The Pop of Yestercentury

I didn’t worry about my regional accent until I got to college. My speech didn’t change when I got there, but for the first time, I met people who commented on my speech. They never insulted me, but for the first time, I wondered if I “talked weird” or “didn’t speak properly.”

One professor enjoyed repeating certain words I used when answering questions in class, playfully drawing attention to my accent while demonstrating the proper pronunciation. They didn’t correct me on names or jargon. They’d just find some unremarkable word amusingly incorrect. If I dropped an “r,” they’d lodge it back into place. If I slurred a fricative, they’d over-enunciate it (e.g., “THose THings, Andrew?”). They especially liked to sharpen my softened “t’s” (“Yes, in the capiTal…”).

My Spanish professor was more diplomatic. When my regional accent came out—for example, asking “day don-day err-ess” and not “¿de dónde eres?” or accenting the wrong half of “hablo”—they would offer corrections in a neutral tone. They also politely addressed some of the pronunciations I picked up from Puerto Rican and Dominican friends back home. My Italian professor was not as generous when an occasional Sicilian pronunciation slipped into my answers. I grew up hearing some phrases from neighbors. I thought of them as just another way to speak Italian, but this Milanese-born speaker literally didn’t want to hear it.

In their own way, all three teachers were telling me “that’s not the way it should sound.” They were teaching me that proper pronunciation, inflection, and rhythm were just as important as vocabulary and grammar. Without the right sounds, I might be saying something but not speaking the language.

For my Spanish teacher, it was a practical matter. The correct sound allowed students to communicate effectively within that linguistic idiom. My Italian teacher was concerned with authenticity. For them, variations obscured the more refined usage. “People may speak any way they choose, but they’re not speaking Italian.”

My amateur elocution coach’s suggestions didn’t make the same impact. Beyond the fact that they were teaching a political science course and not an English seminar, their guidance pointed toward social convention rather than linguistic precision or cultural pride. It felt like a stylistic preference rather than a claim about cultural authenticity. They objected to how I said what they clearly understood.

“That’s not the way it should sound” could also be a statement of elementary music criticism. The notes, the pitches and rhythms may be correct. But if elements like timbre, articulation, phrasing, or dynamics are off, the music might “sound funny” enough to fall short of some aesthetic threshold. It’s something more than a local derivative or creative choice. Depending on the listener, missing the mark might mean more than disliking the music; they may hear a crass imitation, dilution, or an insult to that tradition and its community.

These distinctions often appear in discussions of all the pre-, para-, and formerly-known-as-jazz recorded during the twenties. Ironically, Jazz Age listeners consumed a lot of music that, today, wouldn’t earn the name even by the loosest standards. A century ago, “jazz” was as much a marketing term as a musical description. It’s now easy to dismiss a lot of this music based on anything even approaching jazz content (which too often leads listeners to dismiss it as music entirely). Yet the twenties also produced a lot of music audibly influenced by what is now commonly accepted as authentic jazz of the time.

Take Joseph Samuels’s “Bugle Call Rag.” The tune is one of the earliest jazz standards. It’s received hundreds of hot treatments, starting from its inaugural recording by the New Orleans Rhythm Kings (two of whose members composed the tune), less than a year before Samuels and his band recorded it in May 1923.

At the time, New Orleans-style jazz (or New Orleans via Chicago-style jazz) was growing in popularity and influence to become the dominant style of jazz. It is an obvious influence in terms of repertoire and instrumentation in Samuels’s “Bugle.” The musicians don’t sound hesitant within these influences. They’re not struggling to play together or maintain musical momentum. Still, in terms of rhythm, inflection, and emotional impact, Samuels’s record may subvert contemporary expectations about what “jazz” was supposed to sound like:

Beyond flatted notes or bent tones, there’s not much of a blues sensibility here. That might be a summary judgment against this record being “jazz.” There are shades of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band without the intense, sometimes manic energy found on their records. The Samuels group is far from the earthy, seamless polyphony of King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band. Musicologists often discuss jazz musicians doing things “between the beats.” This band thrives on the beat—specifically up-beats and off-beats. Their syncopation is deliberate and intense. Their eighth notes are confidently symmetrical.

Jules Levy Jr.’s clean tone, pinpoint attack, and sheer volume make for a sober lead. With the second trumpet in close harmony, this group revels in the ringing metallic blast of a brass band. Listeners accustomed to the styles of Oliver, Louis Armstrong, or Bix Beiderbecke may dismiss Levy as stiff. Or they might hear his melodic bedrock creating dynamic tension with Samuels and Ephriam Hannaford’s trombone. Oliver, a musician who insisted on a solid lead, might have appreciated Levy’s work for its directness and solidity. Hannaford’s gruff smears border on self-effacing, but they fill out the ensemble while contrasting with Levy’s bright melody and Samuels’s piercing commentary.

The leader’s novelty style—scoops, slurred lines, tone wilting and slicing—sticks out from the start. “Gas pipe” clarinet often prioritizes comedy. Based on recollections by Eddie Condon and other contemporaries, this style already embarrassed some musicians. It’s an obvious departure from the high-flying runs and statelier presence of New Orleanians trained in collective improvisation. For later jazz writers, the style was synonymous with corn and inauthenticity.

It’s easy to hear Samuels as a joker. But disliking the comedy nearly a century later doesn’t mean he was a poor comedian. Plus, his clarinet makes its own musical sense. It’s the only woodwind in the front line, alongside two trumpets and a trombone, atop a voluminous tuba. Those spikes of reed amidst all that brass create a distinct texture. So do the tart notes piercing Jules Levy Jr.’s lead trumpet.

The arrangement includes an improvised solo chorus, now practically an axiom in jazz. Yet this one comes from a pre-Louis Armstrong hot music continuum (an oxymoron for some purists). The soloist’s tone is plush rather than brilliant. There are no spectacular displays of technique tossed out with sweatless ease. At the time, a solo was a facet of the ensemble; it was seasoning but not the main course. Here, the band parting ways for a lone voice creates a novel effect. What trumpeter wouldn’t be proud of this warm, plump tone and wordless couplets briefly taking the regiment in a different direction?

Joseph Samuels and his band did not swing like any of the landmark jazz players of the time or since. Their rhythmic approach coalesced among musicians from other parts of the country with different musical priorities and cultural backgrounds. On paper, there’s no reason to think these musicians would sound like musicians from New Orleans. It might be the equivalent of assuming that New Yorkers should should sound like Bostonians.

But is the difference closer to what my Spanish teacher pointed out, and maybe even what offended my Italian instructor, or is it more like whatever my politics professor was getting at? Is it jazz with a different accent, its own regional dialect, or just linguistic butchery?

I had several courses with that political scientist/diction coach. The more they repeated my words aloud, the more I repeated theirs in my head. People can easily guess the origins of my speech, but it was hard to place this teacher’s vocal mannerisms.

They mostly spoke with a mid-Atlantic, “general American” accent. But they pronounced certain words with a form of what might have been Received Pronunciation, a proper-sounding English accent. But the sound depended more on sentence placement than the word itself. For example, “after” never stood out until it began a sentence and became “Aft-hur.” At other times, words took on a nasal purposefulness. The professor would introduce a contrasting idea with “How-AY-ver…” Random regional inflections materialized during hurried sentences. Something would be “dam-neer im-PAH-Cybil” or “sound an oh-ful lot like” something or other.

Maybe they lived in several different places. Or perhaps they were putting on airs. Was it a genuine expression or a contrived fabrication? If this individual was faking it, but it still sounded interesting, would it matter? Is there more to adopting an accent than just its sound?