Its piano comes from the tradition of ragtime, the musical form that directly proceeded jazz.
Livery Stable Blues also helps answer the question ‘What is jazz?’ by pointing to its roots. The song is structured around three chords and into 12 bars, like virtually all blues songs emerging from the African-American tradition. Its barnyard sounds connect it to the setting of the work songs black field labourers would sing. Its habanera beat, common to so much of jazz, reflects the influence of bouncy Caribbean melodies on New Orleans music – there were several ferries arriving in New Orleans from Havana every day in the early 20th Century. Its repetition indicates the call-and-response tradition of black Baptist churches. The clarinet, cornet and trombone in its arrangement reflect the influence of march music, which was wildly popular in New Orleans during and after the Civil War and resulted in an excess of brass and woodwind instruments floating around the city for would-be musicians to play. Its piano comes from the tradition of ragtime, the musical form that directly proceeded jazz. And its sense of humour comes from minstrelsy, the tradition of parodying opera and operettas and poking fun, often most insensitively, at the racial divide between white and black. Minstrelsy most commonly featured white musicians in blackface projecting their own cartoonish idea of what it meant to be black – and it was by far the most popular form of music in the US from 1840 to 1920. But while minstrelsy involved white Americans parodying their idea of African-Americans, many other white musicians like those of the Original Dixieland Jass Band chose to copy African-American musical traditions wholesale.