Music & Dance

Before the phonograph and the radio, if you wanted music at home, someone in the house had to play it. That simple fact built an enormous industry. By the late 19th century the parlor piano was a sign of a respectable home, and sheet music sold by the millions.

Sheet music covers are some of the most appealing images from the period. Publishers knew that a good picture sold songs, so the covers were printed in color with portraits of the singers, scenes from the song or eye-catching designs. In New York the songwriting and publishing business crowded into a few blocks of Manhattan that became known as Tin Pan Alley, supposedly for the sound of all those pianos playing at once.

Bands were everywhere. Almost every town had a brass band, and the bandstand in the park was a summer fixture. John Philip Sousa led the U.S. Marine Band in the 1880s and then toured the world with his own band, and his marches became the sound of American public life. Ragtime came out of Black musical traditions in the 1890s, and Scott Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag of 1899 was one of its great successes. Jazz followed in the 1910s and 1920s.

Dancing had its own fashions. The waltz shocked people when it was new because the partners held each other closely. Around 1900 the cakewalk swept the country, and in the 1910s came a burst of animal dances like the turkey trot. Vernon and Irene Castle made ballroom dancing elegant and popular just before World War I. The Charleston defined the 1920s.

Worth noticing is how much of this music was made by ordinary people for themselves. Many of the photographs show family groups around a piano, small town bands in borrowed uniforms and dancers in church halls and grange halls. Look also at the instruments. Banjos, mandolins and parlor organs show up far more than they would today, and they tell you what people could afford and what they liked to hear.