This series is written from published material and its byline claims method rather than credentials, so the sources are listed. They are given as books and categories of material rather than page citations; where a claim in the text is contested, the text says so at the point of the claim. In this volume that discipline matters more than anywhere else in the series, because the music’s first decades were documented almost entirely in retrospect.
Oral histories and testimony. Hear Me Talkin’ to Ya, edited by Nat Shapiro and Nat Hentoff, the standard compilation of musicians’ recollections, and the source through which many of this book’s New Orleans and Chicago voices speak. The oral-history collections gathered from surviving New Orleans musicians from the 1950s onward underlie most of what is said about the founding era. All of it is memory, collected decades late, from witnesses with reputations in play; this book has treated it as testimony, not measurement.
New Orleans and the founders. In Search of Buddy Bolden, Donald M. Marquis, the study that separated the documentable Bolden from the legend, and the model for this book’s handling of the era’s myths, including the phantom cylinder. Mister Jelly Roll, Alan Lomax, preserves Morton’s Library of Congress narrations of 1938: indispensable and unverifiable in roughly equal measure, and cited here as Morton’s own telling throughout. The Original Dixieland Jazz Band’s story is told at book length by H. O. Brunn in a study written with the band’s cooperation and sharing its slant; the 1917 copyright litigation is reported in the contemporary Chicago press.
Chicago, New York and the twenties. Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans and Armstrong’s other memoirs and letters, read as the self-portraits they are; the Armstrong biographical literature for the Oliver, Henderson and Hot Five years. Ellington’s Music Is My Mistress, plus the scholarly literature on the Mills arrangement and the Cotton Club economy. On the music itself, Gunther Schuller’s Early Jazz and The Swing Era are the technical authorities behind this book’s descriptions of arrangements and solos.
Kansas City and the Southwest. Count Basie’s autobiography Good Morning Blues (with Albert Murray), the source for the Reno Club figures, told fifty years on; Ross Russell’s Jazz Style in Kansas City and the Southwest; the Kansas City jazz literature generally for the Pendergast economy. The Cherry Blossom session of December 1933 rests on participants’ much-later accounts, principally Mary Lou Williams’s; the text says so where it tells the story.
Swing, the business and the ban. John Hammond’s memoir John Hammond on Record, the source for the W9XBY story and the Basie Decca contract figures, with his interests declared. Scott DeVeaux’s The Birth of Bebop, the indispensable economic and institutional history behind this book’s account of the recording ban, the contrafact economy and the swing-to-bop transition. Ira Gitler’s Swing to Bop for the participants’ own accounts of the Minton’s years. The union war is documented in the trade press of 1942–44 (Down Beat, Metronome, Variety, Billboard) which also supplies chart positions, disbandment reports and the December 1946 roll call.
The women. Sherrie Tucker’s Swing Shift: All-Girl Bands of the 1940s, the scholarly recovery of the Sweethearts of Rhythm and their circuit, built on interviews with surviving members; Linda Dahl’s Stormy Weather and her Mary Lou Williams biography Morning Glory; the Lil Hardin Armstrong material in the Armstrong literature and her own interviews.
Holiday, Parker, Monk. Lady Sings the Blues is cited nowhere in this book as sole authority: the memoir was ghostwritten and is unreliable on checkable facts, as its own later editions concede. The Holiday, Parker and Monk biographical literature (including the documented record of the Camarillo confinement and the cabaret-card cases) stands behind those passages, with the era’s police-licensing regime documented in histories of the New York club world.
Where figures and stories are disputed, the ODJB’s sales, the Keppard refusal, the Bolden cylinder, the depth of the 1929-33 collapse, the Reno Club wages, the Mills percentages, the In the Mood riff lineage, the weight of the cabaret tax in the 1946 collapse, the time-zone explanation of the Palomar night, who played what on the November 1945 Savoy date, the text flags the dispute at the point of use rather than choosing quietly. In this volume the disagreements are not blemishes on the record. For whole stretches of the subject, they are the record.
