The musical DNA in Livery Stable Blues comes from black artists and shows that jazz is a fundamentally African-American music, even if an all-white band was first to record it.
The musical DNA in Livery Stable Blues comes from black artists and shows that jazz is a fundamentally African-American music, even if an all-white band was first to record it. The particular mix of African-style drumbeats and the Caribbean rhythm, found in this song but so common to jazz as a whole, points to the time from 1817 to 1843, when black slaves – some from Africa, some from the Caribbean, some from the interior of the American South – would gather on Sundays in New Orleans’ Congo Square to play music and cross-pollinate their traditions. New Orleans Creoles of colour, who were the mixed-race descendants of black and white ancestors, typically identified more with European culture than with Africa’s. After the Jim Crow laws of 1890 classified the city’s mixed-race Creoles as ‘black’, they were only allowed to play with other black musicians and this brought a greater musical fluency and technical skill to black music because many Creoles of colour were trained in classical music. Jazz emerged from this merger of forms.