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. 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. 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. Its piano comes from the tradition of ragtime, the musical form that directly proceeded jazz. 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 repetition indicates the call-and-response tradition of black Baptist churches. 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 barnyard sounds connect it to the setting of the work songs black field labourers would sing. The song is structured around three chords and into 12 bars, like virtually all blues songs emerging from the African-American tradition. Livery Stable Blues also helps answer the question ‘What is jazz?’ by pointing to its roots. Early jazz pioneer Jelly Roll Morton, whose own name was a euphemism for sex, first developed his own style playing piano in these ‘sporting houses’ and to get extra tips he’d peek at a prostitute and her client through a peephole and time his playing with the pace of their revels. Or perhaps it referred to the jasmine perfume that prostitutes in New Orleans’ famed Storyville red light district often wore – jazz music had developed, in part, as the music played in brothels. That particular spelling suggests “jas” could have come from jasm. On 14 November 1916, the New Orleans Times-Picayune newspaper referred for the first time to “jas bands”. Dating back to 1860 there had been an African-American slang term, ‘jasm’, which means ‘vim’ or ‘energy’. One of the most striking features of jazz to its earliest listeners was its speed, its sheer energy.
‘Jazz’ was named the Word of the 20th Century by the American Dialect Society, which is remarkable since we don’t actually know for sure from where the term originates. More than other forms of popular music Jazz is particularly fraught with these kind of debates, but some of the most heated arguments among jazz aficionados are even more fundamental: what qualifies as jazz? Does jazz have some essential ingredient? Where does the term “jazz” even come from? One hundred years after the first jazz recording, the answers remain elusive, but the story of Livery Stable Blues shows how early the questions that still surround the genre were raised. The judge who presided over the lawsuit about who wrote Livery Stable Blues ultimately ruled that since the song was in bad taste and composed by people who couldn’t actually read or write sheet music it would be remanded to the “public domain” with no writer attributed at all.
We’ve all heard the arguments, usually from very concerned parents, about what defines good taste or aesthetic achievement in popular music. Livery Stable Blues, one of the first true hit singles, selling over one million copies at a time most still preferred to buy sheet music over recordings, inspired its own attribution battle. We follow the legal challenges over who wrote Stairway to Heaven or whether Blurred Lines should have listed Marvin Gaye as a co-author. When they recorded Livery Stable Blues the all-white Original Dixieland Jass Band borrowed to the point of plagiarism from the African-American musicians they’d heard in their native New Orleans. We all know the debates, from Elvis to Taylor Swift, over white copycats appropriating the sound and style of black musicians. That would be a remarkable milestone in its own right, but embedded into Livery Stable Blues are issues that have haunted jazz, and popular music as a whole, ever since.