In 2016, David Gilbert released his book Product of Our Souls: Ragtime, Race, and the Manhattan Musical Marketplace. This June, Archeophone Records released a companion compact disc subtitled The Sound and Sway of James Reese Europe’s Society Orchestra. While the CD and accompanying 56-page booklet focus on Europe’s life and works, the book itself spends its first two-thirds setting the stage for the arrival of Europe’s Clef Club. It’s a story that includes him, but also Ernest Hogan, Will Marion Cook, George Walker, Bob Cole, and the urban culturescape itself from Times Square lobster palaces to Tenderloin District piano dives haunted by Willie “The Lion” Smith and James P. Johnson.
The Story
Black history is usually taught with a direct leap from emancipation to the Montgomery bus boycott. Those seeking to fill the gap in college will also learn the turn of the century ideas of writers like W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, transposed onto the later Harlem Renaissance. Because of their uncomfortable associations with minstrelsy, black entertainers before the 1920s are usually glossed over. Gilbert attempts in his book to fill in that gap and demonstrate how a cohort of pioneers “ragged uplift” and shifted the cultural marketplace from blackface minstrelsy to black musical professionalism from within the confines of that world. The book is directed at a wider
