Scott E. Brown's biography of James P. Johnson is, to my understanding, the only book-length study of the life and music of the stride pianist. Due to my interest in early jazz and, increasingly, ragtime, I decided to read it to learn more about Johnson's place in the history of jazz. Brown's biography emerged from a student thesis, which can be clearly discerned. However, the provocative title is warranted because Brown's study illustrates many of the innovative and important features of Johnson's music on jazz and black music. Through his influence on Fats Waller, his composing of "serious music" drawing on African American spirituals and blues, and later generations of jazz pianists adapting the stride style, such as Thelonious Monk and Jaki Byard, Johnson's legacy in jazz is large and multifaceted.
As an active participant in the musical scene of New York in the 1910s and 1920s, Johnson witnessed the transformation of ragtime piano and the development of early jazz. Ragtime musicians in New York and New Jersey were, by the time young Johnson began playing in saloons, "ragging" popular tunes and engaging in "cutting contests." The Clef Club's emergence led to better gigs for black musicians and their refined mannerisms were, according to Brown, emulated by Johnson's generation. However, the older Clef Club musicians were not eager to embrace the blues or the polyphony of New Orleans jazz, so the younger artists like Johnson were the ones to channel the blues scale, blue notes, and vocalization to their instruments.
Indeed, the strong influence of black southern folk music and traditions, like the "shout," also help explain the emergence of stride as a distinct piano style from ragtime. The ringshout and similar black southern dances, rooted in the religious musical culture of black slaves and their descendants, transferred to secular expression after Emancipation. The "shout" was witnessed by a young Johnson in the dances held by his parents, and the riffs of stride were based on the rhythmic variations of shout dances. Johnson wasn't alone in attributing the origins of stride to the shout dances brought from the south by black southerners. His friend, Willie the Lion Smith, also noted the influence of the shout dances on stride piano, which, especially in its rhythmic riffing and blues influences, is more jazz than ragtime.
Besides his ingenious stride piano style and songwriting for black musical theater, what most distinguishes Johnson is his desire to compose "serious" music drawing on the Western classical tradition. In Yamekraw, his Negro rhapsody, or The Organizer-A Blues Opera, a collaboration with Langston Hughes, Johnson drew on the blues, spirituals, and black folk material for classical works. Indeed, he knew Gershwin and likely understood the sources of black folk music better than the latter, although none of his symphonies were as successful as Gershwin's. Just as Joplin's opera, Treemonisha, was steeped in black folk music elements, Johnson endeavored to pursue a similar goal of fusing the "high" art of classical forms with black folkloric and blues roots, something many Harlem Renaissance critics and literary figures were hoping to accomplish in their own works.
His musical contributions to the blues opera project with Langston Hughes also hints at social reformer or even socialist sympathies of Johnson. Hughes was, for a time in the 1930s, writing militant poetry reflecting his left-wing convictions. His opera with Johnson expresses those sentiments, too, as it involvements a labor organizer among black sharecroppers in the Jim Crow South, teaching them the path to their liberation is organization (to create a world without hunger, with no color line). Unfortunately, Brown's biography does not explore this, but it may suggest something of the degree to which the Communists during the Depression were influencing Harlem jazz musicians as well as intellectuals like Hughes.
This desire to be taken seriously as a composer has been a consistent theme with many jazz musicians, who encountered a racist music industry and social prejudice. For instance, Johnson's music for black musical theater, often considered the highlight of the various musicals he was involved with, were limited to black musicals often reliant on racial stereotypes and ignored by the white musical establishment. He also sought to live on his composing rather than the brutal nightclub or dancehall circuit, which were the only venues jazz could be heard in during the 1920s. Although it seems like Johnson still enjoyed performing at Harlem rent parties where fellow stride pianists like Fats Waller and Willie the Lion Smith would also pop in, one can see see how he sought to find a place for his music beyond the limitations imposed on jazz as "entertainment" unfit for the high arts. In addition to his efforts at "serious" music and the consolidation of stride piano, his presence at the early days of jazz in New York surely attest to his importance in the jazz pantheon.
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