josepp

I rarely try to have things both ways! You (possible deliberately) misunderstand my distinction between swing as in dance and swing as in jazz. I refer to swing in dance as the actual movement of swinging your partner around - the songs have phrases like swing your partner into line are used. You can do that to an old fashioned waltz or a four-square march without the music having to have a jazz swing.

You were the one claiming that swing in the titles of songs was an indication that the meaning (in the sense of swinging jazz) was widely understood. I merely point out that in the sheets at Levy - I looked at those from 1850 to 1920 - it is never used in the songs in that sense. I don't need to tell from the sheet music whether the music swings or not - that wasn't your claim. I can't see that you've produced any evidence for this assertion that swing was widely understood in the general population before jazz spread out from New Orleans or Chicago. (Your later statement that every music has its own form of swing just muddies the water; you can't start off talking about one definition of swing and change to another later. What you say is true - almost every musical style has its own conventions for playing it; the notes on paper are never the whole story, and that's true for classical music as much as any other).


Given the other songs Joe Young wrote I'm fairly sure that The Trolley Car Swing was written as just a simple novelty song (and the allegro marking does nothing to disagree with that). It does have a mildly sexually liberated lyric - Grab for a strap, fall in some woman's lap - (the cover shows the conductor and a lady dancing with what may be some abandon) and a decent (blues influenced I would say) melody. I haven't heard the recording (couldn't find one online when I looked earlier), so I don't know how Elida Morris performed it, and it's certainly true that a good singer can work wonders even with something that doesn't look promising on paper.


You may have a valid point to make, but it takes more than just saying it for it to be true. I could claim that Percy Grainger's 1906 recordings of the Lincolshire singer Joseph Taylor clearly show that Joseph Taylor swung and that therefore swing was created in the English East midlands; I might be hard-pressed to get anyone to believe it!


But, as you say, discussion is good and your thread seems to be making people do some thinking (and listening maybe). Keep it up!

Mick