The 1920s was the decade that marked the beginning of the modern music era. The music recording industry was just beginning to form and a multitude of new technologies helped to create the way music was made and distributed. The phonograph was invented by Thomas Edison in 1877 and it used wax cylinders to play back recordings. This invention lead to a recorded music market that began to appear in the 1880s. The gramophone was then created in the late 1880s and it used flat discs to reproduce sound, becoming popular in the early 1900s and replacing the phonograph. The way the music was recorded changed in the mid-1920s when the acoustical recording process was replaced with the electrical process. This change made the way that recordings were made sound much better and more natural, helping to expand the popularity of recorded music.
RAGTIME Ragtime was popular towards the end of the 19th century and into the first two decades of the 20th century, roughly 1893 to 1917. It is the style of music that preceded jazz. Its rhythms made it lively and springy, and therefore ideal for dancing. Its name is believed to be a contraction of the term “ragged time,” which refers to its rhythmically broken up melodies. Ragtime developed in African American communities throughout the southern parts of the Midwest, particularly St. Louis. The first ragtime composer to have his work published as sheet music was Ernest Hogan, who gets credit for coining the term "ragtime." His song "La Pas Ma La" was published in 1895. Hogan is problematic in the history of ragtime because one of his most popular songs contained a racist slur, which angered many African-American fans of the genre. Scott JoplinPerhaps the most famous composer of ragtime music, Scott Joplin (1867 or 1868 -1917) composed two of the genre's most well-known and popular pieces, “The Entertainer” and “Maple Leaf Rag.”
EARLY DANCE MUSIC Prohibition of alcohol began in 1920, this lead to an underground market for much sought after drinks and the creation of places like speakeasies. Speakeasies started out small, but as the Roaring Twenties came into its prime, speakeasies followed and expanded into clubs that featured musicians and dancers. Nearly every town in the country had some form of dance band and a place to gather, making dance music some of the most widely heard and accepted music to come out of the 1920s. Dance music laid the foundation for what would become classic pop standards. The "Charleston," the "Black Bottom," the "Shimmy," the "Foxtrot," and the "Lindy Hop" were some of the most popular dances of the time. Most dance music resembled what we would call Big Band today, but at the time it was considered Jazz and it had elements of the formerly popular Ragtime music.
JAZZ Jazz music began in the early 1900s within the black community in New Orleans. It was a new type of music that combined European and African styles. It is a difficult style to define as it incorporates several different elements of several different styles, relies on a lot of improvisation and syncopated rhythms and is subjective in many ways. Jazz music reached the mainstream in the 1920s when Southern African American musicians began moving up to Chicago looking for work. The Twenties are often called the Jazz Age because the popularization of Jazz music had an enormous cultural effect. Jazz music was important because it influenced fashion, dances, accepted moral standards, youth culture, and race relations. Jazz music was one of the first types of music to be culturally appropriated by the American white middle class and Jazz scholars often separate the music into "Jazz" and "White Jazz," marking a difference in style and meaning between original African American jazz artists and popularized white jazz artists. Louis Armstrong