I think it’s safe to say that most of us jazz enthusiasts are viewed by the youth of today as amusing yet hopelessly insulated from any moral harm the music we love could ever hope to cause us. Yet in its initial decade of existence, jazz brought about much anxiety to the guardians of the culture and social fabric. Some held such worry where even the most bland of jazz bands were still a gaggle of Neros fiddling—albeit with pep and pluck—while a civilization burned to the ground. At least one prism in which we can use to view the public’s worries towards the new musical and social trends is via the press at that time.
In America’s newspapers often the association between jazz and moral corruption were made by using both legitimate and tenuous connections. One such instance employing both approaches was the case of Julie Rector. In September 1924 it was reported that this woman who was one of Chicago’s best “colored shimmy shakers” was fined $200 in a Chicago Morals Court for conducting an “obscene and indecent show” while a jazz band played at a Southside “black and tan” club. The establishment called the Entertainers’ Café had been raided by police two months previous to the ruling and subsequently shut down. Reports of the incident alternated in describing Rector as a “shimmyite” or a “muscle dancer.” She and another dancer brought their act into
