Darktown Strutters' Ball: A Song History

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Shelton Brooks, an African American songwriter born in Amherstburg, Ontario, in 1886, who worked as a ragtime pianist and a vaudeville comedian, wrote "The Darktown Strutters' Ball" several years after his first hit, "Some of These Days" (1910).[1][2] Will Rossiter of Chicago published the sheet music, though sources differ on the year, 1916 or 1917, and Sophie Tucker added the song to her repertoire.[2][3] In vaudeville it won over Black and white audiences alike.[3] The word "Darktown" was older than the song: in the late nineteenth century Currier & Ives issued a series of "Darktown" prints that the Metropolitan Museum of Art describes as racist stereotypes.[4]

Photograph of a silver-plated cornet with three rotary valves and an extra crook

Hall & Quinby, Rotary Valve Cornet, metal, silver plated, 1870–75. Shown for its subject; it has no connection to the song.

The Six Brown Brothers, a saxophone sextet, recorded it for Victor in Camden, New Jersey, on May 9, 1917.[5] On May 31 the Original Dixieland Jazz Band cut an instrumental fox-trot version in New York for Columbia, issued as Columbia A2297, with at least one take credited on the label to the "Original Dixieland Jass Band."[6] The band's "Livery Stable Blues," released earlier that year, is widely regarded as the first jazz record, but the Library of Congress calls it a "problematic 'first'": a white band recording an African American style, whose members took the credit rather than acknowledge the Black New Orleans musicians they had learned from.[7] The band's Columbia recording of Brooks's song was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2006.[8]

The Canadian Encyclopedia names it, with "Some of These Days" and "Walkin' the Dog," among Brooks's songs that remain jazz standards.[1] Shelley Stevens includes it in Baker's Dozen #10: Ragtime And Honky Tonk, a collection of thirteen ragtime tunes for mountain dulcimer in DAD tuning with standard notation and tablature, published by Fingers Of Steel.[9]

Our book that contains the song "Darktown Strutters' Ball"

Sources

  1. The Canadian Encyclopedia: "Shelton Brooks".
  2. University of Arizona Libraries, American Vaudeville Museum Archive: "The Darktown Strutters' Ball".
  3. Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame: "Shelton Brooks".
  4. The Metropolitan Museum of Art: "Darktown Society -- On Their Manners".
  5. Discography of American Historical Recordings: "Victor matrix B-19847. The Darktown Strutters' Ball / Six Brown Brothers".
  6. Discography of American Historical Recordings: "Columbia matrix 77086. The Darktown Strutters' Ball / Original Dixieland Jazz Band".
  7. Library of Congress, Folklife Today: "The Painful Birth of Blues and Jazz".
  8. Recording Academy: "GRAMMY Hall Of Fame".
  9. Fingers Of Steel: "Shelley Stevens, Baker's Dozen #10: Ragtime And Honky Tonk".
  10. Image: Hall & Quinby, Rotary Valve Cornet, metal, silver plated, 1870–75. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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