| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

William Howland Kenney. Jazz on the River. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2005. Pp. x, 229. $27.50.
The first master narrative of jazz was that it traveled "up the river" from New Orleans to Chicago on the backs of its first generation of stars: Louis Armstrong, George "Pops" Foster, and Baby Dodds (among others). William Howland Kenney's Chicago Jazz: A Cultural History, 1904–1930 (1993) is the definitive history of its arrival in that city's black and tan clubs, the primary site of social integration and white musicians' apprenticeship. His new book is the first academic overview of "riverboat jazz" (p. 39), an elusive, legendary aspect of the music's dissemination during the interwar period, that has always revolved around two men: Joseph Streckfus of Streckfus Steamers, Inc., and Fate Marable, his musical supervisor. Reimagining the riverine culture that connected New Orleans, Memphis, St. Louis, Davenport, and the Ohio River spur cities, Cincinnati and Pittsburgh, Kenney argues that the steamboats fed on feelings of nostalgia, romance, and segregation to produce a distinctive Upper South plantation complex—as codified in the musical Show Boat (1927)—that also heralded the social changes of black migration.	1
By the late nineteenth century, riverboats had long been eclipsed by railroads even in rural southern economies. Lacking in speed, organization, and safety, the flat-bottomed, wooden sternwheelers commonly burned to the ground from boiler explosions or were destroyed by ice. John Streckfus and his four sons brought efficient corporate organization to river traffic: the company's boats ran on schedule and bought up small, failing companies that granted them riverfront landings from St. Louis to St. Paul. Yet profits remained thin until the Streckfus family reenvisioned the steamboats as recreational vessels. Advance agents would book civic groups and women's clubs for mornings and afternoons, while ads promoted the "floating ballroom" (p. 22) for the ships' romantic evening cruises. Successful right through the Depression, Streckfus Steamers commissioned two stainless steel ships in the 1930s with huge art deco ballrooms equivalent to the Savoy Ballroom in New York.	. . .

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