Emily Needle

• BA (Hons) History
• From Rags Through Race to Ragtime: The Jenkins Orphanage Band and American Audience Response to Jazz in Turn of the Century Charleston.

This research project utilises the Jenkins Orphanage Band, from Charleston, South Carolina as a case study to explore some of the bigger questions surrounding the development and dissemination of Jazz in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century United States. It will examine the ethnic and economic profile of Jazz audiences in an attempt to assess the reception of Jazz, the extent to which Jazz, developed in the segregated environment of the ‘Jim Crow’ South, was able to cross class and racial divisions among national audiences, and the influence that the band’s particular syncopated Gullah rhythms had on music beyond the region.

Project Supervisor: Prof Susan-Mary Grant, School of History, Classics & Archaelogy
 
Funding Source: Newcastle University