After slavery was abolished, some black musicians were able to find work as entertainers in bars and clubs. They developed a genre of solo piano music known as Ragtime, music that is lively and upbeat. Ragtime features an active left hand bass line that bounces around the keyboard, often in octaves. The right hand plays a melody that is full of syncopated sixteenth notes. This type of music is very difficult to play. Scott Joplin, the son of a former slave, is the best-known Ragtime composer because of his hits “The Entertainer” and “Maple Leaf Rag.”

At the turn of the century, W. C. Handy popularized the Mississippi style known as “Delta Blues.” Blues typically features a singer and a guitar player. The structure of the music is simple: the lyrics are written in rhyming couplets in which the first line is sung three times. The range of the melody is limited, and the chord progression of the guitar is repetitive. The chord progression known as 12 bar blues is widely used as a basis for improvisation. Blues music is highly expressive and personal.

In the city of New Orleans, black musicians began to form dance bands and marching bands at the beginning of the century. These bands performed in the streets, at brothels, and – hard as it may be to believe – at funerals. These bands included brass instruments like trumpet and trombone and reed instruments like clarinets. A banjo or guitar provided the rhythmic foundation. Stationary (non-marching) bands might also include an upright bass and drums. These bands developed the style known as Dixieland, in which a single instrument plays a melody while the others improvise around it. Dixieland was built around the call-and-response structure that was borrowed from the work songs of the slaves, and tribal music before that.

These early styles of jazz began to achieve widespread popularity in the 1920s and ‘30s – so much so that this era is often referred to as the “jazz age.” The period of prohibition, when alcohol sales were banned in the United States, led to the proliferation of secret clubs where people could buy alcohol and listen to jazz. These clubs, called speakeasies, created an environment where races could mingle more freely than they could in a segregated society. Thus, white audiences began to develop a taste for “black music.” The widespread use of the radio also contributed to the spread of jazz music to a larger audience.