On 26 February 1917, five young musicians from New Orleans walked into the Victor Talking Machine Company’s studio in New York and recorded two tunes, one of which has a rooster, a horse and a cow in it. The disc, “Livery Stable Blues” backed with “Dixieland Jass Band One-Step”, is usually counted as the first jazz record ever issued.
All five players were white. The Black and Creole musicians who had been playing this music in New Orleans for the best part of twenty years had to wait another five or six years for their turn in a studio.
A New Orleans band in a New York restaurant
The group was the Original Dixieland Jass Band: Nick LaRocca on cornet, Larry Shields on clarinet, Eddie Edwards on trombone, Henry Ragas on piano and Tony Sbarbaro on drums.
LaRocca was 27, the son of Sicilian immigrants, and had learned his trade in Papa Jack Laine’s brass bands in New Orleans.
The band had gone north the year before. In March 1916 an early version opened at Schiller’s Cafe in Chicago under drummer Johnny Stein, billed as Stein’s Dixie Jass Band. Over the following months the line-up changed. Sbarbaro took over the drum chair in June and Shields replaced the original clarinettist, Alcide Nunez, at the end of October.
At the start of 1917 they moved to New York for a residency at Reisenweber’s Café on Columbus Circle, playing for dancers. The booking ended up running for 18 months.
Record companies were quick to take an interest. Columbia brought the band in for a test session at the end of January and released nothing from it. Victor tried four weeks later.
What’s on the record
“Livery Stable Blues” is a fast blues with a gimmick. In the breaks, Shields’s clarinet crows like a rooster, LaRocca’s cornet whinnies like a horse and Edwards’s trombone moos like a cow.
Victor issued the disc as number 18255 on 7 March, nine days after the session.
You will often read that it sold a million copies. Victor’s own production figures put the number pressed at around 250,000. Either way, it did well enough for Columbia to call the band back in May to try again, this time with “Darktown Strutters’ Ball” and “Indiana”.
By the end of 1917 the band had swapped “Jass” for “Jazz” in its name and was billing itself as “The Creators of Jazz”.
The court case over who wrote it
The first argument about the record was over money.
Alcide Nunez, the clarinettist Shields had replaced, registered “Livery Stable Blues” as his own work with cornetist Ray Lopez, and the Chicago publisher Roger Graham put out the sheet music. The band published its own version as “Barnyard Blues”, with LaRocca named as composer, and its manager Max Hart took Graham to federal court in Chicago.
Judge George A. Carpenter dismissed the case later that year. He decided that neither side owned the tune, because it was an old Black folk melody that had been in circulation for years.
That ruling came within months of the record going on sale, and it meant a federal court had already found that the band did not originate the tune it was famous for.
Why Bolden, Keppard, Oliver and Ory weren’t first
Buddy Bolden is the name most often given as the first jazz bandleader. His group was at its peak in New Orleans from about 1900 to 1907. That year he was committed to the state asylum at Jackson, Louisiana, and he stayed there until his death in November 1931. His trombonist Willie Cornish remembered the band making a cylinder recording, and no copy has ever been found.
Freddie Keppard came closest to beating the Original Dixieland Jass Band to it. His Original Creole Orchestra was touring the vaudeville circuit and playing New York around the end of 1915 when Victor made an approach.
Accounts of what happened next vary. The best-known version has Keppard refusing because rival players would be able to copy his ideas from the disc. The historian Lawrence Gushee reported that the offer was a flat $25 and that Keppard said he spent that much on gin in a day. Members of the band recalled being asked to cut a test without being paid for it.
Victor’s files do list an unissued test by a “Creole Jass Band” from December 1918. Keppard’s surviving records were all made in Chicago between 1923 and 1927.
King Oliver and Kid Ory were still working in New Orleans in February 1917, a long way from the studios of New York. Oliver moved to Chicago in 1918 and Ory left for Los Angeles in 1919.
Ory got on record first. In 1922 his band cut “Ory’s Creole Trombone” and “Society Blues” in Los Angeles for the Nordskog label, with Ory paying for the pressings himself.
Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band followed on 5 and 6 April 1923 at the Gennett studio in Richmond, Indiana. The second cornet player on that session was a 21-year-old Louis Armstrong, making his first records.
It’s worth adding that not every historian accepts the Victor disc as the first. Some point to “Down Home Rag”, recorded for Emerson in December 1916 by the Black clarinettist Wilbur Sweatman. A group called the Versatile Four had recorded the same tune ten months before that.
LaRocca’s claim
The Original Dixieland Jazz Band took the music a long way. On 7 April 1919 it opened at the London Hippodrome, in what is generally regarded as the first jazz performance in Britain, and it made twenty more sides for Columbia during its stay.
LaRocca announced his retirement in 1925 and went into the building trade back in New Orleans.
When he reformed the band in 1936, he told Tempo magazine that jazz was “strictly white man’s music” and that Black musicians had learned it from white players.
He kept at it for the rest of his life. In the 1950s he wrote a stream of letters to newspapers and to radio and television programmes insisting that he alone had invented jazz. In 1958 he gave his papers to the jazz archive at Tulane University, and he died in New Orleans on 22 February 1961.
No serious historian accepts the claim. The Smithsonian’s John Edward Hasse has dismissed it outright, and Judge Carpenter’s 1917 ruling had already contradicted it more than forty years before LaRocca’s letters.
What the band can fairly be credited with is getting there first with a record that sold in large numbers, and carrying a New Orleans style to Chicago, New York and London before most of the people who created it had left home.
If you’d like to hear those players, our guide to Dixieland jazz picks out ten artists and a recording for each, and our history of jazz follows the story on from here.
Featured image: Strand studio, New York, Public domain, adapted, via Wikimedia Commons
