Swing Along! The Music of Early African American Composers

The performing arts included some of the few professional avenues available to African Americans before and after World War I. African American performers and musicians who participated in the popular vaudevillian and minstrel blackface numbers, that mocked the experience of black people in America, would often strive to layer on irony, humanity, and depth to the depiction of black life on stage.  African American musicians of this era would sculpt vaudevillian ‘novelty’ music into new forms, jazz and blues, that would reshape the history of music.

A number of the metropolitan vaudeville theaters opened from the 1900s to the 1920s catered mostly to black audiences, giving African American artists greater opportunities for performing their music and acts.  However, African American composers producing songs that would be performed by multiple races, on stage and in living rooms, were often visually absent from popular music.  The covers of published sheet music by African American composers mostly featured portraits of white performers instead of the song writers themselves (Booker, 2015 p234).