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Music and the Beast Within
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13938 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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2 / 1988 |
5,115 Words |
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John Braeman
John Braeman is professor of history at the University of
Nebraska at Lincoln. |
THE JAZZ AGE
Popular Music in the 1920's
Arnold Shaw
New York: Oxford University Press, 1987
350 pp., $19.95
A set of contrasting themes dominates the popular image of America in the 1920s. The negative side portrays the United States as retreating into an isolationism that forswore any responsibility for upholding peace and thus opened the door for a breakdown of world order climaxing in World War II. Domestically, the picture of America in the 1920s is of a country returning on a grander, more recklessly abandoned scale to what Vernon L. Parington called "the Great Barbecue." The business of America was business--and the accompanying speculative orgy received its comeuppance in the Great Depression. Simultaneously, the soured Puritanism of the countryside and small town was making a last-ditch bid to impose its crabbed and narrow values upon the more open, freer ways of the city dweller. Its most signal triumph (if long-run downfall) was Prohibition; its most menacing expression, the Ku Klux Klan. But there is a more positive side to the picture--a contrapuntal spirit of exuberance, excitement, and adventure. Not simply were intellectuals and artists experimenting with new ideas and modes of expression, but a large segment of the nation's youth was in rebellion against the genteel respectability of its elders. F. Scott Fitzgerald made his reputation as the literary chronicler of that rebellion; he and his wife, Zelda, appeared, in their own lives, its personification. It was Fitzgerald who was responsible for identifying the ferment of the decade with a distinctive musical idiom by titling his 1922 collection of short stories Tales of the Jazz
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