New Orleans city council establishes “Congo Square” as an official site for slave music.
Scott Joplin’s Maple Leaf Rag is published and sells over 100,000 copies.
Louis Armstrong is born.
George Gershwin debuts Rhapsody in Blue along with Paul Whiteman’s band.
Born in the South, the blues is an African American-derived music form that recognized the pain of lost love and injustice and gave expression to the victory of outlasting a broken heart and facing down adversity. The blues evolved from hymns, work songs, and field hollers — music used to accompany spiritual, work and social functions. Blues is the foundation of jazz as well as the prime source of rhythm and blues, rock ‘n’ roll,
country music. The blues is still evolving and is still widely played today. New Orleans had a great tradition of celebration. Opera, military marching bands, folk music, the blues, different types of church music, ragtime, echoes of traditional African drumming, and all of the dance styles that went with this music could be heard and seen throughout the city. When all of these kinds of music blended into one, jazz was born. Before Armstrong, Dixieland was
the style of jazz that everyone was playing. This was a style that featured collective improvisation where everyone soloed at once. Armstrong developed the idea of musicians playing during breaks that expanded into musicians playing individual solos. This became the norm.