (Duke Ellington and) The Jungle Band,
Brunswick 6003 (New York: Brunswick Records, 1930).
139. Edward Elzear (‘Zez’) Confrey, “Kitten on the Keys”, 1921, performed by Zez
Confrey and his Orchestra on Zez Confrey: Creator of the Novelty Rag, compliled by David A.
Jasen, RF 28 (New York: Folkways Records, 1976).
140. Archie Gottler, “Oogie Oogie Wa Wa”, 1922, performed by the Benson Orchestra
of Chicago, online at National Jukebox, Library of Congress, http://www.loc.gov/jukebox/
recordings/detail/id/8914 (accessed 20 May 2011).
141. Mueller-Potter Drug Company advertisement, Oshkosh (WI) Daily Northwestern, 10
January 1925, 7 [selling ‘Prince of Wails’, recorded by Fletcher Henderson’s Orchestra].
142. Duke Ellington and Irving Mills, “Wall Street Wail”, 1929, performed by The Duke
Ellington Orchestra (as The Jungle Band) on Early Ellington, disk 2.
143. Ager, Yellen, and Van Loan, “Crazy Words, Crazy Tune”.
144. Nat Vincent, Billy Frisch, and Billy Hueston, “Jimbo-Jambo”, 1922, performed by
Billy Murray on Hits of ’22: Do It Again! AJA 5522 (London: ASV Ltd, 2003).
145. “Doo Wacka Doo”, 1924, performed by the Paul Whiteman Orchestra with Billy
Murray, online at National Jukebox, http://www.loc.gov/jukebox/recordings/detail/id/10037
(accessed 20 May 2011).
146. For “Heebie Jeebies” see Neil Leonard, Jazz and the White Americans (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1962), 63; also Schuller, Early Jazz, 98–9, 109.

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147. Fox quoted in Schuller, Early Jazz, 355.

148. “Dancing Develops Pretty Backs—Whitman [sic]”, Ogden (UT) Standard-Examiner,
18 November 1923, sect. 2, p. 8.
149. “No—And Then Again Yes”, Sheboygan (WI) Press, 7 January 1926, 6; see also Bee
Jackson, “Hey! Hey! Charleston!” Collier’s Weekly, 10 December 1927, 12, 34.
150. “Jazz Dance Builds Healthy Race, Paul Whiteman Tells Flappers”, Wisconsin Rapids
Daily Tribune, 3 March 1925, 7.
151. Whiteman and McBride, Jazz, 295.
152. See, e.g., Alma Sioux Scarberry, “The Prince of Jazz”, Hamilton (OH) Evening
Journal, 14 May 1930, 8.
153. “Music that Creates Moods Hope of Radio Band Pioneer”, Fairbanks (AK) Daily
News-Miner, 16 January 1930, 6.
154. Laubenstein, “Jazz—Debit and Credit”, 610, quoting unnamed sources.
155. “The Musical Doctor”, Ogden (UT) Standard-Examiner, 2 June 1922, 4.
156. Historians of eugenics stress that the ideas had real scientific credibility in the United
States as late as the early 1930s and that contrary to what might be assumed these ideas found
support across the political spectrum. For a good, brief introduction to American eugenics see
Diane B. Paul, Controlling Human Heredity: 1865 to the Present (Atlantic Highlands, NJ:
Humanities Press International, Inc., 1995); for a look at the historiography, Frank Dikötter,
“Race Culture: Recent Perspectives on the History of Eugenics”, American Historical Review
103 (April 1998): 467–78; more recent additions to the literature include, Edwin Black, War
Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Plan to Create a Master Race (New York: Four
Walls Eight Windows, 2003); Alexandra Minna Stern, Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers
of Better Breeding in Modern America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
157. Lothrop Stoddard, The Revolt against Civilization: The Menace of the Under Man
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1922), 253. See also, e.g., Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill
Johnson, Applied Eugenics (1918; New York: The Macmillan Company, 1922), 227; Herman
Lundborg, “Race Biological Perspectives”, Social Forces 9 (March 1931): 399.
158. See especially Martin S. Pernick, “Defining the Defective: Eugenics, Aesthetics, and
Mass Culture in Early-Twentieth-Century America”, in The Body and Physical Difference,
edited by David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1997), 89–110; Pernick, The Black Stork: Eugenics and the Death of ‘Defective’ Babies in
American Medicine and Motion Pictures Since 1915 (New York: Oxford University Press,
1996).
159. Albert Edward Wiggam, The Fruit of the Family Tree (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-
Merrill Company, 1924), 262–79 [quotes from 278–9].
160. For eugenics, Lamarckism, and the improvement of individuals see, e.g., Ibid.,
63–84, 330–52; Stoddard, Revolt against Civilization, 34–48; Lundborg, “Race Biological
Perspectives”, 398–9.
161. See, e.g., Susan L. Smith, Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired: Black Women’s
Health Activism in America, 1890–1950 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1995); Julian B. Carter, The Heart of Whiteness: Normal Sexuality and Race in America,
1880–1940 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).
162. See, e.g., Baynton, “Disability and the Justification for Inequality”, 37–41; Winthrop
D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1968), esp. 436–57; George M. Fredrickson, The Black
Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914
(New York: Harper and Row, 1971), esp. 46–51, 60–4, 74–96. For continuing racism in the
1920s see, e.g., Paul L. Murphy, “The Sources and Nature of Intolerance in the 1920s”, Journal
of American History 51 (June 1964): 60–76; Kevin Boyle, Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil
Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2004).
163. For the influences affecting jazz in the 1920s see, e.g., Henrietta Straus, “Jazz and
‘The Rhapsody in Blue’”, Nation, 5 March 1924, 263; Isaac Goldberg, “Aaron Copland and
His Jazz”, American Mercury 12 (September 1927): 63–5; Herbert A. Miller, “A Program for
Institutions of University Rank”, Advocate of Peace through Justice 90 (September 1928):
549. In the secondary literature, see Sargeant, Jazz, Hot and Hybrid, esp. 111–220; Magee,
“‘Everybody Step’”, 724–8.

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164. In addition to familiar categories based on skin colour, in the early twentieth century
essentially every ethnic group or nationality (particularly European ones) was thought to
constitute a ‘race’. The various European races were typically arrayed for analysis in three
broad groups (in order of perceived eugenic value): Nordics (northern Europeans), Alpines
(from central and eastern Europe), and Mediterraneans (southern Europeans). For examples
from the 1920s see, e.g., Gertrude Atherton, “The Alpine School of Fiction”, Bookman 55
(March 1922): 26–33, who uncritically accepts the distinction; Harry Elmer Barnes, “The
Race Myth Crumbles”, Nation, 6 May 1925, 515–17, ridicules views like Atherton’s. For a
more complete discussion of the expansive understandings of race in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, David R. Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s
Immigrants Became White (New York: Basic Books, 2005), esp. 3–92.
165. For an academic view of European races, Kimball Young, “Intelligence Tests of
Certain Immigrant Groups”, Scientific Monthly 15 (November 1922): 417, n. 2; in the secondary
literature, see Desmond King, Making Americans: Immigration, Race, and the Origins of the
Diverse Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), esp. 173–218.
166. Wiggam, Fruit of the Family Tree, 262.
167. Stoddard, Revolt against Civilization, 88.
168. Harry H. Laughlin, “Analysis of America’s Modern Melting Pot”, hearings before the
Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, House of Representatives, 67th Congress, 3rd
Session, 21 November 1922, 730.
169. Wiggam, Fruit of the Family Tree, 7.
170. For argument about immigrants filling prisons and other institutions, see Laughlin,
“Analysis of America’s Modern Melting Pot”, passim.
171. E.g., “Why They Say Jazz is Here to Stay”, Atchison (KS) Daily Globe, 18 May 1924,
8.
172. E.g., advert. for Lillian Eichler, The Customs of Mankind (1924) in American Legion
Weekly, 27 March 1925, 15.
173. E.g., “A Doctor on Jazz”, Helena (MT) Daily Independent, 8 September 1927, 4.
174. Stoddard, Revolt against Civilization, 136–40 [quote from 137].
175. Faulkner, “Does Jazz Put”, n.p.
176. “Where Is Jazz Leading” (Part I), 518.
177. “‘Jazz Goes Back to the Jungle’”, New Castle (PA) News, 9 February 1922, 11. See
also “Warns White Races They Must Drop Jazz”, New York Times, 20 September 1927, 4.
178. Michael F. Guyer, “The Researcher in Science”, Scientific Monthly 13 (December
1921): 551; Michael F. Guyer, Being Well-Born: An Introduction to Eugenics (Indianapolis:
The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1916). For development of the saxophone see, e.g., Frankenstein,
Syncopating Saxophones, 52–60.
179. Goldberg, “Aaron Copland and His Jazz”, 63.
180. C.B. Davenport, “The Effects of Race Intermingling”, Proceedings of the American
Philosophical Society 56, no. 4 (1917): 367. For race theories, eugenics, and the criticism of
hybridity among humans see, e.g., Guyer, Being Well-Born, 296–9; Carl C. Brigham, A Study
of American Intelligence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1923), 205–10.
181. “American Jazz Is Not African”, New York Times, 19 September 1926, sect. 10, p.
8.
182. “Jazz”, Galveston (TX) Daily News, 28 May 1922, 24.
183. Schuller, Early Jazz, 343–44, mentions Ellington’s ‘jungle’ songs.
184. As quoted in Rogers, “Jazz at Home”, 667.
185. E.B. Reuter, “Civilization and the Mixture of Races”, Scientific Monthly 31 (November
1930): 442–9, 448–9.
186. As quoted in “Why They Say Jazz is Here to Stay”, Atchison (KS) Daily Globe,
18 May 1924, 8. See also “Clinical Notes”, American Mercury 5 (May 1925): 97, for more
from Stokowski. Otto Kahn, chair of the board of directors of New York’s Metropolitan Opera
Company, was another individual prominent in non-jazz music circles who stressed jazz’s
positive contribution to the improvement of music: see, e.g., “Why Mongrelize?” Decatur (IL)
Review, 23 August 1925, 6; “Sharps and Flats”, The Musical Times, 1 June 1925, 540.
187. Reeve quoted in “The Usefulness of Jazz”, Hamilton (OH) Evening Journal, 31
December 1926, 6.

38.129.136.150 on Tue, 05 F on Thu, 01 Jan 1976 12:34:56 UTC
188. Franz Boas, “The Question of Racial Purity”, American Mercury 3 (October 1924):
163–69, esp. 167.
189. In his discussion of jazz criticism, Lewis Erenberg notes that the first specifically jazz
magazines in the United States did not appear until the 1930s. Only then did jazz proponents
control outlets in which they could express their opinions. This may explain at least some of
the limited numbers of positive reactions to jazz in the 1920s, at least in print sources. Lewis
Erenberg, Swingin’ the Dream: Big Band Jazz and the Rebirth of American Culture (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1998), xiv.
190. Paul Whiteman, “In Defense of Jazz and Its Makers”, New York Times, 13 March
1927, sect. 4, p. 4.
191. Whiteman and McBride, Jazz, 17, 33.
192. Rogers, “Jazz at Home”, 665.
193. Ibid., 665, 667.
194. Ibid., 666.
195. Ibid., 667.
196. Carl Engel, “Views and Reviews”, Musical Quarterly 8 (October 1922): 626. See also
the similar opinions of Vincent Lopez and composer Charles Wakefield Cadman in “Where Is
Jazz Leading” (Part I), 520, 518; and novelist Booth Tarkington and vaudevillian Fred Stone in
“Where Is Jazz Leading” (Part II), 595, 596.
197. Columbia Records advertisement, La Crosse (WI) Tribune and Leader-Press, 10
February 1920, 10.
198. Henri-Jacques Stiker, A History of Disability, translated by William Sayers (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), esp. 121–50 [quote from 121].
199. In the United States, e.g., the rehabilitation law for soldiers, the Smith-Sears Act
of 1918, was followed in 1920 by the Smith-Fess Act, extending the perceived benefits of
rehabilitation to the civilian disabled; see C. Esco Obermann, A History of Vocational
Rehabilitation in America (Minneapolis: T.S. Denison and Co., 1965), esp. 147–74, 211–69,
for rehabilitation legislation and programmes in the United States during and after World War
I.
200. Assessing rehabilitation programmes goes beyond the scope of this essay, but for
a recent critique of rehabilitation, especially its emphasis on economic productivity, see
Ana Carden-Coyne, “Ungrateful Bodies: Rehabilitation, Resistance and Disabled American
Veterans of the First World War”, European Review of History: Revue Européenne d’Histoire
14 (December 2007): 543–65.
201. “What’s the Matter with Jazz”, 6.
202. Stringham, “‘Jazz’—An Educational Problem”, 195.
203. “Jazz Not Monster, Says Paul Whiteman”, Kingsport (TN) Times, 27 August 1925,
6.
204. Rogers, “Jazz at Home”, 667.
205. See, e.g., Leonard, “Traditionalist Opposition”, 85 [Sousa and Spaeth anti-jazz];
“Where Is Jazz Leading” (Part I), 520 [Sousa pro-jazz]; “Jazz Borrows Old Melodies”, Ogden
(UT) Standard-Examiner, 28 November 1923, 10 [Spaeth pro-jazz]; “Where Is Jazz Leading”
(Part I), 518 [Gilbert anti-jazz] and—within the same expression of opinion—520 [Gilbert pro-
jazz].
206. Carney, Cuttin’ Up, 175, n. 31. See also Hansen, “Social Influences”, 498–99; and
Carney, 63–7, for a more complete discussion of Peyton’s complex opinions about jazz.

38.129.136.150 on Tue, 05 Feb 2019 17:36:09 UTC

Disease Is Unrhythmical

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'Disease Is Unrhythmical': Jazz, Health, and Disability in 1920s America

Author(s): Russell L. Johnson

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The 1920s in the United States are commonly

We are organized vibrations. The object of all cures is to change

—Eva Augusta Vescelius (d. 1917),

In early 1926, the Salvation Army in Cincinnati, Ohio sued to prevent

Health & History, 2011. 13/2 13

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The jazz of the Jazz Age

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and the widespread availability of phonographs and records allowed

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Jazz: Disabled as music and disabling in its effects

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Other voices within the music industry echoed Galli-Curci’s view.

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mental sufferers with beautiful music’.74

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battlefield. Examples included ‘a riot of discord’,96 a combination

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1920 made dancing or playing dance music of any kind, anywhere—

Jazz revitalises music and reinvigorates the body

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In reality, jazz proponents believed that people’s interest in jazz

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valued. Since the advent of Africans in America, white Americans,

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anthropologist Franz Boas, one of the leading voices challenging

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halls, and books were filled with descriptions of jazz as defective

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Times, 13 March 1927, sect. 4, p. 4 [‘disease’]; Edwin J. Stringham, “‘Jazz’—An Educational

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147. Fox quoted in Schuller, Early Jazz, 355.

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