Kind of Life in Which Anything Might Happen

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‘… into Another Kind of Life in Which Anything Might Happen…’ Popular Music and Late
Modernity, 1910-1930
Author(s): John Baxendale
Source: Popular Music, Vol. 14, No. 2 (May, 1995), pp. 137-154
Published by: Cambridge University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/853396
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Popular Music (1995) Volume 14/2. Copyright ( 1995 Cambridge University Press
. . into another kind of life
in which anything might
happen …’ Popular music and late modernity, 1910-1930
JOHN BAXENDALE
One evening in Leeds, in about 1913, the young J.B. Priestley had a br modernity:
. . hot and astonished in the Empire, we discovered ragtime … It was as if we had been
still living in the nineteenth century and then suddenly found the twentieth glaring and
screaming at us. We were yanked into our own age, fascinating, jungle-haunted, monstrous
… Out of these twenty noisy minutes in a music hall, so long ago, came fragmentary but
prophetic outlines of the situation in which we find ourselves now, the menace to old
Europe, the domination of America, the emergence of Africa, the end of confidence and
any feeling of security, the nervous excitement, the frenzy, the underlying despair of our
century .. . here was something new, strange, curiously disturbing … (Priestley 1962,
pp. 66-7)
Priestley’s account, written half a century after the event, may be a rather
overblown piece of hindsight. But it is hard to dispute its central proposition: that
there was a crucial shift in popular music in Britain during the 1910s and 1920s,
at least as important as that signalled by the dawning of the rock ‘n’ roll era in
the 1950s; and that this shift had something to do with the changing experience
of ‘modernity’. Not only did the forms of the music change, absorbing African-
American and Latin American influences, but so did the technology of its repro-
duction – sound recording and the wireless – its whole mode of production and
distribution, with the rise of the multinational ‘music industry’; and the social
context of its use, with the shift from music-halls and theatres to dance-halls and
the home. The impact of what Richard Middleton has labelled the ‘moment of
mass culture’ (Middleton 1990, p. 13) was felt across a broad cultural front: this is
also the moment of the national popular daily press (1896), cinema (late 1890s)
and radio (early 1920s), not to mention ‘traditional’ working-class culture
(Hobsbawm 1984; Stedman Jones 1983).
But Priestley reminds us that there was more to this moment than new indus-
tries and new technologies. The ‘shock of the new’ was an experience of unexpec-
ted intensity:
We were used to being sung at in music-halls in a robust and zestful fashion, but the
syncopated frenzy of these three young Americans was something quite different. Shining
with sweat, they almost hung over the footlights, defying us to resist the rhythm, gradually
137
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138 John Baxendale
hypnotising us, chanting and drumming us into another kind of life in which anything
might happen … (Priestley 1962, p. 67)
This could be a forties swing band, the Beatles at the Cavern, an early punk gig circa
1975: what it could not possibly be is Gus Elen or Marie Lloyd leading the audience
into the chorus of their latest hit. There is an emotional intensity here which
nineteenth-century Britain probably only experienced in a religious context, and its
arrival in the world of the Leeds Empire was a disturbing foretaste of what was to
come. What it foretold was more than the future of popular music: it was the whole
experience of the twentieth century – the experience, we might say, of late modern-
ity. Priestley thus does what probably only a middlebrow writer with a taste for the
drama of history could do – and something which serious historians should doubt-
less avoid like the plague: he connects a moment of personal experience, through a
new form of music, to the geopolitics and the mentality of a whole epoch.
The purpose of this article is to retrace Priestley’s steps through these connec-
tions, and try to situate the change in popular music in a broad context of historical
change. It addresses a curious case of neglect. Thanks to the exemplary work of
Dave Russell, Peter Bailey and others, we now know a lot about the Victorian
musical system (Bailey 1978, 1986; Bratton 1986; Herbert 1991; Russell 1987; Scott
1989). Academic interest in rock ‘n’ roll and its musical successors, and the associ-
ated youth cultures has, of course, been considerable. The ‘middle passage’
between the two, while acknowledged, has been little studied by historians (but
see Frith 1988a; Hustwitt 1983). This article will not single-handedly correct that
neglect. What it will argue, though, with Priestley, is that popular music has
something to do with important historical changes in the early twentieth century,
and it will suggest some ways in which the links might be looked at.
The Victorian popular music system
Popular music, like anything else, is shaped by the social relations in which it is
created: it has no ‘innocent’, pre-social existence which is subsequently corrupted
by society (Frith 1988a, pp. 11-12). Since long before the nineteenth century, these
social relations have been to an important degree market relations – the production
of music as a commodity by paid professionals for a paying audience. In this
section, I ask what effect these market relations – which were changing as part of
the development of the capitalist economy as a whole – had on the music itself
and its social meaning.
We can see the changing political economy of music production in terms of
a shift from the Victorian popular music system to the new system which became
dominant in the early twentieth century and has prevailed ever since.
The Victorian musical system was one in which songs were produced as
commodities, and their exchange value realised by charging people to hear them
performed professionally, in music-halls and theatres, and by selling sheet music
for amateur performance at home. This system produced the kind of music appro-
priate to its social relations of production, exchange and use. Since songs would
only be heard when they were actually performed, and had to be viable for ama-
teur pianists and singers, the requirement was for simple, strong melody lines,
familiar harmonic structures and a chorus that the audience could easily sing along
with. ‘Think of a catchy refrain..,. think of a haunting pretty melody – and there
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Popular music and late modernity, 1910-1930 139
you are. The fortune of your publisher is made .. .’ – so said Joseph Tabrar, who
claimed, however implausibly, to have written over 17,000 such songs (Bennett
1986, p. 9). The familiarity of the songs was further enhanced by the relative unity
of all Victorian music: a ‘congruence of musical technique, repertoire and practice’
between church music, concert music, opera, brass band, dance music, music-hall
song and parlour ballads, which included a common emphasis on tunefulness and
sentimentality (Middleton 1990, p. 13; Russell 1987, chapter 1). Much the same
could be said of the musical comedy which from the 1890s was starting to displace
music-hall as a producer of hit songs: whether its mise en scene featured romantic
fantasy or wry commentary on contemporary life, musically it remained firmly
within the Victorian mainstream.
Within music-hall, and the later variety theatre, song was just one elemen in a mixed bill of entertainment, which might include comedy, juggling, acrobat magic, animal acts – all manner of turns. But music had a particular contributi to make, through its ‘singalong’ factor, to the general ambience of the halls, whi was part of what customers were paying for. In Peter Bailey’s phrase, music-ha was a ‘highly-charged social space’ (Bailey 1986, p. xvii), a forum in which individual was on display, and could assume and switch identities, but it was als valued for that sense of community which Richard Dyer has identified as one o the ‘utopian’ elements in popular entertainment (Dyer 1992, pp. 18-25). The mil added to the value of the songs, which were tailored to its needs, and furth ‘added value’ came from the individuality and glamour of star performers, eme ging from the 1870s, and assiduously promoted by impresarios, agents and press.
Into this musical world, dominated by live performance in the music-hall,
the theatre, the street or at home, and by songs compatible with mainstream
musical forms, there erupted disruptive new forces which were to establish by the
1920s a new popular music system. There was new music, African-American or
Latin American in origin, bringing with it a passion for social dance of a new
and ‘freer’ kind; there was a multinational entertainment industry, replacing the
small-scale capital of the old music-hall; and there were new technologies of mass
reproduction – the gramophone and the wireless. Music became more available
than ever, but it was relocated, in the home, in the dance-hall, or in innumerable
public places where the ubiquitous loudspeaker was to be found. Mass reproduc-
tion meant that people could now hear music in their own homes which they
were not themselves capable of playing – a fact which was to greatly enhance the
artistic status of ‘popular’ musicians. This new system, in which commodification
through mass reproduction and social dance partly displaced live performance, is
essentially the one we have today, however much the technology, the business
organisation and the musical forms have developed.
The political economy of musical change
What caused this change? It is possible, of course, to talk about ‘external’ shocks
to the old system: new technologies, new forms of music. We can also discuss
changes in the social and ideological context, or in the needs, tastes and composi-
tion of the audience. However, new structures usually emerge out of old ones;
we should start by examining the internal logic and dynamics of the Victorian
musical system itself.
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140 John Baxendale
For this was a system already in a state of change. From the mid-1890s –
before ragtime, before the gramophone – the economic structure on which it rested
was being transformed by the very dynamic of the capitalist system. The 1880s
and 1890s saw a steady rise in the disposable incomes of the mass audience, and
an investment boom in all forms of popular entertainment: Blackpool Tower (1893)
was a symbol of an age in which popular entertainment became a big business.
National chains of variety theatres, lavish in scale and opulent in design, grew
rapidly from provincial origins to national dominance, and displaced the small-
scale music-hall. New entertainment entrepreneurs such as Oswald Stoll, Edward
Moss and Richard Thornton used their market strength in a manner that prefig-
ured the Hollywood studio system, marginalising their competitors and exerting
greater control over performers and audiences alike.
The competition between these big players transformed the experience of the
audience. In the new palatial – and efficient – theatres, they sat in tip-up seats
instead of moving freely around the floor, and were cleared out after the show,
which went on twice nightly, rather than lingering all evening. Bars and drinking
became separated from the auditorium (if allowed at all), audience participation
was discouraged, and ‘vulgarity’ banished from the stage – largely in the hope
of attracting the growing numbers of middle-class and female customers. What
audiences saw in the larger theatres was usually a national touring bill topped by
nationally known entertainers. The commodity for sale was increasingly these
performers, and less and less the ambience of the theatre itself, or the company
of one’s fellows. As the house-lights dimmed, the audience and the space they
occupied lost the place they had once held as part of the spectacle.
Capital accumulation, competition and the search for profit were thus trans-
forming the experience of popular entertainment, even when its musical content
remained little changed from the late Victorian heyday of music-hall. When, with
the arrival of ragtime, the music itself began to change, once again it was by
courtesy of these same economic forces. Ragtime had its origins in black American
experience, but was to find a place in cultures to which that experience was com-
pletely irrelevant. It originated as the generation of black Americans born after the
Civil War moved to the cities and developed a musical culture which went beyond
both rural ‘folk’ forms and the dreaming minstrelsy and ‘coon songs’ which were
the first ‘black’ element in music-hall and vaudeville. It was quickly picked up by
white audiences, mediated by (largely Jewish) Tin Pan Alley composers such as
Irving Berlin, and from about 1910 became the focus of a widespread dance-craze
in the United States which rapidly spread to other countries (Erenberg 1981, pp.
73-4). Berlin’s own ragtime pastiche, ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’, became the first
in 1911.
The music itself offered its first audiences the frisson of difference; with its
emphasis on rhythm and syncopation, its introduction of musematic repetition
(‘riffs’ etc.) instead of or alongside the established nineteenth-century techniques of phrase-building and sequence, its novel, and sometimes raucous instrumenta-
tion, and its emphasis on music rather than lyrics, it challenged the existing struc tures of popular song, and sounded exciting, disturbing, revolutionary (Middleto 1990, pp. 275-6). Ragtime opened the gates to a flood of African-American an Latin American elements into popular music through the 1920s, for which ‘jazz’
became the catch-all label, and which were eventually to achieve a new synthesis
with mainstream commercial music under the banner of ‘Tin Pan Alley’.
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Popular music and late modernity, 1910-1930 141
It was the new corporate entertainment industry which spread ragtime to white
America, and brought it to Britain. Albert de Courville of Moss Empires, visiting the
United States in 1912 in search of new acts, found ragtime all the rage, and brought
back with him an ad hoc troup which he called the Original American Ragtime Octet.
They played the Hippodrome, Moss’s London flagship, for fourteen weeks, and
then went on tour, to be succeeded at the Hippodrome by the revue ‘Hullo! Ragtime’,
which ran for 451 performances (Mellor 1970, pp. 136, 204-5). By this time, ragtime
had become a British craze too, the new American dances were being imitated in
fashionable circles and every promoter was touring ragtime acts – one of which
(‘Hedges Brothers and Jacobsen’) Priestley saw at Moss’s Leeds Empire. It was not
unknown for American fashions in entertainment to cross the Atlantic (minstrel
shows, or musical comedy for example), but the speed and impact of ragtime’s arrival
owed everything to the new and highly competitive mass entertainment industry
which had come into being in the previous twenty years. It is hard to imagine an
old-style music-hall caterer imitating de Courville’s voyage of discovery to Coney
Island, or emulating the massive success of his musical import.
As Priestley shows, most people probably first encountered ragtime on the
variety stage, and in the 1920s and 1930s variety theatres continued to provide a
platform for music in the shape of stage bands and touring revue. But if this was
really dance music, its proper home was in the dance-halls which were being built
in such large numbers in the 1920s; if not, it could be bought and listened to at
home – especially as the sound quality of both records and wireless steadily
improved. The cinema is often held responsible for the decline of variety in the
interwar years; but an important part of the story is the shift of interest towards
music and dance, especially among the young, which variety could not adequately
cater for. Many of the great variety theatres built in the 1890s and 1900s can only
briefly have realised their potential as profitable palaces of entertainment.
But it was the rise of mechanical reproduction which set the seal on the
demotion of music-hall and variety as the main vehicle for popular music. As with
cinema, large-scale business allied with new technology bypassed the need to
bring performers into the physical presence of their paying audience, and made
possible the full realisation of the global musical culture which ragtime had prefig-
ured – and which music-hall could not contain. Crucial again was the transatlantic
connection. Both the leading British companies – the Gramophone Company
(1898) and Columbia (1917), which were to merge in 1931 to form EMI – had
strong connections with leading US firms from a very early stage, in the form of
cross-ownership, licensing agreements and worldwide marketing deals, and both
owned overseas subsidiaries (Jones 1985). The gramophone started to break
through to a mass market after about 1914, reflecting the new popular enthusiasm
for dance music and wartime musical comedy and revue, as well as the arrival of
cheap machines (Gelatt 1984, pp. 188-97; Frith 1988a, pp. 14-16). The boom con-
tinued after the war: popular dance bands the Savoy Orpheans and the Havana
Band are said to have made over 300 records between 1922 and 1927, while the
decline in sheet-music sales from 1922 onwards reflected the growing preference
for recorded music over home performance. The shift was reflected in publishers’
royalties: by 1927, the top five record companies were paying nearly ?200,000 a
year for mechanical recording rights, compared with only ?116,000 received in
public performance fees (McCarthy 1971, p. 44; Pearsall 1976, p. 83; Peacock and
Weir 1975, pp. 76, 81, 91).
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142 John Baxendale
Wireless was the final element in the new musical system; at first seen as a
competitor to records, but soon, as now, recognised as their main means of promo-
tion. Wireless sets improved steadily in quality and cheapness throughout the
interwar period, and although it was not until 1934 that most British households
had one, well before that they had become, as one historian has remarked, the
aural centre of the community if not of the household, heard in the street and
eventually displacing the hitherto ubiquitous street musician (Pegg 1983, p. 9;
Davies 1992, pp. 39-40, 111, 119-20). The BBC began broadcasting dance music in
1923, and by 1930 each weekday’s programmes were ended with a band from
10.30 to midnight (Frith 1983). It was increasingly through the BBC that bandlead-
ers such as Jack Payne, Jack Hylton, Bert Ambrose and Henry Hall became and
remained national stars, without having to move from the BBC studios or the West
End hotels where they regularly played, and without their audience having to
leave their homes (Briggs 1965, p. 35).
It is important to emphasise that new technologies did not ’cause’ these
changes to happen; rather, it was the complex interplay of the new culture and
communication industries, their audiences, and changing cultural forms which
determined that the technologies should be used in this way. The shift towards
domestic entertainment, for example, was part of a general pattern of social
change, and not just the ‘impact’ of the gramophone and the wireless, both of
which could be, and were, used in different contexts – in fairgrounds, bars and
drugstores, in Pathe’s public Salon du Phonographe in Paris, or, eventually
indeed, as reproduction improved, in clubs and discos (Gelatt 1984, pp. 45, 103).
By the end of the 1920s, the new popular music system was in place. Its
coming involved three dynamic forces: the growth of corporate cultural industries
operating within an international market; the introduction of new technologies of
mass reproduction; and the globalisation of musical culture. These things did not
happen all at once. The ‘corporatisation’ of the entertainment business from the
1890s, initially a restructuring of music-hall, became the vehicle for unforeseen
musical innovation which was eventually to help undermine it. The record indus-
try became multinational before the music did, but focused at first on the classical
repertoire: revue, ragtime and jazz became popular without it, but were later to
fuel its growth. The internationalisation of popular musical styles was thus less a
product of aesthetic and technical innovation as such, than of the expansion of
the entertainment industry and the cultural market: the developing political eco-
nomy of popular music.
Music, dance and sexuality
If the new popular music was closely linked with global economic developments,
for many it crystallised more domestic concerns. Prominent among these was
sexuality. Many people felt that the 1920s were a time of sexual revolution. What
seems evident in retrospect, however, is that this was not so much a revolution
in sexual behaviour, as a relaxation of public discourse about sexuality, the rules
governing its public expression, and the public behaviour of women generally. It
signalled the renegotiation of the division between public and private spheres that
had previously defined the acceptable role of women, who in politics and popular
entertainment alike, were entering the public sphere in ways that had previously
been impossible. It signalled also changes in the relations between the sexes, with
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Popular music and late modernity, 1910-1930 143
a new focus on the couple as an expressive and consuming unit. Music, and
particularly dance music, was an important mediator of all these changes; so much
so that contemporaries who resisted them frequently blamed the new music for
the new ‘laxity’, and vice versa. The music itself was felt to have dangerous sexual
connotations – note Priestley’s emphasis on sweat, frenzy, nervous excitement,
hypnosis – which were often explicitly linked to images of racial degeneration. But
it was dance which attracted most attention and played the most important mediat-
ing role.
The idea that dance had sexual meanings, and was enmeshed in gender
relations, was not, of course, anything new. It has always been an important
function of social dance in Western culture – in whatever milieu – to construct a
social and cultural space for interaction between the sexes. This was as true in the
seemingly ‘repressed’ Victorian world as in the ‘freer’ 1920s; but the rules were
different and they applied differently to different social classes. Although it has
sometimes been stated that social dancing was an unrespectable pastime for Vic-
torians, that it was mainly confined to the upper and middle classes, and even
that the working classes had no time or energy for it (Hustwitt 1983, p. 8;
Middleton 1981 p. 88; Rust 1969, p. 79), the fact is that respectable people of all
social classes danced, but not all in the same way.
For the upper and middle classes, the rules governing dance in the mid-
Victorian period were part of a broader code of behaviour largely designed to
constrain what women – especially the young and unmarried – could do outside
the family home. These rules were extremely restrictive, and largely designed to
secure the safe transfer of young women from girlhood to marriage – or from the
authority of the father to that of the husband – and thereafter to anchor them
securely to the private sphere of household and family (Davidoff 1973, pp. 49-50).
Dancing in high society was, therefore, confined to private or semi-private dances,
or charity balls, each with their particular place in the social round of the Season,
or in the more modest world of provincial or middle-class society. At both levels,
an important focus was on the young, their flirtations and eventual pairings, and
so these activities were strictly supervised by elders and chaperones (Davidoff
1973, pp. 65-6).
The rules governing the public behaviour of women, like many aspects of
‘respectability’, were applied differently to different classes. Respectable working
men’s wives could attend the music-hall or popular theatre; indeed, recreational
reformers welcomed their presence as a civilising influence. So could unsupervised
working-class courting couples – an unthinkable concept in the higher ranks of
society. Middle and upper-class men could attend, though their motives in doing
so may have been open to unfavourable interpretation. What was impossible was
the social mixing of middle-class women and working-class men: a major problem
for recreational reformers, who sought to reconcile the classes in leisure.
Respectable working-class people could and did dance in public. Dancing
was not yet so fully a part of the commercial entertainment system as song; music-
halls were not equipped for dancing, and although there were some commercial
dance-halls, they did not flourish widely until after the war (Franks 1963, p. 162).
But at Blackpool, for example, which became Britain’s first, and most celebrated,
mass pleasure resort between the 1860s and the 1890s, dancing was a major attrac-
tion for the better-paid and more respectable sections of the working class who
were its main visitors. The earliest commercial entertainment complexes, Uncle
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144 John Baxendale
Tom’s Cabin in the early 1860s and Raikes Hall Gardens in the 1870s, featured
first dancing platforms, and later indoor dance-halls. The Central Pier became the
‘People’s Pier’ – and a profitable concern – when all-day dance music was intro-
duced in 1870 (Turner and Palmer 1981, p. 25). Later, the opulent Tower Ballroom
(1894) and the Empress Ballroom at the Winter Gardens (1896) formed the centre-
pieces of the town’s 1890s investment boom. Even in the 1920s and 1930s the
town’s ballrooms retained their allure, and the Saturday night ‘dance train’ would
carry the youth of Manchester to Blackpool for half a crown, returning home in
darkened railway carriages in the early hours of Sunday morning (Davies 1992,
pp. 90-1).
For working people at home, many of whom could not afford Blackpool, the
street was an important dancing venue, as it was for musical culture in general:
Dancing may often be seen in the alleys and courts in the poorer parts of Lancashire towns,
and even in the side-streets turning out of great thoroughfares. A crowd, not only of
children, but of young men and women will gather round a barrel-organ, and in a few
moments many couples will have begun to dance. (Russell and Campagnac 1900, p. 305)
Street music, often for dancing, was a regular feature of city life, a cheap
entertainment whose quality varied from the expert to the rank amateur. Profes-
sional street-singers retailing popular and music-hall songs, and organ-grinders
from the Italian community playing dance music, vied with ‘singing beggars’,
whose appeal was to charity rather than musical appreciation, and whose numbers
would swell in times of unemployment – not to mention mechanical piano players,
German bands, ‘nigger minstrel’ troupes, evangelical hymn-singers, jugglers or
dancing bears (Davies 1992, pp. 116-24). Brass bands would commonly play for
dancing at pleasure gardens, fetes and public parks, just as at other times and
places they might be playing sacred or classical music. Bandsmen could get
summer jobs in seaside bands – like six Yorkshire miners from Emsley Brass Band
in 1894 and 1895 (Russell 1983, pp. 111-12; Russell 1991).
There were class differences in the style of dancing as well as its location.
The waltz, for instance, was said to be slower on the working-class dance-floor:
more smoochy, perhaps, than the quick waltz, and needing less expertise. In
Blackpool, so the Globe magazine reported,
The Lancashire lad and lass dance, of course, in thick boots: pumps, if they knew them,
they would scorn as trumpery. Their dancing is business: their faces are grimly set with a
Wellington-at-Waterloo expression; the tread is something short of a steam pile-driver, and
the and trembles beneath their percussion. (Turner and
Palmer 1981, p. 25)
Despite these unmistakable class codings of how and where dancing took place,
it was still part of the seamless web of the Victorian musical system. Give or take
the rough and the smooth in musicianship or footwork, debutantes danced to the
same music as holidaying mill-girls. Raikes Hall dances, like any society ball,
featured a standard repertoire of ‘valses, the old polka, the likewise elderly but
graceful schottische, with the quadrilles and lancers by way of a change’, even if
the evening always wound up with a ‘stirring gallop that used to shake the old
wooden ballroom to its foundations’ (ibid., p. 27).
The new social dance
But early in the new century, it was the secure structure of Victorian da whose foundations were to be shaken. ‘It is certain that our American cousins are
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Popular music and late modernity, 1910-1930 145
fonder of dancing than we are, and it is to them that we must look for any new
dances, praying only that they will not send us another cake-walk!’ So wrote
Reginald St Johnston, somewhat nervously, in 1906 (p. 156). His prophecy was
accurate, but his prayer was not answered. In the years after 1910, a succession
of dance-crazes, mostly of transatlantic origin, transformed both the forms and
the social context of dancing in Britain. In both respects, many of the rules and
practices governing Victorian social dance were overturned, and dancing became
a reflection of and a vehicle for significant and much-contested changes in gender
relations and the role of women.
The new dance-steps which succeeded each other with such rapidity af 1910 have often been described (Buckman 1978; Erenberg 1981; Franks 1 Hustwitt 1983). What they achieved was the overthrow of the sequence or dance which had dominated the Victorian scene. Sequence-dances, such as waltz or the polka, were built on formally patterned foot movements which car you round the dance-floor, and which everyone was supposed to perform. All dancers in the room would thus (ideally) be doing the same thing at the s time, and an important element in the pleasure of such dancing derives from feeling of group-participation. The new dances, on the other hand, adopte different kind of foot-movement, more akin to a walk or a shuffle. The key elem here was not how you moved your feet, but what you did with your body. Wh old-style dancing demanded a fairly rigid and formal bodily posture, with lim bodily contact even in the once-scandalous waltz, the new dancing seeme consist of jerky, undignified and even indecent movements of arms, legs trunk, and often a close and lingering embrace with one’s partner – even, in t case of the tango, the intimate contact of legs and pelvic region. Above all, emphasis of this kind of dancing was not on the correct and of a physical ritual, but on the use of the body for self-expression. With the same dance, different couples might, therefore, be doing different things. focus was no longer on the collective mass of dancers, but on the couple, their relatively free expressive movement.
This emphasis on the couple was reinforced, in upper-class circles at a rate, by the changes in the acceptable social milieu for dancing. The change rapid: by 1913, it was observed, respectable middle-class New Yorkers could seen dancing in public places whereas only two years earlier such a thing w have been scandalous (Erenberg 1981, p 146). A similar change seems to h taken place in Britain. Nightclubs mushroomed in London before, during and a the War, in which couples who could afford to could dance without the restric conventions of the Victorian ballroom (Pearsall 1976, pp. 71-80). Going out couple to dance meant, again, that dancing was to do with the couple, an expre sion of their relationship rather than a distanced and ritualised social encounte in a large and supervised group.
For the mass of the population, of course, nightclubs were an irrelevan except as a location for gossip-column items and late-night BBC music broadcas but the growth of social dance as a commercialised pastime, particularly among the young, and its commodification in the form of dance-halls, had a similar eff Dancing is one of the spectacular success-stories of inter-war popular leisu rivalled only by the cinema, though curiously neglected by historians (but Roberts 1973, pp. 232-6; Hustwitt 1983; Davies 1992, pp. 89-94). Indeed, it been stated that 11,000 new dance-halls were opened between 1919 and 1This content downloaded from 140.184.72.37 on Tue, 16 Apr 2019 20:01:49 UTC
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146 John Baxendale
(McMillan 1979, p. 145; Jones 1986, p. 44; Beddoe 1989, p. 118), while even in 1934
there were only 3,400 cinemas (Low 1971, p. 47); however, both figures should
perhaps be treated with caution.
Whatever the exact figures, both one-off dance-halls and chains such as
Mecca certainly throve in the 1920s, and regular dancing to a professional band
several times a week became possible for millions of people. Significantly, the
dance-hall was a young person’s world, colonised almost exclusively by 15 to
25-year-olds, to the extent that the ‘old adult dances’, some complained, were
being driven out. By the 1930s it had become, along with the cinema, the chief
location of adolescent social life, the place to see and be seen, the primary social
space for peer-group gathering and sexual encounter. As such, it both supple-
mented and supplanted the existing street culture – including the ubiquitous open-
air ‘monkey-run’, which in the Manchester suburb of Harpurhey, only survived
while the dance-halls and cinemas were closed on Sundays (Fowler 1992, pp. 137-
44, 148). Like the street and the music-hall, the dance-floor was a ‘highly-charged
social space’ in which ‘the crowd were as much producers as consumers of a form
of social drama, in which styles and identities were tried out and exchanged’
(Bailey 1986, p. xvii). The dramas enacted, whether by couples or single-sex gangs,
were those of gender and sexuality, of bodily self-expression through clothes and
movement. The commodification of the social space in which these teenage rituals
took place was an important landmark in the identification of young people as
cultural consumers. But it could not have happened without the musical changes
which shifted, and sexualised, the social meanings of dance.
Music, sex and racism
Contemporaries were thus right to believe that the explosion of social dance in all
classes from the early 1920s had something to do with sex. But despite the fears
of some contemporaries and the hopes of others, this had less to do with promiscu-
ity than, ultimately, with marriage. Public discourse about sexuality was rife in
the 1920s, but it reflected, not so much sexual freedom, as a new understanding
of the nuclear family as an emotional unit. Sexual satisfaction between spouses,
and emotional bonding between parents and children, became primary functions
of the family, reflected in the spread of contraception, the steady decline in family
size, the popularisation of Freud and the increasingly frank discourse about female
sexuality in women’s magazines and other public places. It has been plausibly
argued that what lay behind this was not just a growth of personal freedom, but
the identification of the family and household as a consuming unit, with a growing
range of products targeted at it, promoted by the growing advertising industry
and the new mass media, and reflected and encouraged by the growing emotional
weight given to the conjugal family. This new consumerism, of course, included
the consumption of leisure – including records, radio sets and dancing (Weeks
1981, pp. 199-214).
Many contemporaries, however, did not see it this way. These social changes
all clustered around women and their sexuality, and the response was a misogyn-
istic moral panic which surrounded popular music and dance in the period
between 1910 and 1930. The dominant female image of the immediate post-war
years was the ‘flapper’: originally simply a prepubescent girl, then an underage
prostitute, and by the early 1920s the ‘frivolous, scantily clad “jazzing flapper”,
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Popular music and late modernity, 1910-1930 147
irresponsible and undisciplined’, as the Daily Mail put it in February 1920 – the
hedonistic successor, in fact, to the more earnest but equally threatening ‘New
Woman’ of the 1890s (Melman 1988, pp. 18-19). Women, some of whom had
earned good wages in the war, were now behaving differently in public – adopting
short hair, short skirts, high heels, cosmetics, smoking, drinking, dancing, and
an androgynous ‘tubular’ shape. Their ‘new license’ became quickly linked to the
declining birth rate and the ‘surplus’ of one to two million women in the popula-
tion. To cap it all, these frivolous, de-feminised (yet somehow libidinous) young
women were competing with men in the labour market, and in 1928 were even
given the vote. Press attacks on the ‘flapper’ were often extreme and aggressive,
and through a dual discourse on female sexuality and mass culture, linked the
appearance and behaviour of women to themes of moral, political and racial degen-
eration (Melman 1988, pp. 17-37). Dance condensed all these offensive elements,
combining the new hedonism with overt sexual expression and indecorous public
behaviour.
The new dances were already being criticised before 1914 as immodest a suggestive, for their animal-like gestures and bodily contortions. But a furthe twist was given to the degeneracy theme by the question of race. Supporter well as opponents of the new music insisted on its ‘negro’ racial identity. Media through imperialist British culture’s image of the ‘savage’ non-European, ‘black ness’ heightened the sense of disorder and degeneration. Before the First World War, the Daily Express solemnly warned its readers of the indecency of the ‘Hug Bear’, unsurprising, the paper remarked, in view of the dance’s origins in ‘negr dancing rooms’. The tango, the dance sensation of 1913-14, was condemned improper by both Queen Mary and the Kaiser, and the society hostess La Helmsley, blissfully ignorant of its Argentinian and ultimately African origin expressed regret that this ‘graceful old Spanish dance’ should have been so rupted by ‘nigger-dance characteristics’ (McMillan 1978, pp. 272-3). This the continued after the war, when Canon Drummond associated ‘the dance of low
niggers in America’ with ‘the morals of the pig-sty’ (Times, 15 March 1919), while
the Charleston craze of 1925 was considered by the Daily Mail to be ‘reminiscent
only of negro orgies’. Even J.B. Priestley, visiting Blackpool in 1933, deplored the
town’s addiction to ‘weary negroid ditties . .. the woes of distant negroes probably
reduced to such misery by too much gin or cocaine’ – although here, apparently,
the racial characteristic under examination was depressive lethargy rather than
mad sexual hyperactivity (Priestley 1934, p. 268). More often, the ‘jungle music’
theme linked racial degeneracy, moral chaos and sexual license with the corrupting
power of both women and the racial ‘other’ – the same ideological mix which
fuelled the contemporaneous moral panic over drugs (Kohn 1992).
It is important to recognise that both these critiques of the new popular
music – sexual and racial – were unprecedented in Britain. Nineteenth-century
middle-class commentators had often thought the music-hall degenerate, not
because of the music, but because of things the crowd got up to – rowdiness,
violence, sexual immorality. The songs themselves were not threatening; at worst
they were deplorably coarse, and destitute of thought – ‘tawdry imitations …
with which the eyes of the poor are dazzled and deceived’ (Russell and Campagnac
1900, p. 295). Sexual innuendo was offensive, but not subversive; it was prostitu-
tion itself which represented a social danger. The negro presented an image of the
pastoral, or a figure of fun, but not a racial threat. In other words, music-hall song
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148 John Baxendale
had a place in the culture, although a lowly one, as a debased form of ‘real’ music.
Critics of ‘jazz’ in the 1920s, however, could not find its place in the culture. It
was read as coming from outside culture altogether – from ‘the jungle’; it was a
force of nature, expressing sexuality and savagery, and invested by both critics
and aficionados with the power to undermine culture. Of course, it was nothing
of the kind, being just as sophisticated a cultural product as any national anthem,
parlour ballad or Methodist hymn. To listen to its innocent, jaunty rhythms today
is to be baffled at the passions it aroused. This music caused offence, not because
of some inherent savagery it embodied, but because it latched on to the most
sensitive social issues of the time – sexuality, race, class – in a way which
nineteenth-century music had not. As Priestley’s account suggests, it would con-
tinue to get under the skin of social life throughout the new century.
Distinctions and disruptions
Beneath the moral panic, and the unthinking racism and sexism, which charac-
terised many hostile responses to popular music in the 1920s, something else was
going on: an important change in the way in which judgements of cultural value
were made. This can be seen as a shift from the sentimental and moralistic aesthetic
criteria of the Victorians to a new set of distinctions based on the social relations
of music’s production and reception. These hinged on a number of dichotomies:
serious/popular, artistic/commercial, authentic/inauthentic, which reflected, and reacted against, the new conditions of cultural production, while at the same tim opening the way for ‘the popular’ to be taken more seriously than the Victorians
would have imagined possible.
As Dave Russell argues, the Victorians tended to believe that ‘music per se mattered, rather than any particular form of music’ (Russell 1987, p. 58). Because of its association with religion, and its supposed ability to civilise and humanise,
there was a general presumption in favour of music of any kind, which gave it a
central role in the ‘improving’ project of rational recreation. Moreover, as we hav already noted, the ‘relative congruence of musical technique, repertoire and prac- tice’ across the different musical genres, allowed a significant degree of tolerance and mobility between them. This applied across the cultural spectrum: brass band played a repertoire ranging effortlessly from popular dance music to the European classical tradition; music-hall programmes would open with an operatic overture;
excerpts from Shakespeare formed a normal part of the popular theatre bill along with melodrama; Sarah Bernhardt toured the music-halls and performed classical
roles in French to Blackpool holidaymakers; and Diaghilev’s Russian Ballet danced
at the London Coliseum for six months on the same bill as the Educated Apes and Jack Lane the Yorkshire Rustic Comedian (Turner and Palmer 1981, p. 42; Barker
1957, pp. 148-9).
This did not mean that Victorians were undiscriminating. Rather, they judged music by the quality and appropriateness of its sentiments, or its ‘improving character. The central guiding principle was that culture could be not only good
for you, but a social force for good, seeking not merely to provide pleasure o personal enlightenment, but, as Matthew Arnold put it (referring to somewhat
higher forms of culture), ‘to make reason and the will of God prevail’ in society
at large. At the humble level of popular recreation, this meant persuading th working class to accept the moral tutelage of their betters, through improving
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Popular music and late modernity, 1910-1930 149
activities such as sport, reading, music or the working men’s club. Hence, the
value of such activities had to be judged by their moral impact, and we see such
moral judgements being made over the sale of alcohol in working men’s clubs, or
the rise of professional sport (Bailey 1978; Cunningham 1980).
The hostility towards Victorian taste which became such a hallmark of the
inter-war years – the rejection of its cloying sentimentality, its overdecoration, its
penchant for moral lessons and improving stories – clearly signals that new criteria
of cultural distinction were gathering strength: distinctions based on judgements
of intellectual status rather than moral worth. Where in the nineteenth century,
the general diffusion of culture was considered a good thing, the new view was
that good culture was, almost by definition, difficult to understand. Conversely,
that which was popular, widely diffused – and, therefore, commercially success-
ful – was almost by definition bad. ‘Serious’ and ‘popular’ thus became important
hallmarks of cultural distinction. The rejection of ‘Victorianism’, coupled with the
rise of artistic modernism, sharpened the hitherto fuzzy distinction between intel-
lectual and popular taste, and it remained sharp up to the ‘postmodernist’ present
day.
However, this did not by any means necessitate a wholesale rejection of
the popular. The presumption was that, in the prevailing relations of cultural
production, the popular was likely to lack artistic merit, technical skill and authenti-
city of feeling, being produced to extract a profit from an undiscriminating and
easily-manipulated mass audience. But, armed with a trained sensibility, people
could discriminate within the popular between bad and good (for the Leavisite
use of ‘discrimination’, and their emphasis on the role of education, see Thompson
1964). More than this, once ‘good’ popular culture had been identified, it could be
appropriated, enjoyed, taken seriously, and even used as a mark of cultural status.
Crudely speaking, popular music was acceptable if it could be considered
‘art’, or it had the merit of ‘authenticity’. ‘Art’ meant individual creativity and/or
technical virtuosity: both of which, it should be noted, were easier to search out
in the age of sound recording, which preserved individual performances and did
not reduce music to dots on the page. So in 1934, the ‘serious’ musicologist Con-
stant Lambert, while rejecting most of what he called ‘jazz’ as formulaic and com-
mercial, could hail Louis Armstrong as ‘one of the most remarkable virtuosi of the
present day’, and Duke Ellington as ‘a real composer, the first jazz composer, the
first negro composer of distinction’ (Lambert 1934, p. 155). From the late 1920s
onwards, the category of ‘jazz’ became more clearly delineated, as a field in which
art was indeed possible – even, some said, the art music of the present day, and
as such to be carefully distinguished (as Lambert failed to do) from Tin Pan Alley
tunes and commercial dance music. The dispute over ‘hot jazz’ – non-danceable
and so both less commercial and artistically superior – was a crucial turning-point
here (Hustwitt 1983, pp. 25-7; McCarthy 1971, pp. 47-50; Frith 1988b).
If ‘art’ came from gifted individuals, ‘authenticity’ was bestowed by humble
and anonymous collectivities, ‘expressing their participation in an unalienated cul-
ture’ rather than their virtuosity or sophistication (Middleton 1990, p. 129; see also
Chapter 5 passim). This notion always lurked behind the Romantic nostalgia for
‘the people’, but was brought to the fore by the English folk-song revival, when
Cecil Sharp and others elaborated the distinction between folk ‘authenticity’ and
music-hall commercialism (Sharp 1907). Again, the delineation of musical categor-
ies was a crucial instrument of discrimination. Sharp rigorously excluded any comThis content downloaded from 140.184.72.37 on Tue, 16 Apr 2019 20:01:49 UTC
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150 John Baxendale
mercial influences from the folk-song he collected (and thereby, in a sense,
invented) (Harker 1982). Later, a similar process of categorisation identified blues,
hitherto subsumed in a whole mass of commercial black music, as a distinct and
authentic folk-form (though one which also produced great individual artists). The
pop culture era that began in the late 1950s saw the further drawing and
sharpening of categories, and the deployment of ‘art’ and ‘authenticity’ in order
to distinguish between them (the early Elvis versus the late; ‘pop’ versus ‘rock’;
‘serious’ reviews of Beatles albums; etc.).
These distinctions of cultural value, Pierre Bourdieu reminds us, are more
than mere differences of taste or opinion; they are the crucial hinges of the system
of cultural power and status (Bourdieu 1984). New patterns of cultural distinction
may seem like a response to the arrival of new cultural forms: Americanisation,
or modernism. In fact, both the forms and the responses were part of a wholesale
restructuring of cultural relations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries.
The focus of cultural power in the mid-Victorian era had been a ‘pu sphere’, dominated by the printed word, embracing the middle-class, masculin worlds of business, politics and intellectual life. Throughout the nineteenth ce tury, however, intellectual life became increasingly professionalised and s cialised, separated from a general middle-class public (Heyck 1982). At the s time, that middle-class public was itself being displaced by commercialisation fr any direct influence on popular culture except as customers, and any influence popular taste except through the agencies of the state: the education system, t BBC, the arts bureaucracies. A new and expanded public sphere emerged, b on the mass media and a mass audience, whose hallmark was its inclusiveness.
Within this sphere, the exercise of traditional cultural authority became increas-
ingly problematical: even the BBC, guided by John Reith’s quasi-Arnoldian cultural
project, was obliged to embrace popular entertainment, though on its own idiosyn-
cratic terms (Frith 1983). Intellectuals had the option of rejecting the mass-popular
altogether, but such an ‘impossibilist’ stance risked complete marginalisation (see
Leavis 1930). The only way of engaging with it was to apply some principles of
discrimination, by which the popular could be partly appropriated as an object
within intellectual discourse. Hence, the criteria of ‘art’ and ‘authenticity’,
designed to assert the superiority of intellectuals and ‘real’ people over stars and
impresarios, and of traditional cultural production over ‘mass culture’. Thus, the
ideal of the individual artist was set up against the increasingly collective organis-
ation of modern cultural production, and its orientation to the market; while
‘authenticity’ criticised cultural production for becoming professionalised, and sep-
arated from cultural consumption. That these criteria were not always compatible
with each other revealed contradictions in the intellectual critique of the popular,
but together they ensured that whenever popular music was valued by intellec-
tuals, it was for qualities which went against the flow of modern cultural change.
Conclusion: globalisation and the strange power of cheap music
For Priestley, with whom I began, ragtime was not just disturbing in itself, but a
harbinger of disturbance, that continual disturbance in which we recognise the
experience of modernity: in Marshall Berman’s words (somewhat reminiscent of
Priestley’s), ‘disintegration and renewal, trouble and anguish, ambiguity and conThis content downloaded from 140.184.72.37 on Tue, 16 Apr 2019 20:01:49 UTC
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Popular music and late modernity, 1910-1930 151
tradiction’ (Berman 1982, p. 345). In the early part of the twentieth century,
changes were taking place which could be said to herald the onset of ‘late modern-
ity’: a period in which, Berman argues, modernisation takes in the whole world,
the maelstrom becomes the norm, and ‘as the modern public expands, it shatters
into a multitude of fragments’ (ibid. p. 17). I have suggested in this article that
popular music was at the cutting edge of this process, present in the formation of
a global economy and culture, in the restructuring of gender and sexuality, in the
dissolution and reformation of the public sphere and discourses of cultural value.
It is now time to bring these points together underF the general heading of ‘late
modernity’. (In the discussion that follows, I am indebted to Murdock (1993),
Giddens (1990), Kern (1989) and Robertson (1992), although I have not followed
any of them on all points.)
Central to the experience of late modernity is the complex process of ‘globalis-
ation’. The earlier period of modernity – say, from the Renaissance to the nine-
teenth century – saw the formation of nation-states and national-popular cultures,
drawing ‘the people’ into the imagined community of the nation, along the path-
ways laid out by the formation of the national state and market. Towards the
end of this phase, music-hall song became the first, and possibly the last, fully
national-popular music: which is why it serves even today to evoke a certain lost
Englishness.
Late modernity reverses this emphasis on the nation. By the beginning of
this century, the capitalist economy was growing extensively, beyond and across
national boundaries, to form a world-wide network, while within the nation it
consolidated intensively to absorb aspects of life which had not yet been fully
commercialised. Thus, while music was becoming fully a commodity within Bri-
tain – with the expansion of the Victorian popular music system – the framework
was already developing which would make it an international commodity, with
results that would undermine both national identity and the cultural basis of social
order.
Cultural commodities – including Hollywood movies and Priestley’s rag-
time – were the first to be produced and distributed on a truly global scale. Culture
is cheap to export, and technologies of mass reproduction give an enormous cost
advantage to producers with large markets. A globalised commercial culture
rapidly emerged; national cultures were not obliterated, but had to be rearticulated
within the new global framework, and their autonomy was seriously compromised
by the emergence of new centres of cultural power lying outside national borders.
Because these centres were generally in the United States – Hollywood, Tin Pan
Alley – the loss of autonomy was experienced as ‘Americanisation’. In fact, the
situation was more complicated: American forms were rarely simply swallowed
whole, but were usually renegotiated on national terms – as, for example, with
British jazz and dance music (Frith 1983; Godbolt 1984). In response to Americanis-
ation, the state adopted in the 1920s for the first time the role of protector of the
national culture, forming the BBC in 1922, and setting up quota barriers against
Hollywood films in 1927.
Globalisation does not just disrupt music: it renders it disruptive. Anthony
Giddens has described a process of ‘disembedding’: the separation of social and
cultural processes from localised contexts, and their reorganisation across large
distances of space and time (Giddens 1990, p. 53). It is through ‘disembedding’
that words such as ‘market’ and ‘audience’, which once referred to people gathered
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152 John Baxendale
together in a single location, came to apply to processes taking place across the
whole globe. Because of its abstract nature, music is easily disembedded from its
origins by the operation of the world market, and introduced into completely new
cultural and geographical locations: so that J.B. Priestley’s Blackpool holidaymak-
ers end up ‘singing the woes of distant negroes’ instead of ‘our own silly, innocent
nonsense’ (Priestley 1934, p. 268).
‘Our own nonsense’ is, of course, always ‘innocent’. But disembedding
makes it impossible to say whose nonsense it really is, let alone what it ‘authentic-
ally’ means: Tin Pan Alley is where all the folk-songs come from nowadays. Disem-
bedded from their origins, new musical forms arrive, as it were, without labels –
with nothing to indicate what they signify except their relations of similarity and
difference with familiar music. Their meaning can only be determined by a process
of articulation – establishing links with existing social practices and meanings
(Middleton 1990, pp. 8-10). In other words, meanings were up for grabs, Thus,
early jazz was appropriated in England by
(Frith 1988b), and early rock ‘n’ roll by working-class youth subcultures – appropri-
ations which partly defined what these musics meant within British culture. Such
articulations, and, therefore, the music’s meaning, can be struggled over: once
defined, they can become weapons in other struggles. Unfamiliar music, perceived
as threatening and incomprehensible because of its differences from the main-
stream, becomes the focus of concern over points of social conflict such as youth,
gender, sexuality, crime, race, or is seized upon by emergent or marginalised
social groups as a mark of identity. The disembedded nature of modern popular
music, its open invitation for us to fight over its meaning, allows it to get ‘under
the skin’ of social life, in a way which more explicit political or social comment
cannot do.
Ragtime arrived in Britain, and in the Leeds Empire, at a moment of crisis around class, gender and cultural values: a crisis itself provoked by the shifts a changes of late modernity. Through the twin processes of mass democracy mass consumerism – the (supposed) sovereignty of the voter coupled with that the purchaser – the working classes were becoming assimilated into the social a political system. Democracy and consumerism also speeded the breakdown of th Victorian gender system, with its emphasis on the separate spheres of men and women, and freed women to become political and economic agents – voters, pro ducers and consumers – on the same footing as men: freed them also to beh more ‘loosely’ in public places. Instead of being guided, as ‘rational recreationist had hoped, by the moral tutelage of the concerned middle classes, democratisat was increasingly mediated by the new commercialised ‘public sphere’ of m communication. The structures and centres of Victorian cultural power were cru bling, while new ones were growing up behind a populist facade of consum power.
Strange and wild to their new audiences, ragtime and its successors were a
product of the same social crisis, whose connotations they picked up in their
disruption of Victorian musical codes, in the new sexualised forms of dance, by
being loud, rhythmical, foreign and black. Priestley was right to hear in this music
the ‘fragmentary but prophetic outlines’, psychological and geopolitical, of the twentieth-century world. What he heard in Leeds was the harbinger of something with which the fixed points of the Victorian musical, and social, system could not possibly cope: the sound of late modernity.
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Popular music and late modernity, 1910-1930 153
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