Books about Jazz Musicians of the 1920s

by Jeff Stookey
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5 books
This list consists of books by or about jazz musicians of the 1920s in the Chicago music scene. My novel trilogy Medicine for the Blues features an ambitious young jazz piano player whose dream is to go to Chicago. So I did a good deal of research into musicians of the era. These are some of my favorite books by authors who look back on the early days of jazz with love and nostalgia. They are White musicians who loved the music played by Negro musicians and took up that cause with religious fervor.
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Remembering Bix

A Memoir Of The Jazz Age
Ralph Berton, 2000
Because this book is told from the perspective of a precocious 13-year-old Ralph Berton, as he idolizes jazz great Bix Beiderbecke, it has an enchanting nostalgic quality. It takes you back to another time and reveals some surprising secrets about many of the characters. In some sense, I loosely modeled my fictitious piano player after the Bix in this book.

Really the Blues

Mezz Mezzrow, Bernard Wolfe, 2016
Mezzrow tells his story in the slang vernacular of the early 20th;-century jazz world. The language alone makes this book a standout, indeed, I’ve read that it was a big influence on Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation writers of the 1950s. You will get a close-up look at many music greats viewed through the eyes of this musician who knew, played music with, and idolized them. It’s a view from an underworld seldom depicted in fashionable circles.

We Called It Music

Eddie Condon, 1992
Eddie Condon’s smart mouth creates a memorable picture of the early jazz scene he loved and later tried to revive.. Starting with his childhood, his stories are amusing and incisive. He has a knack for a turn of phrase that flashes like lightning, for example when he describes a high school friend who “decided to take a course in bumology,” and hopped a freight train. Back then Eddie was “nuts about music” even before he began to teach himself to play. Later on, much of his time is spent looking for music work and chasing women, one of whom he describes as having a “thirty-six-inch smile.” Condon depicts a lively portrait of a lost era.

The Stardust Road

Hoagy Carmichael, 1983
Carmichael writes about his family and early life in Bloomington, Indiana, where he became a jazz maniac, like many of his friends. Writing in an idiosyncratic style all his own, Hoagy jumps around in time and space, describing his college friend Monk, the surreal poet, his musician friend Bix Beiderbecke, among others, and describing the era and the music. It’s another nostalgic look back as Carmichael’s own development as a talented songwriter unfolds.

Jelly Roll, Bix, and Hoagy

Gennett Records and the Rise of America's Musical Grassroots
Rick Kennedy, 2013
This book is a chronicle of the recording of jazz and other distinctively American music of the early 20th century. Kennedy details this unlikely history of the little recording studio of Gennett Records, housed in a piano manufacturing business in the small town of Richmond, Indiana, nearly 300 miles from Chicago. The Black and White jazz greats, blues singers, rural fiddlers, cowboy songsters, and other creators of roots music—they are all described here in colorful anecdotes.