"Stomp Off—Let's Go": Race, Gender, and the Complicated Narrative of New Orleans Jazz after the Exodus

Much of the New Orleans jazz narrative focuses on the first generations of musicians, most of whom developed their identity after leaving the city. Chicago, for example, provides a much more complete picture of “New Orleans” talent in the 1920s than any specific place in Louisiana. Still, a form of New Orleans music survived this exodus and the resultant culture of the city during the 1920s underscores much of the complexity of southern urban life. Bands like the New Orleans Owls, a reformulated New Orleans Rhythm Kings, and the Boswell Sisters performed throughout the city in hotels and on the radio. The Owls, too, recorded in the city, and overall, these jazz musicians impacted strongly the musical culture of New Orleans in the post-migration/pre-swing era. At the center of this scene stood hotels such as the Roosevelt Hotel (with its nightclub, “The Cave”) as well as radio stations like WSMB, both of which helped preserve and transmit a music that would shape a rather false memory of what constituted New Orleans jazz. Overall, this paper seeks to situate the story of New Orleans jazz in the 1920s within the broader context of jazz history as well as the cultural memory of the city. During this period, as the city’s racial culture coalesced crudely into a bifurcated fiction, a particular style of New Orleans jazz served as the soundtrack for a complex time of racial, class, and gender confusion. Far removed from Storyville, the jazz of New Orleans in the 1920s signifies both a break from the past as well as a faint signal to what some New Orleanians would later claim as the “authentic” sounds of the earliest days of jazz music.