The American Conservatives article By now you know how jazz music changed how we talk about America.
It was the soundtrack to the first presidential election.
It’s the song we sing every morning.
And it changed the way we saw our country.
It took a decade to break through the stigma of racism, but by the time we were through with the sixties, jazz music had become the standard soundtrack to our own political struggle.
In 1962, for instance, the president of the National Jazz Federation, Al Jolson, was shot and killed by an assassin who was part of a gang who wanted to destroy jazz.
In 1968, the country’s first black president, Richard Nixon, made the song his signature and launched the Vietnam War.
The music helped him defeat the civil rights movement and became a rallying cry for many of his supporters.
And then in 1972, the Civil Rights Act was signed into law, with the aim of removing the barriers that had defined the lives of millions of Americans since the early twentieth century.
It would become the first law in the country to make the criminalization of political dissent, and it ushered in a new era of activism that included civil rights marches and the protests that followed.
The song was so ubiquitous that in its heyday, the National Anthem was played on buses and in churches, and in many American cities it was a fixture in the public square.
And even today, its lyrics continue to be a part of our cultural lexicon.
In a recent piece for Slate, I argue that in the words of jazz historian David Schuster, jazz has played a role in shaping how we think about our nation’s past and its future.
For many Americans, jazz was a central figure in the creation of the modern republic, and jazz became a key tool in that process.
Jazz music has played an important role in changing how we see our nation.
It gave us our nation of laws, our nation that is founded on the Constitution, our great nation.
Its history has helped us make sense of the American experience and the world around us.
The musical genre was born out of the turmoil of the 1960s.
In response to the Civil War, Americans turned to new forms of protest, such as the Watts riots of the late 1960s, which involved the looting and arson of African-American businesses and homes.
But it also brought new ideas about race and the state.
The idea of the country as a melting pot of races, cultures, and religions has helped shape how we view our nation, and how we have always viewed each other.
In his new book, The Jazz of America: The Story of the Jazz Artists Who Created It, music historian David Zweig explores how the jazz of the early sixties came to be the template for a nation built on the foundation of its citizens’ shared experience and shared history.
The Jazz: The Birth of the Country was published by Random House in June.
Read more about jazz and the history of the music genre here.
Follow the author: on Twitter @bradfischman