When people think of jazz, they usually associate it with the likes of Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, and Jelly Roll Morton. Even though African Americans were crucial to the spread and innovation of jazz, whites were the dominant figures in the actual populization of the form. Groups such as the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, which mainly consisted of white musicians, would establish a firm

Woman: I'm in there and I mean way back.

Jazz has had such a major impact on the culture and lives of Americans. To not include it in the history of the United States would be doing it an injustice, not only to the music itself, but to the people who developed it and gave jazz the status it has today. Jazz clearly paved the way for all types of American expressionism and allowed for people to explore parts of themselves that they never knew existed. Jazz, known as the being grandfather of American music, has guided innovators of all types of music and influenced them to do something original. The society that jazz has helped to build made it unique in that despite all the animosity going against it in its developmental stages in the U.S., has flourished as not only an artform, but as a way of living.

standing in jazz history before any of the great African American jazz musicians were able to be publicized. White jazz groups were also the first to make recordings, which helped boost their popularity among jazz listeners (Feinstein 15-16). With the growing interest in jazz, many whites wanted to explore the phenomenon of the “Black Mystique”. As this example from Jazz in Black and White by Charley Gerard states, white people flocked to the jazz clubs and venues to experience the jazz sensation:

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