Harlem and Other Outside Influences on Charleston Music

The Outside's Influence on Charleston Music
Tours, records, and radio

Records and Radio
Similar to the way the Chicago Defender acted as a way for southern African Americans to hear about the North, radio and records provided inspiring glimpses of northern musical life. Listening and imitating the playing on records not only informed the Jenkins musicians of the 'outside,' but it also changed the way they played their music. As Jabbo Smith once said, "You may think it's yours, but it's something you heard."

In John Chilton's Jazz Nursery, he talks about Jabbo " hearing trumpeter Sidney De Paris on one outing and listening to Johnny Dunn's Margie and Clarence Williams' Of All The Wrong Things You've Done to Me with Louis Armstrong on trumpet." Another Jenkins alum, Cat Anderson, talks about the influence of records:

Louis Armstrong Record
There were records at the school, but in those days
the only ones that interested me were Louis Amstrong's.
In the school, all the trumpet players played Shine, and
made a hundred C's with the F on top.

Lawrence Levine writes about the power of radio in his book Black Culture and Black Consciousness:

the process of cross-fertilization in Afro-American music, dating back
to the interaction of African and
Euro-American musical styles in the colonial period and the camp meetings of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,
was vastly accelerated in the 1920s and
1930s by the introduction of such mass
media as radio, movies, and,
especially, records.
Phonograph

Tours

The musicians of the Jenkins' Orphanage Bands also had the rare opportunity to see the 'outside' up close on their infamous tours to raise money. One of their most famous tours was to the 1914 Anglo-American Exposition held near Shepherd's Bush in London:

To celebrate the centenary of peace and progress in the arts, sciences,
and industries of the United States of America and the British empire.

John Chilton also documents Jabbo Smith remembering how techniques learned from tours and times spent North soon embedded themselves in fellow players:

[he] recalled that when Gus Aitken returned, after one bout of freedom, he brought with him the art of flutter-tonguing and growling on the trumpet, he had acquired these skills during his travels; soon, every brass player in Jenkins' was surreptitiously practicing their effects.


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