What Is The Beginning Of Jazz?

Jazz had its beginning in song.  Its roots lie deep in the tradition of Negro folk singing that once flourished through out the rural South land of the United States before the civil war.  The Negro, in those days, owned only a few crude musical instruments which he made for himself from boxes, barrels, and brooms.  His voice was his principal means of musical expression.  Songs of work and play, trouble and hope, rose on rich and rhythmic voices every where in the South – from peddlers crying their wares to the country side, from work gangs on their wariness in their unpainted cottages over looking the cotton fields, from the way side singing with the sounds of Sabbath praise.  

For the rhythms the Negro musicians looked to their African heritage, building much of their music over the rhythms of African drums.  Drumming styles long familiar to the African, but new to the Western ears, gave this new music a swinging, dancing character of its own.

Blues singers wandered through the South with battered guitars and worn harmonicas, singing songs they invented, adapted, or borrowed.

This then was the music in which pioneer musicians gave jazz its first voice and defined its musical form. Many of the old time musicians never heard the word jazz, which was not used to describe their music until about 1920.