The “Roaring Twenties” were off to a rousing start by late 1920. Musically, if not in other ways as well, the contributions of African Americans were already defining it. Mamie Smith recorded “Crazy Blues” and immediately after its release sold hundreds of thousands of copies launching the “race record” market for recordings by African Americans. In the summer of 1921, pianist/composer Eubie Blake with his partner Noble Sissle, along with blackface comedians Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles, re-introduced African American musical theater to Broadway with their ground breaking show Shuffle Along. Although instrumental jazz exploded on the scene in 1917 with the performances and recordings of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, ragtime, which had been the musical stylistic juggernaut since the late 1890s, continued to define popular, syncopated piano music. That changed in January 1921, with the music of James P. Johnson.
James P. Johnson, born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in 1894, cut his teeth on ragtime. But in New Brunswick and later in Hell’s Kitchen on the west side of Manhattan where his family moved when he was about 14 years old, he encountered a style of music and dance called the ring shout that had been brought to New York from the South Carolina and Georgia Sea Islands by African Americans moving North in the first major wave of the Great Migration. This origi
