From Eubie Blake National Jazz Institute and Cultural Center

By the 1890s, the piano became a familiar sight even in working-class settings and began to produce new kinds of music.

When the African American community took up the piano after the Civil War, they put their inherited traditions into church and dance music. These exciting new sounds gave birth to important new styles, creating ragtime, jazz, and gospel.

Tin Pan Alley, New York's music publishing district in the early 1900s, drew on the diverse cultures of New Yorkers and Midwesterners, African Americans, immigrant Eastern Europeans, Jews, Irish, Italians, and Germans. Often self-taught, composers scrambled to make a living, pumping out song after song and establishing 20th-century American popular music.

Image on right shows transposing lever.

Gift of Irving Berlin

SI photograph by M. Erixon-Stanford