Jazz on the River (review)

During warm-weather months in the first half of the twentieth century, the whistling roar of a calliope announced to communities alongside the Mississippi River that a steamboat was nearing town. Large excursion boats accommodated a few thousand passengers, who climbed aboard to enjoy a slow cruise, spending several hours on a short day trip or a moonlight escape. Starting in the 1910s and continuing up to the Second World War, steamboat companies presented musical entertainment as an added attraction. Passengers would stroll on the outer decks to take in the view and the fresh air or join the fray on enormous dance floors, enjoying live music played by polished dance bands of ten to twelve men. While the spread of jazz is often told in terms of urban culture, and via the impact of recordings and radio, live music on the riverboats helped to disseminate the sound of jazz and dance music throughout the centre of the United States for more than three decades.

Like his previous publications on ragtime, Chicago jazz, and recorded music, William Howland Kenney's Jazz on the River illuminates a fascinating aspect of early twentieth-century musical culture. Jazz enthusiasts have long repeated the tale of how the music travelled up the Mississippi River from New Orleans to Chicago, even though the Mississippi does not actually reach the Windy City, but Kenney is the first historian to delve so deeply into this chapter of America's past. While growing interest in American roots music has brought increased familiarity about the music flourishing in the communities beside the Mississippi, few scholars have addressed music on the river itself and none has done so in such a comprehensive fashion.

Kenney concentrates his attention on musical life on the riverboats, stepping off the boat for occasional visits along the shore. Each of the first three chapters centres on a key figure of riverboat jazz: the excursion boat owner John Streckfus, the prominent bandleader Fate Marable, and Marable's most famous band member, Louis Armstrong. The final three chapters sail up the Mississippi, making brief stops at Memphis, St. Louis, and Davenport, Iowa, where Bix Beiderbecke and Jess Stacy come aboard, and then travel up the Ohio River to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Compact and handsomely packaged, Jazz on the River includes an evocative selection of black-and-white photographs and illustrations, a concise set of notes, a remarkably thorough index, and several informative appendices, including a long list of excursion boat musicians and a catalogue of river-themed song titles that alone could demonstrate how deeply river culture has permeated jazz and the American musical imagination.

Always on the lookout for ripe metaphors and frequently gesturing towards broader cultural resonance—strategies especially on display in the book's provocative, wide-ranging introduction—Kenney draws connections between music on the river and themes involving music and migration, the symbolic power of the river, the growth of tourism, the costs of industrialization and urbanization, musical nostalgia, and music and race. A historian by profession, Kenney animates his clear, persuasively argued narrative with brief asides on the work of Homi Bhabha, Walter Ong, Jacques Attali, and other voices from anthropology, geography, philosophy, psychology, cultural theory, and beyond. While these suggestive tributaries generate plenty of food for thought, the primary strength of Jazz on the River lies in its richly detailed treatment of the social, cultural, and historical context in which riverboat musical culture flourished.

Carefully researched, clearly presented, and authoritatively written, the opening chapter presents a history of Streckfus Steamboats, taking into account corporate, commercial, and personal factors. Turning an outmoded delivery system of packet boats into a fleet of excursion boats for sightseers, this enterprising family of German immigrants built a small empire that grew in parallel with the rise in American tourism at the start of the century. But as Kenney explains with the help of vivid reproductions, on-board entertainment simultaneously perpetuated nineteenth-century roustabout cultural traditions, long established minstrel stereotypes...