Corrections v.1

Before I post on Louis Armstrong - corrections/missed citations from last post (10/8-9; final paragraph):

• Perhaps there have been hundreds, I know I've hear a few, but the specific source of the assertion about blogging being a democratic form of journalism and knowledge production/dispersal came from the article, "Trapped in between the Lines: The Aesthetics of Hip-Hop Journalism," by Oliver Wang, which is included in the collection Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip-Hop, edited by Jeff Chang. Therein, Wang says: "Blogging was a more democratic medium [than print journalism], but improved access didn't necessarily translate into different, let alone better, writing.... There was also a question of attitude. The lack of accountability made it far easier for online writers to be mean, vicious, or just snarky at whatever artists they choose. Although there was much cheerleading going on, never had so many self-professed fans generated so much negativity against hip-hop artists" (172)
• The final sentence of my last post makes great assumptions about what kind of documentation was being made during the development of jazz at its various points around the country. It is not within my knowledge whether jazz was written about outside of the white-operated print outlets. I would guess, after reading Blues People, by LeRoi Jones, that there probably was some writing being done about jazz by black writers. But if it were by and/or for the working-class, laboring black population (those, he refers to as descendants of the field slaves), writing would have been done in addition to work - just as musicians outside of the mainstream have always held down other jobs in order to support their expression, love, hobby, talent, vice, whatever you want to call it. Thus, we would see more prolific writing around the World Wars, and a sharp decline during the depression. Perhaps I'll address this more later in my research... In addition, with education rates for black youth being so low - at least in the South where many styles emerged (field hollers, spirituals, blues, New Orleans/Dixieland jazz), what purpose would writing serve to a population that, historically in this country, was not allowed to keep any documentation, and had to rely on other forms of communication for transfer of ideas and creation of histories? I don't know. Then again, there could have been writing by the black middle class, members of which, Jones argues, were repulsed by any black musical form that reflected their African forebears and the history of slavery in this country - a memory thought necessary to erase in order to assimilate and become citizens. To follow Jones' argument, the writing of the black middle class would be aimed at white men, trying to prove their allegiance to the country, and subsequently, deservance (is that a word?) of all the rights and privileges of citizenship. Further, that would mean that when big-band swing styles were in full effect, verging on pop, these black middle class writers would have been first to praise them, support claims of Benny Goodman as "King of Swing," etc. and renounce other, "blacker" forms of jazz - in which one could still hear the blues.
  

That is to say, those are some possibilities I see about early jazz writing done by people in the black community, as opposed to white jazz critics, and newspapers and the like. Though I didn't fully understand when I made the comment, I had an inkling of what I stated above - it is possible there are no written or surviving documents of certain views on jazz that were present in the moment, because they were never written down. Blogging isn't necessarily much different, as it does leave out many people still. There are many homes without computers and many people without homes (and though there are usually desktops available for use at public libraries, it's pretty easy to think of some reasons why that doesn't equate waiting-lines to check out the "blogosphere"). More than anything, it was a lament about U.S. Society, inequalities, the voices that go unheard and people that get forgotten (or, perhaps more accurately, are obscured and silenced), and how they are not, in the least, new phenomena.

This is Reed, and I'm out...till noon tomorrow.