The Jazz Age

The decade following World War I would one day be caricatured as "the Roaring Twenties," and it was a time of unprecedented prosperity — the nation's total wealth nearly doubled between 1920 and 1929, manufactures rose by 60 percent, for the first time most people lived in urban areas — and in homes lit by electricity. They made more money than they ever had before and, spurred on by the giant new advertising industry, spent it faster, too — on washing machines and refrigerators and vacuum cleaners, 12 million radios, 30 million automobiles, and untold millions of tickets to the movies, that ushered them into a new fast-living world of luxury and glamour their grandparents never could have imagined. Meanwhile, at the polls and in the workplace as well as on the dance floor, women had begun to assert a new independence.

Nothing quite like it had ever happened before in America. And by the mid-1920s, jazz was being played in dance halls and roadhouses and speakeasies all over the country. The blues, which had once been the product of itinerant black musicians, the poorest of the southern poor, had become an industry, and dancing consumed a country that seemed convinced prosperity would never end. There were "all-girl" orchestras on the road now — including Babe Egan's Hollywood Red Heads, a band billed as the Twelve Vampires, and the Parisian Red Heads, all of whom actually came from Indiana. More than 100 dance bands regularly criss-crossed the wide-open spaces between St. Louis and Denver, Texas and Nebraska, playing one-nighters. They were called "territory bands" — the Coon-Sanders Nighthawks; the Alphonso Trent and Doc Ross and Troy Floyd and Benny Moten Orchestras; the Deluxe Melody Boys and Happy Black Aces; Jesse Stone's Blue Serenaders; George E. Lee and his Singing Novelty Orchestra; Walter Page and his Blue Devils; and Andy Kirk's Clouds of Joy. "People didn't think anything about going 150 to 200 miles to dance back in those times," one territory band...