This is an ongoing project that concentrates on the representation of ragtime and early jazz music in "Negro Newspapers" from St. Louis, Missouri, during the first two decades of the 20th century. During my summer 2019 research trip to St. Louis (Aug. 13-23), I worked at the Missouri Historical Museum’s Research Center using microfilm copies of the St. Louis Argus and finished going through every page of the newspaper for the year 1919. Additional research was conducted at the Minnesota History Center's Research Library in St. Paul, where I examined all editions from June through December 1918 of that city’s prominent African American newspaper, the St. Paul Appeal, . 

Ragtime emerged as one of America’s most popular musical genres during the first two decades of the 20th century, and the major city in which it first flourished was St. Louis. Although scholars continue to debate whether ragtime should be viewed as a precursor to jazz music or, in fact, constitutes jazz in its earliest form, insufficient attention has been devoted to how the music was treated in African American discourse, particularly in the Midwest. The current project aims to address this deficiency in the extant English-language research on jazz history.