THE CITY COMMISSIONERS of Paducah, Kentucky—my home-town—voted on February 17, 1916, to appoint a civic commission and charge it with investigating vice conditions in the city. The commission subsequently contracted with a chief investigator to do the detail work, one George J. Kneeland, the very same sociologist who had conducted similar studies in New York City and Chicago. He, in turn, hired two undercover investigators and instructed them to seek out and report on prostitution in this small city of twenty-three thousand people.
Sixty-six houses of prostitution were subsequently identified by the agents. These places were even mapped at the front of the published report as “Some Sore Spots of Paducah Today.” The report also counted 174 full-time prostitutes in the city. Under the heading “What Prostitution Means to Paducah,” the shocking extrapolation was that one in every thirty-five adult women in the city worked in prostitution.1
Later in the report, Kneeland turned to agent accounts for what actually went on in Paducah’s vice scene.
The first thing on entering one of these houses, is to be importuned for dimes for the piano. This begging is constant and repeated, the girls even trying to get money out of your pockets if you are reluctant. Next is the begging of a quarter for a drink—then follows the soliciting to go to bed.
The rest of the richly detailed, sixty-three-page report followed the well-developed Kneeland formula: analyze and edit the reports, redacting where necessary; print a good number of investigator reports along with commentary; discuss medical implications and law enforcement issues; make recommendations.2
The Paducah report is inherently interesting to anyone from that fair city. But, implicitly, it also suggests a possible answer to a question that has long vexed one of its musicological progeny. Fate Marable was a fellow native son of Paducah. Born in 1890, he left town in his late teens for a gig as pianist/calliope player on steamboats plying the Mississippi River. Marable quickly worked his way up to bandleader and subsequently hired many players out of New Orleans to fill chairs in his highly regarded dance band. Baby Dodds, Johnny Dodds, Red Allen, Jimmy Blanton, and others were trained under his baton and later became prominent in jazz history. Most famously, Marable hired a young cornetist, Louis Armstrong, mentored him in reading music and the art of ensemble playing, and encouraged his improvisational skills. Marable’s protégé, of course, went on to become the key figure in the early development of jazz.3
So what kind of musical training could Marable have received that prepared him for such a career? Well, as the vice commission report suggests, there were sixty-six brothels in Paducah, many of which must have provided jobs for black piano players with ragtime chops. The professors might have served as teachers to young Fate, or as role models, or perhaps even included him among their number. Speculation? Sure, and probably unprovable. But there was a network in place to support Marable, and his subsequent career certainly fits the pattern.4
Paducah’s vice study is introduced here not only so that I might postulate about my hometown’s music history, but also to show that cities other than New York had “Some Sore Spots” in which prostitutes and their clients danced to alleged music. Furthermore, there were a lot of such cities. One estimate is that by 1900 nearly one hundred American cities—north, south, east, west; large, medium, small—had tenderloin districts (several with multiple districts) and one hundred thousand prostitutes lived in towns and cities scattered across the land. Then came social reform movements and the campaign against commercialized sex, which also stretched across the nation. The Paducah report mentioned that the American Social Hygiene Association had coordinated vice investigations in 105 cities, nearly all of them between 1910 and 1916. In 1917, Howard B. Woolston, an urban sociologist, visited forty American cities that had already published vice reports in order to conduct a follow-up survey of conditions. There is no reason to suppose that there were not parallels in these cities to New York’s culture of sex, music, and dance; in fact, it would be harder to imagine the contrary. Everybody’s Doin’ It then is not just New York’s story or Paducah’s. It is America’s story.5
It’s also the story of many thousands of routine and anonymous musicians in New York, Paducah, and throughout the nation. The 1910 census counted 39,163 professional male musicians in the United States. An earlier calculation in this book projected that approximately thirty percent of Manhattan’s professional male musicians made their livelihood in the underground vice economy, or about one of every seventeen hundred citizens. A comparative analysis of population and musicians in Chicago suggested a ratio there of about one in two thousand. To take Chicago’s more conservative number and factor it against the population in the fifty largest American cities in 1910 (where just twenty-two percent of the nation’s citizens lived), yields 10,152 professional full-time male musicians working in places that harbored prostitution. Since some of the other thirty thousand musicians throughout the nation were surely employed in the commercialized sex industry outside those large cities (remember little Paducah, with its sixty-six sore spots), a rough but conservative estimate is that one in three professional, full-time male musicians in the United States in 1910 made music in direct support of commercialized sex.6
To state the obvious, that’s a tremendous number of musicians working night after night throughout the country refining a musical language intended to heighten an atmosphere of loosened sexuality. But by the end of 1918, a hundred tenderloin districts had been closed down, raising the question of musicians’ welfares. Inevitably, as was the case in New York, many musicians in the United States around this time abandoned hopes of a music career altogether. Whereas the 1920 census showed that the number of musicians/music teachers in New York was about the same as in 1910, the situation was much worse across the nation as the numbers declined by 9,045.7
Musicians who managed to retool and rise to the challenges of a new world shaped by new social expectations did so in a vastly different musical environment than ten years before. A typical tenderloin dance band in 1910 was two to four musicians, suitable for the smaller concert saloons, dance halls, and dives, many unlicensed, that hoped to avoid wide public scrutiny while maintaining their patronage, which was often multiracial. By the 1930s, combos would feature five to seven musicians and big bands were even larger, better numbers for the grand restaurants, theaters, and nightclubs that sought wide public attention, places like the Apollo Theater and the Cotton Club, where the performers were black and the audiences white. Music as an intimate, backroom, black-and-tan experience was in rapid decline; music as a public, big-space, segregated experience was in high ascendance. This was a track that would have broad ramifications for subsequent developments in American popular music and its consumption.
In 1871, Charles Darwin addressed a fundamental conundrum that underscores much of this book: “Why music?”
[I]t appears probable that the progenitors of man, either the males or females or both sexes, before acquiring the power of expressing their mutual love in articulate language, endeavored to charm each other with musical notes and rhythm.
He continued on to suggest that humans, like songbirds, enhance their chances of reproductive success if they are musical.8
One does wish, though, that Darwin had applied more of his prodigious analytic skills to the last word in his observation. He, like many middle-class Victorians, seemed to assume that rhythm served a role in music-making but that it was perfunctory and less important than “tones and cadences,” or melodies and harmonies. In his section on music in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, which he titled “Voice and Musical Powers,” rhythm as a critical component in dance music is not mentioned at all.9
Yet from deep in our human history up to the present in many parts of the world, “to enjoy music and to dance to it are virtually synonymous.” Although the English language has never developed a word that articulates that fundamental “music/dance” overlay, other cultures have been more comprehending and found their word. For instance, among the hundreds of millions who speak the bantu languages, ngoma can mean either music or dance or theater or some elision of the three. To expound a bit from Darwin, men and women have sometimes endeavored to charm each other with song and symphony to be sure, but mostly they have done so with something very like ngoma, even when they did not have a word for it. Furthermore, there are plenty of personal stories suggesting that this kind of charming can and often does lead to sexual expressions of mutual attraction.10
Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist, has framed the issue:
Music is a biological adaptation, universal within our species, distinct from other adaptations, and too complex to have arisen except through direct selection for some survival or reproductive benefit. Since there are no plausible survival benefits for music production, reproductive benefits seem worth a look.
That look has begun with some recent scientific studies offering provocative (but still tentative) support to both Darwin’s postulation and the veracity of common anecdotes. Experiments from 2005 and 2007 suggested that hormonal levels and genetic makeup could be communicated to potential mates through dancing. Research out of a laboratory dedicated to dancing and psychology concluded that men who had high levels of testosterone danced differently than men with low levels, and that heterosexual women of childbearing age were most attracted to the high-testosterone dancers. On the other side of the mating game, work published in 2012 propounded that forty-eight young heterosexual women subconsciously expressed late follicular ovulation through their dancing and that males, viewing video clips alone, were capable of detecting danced cues that signaled female fertility. Much more work remains to be done, of course. But when it comes, scientists and musicologists must resist the easy wisdom that music-making and dancing are necessarily separate human activities, a notion that was not the case in human evolutionary history nor with the many whose engagements with ngoma have made up this book.11
Miss Lee, a singer then enjoying a flourishing career in cabaret and vaudeville, joined Committee of Fourteen agent S. F. Lieb’s table one evening in 1915 at the Broadway Rose Garden. After some casual chitchat, she asked Lieb if he danced. After he confirmed that he did, she invited him onto the floor with her. According to Lieb, Miss Lee’s dancing, like that throughout the Rose Garden, was in a “particularly vulgar fashion.” She wiggled herself while dancing and rolled her eyes around. Lieb asked her if she was enjoying herself. She replied that there was nothing quite so nice as dancing, except for “the real thing.”12
It is not clear from Lieb’s report if Miss Lee was a part-time prostitute trying to procure a client, or even if solicitation was made or implied on anyone’s part. In any case, such questions miss the bigger point. Everybody’s Doin’ It is, to be sure, a book about how a huge, profitable industry provided an infrastructure supporting important developments in dancing and music-making in America. But that formulation unfortunately suggests that the narrative can be broken into largely discrete, discipline-specific components that don’t, or only barely, touch one another: sexuality and gender studies; dance history; musicology. In the end, that’s not how I have come to see this book, and I don’t think Miss Lee, or even agent Lieb, would have seen it that way either. Miss Lee wiggled in a vulgar fashion to alleged music that naturally and seamlessly put her in mind of sex. The sensations that she enjoyed so much, surely among the better things in life, quite likely resulted from complex codes deeply embedded in the biological and psychological constitutions of what makes us who we are. In this way, she had kinship with the many millions before her and after, whether prostitutes, charity girls, johns, committee agents, gays, straights, blacks, whites, ordinary people, extraordinary people, editors, reporters, philosophers, dance historians, musicologists, perhaps even a social reformer or two who hadn’t forgotten how to dance. Yet even more than the richness of sensual experiences involving sex, music, or dance is an elemental humanity that joins all of us together in all these things. For that’s the real “real thing.”