How Swing Dance and Jazz Music Impacted America

My capstone project pertains to how swing dance and jazz music impacted America and the affects it had on the line of segregation during the time of the Great Depression. For many years the time and era of swing and jazz always amused me. Though they were hard times and people basically had nothing to live for, the fact that music, swing and jazz in particular, brought them to life, was a beautiful concept.

Music and dance are two things that I believe gives people a reason to tolerate the adverse effects of the world. They help people recognize the world for the beauty that it is and withholds deep with in itself, you just have to look for it. It is people escape goat, and that’s what many call their center. It is a reason to get up in morning.

Origins

Jazz

Tracing the origins of Jazz in its formative years was hard to come by. Jazz dates back to the days of our ancestors and their ancestors before them. Starting from the slow beats of the drums developing to the playing of the saxophone and a number of other instruments, Jazz sets itself as a diverse form of music. Its genre is so vast that recordings of Jazz did not begin until 1917.

The location to where jazz originated and the people involved in it have been a mystery to many and the subject to much controversy. Jazz was known to have been born in the U.S from non-jazz elements: the Blues, Ragtime band music, Hymns and Spirituals, etc. So why then was New Orleans singled out at the sole birthplace of Jazz? Writers and historians soon came to realize that there was one factor New Orleans contained that other places needed, that made the era of jazz rise which was the black Creole subculture.

Early Jazz influences came from the post-Civil War and Emancipation era, a time when...

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...ple come hear us. He says, "You know, Jer, they save their pennies for the weekend so they can get ... some beer and go out and pay whatever it costs to go to a dance with their wives or girlfriends, have a ball, forget about their trouble and then ... after it's all over, start all over again, get that money back.”

Jazz music and Swing had physically and mentally challenged racial segregation and other social issues in America, and made its peak impact during the Great Depression.

Works Cited

http://daffy.uah.edu/lindy/origins.html http://www.pbs.org/jazz/time/time_depression.htm http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_effect_did_jazz_have_on_the_Great_Depression#slide1 http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/freedom/1917beyond/essays/jazz.htm http://www.redhotjazz.com/bigbandessay.html http://atj.8k.com/atjh1.html http://www.centralhome.com/ballroomcountry/swing.htm