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ethnic minorities in America. They were ashamed of slavery as well as of
everything African.

The folk culture, nevertheless, flourished within the music produced by
the Afro-American community. The spirituals and work songs were the
product of the slave. After Emancipation, work songs were replaced by the
blues. Work songs had been adapted to the mass labor techniques of
slavery, whereas the blues, which is a solo form, was the creation of a
lone individual working as a sharecropper on his own tenant farm. It
continued to express the earthy folk culture, and it, too, was woven into
daily life. It expressed the daily tribulations, weariness, fears, and
loves of the Afro-American after Emancipation. At the beginning of the
twentieth century, blues along with ragtime, became popular, although not
always respectable. They could be heard most often in saloons and
brothels--nevertheless, they were beginning to move out of the
Afro-American subculture and into the white society. W. C. Handy, while
by no means the father of the blues, became its best-known commercial
creator. He is still remembered for the "Memphis Blues" and the "St.
Louis Blues."

In New Orleans, the folk tradition and formal music came together for the
first time. There, the Latin tradition had permitted the Creoles to
participate in education and culture. They had developed a rich musical
tradition, and many of them had received training in French
conservatories. However, they preferred the sophisticated European music
to the more earthy sounds of their blacker brothers. With the growth of
Jim Crow legislation, the Creoles lost their special position in society,
and they found themselves forcibly grouped with the blacks, whom they had
previously shunned. Out of this fusion of technical musicianship and folk
creativity emerged a new, vigorous music which became known as jazz.

Jelly Roll Morton was one musician who had begun by studying classical
guitar but preferred the music of the street. He became a famous jazz
pianist and singer. Over the years, he played his way from night spots in
New Orleans to those in St. Louis, Chicago, Los Angeles, and scores of
smaller cities. The musical quality of jazz, instead of adopting the pure
tones of classical music, was boisterous and rasping. Instruments were
made to imitate the human voice, and they deliberately used a "dirty"
sound. Both the trumpet playing and singing of Louis Armstrong
illustrate this ja