50 Fun Facts About 1920s Music

Which 1927 Warner Bros. film starring Al Jolson is credited with ending the silent era with its synchronized songs?

The Jazz Singer was mostly silent but had six numbers sung to the Vitaphone disc system, and its success pushed every studio toward sound.

Which gravel-voiced jazz trumpeter made wordless scat singing a sensation with the 1926 record 'Heebie Jeebies'?

Louis Armstrong is said to have dropped his lyric sheet during the take and improvised nonsense syllables, though scat was already heard around New Orleans.

Which 1920s dance craze was launched by a tune of the same name in the 1923 Broadway show Runnin' Wild?

The Charleston is named after the South Carolina harbor city, and the dance hit its peak of popularity from mid-1926 to 1927.

Which eerie-sounding electronic instrument, invented by a Russian physicist in 1920, is played without being touched?

The theremin senses the player's hands as they move near two metal antennas, and its inventor patented it in the United States in 1928.

Cliff Edwards, a 1920s recording star known as 'Ukulele Ike', later voiced which Disney character in Pinocchio?

Jiminy Cricket became his most famous role, and in that 1940 film he introduced 'When You Wish Upon a Star'.

Which 1925 jazz standard by Ben Bernie and Maceo Pinkard later became the Harlem Globetrotters' theme tune?

Sweet Georgia Brown is heard at Globetrotters games in a whistled 1949 instrumental by Brother Bones and His Shadows.

Which song, tied forever to a 1952 Gene Kelly film, was first popularized in The Hollywood Revue of 1929?

Singin' in the Rain was performed in that early MGM talkie by Cliff Edwards and the Brox Sisters, 23 years before Kelly danced through his puddles.

Which Harlem nightspot of the Prohibition years starred Black performers but admitted almost only white customers?

The Cotton Club was run by bootlegger Owney Madden, who used it to sell his own beer to a wealthy downtown crowd.

Which American-born dancer became the toast of Paris in 1926 in a skirt of artificial bananas at the Folies Bergère?

Josephine Baker first wore the costume in the revue La Folie du jour, and it became a lasting symbol of the Jazz Age.

Which American writer further popularized the label 'the Jazz Age' with the title of a 1922 short-story collection?

F. Scott Fitzgerald did not coin the phrase, which was in popular use before 1920, but his Tales of the Jazz Age spread it much further.

Which 1924 George Gershwin concert piece opens with a solo clarinet sliding upward in a famous wailing glissando?

Rhapsody in Blue got its opening swoop by accident: a clarinetist stretched the notes at rehearsal as a joke on the composer, who liked it.

Which Washington-born bandleader got his aristocratic nickname in boyhood for his dapper dress and noble bearing?

Duke Ellington won his big break in 1927, a house-band job at Harlem's most famous nightspot, only after King Oliver turned the booking down.

Which regal nickname did the national press give Bessie Smith, the highest-paid Black entertainer of her day?

Empress of the Blues was an upgrade on the title her label's publicists had given her, and she toured the country in her own custom-built railroad car.

Which Nashville radio show, begun on WSM in 1925, took its name from a joke about the classical program before it?

Grand Ole Opry was announcer George Hay's quip in 1927, made as an hour of network grand opera gave way to his barn dance.

Which soft vocal style of the late 1920s is epitomized by singers such as Rudy Vallée and the young Bing Crosby?

Crooning became possible when improved microphones picked up quieter sounds, so vocalists no longer had to project to the back row of a theater.

Which nickname did New York's songwriting and sheet-music trade take from a stretch of West 28th Street in Manhattan?

Tin Pan Alley is said to have begun as an insult, likening the din of many cheap upright pianos playing different tunes to pans being banged.

What were the illicit Prohibition-era bars, lively venues for dance tunes and novelty numbers, commonly called?

Speakeasies were often owned by organized criminals, and they largely disappeared once the national ban on alcohol ended in 1933.

Which former railroad worker, billed as 'The Singing Brakeman', is widely regarded as the Father of Country Music?

Jimmie Rodgers was best known for his yodeling, and a second session held at his own insistence produced 'Blue Yodel No. 1 (T for Texas)'.

Which Canadian bandleader began a New Year's Eve radio tradition in 1929, closing each broadcast with 'Auld Lang Syne'?

Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians played from the Roosevelt Hotel in New York in what was billed as radio's first nationwide New Year's Eve broadcast.

Which Tennessee border city hosted the 1927 recording sessions hailed as the 'Big Bang' of modern country music?

Bristol hosted the sessions for twelve days on the third floor of a hat and glove company on State Street, the road that marks the state line.

Which composer of 'Blue Skies' and 'Always' could not read sheet music and played piano almost entirely in F-sharp?

Irving Berlin kept to the black keys and owned transposing pianos that changed key for him at the pull of a lever.

Which 1927 Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein musical, with themes of racial prejudice, introduced 'Ol' Man River'?

Show Boat worried its producer, Florenz Ziegfeld, who feared that its serious tone would put audiences off.

Which song, a number one hit for Bobby Darin in 1959, was written for the 1928 German stage work The Threepenny Opera?

Mack the Knife was composed by Kurt Weill to words by Bertolt Brecht, as a street singer's ballad that opens and closes the drama.

Which 1928 Maurice Ravel piece is built over a single snare-drum rhythm that never changes from start to finish?

Boléro became the composer's most famous work, much to his surprise: he had predicted that most orchestras would refuse to play it.

Which opera, home to the aria 'Nessun dorma', did Giacomo Puccini leave unfinished when he died in 1924?

Turandot was completed from the composer's sketches by Franco Alfano and premiered in 1926, almost a year and a half after his death.

KDKA, which began by broadcasting the Harding–Cox election results in November 1920, is a radio station in which city?

Pittsburgh is home to KDKA, considered by many historians the first commercially licensed radio station, a title that a rival, WWJ, has long disputed.

Which brittle material were most 78 rpm records of the 1920s pressed from, decades before vinyl took over?

Shellac is a resin secreted by the female lac bug on trees in India and Thailand, so the decade's hit discs were made with help from insects.

Which dance-band leader, whose orchestra hired a young Bing Crosby, was often hailed by the press as the 'King of Jazz'?

Paul Whiteman led one of the most popular dance bands in America, and a rival bandleader later wrote that no one had carried the title with more dignity.

Which hit tune from the 1925 musical No, No, Nanette did Dmitri Shostakovich orchestrate in under an hour to win a bet?

Tea for Two took him forty-five minutes, working from memory, and the arrangement is known as Tahiti Trot.

What name was given to the young women of the 1920s who bobbed their hair, wore knee-length skirts and listened to jazz?

Flappers became icons of the decade's postwar turbulence and of the export of American jazz culture to Europe.

George Gershwin brought which Parisian street noisemakers home to use in the 1928 premiere of An American in Paris?

Taxi horns, four of them, crossed the ocean for the Carnegie Hall premiere, where the New York Philharmonic honked its way through the opening.

Which American record company, whose trademark showed the dog Nipper beside a gramophone, was absorbed by RCA in 1929?

Victor gave its name to the Victrola, and the deal handed its new owner the New World rights to the famous 'His Master's Voice' trademark.

Which 1927 Hoagy Carmichael tune, first recorded as an instrumental, has since been recorded more than 1,500 times?

Stardust was first cut by its composer at the Gennett studios in Richmond, Indiana, and Mitchell Parish supplied the lyrics that made it a vocal standard.

Which New Orleans pianist and leader of the Red Hot Peppers claimed to have invented jazz himself in 1902?

Jelly Roll Morton drew criticism for the boast, though one critic wrote that his real achievements were so vast he had no need to stretch the truth.

Which trio from southwest Virginia made country standards of 'Wildwood Flower' and 'Keep on the Sunny Side'?

The Carter Family was Sara Carter, her husband A. P. and her sister-in-law Maybelle, all three born and raised in that corner of the state.

Which 1921 all-Black Broadway hit, with music by Eubie Blake, is credited with inspiring the Harlem Renaissance?

Shuffle Along gave Broadway 'I'm Just Wild About Harry', which Harry Truman revived as his campaign song in 1948.

Which Texas-born slide guitarist's 1927 recording 'Dark Was the Night' travels on the Voyager probes' golden records?

Blind Willie Johnson hums and moans over his bottleneck guitar instead of singing words, on one of only 27 pieces of music sent into space in 1977.

Paramount Records, a noted 1920s jazz and blues label, was founded by a Wisconsin company best known for making what?

Chairs were the main trade of the Wisconsin Chair Company, which also built wooden phonograph cabinets and launched the label through a subsidiary.

Arthur Honegger's 1923 orchestral piece Pacific 231 is commonly heard as a portrait of which machine in motion?

A steam locomotive is what the title seems to promise, and the composer wryly said it would be inhuman to correct the critics who described its onrush so minutely.

Chicago station WLS, home of the National Barn Dance from 1924, took its call letters from which retailer's slogan?

Sears founded the station and named it for its boast of being the World's Largest Store, before a farm magazine took over the microphone.

Ottorino Respighi's 1924 tone poem Pines of Rome calls for a phonograph record of which bird's song to be played?

A nightingale on disc, cued near the end of one movement, was considered innovative for its time and the first such use of a recording in music.

Which composer developed his twelve-tone technique in 1923, a method that became tied to the Second Viennese School?

Arnold Schoenberg designed the method so that all twelve notes of the chromatic scale sound equally often and no single note is emphasized.

Which 1929 MGM musical, Hollywood's first all-talking one, was also the first sound film to win Best Picture?

The Broadway Melody was also the top-grossing picture of its year and the very first musical its studio released.

Which 1920 Okeh recording by vaudeville singer Mamie Smith opened up the market for what labels called 'race records'?

Crazy Blues is considered the first significant hit in its genre, and its unexpected sales led major labels to court African American buyers for the first time.

Which company, started in Cincinnati by a German immigrant, built theatre organs heard in the era's silent movie houses?

Wurlitzer also turned out band organs, orchestrions and player pianos, and later became a famous name in jukeboxes.

Which star soprano sang two arias in a pioneering 1920 radio broadcast from Marconi's factory in Chelmsford, England?

Nellie Melba, the Australian diva whose name lives on in a peach dessert, was the first artist of international renown to take part in direct radio broadcasts.

Kid Ory, a Louisiana-born jazz bandleader, was known for the 'tailgate' style of playing which brass instrument?

Trombone players in this style lay a rhythmic line underneath the lead parts, a knack he is said to have developed from playing the banjo in his youth.

Which 1929 tune by Milton Ager and Jack Yellen became the theme of Franklin Roosevelt's 1932 presidential campaign?

Happy Days Are Here Again reached the screen in the 1930 film Chasing Rainbows and went on to become the unofficial anthem of the Democratic Party.

Which Harlem record label of 1921 was the first widely distributed one owned and operated by African Americans?

Black Swan was named after Elizabeth Greenfield, a 19th-century opera star who was known by that title.

Which New Orleans clarinetist took up the straight soprano saxophone in London and became its first influential player?

Sidney Bechet developed a style on it quite unlike his clarinet tone, and his example made the instrument popular in jazz.