Well,

almost from the start, songwriters tried to learn from jazz.

The first jazz recordings appear in 1917.

And by the time you get to 1920 and into the 1920s, jazz is everywhere in America.

So all of a sudden, if you're a professional songwriter, you're paying attention to this.

And there was this idea that if we could bring jazz into our songs, if we could write songs that were jazzy, we would really be at the cutting edge.

But this wasn't easy.

Is that a fair definition?

But his most notable trait was probably the sheer volume of his attack.

It's always fascinating to ask who is the inventor? Who is the first person who created this? And one of the things I try to point out to people is it's surprising in music how little we know about this.

And when I tell people the first jazz musician was Buddy Bolden, but we really can only guess what he sounded like, they're amazed.

But in fact, I think you could do a test.

You've got these music professors in a room and say, What was the first sonata? What was the first symphony? What was the first fugue? The debates would be endless.

And this is because – and you know my philosophy of music.

This is because these sounds, when they first come out, are so outside the boundaries of the normal.

Why is James Reese Europe not considered not part of this conversation?

Um, is there, is there one thread that runs through American music, or are there so many threads that it's just impossible to narrow it, Ted?

Well, as you know, I, uh, have a music newsletter called The Honest Broker, and I have a large number of subscribers.

Many of them are professional musicians themselves or are other music critics, so it's a very knowledgeable audience of music lovers.

So I asked them last week, I asked them to tell me what was the quintessential American song or songs.

I was wanting to, to tap into their wisdom, and I got back hundreds of responses immediately.

I mean, just the overwhelming number of, of people commenting on this.

So the first thing I, I realized is that people feel strongly about this.

You will not be able to lose yourself on Skag and skip out for beer during commercials because the revolution will not be televised.

Ted, why do you think America has become the place that's generated so many genres?

Well, America has many advantages in terms of land mass and economy, but I think the most decisive reason why American music is become so popular and innovative is the Black component, the African component, because it's really the African American musical culture that really boosted the American music business, uh, and it, it-- in many ways.

I mean, we have, uh, the launch of jazz around 1917 just transformed the whole music industry, first in America and worldwide, and that all came out of the Black experience.

The blues, spirituals, work songs, the amount of innovation out of the Black population is huge.

I mean, you could even go back before the Civil War.

If you look at the writings of travelers who went through the American South, and they'll describe the various parties and dances they went to, the musical performers were almost always Black even back then.

So you have this white dominant society, but the musical entertainment is, is contributed by the Black underclass.

I w- I was gonna add George W. Bush, uh, Tom Petty, "I Won't Back Down," and Barack Obama, we all remember the Stevie Wonder, "Signed, Sealed and Delivered." [laughs] Uh, Ted, what, what do you think? What would you add to that? What is it, y- how easy or how hard is it to pick, um, a campaign song?

Ted, why do you think America has become the place that's generated so many genres?

Well, America has many advantages in terms of land mass and economy, but I think the most decisive reason why American music is become so popular and innovative is the Black component, the African component, because it's really the African American musical culture that really boosted the American music business, uh, and it-- in many ways.

I mean, we have, uh, the launch of jazz around 1917 just transformed the whole music industry, first in America and worldwide, and that all came out of the Black experience.

The blues, spirituals, work songs, the amount of innovation out of the Black population is huge.

I mean, you could even go back before the Civil War.

If you look at the writings of travelers who went through the American South, and they'll describe the various parties and dances they went to, the musical performers were almost always Black even back then.

So you have this white dominant society, but the musical entertainment is, is contributed by the Black underclass.

I w- I was gonna add George W. Bush, uh, Tom Petty, "I Won't Back Down," and Barack Obama, we all remember the Stevie Wonder, "Signed, Sealed and Delivered." [laughs] Uh, Ted, what, what do you think? What would you add to that? What is it, y- how easy or how hard is it to pick, um, a campaign song?

And what about you, Ted? When you think about what was American music at the start, what do you think?

I think it's a diverse picture where every group and tradition and cohort had their own songs in a way that's actually very rare to find in other places.

The sheer diversity of American music has always been its great strength.

I've done a study of musical innovation around the world since the beginning of time.

And the most diverse communities have always produced the most innovative music.

You can even go back to ancient Egypt where there was one community where all the surviving Egyptian songs come from.

We only know about the songs because they were preserved in a small village called Deir el-Medina.

Ted, what do you think? What would you add to that? How easy or how hard is it to pick a campaign song?

And what about you, Ted? When you think about what was American music at the start, what do you think?

I think it's a diverse picture where every group and tradition and cohort had their own songs in a way that's actually very rare to find in other places.

The sheer diversity of American music has always been its great strength.

I've done a study of musical innovation around the world since the beginning of time.

And the most diverse communities have always produced the most innovative music.

You can even go back to ancient Egypt where there was one community where all the surviving Egyptian songs come from.

We only know about the songs because they were preserved in a small village called Deir el-Medina.

Ted, what do you think? What would you add to that? How easy or how hard is it to pick a campaign song?

And what was the change around that time that empowered musicians to become above the law?

Well, the real change is that for the first time, we have an audience.

Now, people just take that for granted now.

In fact, when I say the audience was invented around the time of the Renaissance or the late medieval period, people look at me as though I'm crazy.

"No, Ted, there always was an audience." Uh, in fact, there, in, in many times and places, there's no re- there is no audience, where the, the, the music-making is so embedded into the community and the rituals that to say some people are audience and some people are performers is misguided.

But even back when there was...

Let's go back to ancient Rome.

Why do you think it was that it was frequently musicians who were the most worried about music and its influence on society?

Why was it so important to you to, to reject this notion that musical's not, music is not universal?

Well, you know, as I mentioned, I've been researching these elements of music history for decades now, and I kept running into these coincidences that just were inexplicable.

You'd find a style of music in one part of the world, and its similarities to a style thousands of miles away were so striking.

Probably the first time I encountered this w- when I was studying the music of the shamans.

You know, these were sort of the magical priests that would use music to get to an altered mind state and to cure people.

They would go into a trance, often inspired by a drum.

Over the course of the trance, they would go to the other world, and then they would try to cure the ailment of, of, of someone who'd come to them for help.

There's s- you know, the, the, the demimonde of Europe, the, the underbelly, uh, the decadence, and these are the art songs, but the, the revolution came from a totally unexpected direction.

Yeah.

And I would've continued doing that for the rest of my career.But around the time I turned 40, my editor at Oxford retired, and I needed to go find another publisher, and I found that publishers no longer wanted a book that sold 10 or 20,000 copies.

They needed a book that could sell 50 to 100,000 or more copies.

So I had to find within me the resources and the direction to write books I believed in, but also had that capability to sell.

And this was difficult, but I, I managed to do it.

For example, my book "Delta Blues." I wrote a book that was of passionate importance to me, but I was able to c- [chuckles] to convince the publisher that it would sell a lot of copies.

And fortunately, you know, fortunately, it delivered, and it did.

Yeah.