The Blues as Dance Music

Abstract

With all their pseudo-inside wordplay, all the gratuitous redundancies about jazz which is to say blues music being an art form indigenous to the United States, and indeed with all their ever ready lip-service to the element of swing as a definitive factor of the idiom, when these very same reporter/reviewers give their evaluations of actual performances, whether live or on records, it is almost always as if they were writing about the concert music of Europe. They condone as well as condemn on assumptions that are essentially those of the European Academy. Not that they themselves seem to be basically hostile to any of the indispensable elements of the idiom. On the contrary, they seem to be personally fascinated and delighted by them. But even so they almost always write as if about concert-hall music rather than dance music. Some have even written that blues musicians should not have to play in honky-tonks, dance halls, night clubs, variety shows, popular festivals, and the like. As if downright oblivious to the literal source as well as the intrinsic nature and function of the idiom, some have gone so far as to represent the experience of playing in Storyville, or the dives and dance halls of Memphis, Chicago, Kansas City, and Harlem as a most outrageous form of injustice! There are those who even as they used to declare Duke Ellington to be the greatest of American composers immediately began wringing their hands and shaking their heads over what struck them as being the cruel state of affairs that forced him to spend most of his time on the road with his orchestra playing in nightclubs, ballrooms, and theaters. The fact that Duke Ellington had already become Ellington the Composer by writing music for such places long before his first Carnegie Hall concert seems to have escaped them at such moments, as did the fact that as important as formal concerts came to be to Ellington, he never expressed any desire to take his orchestra off the circuit. As he said one night during an intermission in a dance at the Propeller Club at Tuskegee to a young literary type who was concerned about an article that had reported him (Ellington) as having said that he