Corrections:

"And it is Keppard's Creole Band, by the way, that jelly Roll Morton offered as the direct origin of the O. DlJ.B.'s style."

.."the first strain of Fidgity Feet echoes At a Georgia Camp Town Meeting (1897)"

**

Here's another quote from William's Jazz Masters of New Orleans :

"Music historian Wilfred Mellers puts the case in extreme terms in comparing the O.D.J.B records to those of Jelly Roll Morton and King Oliver. At the same time, he touched on a psychological truth that most white Americans have still to deal with:

"The wildness of the blues, the tension of the heterophony, have vanished, leaving only a eupeptic jauntiness. Oliver makes something positive, even gay, out of a painful reality; the Dixieland Band, purging away both passion and the irony, leave is with the inane grin of the black-faced minstrel. The brassy, reedy sonority of the Negro band- which can be simultaneously hard as nails and warmly sensitive-becomes a footling tootle; the perpetual jigging of the dotted rhythm becomes a jerking of puppets. All that comes over as genuine is an element of pathos beneath the merriment. If there was pathos in the vivacity of the Negro rags*, it is sadder still to find white men-with or without blackened faces, wearing the same mask. The pathos is for the most part extra-musical."

Mellers is speaking about the music's effect, of course, and a comparative effect at that, which (for Oliver's group at least) is out of historical order and context. But perhaps one is not right to hurl personal recriminations at the members of the O.D.J.B. Perhaps they did not deliberately "purge away" anything. They may have played honestly what they felt, understood, and could play, by and large. If their music had the social function of sentimentalizing an urgent Negro idiom for the benefit of whites, how far can one go in blaming them personally?"

pp 32-33

*When I first read this I thought that "rags" referred to tattered clothes. But then I remembered that I was reading a book about early jazz. It therefore seems most likely that in this context, the word "rags" refers to "ragtime music".