![]() Nationally renowned in his day, Johnson was the first African American to have his music published and the first American, Black or white, to lead a musical ensemble on a tour of Europe (in 1837). The merging of African and European musical practices and styles in America that gave birth to jazz in the early 1900s had been unfolding for hundreds of years in Philadelphia, making the city a particularly fertile musical environment as jazz was taking shape.Īlmost a century before jazz emerged, Philadelphia bandleader and composer Francis Johnson (1792-1844) was reinventing popular songs and dance tunes of the 1820s and 1830s with new rhythmic and melodic elements, a practice that would later become a hallmark of jazz. The city had a long and especially rich history of Black popular music dating to the early nineteenth century, a period when it was also the nation’s cultural capital and a vibrant center of music in the European tradition. Philadelphia was the nation’s third largest city in 1900, behind New York and Chicago, with a large and rapidly growing African American population. ![]() ![]() While historians generally cite New Orleans, Chicago, and New York as key cities in the emergence of jazz in the early twentieth century, Philadelphia was an important center in the early years of jazz as well.
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