loud, degenerate music promoting deviant behavior of all kinds

epub or mobi, with thanks to the original sharer

Eventually, though, the new sound played by Bolden and his emulators became so popular—among working-class audiences both black and white—that it began to draw attention from some unwanted quarters as well. Police would show up at so-called cutting contests and begin “whipping heads” to restore order. And eventually the city’s reformers began to take notice, and they did not like what they heard. To their ears, the new sound was dangerous, an affront to their notions of respectability, restraint, temperance, and civil order. This new black music represented excess and licentiousness, a direct flouting of traditional moral values. Perhaps most perniciously, it promoted contact—much of it of the most scandalous type—across the color line, and in a context of social equality that was simply intolerable to most Southern whites. Even before Bolden began to make his mark, reformers had already started protesting about the detrimental effects of so-called coon music. In 1890, the Mascot had railed against a “nigger band” then playing in one of the city’s more notorious venues: “Here male and female, black and yellow, and even white, meet on terms of equality and abandon themselves to the extreme limit of obscenity and lasciviousness.” Soon the Daily Picayune was also taking up arms against the new sound, calling it “demoralizing and degrading”—something “wholly forced and unnatural.”