Internet Research Sites
Basinstreet.com
Dr. Karl Koenig, Ph.D, provides incredibly detailed research on the evolution of early jazz in New Orleans, and the musicians who developed it and carried the sounds throughout the United States. Discusses persons, places, styles, and geographical settings. The site doesn’t discriminate between famous New Orleans jazz musicians and obscure ones. Styles of music that fed into the evolution of jazz, such as blues and ragtime, are discussed. A ton of material. Not for the faint-hearted!
Chicago South Side Piano
This website is the love child of seven enthusiasts for the blues piano sounds of the early days in the music joints of south Chicago. “This site is our tribute to all those fellas who were radiating the 88’s during the 20s and 30s in the Wind City.” Think Jimmy Blythe, Black Bob, Clarence Jones. Not only does this website provide informative articles, but it is wonderfully pleasing to the eye.
Doctor Jazz
Monrovia Sound Studio hosts the Doctor Jazz website that is devoted to scholarly research on the life and times of Jelly Roll Morton, as well as the friends and fellow musicians orbiting around him. Hence, you can access Doctor Jazz through the Monrovia website (where you will find other interesting research on early jazz) or go directly to the Doctor Jazz website. There is a ton of information you will not easily find elsewhere.
Monrovia: www.jazzstudiesonline.org
Doctor Jazz: www.doctorjazz.co.uk
Jazz Age 1920s
One of the handful of websites devoted to real research about jazz and pop singers and musicians of the 1920s. Some great articles! The “Jazz Age pages feature accurate, original-research bios of some of the lesser known personalities of the era. Numerous rare, high-quality photographs and audio files are distributed throughout the website.”
Old Time Blues
This is a website “founded in 2015 by writer and folklore collector R.C. Montgomery with a mission to preserve and chronicle the music within the grooves of decades old 78 RPM records, and bring their sounds to the ears of a new generation of listener, as a sort of digital archive ….” The site is more than a digital resource of old blues and blue-related sounds, however. There is well-grounded historical research to document the posted 78s.
RagPiano.com
Bill Edwards is a ragtime pianist who has been performing and recording–and even writing his own ragtime pieces–for over forty years. His website has outgrown the boundaries of pure ragtime, and more properly is described as a detailed examination of the music, composers, and performers of the “ragtime era”. The amount of time and research that have gone into this site is phenomenal!
Songobiography–A Musical Memoir
Elijah Wald is a respected music historian, plus Blues and folk music performer. He has published acclaimed books on subjects ranging from Robert Johnson to Bob Dylan to “Narco-Corridos”. He has even done an instructional DVD on playing guitar a la the great Bahamian musician, Joseph Spence. A part of Wald’s website is “Songobiography”, where he researches the histories of a variety of old songs. If, for instance, you want to know how Mamie Desdunes lost her two fingers check out Mamie’s Blues. Want to learn the story behind Mississippi John Hurt’s Louis Collins, check out “Songobiography”. Wald does real research.
Elijah Wald website: https://www.elijahwald.com
Songobiography: https://www.elijahwald.com/songblog/
