Chicago's Jazz Trail, 1893-1950

Abstract

Chicago's 1893 World Columbian Exposition was the magnet that attracted hundreds of black itinerant musicians, entertainers, intellectuals, and hustlers to its doorsteps. They all came to Abraham Lincoln's city by the lake in search of opportunities to display their talents. Talented individuals, such as W. C. Handy, the father of the blues, Scott Joplin, the king of ragtime composers, Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist and author, Bert Williams, the master comic, Ida B. Wells, the freedom fighter, James Weldon Johnson, author and musician, W.E.B. Du Bois, author and black liberation leader, Paul Laurence Dunbar, the poet, and Jesse Binga, Chicago's first black banker, left their footprints on the steps of the Haitian Pavilion, the center of black entertainment on the Columbian Exposition grounds-what today is Jackson Park. The Haitian Pavilion was an incubator for jazz music; it was there that Scott Joplin and others discovered that many of their fellow black musicians had developed musical skills in isolation from each other in various sections of the country and had created an original art form that had common elements endemic to black lifestyles. The bridge between ragtime and jazz was built by one of Joplin's young admirers, Ferdinand Jelly Roll Morton, who spent a great deal of time on Chicago's State Street. Joplin, Morton, and Porter collaborated on a work called King Porter Stomp. The tune was named in honor of after the deaths of both Joplin and King. However, King Porter Stomp was not immortalized until 1924 when it was recorded in Chicago by Joe Oliver, Louis Armstrong's mentor. It was recorded again the following year by the Fetcher Henderson Orchestra. However, it was Chicagoan Benny Goodman's 1935 rendition of the Fletcher Henderson arrangement that gave the tune national prominence. State Street and its environs were training grounds in jazz for white musicians such as Benny Goodman, Bix Beiderbecke, Tommy Dorsey, Paul Whiteman, Red Norvo, and Bunny Berigan. One of State Street's earliest jazz laboratories opened its doors on June 18, 1905. It was Bob Motts's Pekin Temple of Music, which was located at 2700 South State