Chapter 2 - Ethnographic Transcription and the Jazz Auto/Biography

Summary

Given the increasingly important role that music, especially jazz, played in the American literary soundscape, my second chapter explores two instances of jazz autobiography: Alan Lomax’s Mister Jelly Roll: The Fortunes of Jelly Roll Morton, New Orleans Creole and “Inventor of Jazz” (1950) and Sidney Bechet’s Treat It Gentle (1960). Through my analysis, I reveal the critical intervention of Zora Neale Hurston in shaping the practices of transcription so that the voices represented on the page adhere to the “laws of sound.” While the tendency has been to read Lomax and Bechet’s books in the context of popular jazz autobiography, I argue that the avant-garde nature of their transcription practices warrant their consideration alongside more canonical works of modernist prose. These books are not oral histories but rather aural histories that require readers to think critically about the sonic identities of musicians who themselves experimented with recording technology.