Chapter 6: The Birth of Jazz
New Orleans jazz was one of the first genres of American music to gain widespread popularity through commercial recordings. However, despite the genre’s deep roots in African American musical traditions, the recording industry’s racial biases meant that many of the earliest jazz recordings did not reflect the contributions of Black musicians who helped create the form. Although artists like Louis Armstrong, Kid Ory, and King Oliver were already making waves in live performances by the 1910s, record companies were largely uninterested in recording Black musicians or marketing to Black audiences. As a result, very few recordings of African American jazz artists were made before the 1920s, and the first wave of jazz records featured white performers instead.
The first commercially successful jazz recording was made in 1917 by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band (ODJB), an all white ensemble from New Orleans. The group was invited to perform in New York City in 1916, where their spirited music quickly caught on with urban audiences. In 1917, they recorded “Livery Stable Blues” for Victor Records, a recording often cited as the first commercially released jazz record. “Livery Stable Blues” followed the 12 bar blues structure that was a hallmark of New Orleans jazz, but it also included a range of novelty sound effects, such as a trombone mimicking a cow’s “moo” and a cornet imitating a horse’s “neigh.” These comic flourishes made the piece a crowd favorite and helped bring jazz into the national spotlight. The ODJB's success demonstrated the commercial potential of jazz, but it also set a pattern in which African American musical innovations were first popularized and often misrepresented by white performers.
While the members of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band were skilled musicians who played in the New Orleans style, their claim to be the inventors of jazz, a claim they themselves made, has been widely discredited. Musicians like Buddy Bolden, Jelly Roll Morton, Kid Ory, and others had been developing jazz well before ODJB's national debut. The band's prominence, however, underscores a broader historical pattern in which Black musical forms were often first legitimized in the mainstream market through white interpreters, raising complex questions about race, recognition, and ownership in American music history.