Eric Pilgrim's List: Tagxedo of Music in the 1920's

• Radio stations were mushrooming across the United States in the 1920s.  In March of 1922, the Atlanta Journal opened up WSB in Atlanta, the first radio station in the south.  Six months later on September 9, Fiddlin' John Carson made his radio debut, one of the first country music performers to modulate the airwaves.
• Bessie Smith was the greatest and most influential classic blues singer of the 1920s.  During her heyday, she earned upwards of $2000 per week, a queenly sum in the 20s.
• King Oliver is a legend in Jazz history.  As a trumpet player, he was strongly influenced by Buddy Bolden whom he imitated, but Oliver soon became a Jazz stylist in his own right. In the end, the designation of "king," which Bolden had long assumed, became Oliver's--particularly after one memorable night in Storyville. 
• Cow Cow Davenport was one of the earliest boogie-woogie pianists.
• Blind Lemon Jefferson recorded over eighty blues tunes between 1925 and 1929 and was generally responsible for the surge of popularity in the country blues in this period.
• Charlie Poole developed a three-fingered banjo playing technique after a baseball accident injured his right hand. This technique influenced many banjo players and would later be perfected by Earl Scruggs.
• Ralph Peer recorded Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family in Bristol, Tennessee in 1927.  Rodgers, known as "The Father of Country Music," reportedly sold over 20 million records in the six years of his career.

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• Early jazz influences found  their first mainstream expression in the music used by marching bands and dance bands of the day, which was the main form of popular  concert music in the early twentieth century.
• Meanwhile, radio and phonograph records — Americans bought more than 100 million of them in 1927 — were bringing jazz to locations  so remote that no band could reach them.
• place more and more emphasis on the innovations of supremely gifted individuals.
• In its early years jazz was considered the devils music by diverse segments of the American public. Vigorous public debate raged between supporters  and detracters.
• Strangely named black dances inspired by African style dance moves, like the  shimmy, turkey trot, buzzard lope, chicken scratch, monkey glide, and the bunny hug were eventually adopted by the general public.
• The popular dance music of the time was not jazz, but there were early forms taking shape in the evolving blues-ragtime experimental area  that would soon turn into jazz.
• Few things did more to popularize the idea of hot music than Berlin's hit song of 1911,"Alexander's  Ragtime Band," which became a craze as far from home as Vienna.
• The 1920's were Broadway's prime years, with over 50 new musicals opening in just one season.
• Even in the 1920's the lights of Broadway lit up the billboards at night in a huge splash of color that was immortalized in song. The dazzling lights  were an attraction in their own right that compared with the shows in popularity.

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