Music of the Early 20th Century: A Wild Mix of Cultures

The opening scene of Upton Sinclair's 1906 classic novel The Jungle features an amazingly detailed depiction of a wedding feast taking place in the rear room of a Chicago saloon. The music at this traditional Lithuanian feast plays a vitally important role in the proceedings. The songs inspire visions of home. Tamoszius Kuszleika is the lead fiddler. He taught himself to play by practicing all night after working in the "killing beds" of the slaughterhouses all day. A ritual called the Acziarimas ceremony is the highlight of the evening, and involves a long dance that lasts for over three hours. The guests form a ring enclosing the bride, Ona, and men dance with her. When they've had their dance, they donate a bit of money into a hat that Elzbieta holds in her hands. Sinclair spares no detail in his vivid descriptions of the dancing party. Reading the novel, one can almost hear the oom-pah of the accordion and drunken scratch and yowl of the violin.

American music in the early 20^th century was an enormous mish-mash of different international styles, brought over to these shores by the hundreds of thousands of immigrants that were arriving at the time. The Lithuanians described in the first chapter of The Jungle were just one group of Europeans who brought their musical traditions with them to the promised land. Especially in large cities, like The Jungle's industrialized Chicago, an eclectic mix of musical influences brewed under the surface of millions of workers.

It's important to bear in mind that recording technology didn't really exist and radio was still in it's infancy at the time. The most popular music in America was performed live and distributed via sheet music. The different types of music brought over with the immigrants pretty much remained isolated to the different communities that represented each culture. Once people of different cultures began to intermingle, their cultural details intermingled as well and new forms of music were often fused and emerged into popularity.