This article explores, in brief, the impact of black cultural entrepreneurship on black uplift within the developing social, cultural, and political landscape of early twentieth century Boston. In the process of promoting an aesthetic hierarchy of distinction, the LWCS, perhaps inadvertently, essentially excluded the black the working class and poor, groups from which many of the city’s jazz musicians originated. In doing so, they sought to advocate and promote a brand of high culture stewardship that, as Paul DiMaggio states, equated to ‘black cultural capitalism’, albeit within a context of rigid racial boundaries during an era of widespread discrimination. This group pursued their own advancement through community activities in the arts, incorporating the tastes, organisational practices and aesthetic sensibilities of Boston’s Anglo-American cultural elites, the Brahmins. Amongst this small collective was a group of upwardly mobile African-American females, who functioned under the group heading of the League of Women for Community Service (LWCS). These people, consisting of business professionals, clerks, teachers, caterers, and small merchants, had some wealth, were college educated, attended churches, and had some standing in community matters. In her 1994 study, The Other Brahmins: Boston's Black Upper Class, 1750-1950, Adelaide Cromwell acknowledges the existence of class differences in Boston, placing emphasis on a small black upper-crust. In this respect, this thesis looks at the ways in which homegrown Boston musicians, such as Johnny Hodges and Harry Carney, and frequenting players, such as Duke Ellington, used jazz music as a way to oppose standard forms of white dominance, cultural elitism, and economic subjugation. This approach would ultimately assist in enriching the Jazz Age with a black art form that was not only unique but a distinct form of expression for a race lacking a significant voice in America at the time. In order to achieve this, emphasis here is placed on tracing instances of voice, and as a by-product heritage, in musical form from the arrival of the first slaves to Boston in the first-half of the seventeenth century and analysing the ways in which these voices were perpetuated through methods of adaptation, appropriation, and evolution. Essential to this process is not only the need to locate the voices of Boston’s black past, whether in text, testimony, sound and beyond, but also to create the conditions to hear them on their own terms. Therefore, the principle aim of this thesis is to piece-together these fragments to form a mosaic history that reveals instances of black struggle, resistance, and progress during a period of heightened racial (Jim Crow segregation), political (the Red Scare), and economic tension. Simply put, the history of jazz in Boston, and with it an important period for black development in the city, exists in fragments such as discographies, newspaper listings, musical handbooks, potted witness accounts among others. For insofar as the impact of jazz music on social, political, and economic climates in cities such as New York, New Orleans, and even Kansas have been recorded, the music’s impact on and significance in Boston is yet to be addressed in any great detail. In this respect, the Jazz Age (represented here as circa 1919 – 1929) serves as a noteworthy case-in-point. Beyond the struggle for abolition, however, the historical experiences of the majority of black Bostonians, especially during the early twentieth-century, are lacking recognition.
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