Still Roaring
Few decades in American history have been as dynamic or influential as the 1920s, when jazz, blues, country, and Tin Pan Alley tunes all eclipsed European waltzes and operettas as the nation’s popular music. “The Twenties marks the beginning of the American century in a lot of ways,” says Harry Ransom Center curator Oliver Franklin. “It was the decade America found its place in the world as we know it today, for good or bad.” Part of the HRC’s 50th Anniversary, its multimedia “American Twenties“ exhibition includes art, literature, and artifacts from the HRC’s vast archives on display through July 29, with several music tie-ins scattered around local clubs with era-appropriate artists like Asylum Street Spankers, Guy Forsyth, Glovertango (Friday at the Continental Club), and White Ghost Shivers (Saturday at Emo’s, plus a Twenties fashion show). Museums don’t usually sponsor club gigs, but Franklin emphasizes how crucial Prohibition and speakeasies were to the decade’s musical culture. “When Prohibition happened, people who wanted to have fun and wanted to drink and were creative people were forced to congregate in these sequestered locations and encounter things they’d never heard before,” he says. “That was quite liberating. It created a soup where all these things were born.”
This article appears in March 2 • 2007.