Everybody's Doin' It: Sex, Music, and Dance in New York, 1840-1917
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- $33.99
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- $33.99
Publisher Description
"Racy scholarship does the Grizzly Bear here with theoretical rigor." —William Lhamon, author of Raising Cain
Everybody’s Doin’ It is the eye-opening story of popular music’s seventy-year rise in the brothels, dance halls, and dives of New York City. It traces the birth of popular music, including ragtime and jazz, to convivial meeting places for sex, drink, music, and dance. Whether coming from a single piano player or a small band, live music was a nightly feature in New York’s spirited dives, where men and women, often black and white, mingled freely—to the horror of the elite.
This rollicking demimonde drove the development of an energetic dance music that would soon span the world. The Virginia Minstrels, Juba, Stephen Foster, Irving Berlin and his hit “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” and the Original Dixieland Jass Band all played a part in popularizing startling new sounds.
Musicologist Dale Cockrell recreates this ephemeral underground world by mining tabloids, newspapers, court records of police busts, lurid exposés, journals, and the reports of undercover detectives working for social-reform organizations, who were sent in to gather evidence against such low-life places. Everybody’s Doin’ It illuminates the how, why, and where of America’s popular music and its buoyant journey from the dangerous Five Points of downtown to the interracial black and tans of Harlem.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this explosive history of sex, music, and dance in New York City, Cockrell (Demons of Disorder) details an "underworld in which legions of lower-class blacks and whites danced madly to wild music-making in the search for joy and escape." In the 1840s, the city's dance halls and saloons were a hotbed of prostitution and musicians fanned the flames. Outraged reformers, investigators, preachers, and politicians fought vice by implementing license requirements for liquor and entertainment, dry Sundays, and a ban on serving booze where live music was performed. But by the Civil War, commercialized sex was the city's second-largest industry, with 400-plus musicians playing in bars and brothels. By the turn of the century, heavily syncopated ragtime was moving young New Yorkers, as Cockrell writes enthusiastically, "in fresh, sexy, uninhibited ways"; "tough dances" such as the hug-me-tight, the Bowery glide, and the turkey trot became ubiquitous. In 1913, a whopping 1,300 musicians were playing the circuit. Then came 1917, when the onset of WWI led the War Department to crack down on the so-called tenderloin districts: musicians lost gigs, and duos such as Vernon and Irene Castle performed sterilized versions of popular dances. Cockrell's fascinating story and soundtrack of disorderly old Gotham will delight New York City historians and music buffs alike.
