by Anne Shaw Faulkner, from Ladies Home Journal,
August 1921
America is facing a most serious situation regarding
its popular music. Welfare workers tell us that never in the
history of our land have there been such immoral conditions
among our young people, and in the surveys made by many organizations
regarding these conditions, the blame is laid on jazz music
and its evil influence on the young people of today... Never
before have such outrageous dances been permitted in private
as well as public ballrooms, and never has there been used
for the accompaniment of the dance such a strange combination
of tone and rhythm as that produced by the dance orchestras
of today.
Jazz originally was the accompaniment of the voodoo dancer,
stimulating the half-crazed barbarian to the vilest deeds.
The weird chant, accompanied by the syncopated rhythm of the
voodoo invokers, has also been employed by other barbaric
people to stimulate brutality and sensuality.
That it has a demoralizing effect upon the human brain has
been demonstrated by many scientists... A number of scientific
men who have been working on experiments in musico-therapy
with the insane, declare that while regular rhythms and simple
tones produce a quieting effect on the brain of even a violent
patient, the effect of jazz on the normal brain produces an
atrophied condition on the brain cells of conception, until
very frequently those under the demoralizing influence of
the persistant use of syncopation, combined with inharmonic
partial tones, are actually incapable of distinguishing between
good and evil, right and wrong.
Jazz disorganizes all regular laws and order; it stimulates
to extreme deeds, to a breaking away from all rules and conventions;
it is harmful and dangerous, and its influence is wholly bad.
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