THE EPIC OF GILGAMESH is widely considered to be the world’s oldest book. Early in the story, Enkidu, a wild man who lives in and with nature, is seduced by Shamhat, the high priestess of Ishtar. By that he is made human. Shamhat then points him toward the Mesopotamian king Gilgamesh, with whom he will form a deep and fateful friendship, and to the capital at Uruk, where he will see on any ordinary day:
people singing and dancing in the streets,
musicians playing their lyres and drums,
the lovely priestesses standing before
the temple of Ishtar, chatting and laughing,
flushed with sexual joy, and ready
to serve men’s pleasure.
Thus the very first references to music and dancing in the oldest of stories, embedded in a single sentence that climaxes in sexual joy.1
The story told here is at least as old as Gilgamesh, was current when “City Missionary” Helen Campbell reported on her experience of a New York dive in 1895, and is as new as last Saturday night. For when human beings have danced to music and been stirred by the enticing strains of lyres, fiddles, pianos, guitars, mud-gutter bands, and rhythms sounded out by drums, the whiff of sex is ever present.
No effort is made here to chronicle such doings in the millennia since Gilgamesh. Rather, attention is directed toward a particularly compelling period in the history of sexuality, music, and dance—from around 1840 to 1917—in a particularly important city: New York.
Everybody’s Doin’ It explores how the flourishing business of prostitution in New York encouraged dancing made rowdy by wild music, and how that enterprise provided both the reasons for developments in musical style and the economic means to support musicians charged with keeping people dancing. This book promises some answer to a long-standing and fundamental question about how and why American popular music sounds as it does, for the music’s energy served well clients-with-coin, all of whom were seeking entertainment, excitement, and ecstasy. It happens that the music followed simply from the complex job at hand.
Threaded throughout the book are characters, many quite colorful, that either made the music and dance or enabled this story’s telling. These were musicians, dancers, and dive owners, of course, but they were also madams, prostitutes, bosses, reformers, preachers, reporters, policemen, and politicians. Some of them are well-known and well-documented: George Washington Dixon and Irving Berlin among the musicians; John McDowall, Anthony Comstock, and John D. Rockefeller Jr. among those endeavoring to close down the dance halls and saloons. At the heart of the book, though, are the “routine musicians” whom jazz musician Peter Bocage praised as “the men that didn’t know nothin’ about [proper] music. They just make up their own ideas.” Routine musicians stitched everything together, for over in the dark corners of saloons, dives, brothels, and dance halls they watched the dancers, made up new musical licks, and counted the tips to weigh the results.2
The music they fashioned—exhilarating rhythms, a brassy sound, the thumping bass, and sinuous melodies—came out of an improvised, oral tradition, a music-of-the-air that was not published or written down. Finding good descriptions of this made-up music is not easy, for chroniclers typically measured the dive, evoked the people in the space, and waxed about the wildness of the dance, but few of them attempted to put words to ephemeral sound waves, however intoxicating. The best to hope for from most of these sources are descriptions of the band, perhaps aspects of playing style, and references to a song or two. Yet even these accounts are often distortions, for those doing the reporting were generally writing for middle-class patrons who preferred to confirm prejudicial attitudes toward those lower on the social scale than to be challenged to appreciate their culture. Even something so seemingly simple as compiling a list of songs from the sources is also suspect, for although one can usually dig out a title from a sheet-music archive, in actual mud-gutter performance the lyrics would likely have been distorted and parodied and the notes on the hallowed, published page subjected to all sorts of disrespect, even disregard. To analyze reports and commentary for musical style and substance then is somewhat akin to examining a letter in a mirror, for everything is written backwards. If enough chroniclers like Helen Campbell thought the musicians “unskilled,” the music “discordant” or “noise,” that all accordions were “wheezy,” and that the bass viol had a “bad cold,” then there is a very good chance that something interesting was going on. Certainly those in the hall dancing so rudely thought so!3
What can be said meaningfully about a music, obviously everywhere, that left so few marks on the historical record? A sort of historical triangulation suggests some answers. At point “A” are source texts: descriptions, reports, testimony, illustrations, lyrics, sheet music, etc. Although relatively scant and seldom in the voice of those most under study, their utility to any historiographic effort is obvious. Point “B” provides a perspective on the contexts in which the music flourished and what they might suggest implicitly about the nature of music-making. If, for instance, the blood of dancers was said to be “on fire” and images from the time showed “high-kicking” female dancers and leering male dancers, and it was in the best interest of the musicians’ livelihood to keep the dancing at a high pitch, then the music was likely to be hot, energetic, tremendous fun, made-up, and open-ended enough in form to keep the dancers dancing.
At point “C” is the issue of class. A reporter in 1866 observed that those living on the impoverished Lower East Side “roll out more lustily their music tasks, and with a purer relish, than their more dainty little friends in the higher walks of life.” Everybody’s Doin’ It foregrounds people impoverished in material resources but rich in music. Those lower-class New Yorkers—the “other half,” as they were called by Jacob Riis in 1890—often sought through music to bring joy to lives dulled by want. The music provided them the freedom to imagine and express made-up ideas not bound by economic circumstance. From that came an improvised music that emphasized the offbeat accents between regimenting downbeats and prompted provocative dance moves that those who considered themselves respectable considered rude and wildly inappropriate.4
An emphasis on class invites a consideration of race. Blacks and whites intentionally intermingled in both “disorderly houses” and in the later “black and tans.” Even Mrs. Campbell did not seem shocked by the mixed-race, lower-class culture she observed. In fact, working-class blacks and whites in New York commonly drank together, danced together, and lived and loved together (as well as, on occasion, fought together). They also made music together. As it is impossible to imagine the development of American popular music and culture without considering the central contributions of black Americans, so is it equally impossible to imagine this book without acknowledging the place of New York’s black musicians.
There is no single, great life that could trace the central story of Everybody’s Doin’ It, nor is there one singular institution that could stage it. A rich gallery of colorful people, institutions, and organizations make up a larger, kaleidoscopic drama. Their bits are acted in chapters that progress in roughly chronological order, with each more or less dedicated to a single decade, going from the 1840s through the 1910s. The focus is always on what can be learned about the evolution of New York music-making by examining the circumstances in which it occurred. Toward that end, each chapter pays special attention to developments that illuminated new sounds and styles, all of which inevitably set the stage for what followed, be it social, cultural, or political.
This then is the story of what Enkidu heard in Uruk, what Helen Campbell heard on New York streets and in saloons, and what all the world discovered at the dawn of the Jazz Age: a dynamic music and dance entwined with expressions of basic human urges. Like most things touched by humankind it is a complicated story, not always an easy one, but sometimes too a beautiful one. Perhaps such must necessarily be the case in an underground world of secret entanglements that nurtured the awesome mysteries of music and dance.
