Southern Syncopated Orchestra

Abstract

The Southern Syncopated Orchestra has exercised an enduring fascination for European enthusiasts and researchers, and understandably so. It brought to Europe the first of the New Orleans greats to cross the Atlantic and provoked some of the earliest serious public commentary on outside the pages of the African-American press. Furthermore, it was the ultimate nursery. Many of the non-American members of the African diaspora who were to play in Europe during the first age, and some of their white contemporaries, learned their trade in its ever-changing ranks. This very large musical aggregation, which was said to have a repertoire of about five hundred songs (Kings Bench Division 1920), played a mixture of jazz, ragtime, spirituals, minstrelsy, light classical music, and anything else which could be given a credible African-American cast in a climate which at first sight was one of almost total public ignorance. In reality, it is not quite that simple. It is not an accident that the original prime mover of the Southern Syncopated Orchestra (SSO), Will Marion Cook, had also been involved with the high profile London presentation of In Dahomey back in 1903 (Green 1983; Parsonage 2005, 81-104). This also was only one incident, though a very important one, in a long line of presentations of music with a distinctively African-American content extending back into the nineteenth century. The evolution from minstrelsy to ragtime to jazz was all traceable in the comings and goings of performers on the music-hall circuits throughout Europe (Pickering 1990; Lotz 1997a). Catherine Parsonage (2005) has recently written at length on the context and significance of the Southern Syncopated Orchestra, making brilliant use, with full acknowledgment, of many of the facts presented in the original version of this study. It would be quite difficult to improve on her interpretation. The important point is to set aside notions of development drawn from the dream picture developed by the young enthusiasts of the 1930s. This views African-American music as a simple line of development in which an apparently spontaneous musical development in New Orleans spread up the river to Chicago and then to New York City, from where it conquered the world. In practice this line of development is often viewed through the forms resulting from co-option by mainstream culture, though this is rarely acknowledged. Though this model has been formally rejected by serious scholars for decades, much current writing about still accepts its implications and the concomitant notion of artistic progress in which each stage is of greater artistic value than its predecessor, which must henceforth be dismissed as a technically inferior and an old-fashioned embarrassment. This view of the history and significance of each stage of development flies in the face of everything we know about the rest of human artistic endeavor. Parsonage's analysis of contemporary perceptions of the differences between and the types of African-American music which had preceded it in the European market place is required reading for understanding the SSO's significance. The American background also has been in the last decade the subject of three major studies by Lynn Abbott, Tim Brooks, and Doug Seroff which are also important sources (Abbott and Seroff 2002, 2007; Brooks 2004). The crucial point for the immediate purpose is that music of distinctively African-American character in both style and performance practices had been present on the London scene for decades, and that during the Great War African-American string-band music had become the music of choice of London's movers and shakers. In London's upper-class clubs, complete African-American bands such as the Versatile Four (Berresford, Rye, and Walker, 2995) and Dan Kildare's Clef Club Orchestra (Rye and Brooks 2997) wowed listeners and dancers alike in between playing numerous private parties for well-heeled Londoners desirous of forgetting the war. …

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