The roots of such music can be traced back still further to the gospel hymns, work songs, and field calls that developed amongst slave populations in the south during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Scholastic 2011). The Southern and decidedly African-American sounds of blues and early jazz were brought along with the Great migration, where New Orleans styles like Dixieland met with the calmer strains of the Mississippi blues and other styles (Scholastic 2011). In New York, with the greatest concentration of African-Americans, new collaborations and iterations sprang up quite rapidly.

The Harlem Renaissance, named for the neighborhood in Manhattan where the African-American community was concentrated and centralized, was an explosion of artistic, literary, and musical expression largely because it represented the first major community of African-Americans located in a small geographical area (McDougal & Littell 2008). The jazz music that developed in New York as a part of this...
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