The ‘grave disease’
interwar British writers look at ragtime and jazz
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/jazz.v7i1.23Keywords:
African American music, literature, raceAbstract
This essay is about the reaction of a group of interwar British writers to American popular music, to which (in the absence of more precise definitions) they give the terms ragtime and jazz. The group, mostly still well-known, includes John Buchan, Aldous Huxley, Eric Linklater, J. B. Priestley and Aelfrida Tillyard. Despite greatly differing political, social, racial and biological agendas, these writers depicted ragtime and jazz as symptoms of a mass produced, corrupt, sex-ridden culture that was contaminating an ageing European culture, fatally weakened by the First World War. The writers use language borrowed from pathology to suggest that such music attacks the moral as well as the physical constitution.
References
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Baxendale, John (1995) ‘“… into Another Kind of Life in Which Anything Might Happen …”: Popular Music and Late Modernity, 1910–1930’. Popular Music 14/2: 137–54. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0261143000007406
——(2007) Priestley’s England: J. B. Priestley and English Culture. Manchester: Manchester University Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.7228/manchester/9780719072864.001.0001
——(2011) ‘Popular Fiction and the Critique of Mass Culture’. In The Reinvention of the British and Irish Novel, 1880–1940, eds. Patrick Parrinder and Andrzej G?siorek. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bennett, John F. (2008) ‘A Remarkable Interview’. Journal of the J. B. Priestley Society 9: 43–5, 49–52.
Bergreen, Laurence (1990) As Thousands Cheer: The Life of Irving Berlin. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press.
Buchan, John (1903) The African Colony: Studies in the Reconstruction. Edinburgh: William Blackwood & Sons.
——([1910] 1956) Prester John. Reprint, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
——([1913] 2000) The Power-House. Reprint, with introduction by Christopher Harvie. In The Leithen Stories. Edinburgh: Canongate.
——([1915] 2004) The Thirty-Nine Steps. Reprint, with introduction by Sir John Keegan. London: Penguin.
——([1916] 1993) Greenmantle. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
——([1919] 1956) Mr. Standfast. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
——([1922] 1956) Huntingtower. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
——([1924] 1995) The Three Hostages. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
——([1926] 2000) The Dancing Floor. Reprint, with introduction by Christopher Harvie. In The Leithen Stories. Edinburgh: Canongate.
——(1935) The King’s Grace 1910–1935. London: Hodder and Stoughton.
——([1936] 1956]) The Island of Sheep. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
——(1940) Memory Hold-the-Door. London: Hodder and Stoughton.
——([1941] 2000) Sick Heart River. Reprint, with introduction by Christopher Harvie. In The Leithen Stories. Edinburgh: Canongate.
Clamp, H. M. E. (1928) The Great God Jazz. London: Hurst & Blackett.
Cohen, Harvey G. (2010) Duke Ellington’s America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226112657.001.0001
Curtis, Lionel (1922) ‘A Criterion of Values in International Affairs’. Journal of the British Institute of International Affairs 1/6: 165–80. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3014600
Day, Alan Edwin (1980) J. B. Priestley: An Annotated Bibliography. Stroud, UK: Ian Hodgkins & Co.
Eliot, T. S. (1963) Collected Poems 1909–1962. London: Faber and Faber.
Fagge, Roger (2007) ‘J. B. Priestley, the “Modern” and America’. Cultural and Social History 4/4: 481–94. http://dx.doi.org/10.2752/147800407X243479
Fitzgerald, F. Scott ([1931] 1965) The Crack-Up with Other Pieces and Stories. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Gabbard, Krin (2002) ‘The word jazz’. In The Cambridge Companion to Jazz, eds. Mervyn Cooke and David Horn, 1–6. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Glassock, Simon (2013) ‘A Civilizing Empire: T. H. Green, Lord Milner and John Buchan’. In John Buchan and the Idea of Modernity, eds. Kate Macdonald and Nathan Waddell, 33–48. London: Pickering & Chatto.
Green, Benny (1975) ‘Benny Green on Buchan, a Hundred Years on’. The Spectator 235 (30 August): 282–3.
Hawkes, Terence (1986) That Shakespeherian Rag: Essays on a Critical Process. London:
Methuen. Horn, David (2002) ‘The identity of jazz’. In The Cambridge Companion to Jazz, eds. Mervyn Cooke and David Horn, 9–32. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Howard, Michael (1991) ‘Empire, Race and War in pre-1914 Britain’. The Lessons of History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Huxley, Aldous ([1932] 1955) Brave New World. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Hynes, Samuel (1991) The Edwardian Turn of Mind. London: Pimlico. (First published 1968.)
Johnson, Bruce (2002) ‘Jazz as Cultural Practice’. In The Cambridge Companion to Jazz, eds. Mervyn Cooke and David Horn, 96–113. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kennaway, James (2012) Bad Vibrations: The History of the Idea of Music as a Cause of Disease. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate.
Kennedy, Randall (2002) Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word. New York: Pantheon Books.
Kestner, Joseph A. (2010) Masculinities in British Adventure Fiction, 1880–1915. Burlington, VT: Ashgate.
Klarman, Michael J. (2004) From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kruse, Juanita (1989) John Buchan and the Idea of Empire: Popular Literature and Political Ideology. Lewiston, NY: Mellen.
Kuklick, Henrika (1992) The Savage Within: The Social History of British Anthropo¬logy, 1885–1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Linklater, Eric ([1931] 1987) Juan in America. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Lock, Graham, and David Murray (2009) Thriving on a Riff: Jazz & Blues Influences in African American Literature and Film, eds. Graham Lock and David Murray. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lownie, Andrew (1995) John Buchan: The Presbyterian Cavalier. London: Constable.
McKay, George (2005) Circular Breathing: The Cultural Politics of Jazz in Britain. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/9780822387282
Malik, Kenan (1996) The Meaning of Race: Race, History and Culture in Western Society. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Moore, Hilary (2007) Inside British Jazz: Crossing Borders of Race, Nation and Class. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Nicholson, Stuart (1999) A Portrait of Duke Ellington: Reminiscing in Tempo.
North, Michael (1999) Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Omry, Keren (2008) Cross-Rhythms: Jazz Aesthetics in African-American Literature. London: Continuum.
Overy, Richard (2009) The Morbid Age: Britain and the Crisis of Civilization, 1919–1939. London: Penguin.
Parsonage, Catherine (2005) The Evolution of Jazz in Britain,1880–1935. Aldershot: Ashgate.
——(2007) ‘Fascination and Fear: Responses to Early Jazz in Britain’. In Cross the Water Blues: African American Music in Europe, ed. Neil A. Wynn, 89–105. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Priestley, J. B. (1912) ‘Secrets of the Rag-Time King: A Remarkable Interview’. London Opinion 35, no.456, 14 December, pp. 442–3.
——(1922) Papers from Lilliput. Cambridge: Bowes & Bowes. [not cited]
——(1923) I for One. London: John Lane.
——(1927) Open House: A Book of Essays. London: Heinemann.
——([1930] 2012) Angel Pavement. Ilkley: Great Northern Books.
——(1933) Wonder Hero. London: Heinemann.
——([1934] 1987) English Journey. Reprint, with introduction by Beryl Bainbridge. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
——([1939] 1996) Let the People Sing. London: Mandarin.
——(1941) Out of the People. London: Collins.
——(1949) Delight. London: Heinemann.
——(1957) ‘Mass Communications’. In Thoughts in the Wilderness, 8–13. London: Heinemann.
——(1962 [1963]) Margin Released: A Writer’s Reminiscences and Reflections. Reprint, London: The Reprint Society.
——(1975) Particular Pleasures. London: Heinemann.
Redley, Michael (2009) ‘John Buchan and the South African War’. In Reassessing John Buchan: Beyond The Thirty-Nine Steps, ed. Kate Macdonald, 65–76. London: Pickering & Chatto.
Rich, Paul B. (1990) Race and Empire in British Politics. Second edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Smedley, Audrey (1998) ‘“Race” and the Construction of Human Identity’. American Anthropologist N.S. 100/3: 690–702. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/aa.1998.100.3.690
Tillyard, Aelfrida (1930) Concrete. London: Hutchinson & Co.
——(1932) The Approaching Storm. London: Hutchinson & Co.
Townsend, Peter (2000) Jazz in American Culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Toye, Francis (1913) ‘Rag-Time: The New Tarantism’. English Review: 654–8.
Vermazen, Bruce (2013) ‘“Those Entertaining Frisco Boys”: Hedges Brothers and Jacobson’. Journal of the Society for American Music 7/1: 29–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S1752196312000478
Waddell, Nathan (2009) Modern John Buchan: A Critical Introduction. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars.
Whitcomb, Ian (1987) Irving Berlin and Ragtime America. London: Century.
Wynn, Neil A. (2007) ‘“Why I Sing the Blues”: African American Culture in the Transatlantic World’. In Cross the Water Blues: African American Music in Europe, ed. Neil A. Wynn, 3–22. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Yaffe, David (2006) Fascinating Rhythm: Reading Jazz in American Writing. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Baxendale, John (1995) ‘“… into Another Kind of Life in Which Anything Might Happen …”: Popular Music and Late Modernity, 1910–1930’. Popular Music 14/2: 137–54. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0261143000007406
——(2007) Priestley’s England: J. B. Priestley and English Culture. Manchester: Manchester University Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.7228/manchester/9780719072864.001.0001
——(2011) ‘Popular Fiction and the Critique of Mass Culture’. In The Reinvention of the British and Irish Novel, 1880–1940, eds. Patrick Parrinder and Andrzej G?siorek. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bennett, John F. (2008) ‘A Remarkable Interview’. Journal of the J. B. Priestley Society 9: 43–5, 49–52.
Bergreen, Laurence (1990) As Thousands Cheer: The Life of Irving Berlin. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press.
Buchan, John (1903) The African Colony: Studies in the Reconstruction. Edinburgh: William Blackwood & Sons.
——([1910] 1956) Prester John. Reprint, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
——([1913] 2000) The Power-House. Reprint, with introduction by Christopher Harvie. In The Leithen Stories. Edinburgh: Canongate.
——([1915] 2004) The Thirty-Nine Steps. Reprint, with introduction by Sir John Keegan. London: Penguin.
——([1916] 1993) Greenmantle. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
——([1919] 1956) Mr. Standfast. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
——([1922] 1956) Huntingtower. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
——([1924] 1995) The Three Hostages. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
——([1926] 2000) The Dancing Floor. Reprint, with introduction by Christopher Harvie. In The Leithen Stories. Edinburgh: Canongate.
——(1935) The King’s Grace 1910–1935. London: Hodder and Stoughton.
——([1936] 1956]) The Island of Sheep. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
——(1940) Memory Hold-the-Door. London: Hodder and Stoughton.
——([1941] 2000) Sick Heart River. Reprint, with introduction by Christopher Harvie. In The Leithen Stories. Edinburgh: Canongate.
Clamp, H. M. E. (1928) The Great God Jazz. London: Hurst & Blackett.
Cohen, Harvey G. (2010) Duke Ellington’s America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226112657.001.0001
Curtis, Lionel (1922) ‘A Criterion of Values in International Affairs’. Journal of the British Institute of International Affairs 1/6: 165–80. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3014600
Day, Alan Edwin (1980) J. B. Priestley: An Annotated Bibliography. Stroud, UK: Ian Hodgkins & Co.
Eliot, T. S. (1963) Collected Poems 1909–1962. London: Faber and Faber.
Fagge, Roger (2007) ‘J. B. Priestley, the “Modern” and America’. Cultural and Social History 4/4: 481–94. http://dx.doi.org/10.2752/147800407X243479
Fitzgerald, F. Scott ([1931] 1965) The Crack-Up with Other Pieces and Stories. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Gabbard, Krin (2002) ‘The word jazz’. In The Cambridge Companion to Jazz, eds. Mervyn Cooke and David Horn, 1–6. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Glassock, Simon (2013) ‘A Civilizing Empire: T. H. Green, Lord Milner and John Buchan’. In John Buchan and the Idea of Modernity, eds. Kate Macdonald and Nathan Waddell, 33–48. London: Pickering & Chatto.
Green, Benny (1975) ‘Benny Green on Buchan, a Hundred Years on’. The Spectator 235 (30 August): 282–3.
Hawkes, Terence (1986) That Shakespeherian Rag: Essays on a Critical Process. London:
Methuen. Horn, David (2002) ‘The identity of jazz’. In The Cambridge Companion to Jazz, eds. Mervyn Cooke and David Horn, 9–32. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Howard, Michael (1991) ‘Empire, Race and War in pre-1914 Britain’. The Lessons of History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Huxley, Aldous ([1932] 1955) Brave New World. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Hynes, Samuel (1991) The Edwardian Turn of Mind. London: Pimlico. (First published 1968.)
Johnson, Bruce (2002) ‘Jazz as Cultural Practice’. In The Cambridge Companion to Jazz, eds. Mervyn Cooke and David Horn, 96–113. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kennaway, James (2012) Bad Vibrations: The History of the Idea of Music as a Cause of Disease. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate.
Kennedy, Randall (2002) Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word. New York: Pantheon Books.
Kestner, Joseph A. (2010) Masculinities in British Adventure Fiction, 1880–1915. Burlington, VT: Ashgate.
Klarman, Michael J. (2004) From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kruse, Juanita (1989) John Buchan and the Idea of Empire: Popular Literature and Political Ideology. Lewiston, NY: Mellen.
Kuklick, Henrika (1992) The Savage Within: The Social History of British Anthropo¬logy, 1885–1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Linklater, Eric ([1931] 1987) Juan in America. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Lock, Graham, and David Murray (2009) Thriving on a Riff: Jazz & Blues Influences in African American Literature and Film, eds. Graham Lock and David Murray. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lownie, Andrew (1995) John Buchan: The Presbyterian Cavalier. London: Constable.
McKay, George (2005) Circular Breathing: The Cultural Politics of Jazz in Britain. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/9780822387282
Malik, Kenan (1996) The Meaning of Race: Race, History and Culture in Western Society. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Moore, Hilary (2007) Inside British Jazz: Crossing Borders of Race, Nation and Class. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Nicholson, Stuart (1999) A Portrait of Duke Ellington: Reminiscing in Tempo.
North, Michael (1999) Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Omry, Keren (2008) Cross-Rhythms: Jazz Aesthetics in African-American Literature. London: Continuum.
Overy, Richard (2009) The Morbid Age: Britain and the Crisis of Civilization, 1919–1939. London: Penguin.
Parsonage, Catherine (2005) The Evolution of Jazz in Britain,1880–1935. Aldershot: Ashgate.
——(2007) ‘Fascination and Fear: Responses to Early Jazz in Britain’. In Cross the Water Blues: African American Music in Europe, ed. Neil A. Wynn, 89–105. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Priestley, J. B. (1912) ‘Secrets of the Rag-Time King: A Remarkable Interview’. London Opinion 35, no.456, 14 December, pp. 442–3.
——(1922) Papers from Lilliput. Cambridge: Bowes & Bowes. [not cited]
——(1923) I for One. London: John Lane.
——(1927) Open House: A Book of Essays. London: Heinemann.
——([1930] 2012) Angel Pavement. Ilkley: Great Northern Books.
——(1933) Wonder Hero. London: Heinemann.
——([1934] 1987) English Journey. Reprint, with introduction by Beryl Bainbridge. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
——([1939] 1996) Let the People Sing. London: Mandarin.
——(1941) Out of the People. London: Collins.
——(1949) Delight. London: Heinemann.
——(1957) ‘Mass Communications’. In Thoughts in the Wilderness, 8–13. London: Heinemann.
——(1962 [1963]) Margin Released: A Writer’s Reminiscences and Reflections. Reprint, London: The Reprint Society.
——(1975) Particular Pleasures. London: Heinemann.
Redley, Michael (2009) ‘John Buchan and the South African War’. In Reassessing John Buchan: Beyond The Thirty-Nine Steps, ed. Kate Macdonald, 65–76. London: Pickering & Chatto.
Rich, Paul B. (1990) Race and Empire in British Politics. Second edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Smedley, Audrey (1998) ‘“Race” and the Construction of Human Identity’. American Anthropologist N.S. 100/3: 690–702. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/aa.1998.100.3.690
Tillyard, Aelfrida (1930) Concrete. London: Hutchinson & Co.
——(1932) The Approaching Storm. London: Hutchinson & Co.
Townsend, Peter (2000) Jazz in American Culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Toye, Francis (1913) ‘Rag-Time: The New Tarantism’. English Review: 654–8.
Vermazen, Bruce (2013) ‘“Those Entertaining Frisco Boys”: Hedges Brothers and Jacobson’. Journal of the Society for American Music 7/1: 29–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S1752196312000478
Waddell, Nathan (2009) Modern John Buchan: A Critical Introduction. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars.
Whitcomb, Ian (1987) Irving Berlin and Ragtime America. London: Century.
Wynn, Neil A. (2007) ‘“Why I Sing the Blues”: African American Culture in the Transatlantic World’. In Cross the Water Blues: African American Music in Europe, ed. Neil A. Wynn, 3–22. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Yaffe, David (2006) Fascinating Rhythm: Reading Jazz in American Writing. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Published
2014-10-07
Issue
Section
Articles
How to Cite
Lawson-Peebles, R. (2014). The ‘grave disease’: interwar British writers look at ragtime and jazz. Jazz Research Journal, 7(1), 23-40. https://doi.org/10.1558/jazz.v7i1.23
