EVERYBODY'S DOIN' IT

Subtitled 'Sex, Music and Dancing In New York, 1840-1917', shake your booty along with this energetic book. It is the eye-opening story of popular music's 70-year rise in the brothels, dance halls, and dives of New York City. It traces the birth of popular music, including ragtime and jazz, to convivial meeting places for sex, drink, music, and dance. Whether coming from a single piano player or a small band, live music was a nightly feature in New York's spirited dives, where men and women, often black and white, mingled freely to the horror of the elite. This rollicking demimonde drove the development of an energetic dance music that would soon span the world. These clubs were packed with prostitutes and good time girls and everyone was boogie woogeying to the melodies. The Virginia Minstrels, Juba, Stephen Foster, Irving Berlin and his hit "Alexander's Ragtime Band," and the Original Dixieland Jass Band all played a part in popularising startling new sounds. Musicologist Dale Cockrell recreates this ephemeral underground world by mining tabloids, newspapers, court records of police busts, lurid exposés, journals, and the reports of undercover detectives working for social-reform organisations, who were sent in to gather evidence against such low-life places. The book illuminates the how, why, and where of America's popular music and its buoyant journey from the dangerous Five Points of downtown to the interracial black and tans of Harlem. This book puts jazz scholarship on a different footing and includes chapters on libertines, blackface minstrels, the small potato humbug, dives, cornets and cancan, ragtime and leapfrogging, and an appendix on songs identified by Committee Fourteen Agents 1913-1917. 270 pages, well illustrated throughout with engravings and a map of New York.