Sublime

This was music that made people want to dance and freed them of the daily hassles of America’s segregated practices. It was music that expressed the full range of black life experiences.

A few renegades resisted this process of simplification—most notably Duke Ellington,

“Sidewalk Blues,” recorded by pianist Jelly Roll Morton and his Red Hot Peppers in Chicago on September 21, 1926.

I often describe it as Nu Jazz,

The Statue of a Gorilla that stands in the Fifth Northern Hall always catches my eye. He is depicted squatting on his Lower Limbs, leaning forward and propping himself up on his Powerful Arms and Fists. His Face fascinates me. His

The blues at this juncture rarely appeared in large cities; the most likely place to hear it in the early 1900s would be agricultural regions of the South where black sharecroppers and rural workers resided.