Crooning emerged as a style that contemporaneous audiences, black and white, read as “white”: it wasn’t until the early 1930s that African American crooners appeared on record. This delay is unusual in American music, where innovations in vernacular music ordinarily have African American origins. That delay is explicable, however, once we recover what crooning signified for black audiences and how that signified meant something different to white audiences. More interesting still is the fact that crooning continues to play a role in contemporary African American music, long after white audiences abandoned it as old-fashioned. The apotheosis of this pattern can be heard in the 1963 record, John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman. Trane then made his one record with a vocalist for fairly obvious reasons, but it is less clear why he chose to do so, not with a jazz singer, but a crooner.

This chapter explores the world of Count Basie, starting in the early days with Buddy Tate and Sweets Edison, looking at the mid-period octet with Clark Terry and Buddy Rich, and continuing to the 'New Testament' band. Shipton's interviews cover many Basie alumni, including Al Grey, Bennie Powell and Grover Mitchell from the trombone section, Joe Wilder from the trumpets, and Butch Miles and Louie Bellson from the rhythm team. Singer Carmen Bradford tells the story of how she joined the band, and the experience of singing with Basie.

Alain Locke located the New Negro movement within the context of minority nationalisms. The tendency to view nationalism as an ideology based on notions of purity and segregation has resulted in a mis-reading of the cultural politics of minority nationalisms, whether in Harlem or Dublin. A significant strain of black cultural nationalism has emphasized the internal diversity of African American culture. In close readings of works by Duke Ellington, Jean Toomer, and Zora Neale Hurston this chapter foregrounds the ways in which the artists of the Harlem Renaissance sought to explore and emphasize the inner diversity of black culture. This emphasis on the hybridity of a minority culture is a characteristic of minority nationalist movements. It is significant in that it poses a challenge to the homogenizing gaze of the dominant culture, and continues to challenge the terms in which nationalism is rejected in much contemporary progressive thought.

This chapter provides an overview of the role of jazz during the period, noting the genre’s beginnings in African music patterns and its migration to unexpected areas such as Chicago and California. The chapter also briefly profiles major musicians and singers associated with jazz during the mid-twentieth century.