[The start of a new year means my annual series on historic anniversaries. Leading up to a weekend post on some of what I’m planning for my Spring semester sabbatical!]
How a handful of influential recordings and artists reflect how much the American musical landscape was evolving and expanding in 1926.
1) The Jazz Age: I could easily have dedicated this whole post to jazz artists and recordings from 1926, as this hugely influential year featured key early works from Jelly Roll Morton and His Red Hot Peppers, Duke Ellington and His Kentucky Club Orchestra, and Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five among many others. I’m no jazz historian, but it seems to me that this was the year this new genre really began to explode.
2) A Blues pioneer: But as has always been the case with American music, the evolution of one genre also interconnects with, influences and is influenced by, inspires and is in conversation with, others. And so it’s no coincidence that in September 1926 some of the first recordings of a Blues artist were also captured—in his Chicago recordings that artist was known as Bo Weavil Jackson, in his New York ones Sam Butler, but in all of them he was charting new musical territory that was also very much in conversation with the artists featured above.
3) Aaron Copland: While Black artists were thus at the forefront of these 1926 innovations, white composers were both inspired by those trends and willing and able to take them in their own directions as well. No classical composer did so more consistently than Aaron Copland, and his 1926 composition, “Concerto for Piano and Orchestra,” features in its second movement what music critic Peter Dickinson has recently called “a crazy kind of supercharged ragtime that really upset the Boston audience … and shows how Copland exploited the jazz age to brilliant effect.” Ain’t that America?
4) The Gershwins: I’d call those the dominant trends in 1926 music, but there was plenty of other goodness happening as well of course. For example, the brothers Ira and George Gershwin composed one of their most prominent and enduring songs, “Someone to Watch Over Me”; originally written (with some help from lyricist Howard Dietz) for the Broadway musical Oh, Kay! (which premiered in November 1926), this tune has gone over to be covered by countless greats, from Frank Sinatra to Ella Fitzgerald to Willie Nelson to Amy Winehouse among its more than 1800 total recordings (to date!).
5) Bing Crosby: While it’d thus be hard to argue that a single 1926 song has been more influential than the Gershwins’s, I’d say that the first recording from one of the 20th century’s most iconic voices and entertainers has to be in the competition as well. And we got that in 1926 as well, with Don Clark and his Hotel Biltmore Orchestra’s “I’ve Got the Girl,” featuring none other than Bing Crosby (all of 22 years old) on vocals. The future of American music was heard all over the place in 1926!
Last historic anniversary tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think?
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