////Regarding The Trolley Car Swing (the product of professional songwriters Joe Young and Bert Grant), it seems to be to the sort of song that could easily appear in a variety show (the cover shows the conductor and a female passenger dancing in the trolley) - it's up-tempo, dotted rhythm and to me the word swing is used purely in a dance meaning. It certainly bears no resemblance to the songs the female jazz or blues singers you mention would have sung.////


You seem to be trying to have it both ways. "It's not swing as in jazz, it's swing as in dance." Oh, well, glad you cleared that up otherwise I'd thought there was a clear connection between the two concepts.

Trolley Car Swing represents a transition of ragtime to jazz that foreshadowed the emergence of female jazz singing--which is a form of jazz distinct from all others. The song is not ragtime although it has some raggy elements--that's only natural. But the way Elida Morris sings it (I can't say what the writers had in mind although I think it's something similar), it is one that's reaching out for that next phase but, of course, doesn't really know what that phase is. People of that era knew you have to swing it but there were certainly many versions and ideas of what that meant instead of the codified, rigid definition we have today--which is the antithesis of what swing meant--musical liberation which was also a sexual liberation because it was inherently beat related and when you let the beat take over and move your body, it's sexual in nature. And this was more important for women than men and hence the emergence of female vocal jazz. That's what led up to the 20s and why social mores changed so completely from long, Victorian hair and flowing dresses to bobs and flapper skirts, from swaying gently to classics to cutting loose with the Charleston, from staying at home and raising the kids to working and voting.

////There certainly were songs with swing in the title, but I've looked at all the sheets in Levy between 1850 and 1920 with it and none (and I include The Trolley Car Swing) seem to indicate swing in the jazz sense. They refer to (i) garden type swings, (ii) the swing-into-line or swing-me-round type from dancing and (iii) swing low sweet chariot and similar.////

Sheet music? You can look at sheet music and tell if it swings?? Can you tell me how you do that? I play jazz pieces all the time on double bass from sheet music and you just have to know how to swing it. That's part of the mystique of swing. Notes on paper is only an approximation.

Aside from that, every music has its own form of swing. You can be the greatest jazz drummer in the world and suck at playing polka. Then you get a polka drummer in there who can't play a 100th of what the jazz drummer can and yet he'll slaughter that guy in polka. Why? Because polka has its own swing and if you don't know it, you can't play it. I think the biggest mistake of the many made in classical music these days is the over-reliance on playing exactly what is on the sheet music with little room to interpret. I don't think the composers thought in that fashion at all. When he writes those funny Italian words at the beginning of a piece, it's an instruction on how to swing the piece but it's only an approximation, a suggestion. It's up to the player to decide.

////I believe the word (in the jazz sense) would have become widely known quite quickly once jazz recording and radio broadcasts became popular, but as for the turn of the century I see no evidence yet. (I'm prepared to be persuaded, but you need to produce some decent contemporary accounts to demonstrate it).////

It's not my job to convince you of anything. That's your job. It's my job to bring up the subject so that it is discussed. I'm long past the point where everybody has to accept what I say. I don't want nor expect them to. That would make the world a pretty dull one for me. But if I give them a new set of ears and they like what they hear, that's great. If they don't, they're free to keep their old ears.