Kickin' It Old School To Start Your Monday Right...

The band: The Original Dixieland Jazz Band. The date: February 26th, 1917. The place: Recording Room B at the Victor Talking Machine Studios. The event: the very first time a jazz band put it on wax. The album was released on March 7th (how’s that for fast turn-around?), and it was an immediate hit, although a bit of a novelty song with the animal noises. Livery Stable Blues (the track above) was b/w The Original Dixieland Jazz Band One-Step.

It was the best-selling record ever of its time, at a quarter million copies. This is at a time when there were probably only a half a million record players in the world. Imagine releasing an album today that ends up on one out of every two MP3 players. The monument of this achievement is something that is completely without peer in the modern age.

For what it’s worth, the band (all white guys, a couple of whom were complete racist fucks) got a bit pompous, touring Europe as “the inventors of jazz,” regularly denying in print that black people had anything whatsoever to do with the creation of the music they played. This is obviously not even remotely the case, as jazz was a reasonably well-known form of music by the time they came around, and that band had only been in existence for a year. However, the world they lived in isn’t the one we live in. I don’t give ’em a pass for it, but they’re dead and gone, so I can’t yell at ’em.