The Jazz Age: Music, Women, and the New Morality

Jazz, a musical genre originating in African American communities of the American South, particularly New Orleans, spread with extraordinary speed during the 1920s, giving the era its popular name, the 'Jazz Age.' The Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to northern industrial cities such as Chicago and New York carried jazz into urban centers, where the Harlem Renaissance -- a flowering of African American music, literature, and art centered in New York -- produced influential musicians such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Bessie Smith. Nightclubs such as Harlem's Cotton Club became emblematic, though frequently under racially segregationist policies that allowed Black musicians to perform for white audiences only, and dancer and singer Josephine Baker became an international sensation after moving to Paris in 1925. Composer George Gershwin incorporated jazz elements into orchestral works such as 'Rhapsody in Blue' (1924), even as conservative critics, often with racial undertones, associated jazz with moral decadence.