u/YoPapaYo42

The Department of the Navy pressured New Orleans to shut down the red-light district where most of the working musicians were employed. Mayor Behrman complied. November 12, 1917, the district closed. The players scattered.
Within five years:
• King Oliver in Chicago, Lincoln Gardens, recording for Gennett (1923).
• Sidney Bechet in New York with Will Marion Cook’s Southern Syncopated Orchestra, then London, then Paris (1919 onward). He played for King George V before he was thirty.
• Jelly Roll Morton in Chicago, recording for Gennett and Paramount (early ‘20s; he’d left NOLA earlier).
• Bunk Johnson out of music until the 1940s rediscovery.
• Buddy Bolden already in the East Louisiana State Hospital since 1907 — he never left it.
The first record sold as jazz — the Original Dixieland Jass Band’s “Livery Stable Blues” — was cut in February 1917 in New York, before Storyville closed, by white New Orleans musicians who’d already migrated.
Two questions:
1. How much of what we call the “Chicago era” is really just New Orleans players who happened to find a recording infrastructure in the city the Illinois Central terminated in?
2. Is there a good treatment of Bechet’s London/Paris years? The Sidney Bechet who came back to the U.S. in the 1920s had played for the King of England. The continental detour seems undertheorized in American jazz writing.
[Disclosure] Working on a podcast about American music history — happy to point if the mods are good with it. Mostly here for the conversation.

Weaver cut "Guitar Rag" for OKeh on November 2, 1923 — solo slide guitar, no vocal, about three minutes. A Black guitarist out of Louisville, recording one of the earliest commercial slide-guitar instrumentals on the books.

Thirteen years later, Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys recorded "Steel Guitar Rag." Same melodic line, retuned for the steel and fitted to a Western Swing arrangement. Credit went to Leon McAuliffe, Wills's steel player. Weaver's name didn't appear.

Wills wasn't unique in this — '30s country and Western Swing absorbed Black source material constantly, and the industry had no clean mechanism for crediting it. But the transaction is unusually clean. The melodic line is recognizable across the tuning change. Anyone who's heard both records can hear it. This isn't influence; it's the same piece of music in a different suit. "Steel Guitar Rag" became a country standard. Weaver's name stayed on its side of the shelf.

His recording finally entered public domain on January 1, 2024.

Two questions for the sub:

Is this transaction unusually clean as these things go, or am I overstating? Most cases I look at are fuzzier — influence, atmosphere, a borrowed turn of phrase. The Weaver-to-McAuliffe line feels closer to a copy than an inheritance.

And if anyone has other examples of a single specific recording getting laundered like this — one record to one record, not "blues influenced country" in the abstract — I'd love to hear them.

(Disclosure: I'm working on a music history podcast about how the recording industry split American music into separate genres, and Weaver's "Guitar Rag" is the show's theme music for exactly the reasons above. Posting because the story stands on its own — happy to point anyone interested to the show but won't drop a link here unless mods are good with it.)