Post-War Chicago:
The Cradle of Jazz
Jazz music was not born in Chicago. However, in the decades surrounding World War I, the Windy City rapidly became the jazz capital of the United States. Jazz began moving into Chicago before WWI, but its wholesale migration to the Midwest was expedited by the “Great Migration” of African-Americans from the South after the war. Against an urban backdrop fraught with economic and racial tensions, jazz music took hold in Chicago in the post-WWI era.
The touring show "Elk's Minstrel" was an example of the jobs in the entertainment industry available to African-Americans in the pre-war and pre-jazz period.
Before WWI, African-Americans typically only had job opportunities performing manual labor and in the music entertainment industry. According to accepted lore, jazz began in the dance halls of New Orleans.[1] Starting around 1915, the impact of the post-war economy on the Southern labor market caused many African Americans to seek employment elsewhere in the country as part of the Great Migration.[3] Due to increased factory production in the North, a European immigration shortage, and a wartime labor shortage, slaughterhouses and factories in industrialized Chicago actively recruited Southern, nonunionized African Americans.[3] The demand was so high that between 1910 and 1920, the number of African Americans in Chicago increased by 148 percent.[4] This influx of new workers had money to spend on entertainment, resulting in numerous “cabarets, nightclubs, dance halls, and theaters” opening in Chicago.[5] In turn, this also created job opportunities for African-Americans in the North as musicians and entertainers. Historical data from the period suggests that about 86 percent of the southern-born African-American jazz musicians of the period moved to the North “in the four decades preceding World War II.”[6] The influx of jazz musicians to Chicago during the WWI era – most of whom were from the New Orleans jazz scene – created a competitive atmosphere among the major players, changing and shaping the style of jazz music.[7] Thus, Chicago evolved into the cradle of jazz.
The Jazz Economy
The early jazz musician migration began during the war. King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band moved from New Orleans to Chicago during this period and was a major influence on the early jazz movement.[8] Before the group settled in Chicago in 1918 and become a prime commodity in the 1920s, King Oliver’s band toured the country on multiple vaudeville circuits.[9]
After touring the country for a few years, King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band made its name in Chicago.
The transitory life of playing pop-up clubs around the country was soon supplanted for many of the most noted jazz musicians of the era when a rich jazz culture developed in Chicago. While this allowed musicians to stay in one place for long periods of time, it meant that the jazz economy could not be solely reliant on African-American patronage any longer.
The burgeoning Chicago jazz scene of the late 1910s did not exist in a bubble. The economic impact of WWI on white Chicagoans had a lasting impact on the jazz movement in general. As jazz became a prominent fixture in Chicago after the war, two prominent jazz and nightlife districts evolved: “The Stroll” on South State Street and the infamous “Vice District.”[10] The Vice District was named for its “500 saloons, 6 variety theaters, 1000 ‘concert halls,’ 15 gambling houses, 56 pool rooms, and 500 bordellos housing 3000 female workers.”'11] Eventually, the Vice District expanded and moved further toward the south of the city as its profitability increased.[12] While the establishments in these areas were initially aimed at African-American consumers, white Northerners wanted in on the action too. As a result, “black-and-tan” cafes were created.[13] These cabarets existed almost exclusively within the African-American-dominated South Side of the city, featured African-American performers, and catered to both white and African-American clientele.[14] Customers could interact in a friendly manner with each other inside of these cabarets in a way which was otherwise frowned upon in the outside world.[15]
The popularity of the music developed a “jazz economy” that created a fertile ground for entrepreneurs of both races to open their own cabarets and take advantage of tourism and local dollars.[16] The more a club catered to white clientele, the more profitable it became. The smallest clubs were owned by African-Americans and catered predominantly to African-American customers.[17] Most cabarets of this type were mid-sized and tried to cater to both races equally.[18]
One of the most celebrated cabarets of the period was the African-American-owned “Dreamland Café.”[19] William Bottoms took ownership of the club in May of 1917.[20] Under his management, the club attracted noted jazz legends like King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band. Cornetist and future bandleader Louis Armstrong was part of King Oliver’s band at the time.[21] Armstrong's draft card can be seen to the right. However, the largest and most profitable “black-and-tans” were owned by white Chicagoans and catered almost exclusively to white audiences.[22] Although in policy Chicago-based “black-and-tan” cabarets did not specifically exclude African-American patrons (until 1928), clubs like the Sunset Café implicitly excluded most South Side residents due to their exorbitant ticket prices.[23]
Louis Armstrong registered for the draft a few months before the war ended.
Racial Divide
The division between the races was political as well as economic. Despite general facade of cordiality inside integrated jazz clubs, inherent racial tensions of the era greatly influenced the style and feel of the growing jazz movement. On the one side were musicians like Tony Jackson, who made a name for himself at Chicago’s Pekin Theater. Jackson said that Chicago gave him “freedom.”[24] The competition between white and African American jazz musicians also had impacts. African-American musicians were not the only ones to move to Chicago from New Orleans. White musicians like Bert Kelly soon followed to the Windy City, hoping to make their names as well.[25] However, there was also the extreme violence of the Chicago race riots in 1919. Mobs of white Chicagoans roved the city on foot and by car during that summer.[26] They bludgeoned people with bats, rocks, and fists and left their victims beaten, bloodied, and often dead.[27] The riots were a reaction to a general national atmosphere of tension and the specific population growth resulting from the Great Migration with its significant influx of African-Americans to Chicago’s industrial labor force in the late 1910s.[28]
The violence and racism of the era stood in stark contrast to the image presented by the crowded “black-and-tan” cabarets. The juxtaposition of overt racial tensions and superficial harmony in the clubs is even more striking when one considers that a teenaged Louis Armstrong was so strongly patriotic that he lied about his birth year on his draft card.[29] The war ended before he could be drafted early. His card remains an artifact that demonstrates the understandable bitterness he might have felt toward U.S. society at that time did obviate his desire to serve his country. He even claimed his birth date was July 4 in a further display of his patriotism. [30]
In Sum:
Jazz may have begun in New Orleans, but much of its history was shaped, recorded, sparked, and expanded in Chicago. The economic and racial tensions created by World War I in the country, and particularly in Chicago, had everlasting impacts on the evolution of jazz.
Created By Natalie Watts
END NOTES
[1] Joseph Gustaitis, Chicago Transformed: World War I and the Windy City (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2016), 206.
[2] Gustaitis, Chicago Transformed: World War I and the Windy City, 207.
[3] William Howland Kenney, Chicago Jazz: A Cultural History, 1904-1930 (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 12.
[4] Kenney, Chicago Jazz: A Cultural History, 1904-1930, 12.
[5] Gustaitis, Chicago Transformed: World War I and the Windy City, 207.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Gustaitis, Chicago Transformed: World War I and the Windy City, 207, 209.
[8] Kenney, Chicago Jazz: A Cultural History, 1904-1930, 12.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Kenney, Chicago Jazz: A Cultural History, 1904-1930, 14.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Kenney, Chicago Jazz: A Cultural History, 1904-1930, 16.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Kenney, Chicago Jazz: A Cultural History, 1904-1930, 17.
[16] Kenney, Chicago Jazz: A Cultural History, 1904-1930, 18.
[17] Kenney, Chicago Jazz: A Cultural History, 1904-1930, 17.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Kenney, Chicago Jazz: A Cultural History, 1904-1930, 18.
[20] Ibid.
[21] Ibid.
[22] Kenney, Chicago Jazz: A Cultural History, 1904-1930, 17.
[23] Ibid.
[24] Gustaitis, Chicago Transformed: World War I and the Windy City, 211.
[25] Gustaitis, Chicago Transformed: World War I and the Windy City, 218.
[26] William M. Tuttle, Jr., Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919 (Urbana/Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 32-66.
[27] Tuttle, Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919, 37, 40-41.
[28] Tuttle, Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919, 66.
[29] War Department, Office of the Provost Marshal General, World War I Draft Registration Card for Louis Armstrong (Selective Service System, National Archives Catalog, ID 596218, 1918). https://catalog.archives.gov/id/596218.
[30] Ibid.
Images
[1] Edwards & Deutsch Litho. Co., and Elks. Elk’s minstrel performance given by Chicago Lodge No. 4, B.P.O.E., 1910. Chicago: Edwards & Deutsch Litho. Co. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2014635572/.
[2] Perret, Etienne. King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band. Cir. 1923. The Frank Driggs Collection, Stanford Libraries. March, 2018. http://riverwalkjazz.stanford.edu/program/sobbin-blues-joe-oliver-new-orleans-trumpet-king.
[3] War Department, Office of the Provost Marshal General. World War I Draft Registration Card for Louis Armstrong. September, 1918. Selective Service System, National Archives Catalog, 596218. March, 2018. https://catalog.archives.gov/id/596218.