Livery Stable Blues

The first jazz record ever made was recorded by five white guys from New Orleans who couldn't read music, and if that sentence doesn't encapsulate the entire complicated history of American popular culture, nothing does. Livery Stable Blues was cut on February 26, 1917, for the Victor Talking Machine Company, and it sold over a million copies in an era when most Americans didn't own a phonograph. The Original Dixieland Jass Band — they hadn't figured out the spelling yet — became international celebrities overnight, despite being far from the most talented musicians playing this style in New Orleans.

Let's get the uncomfortable part out of the way: Nick LaRocca, the cornet player and self-appointed leader, spent the rest of his life claiming he invented jazz. He did not. He wasn't even the best cornet player in New Orleans in 1917. What he was, undeniably, was the first person to get it on record. History has a nasty habit of confusing 'first to document' with 'first to create,' and LaRocca exploited that confusion until the day he died.

But here's the thing that gets lost in the righteous anger: the recording is actually good. Livery Stable Blues is raw, chaotic, and genuinely exciting. The band imitates barnyard animals — a horse, a rooster, a cow — using their instruments, which sounds like a gimmick until you realize they're doing it in perfect rhythmic unison while maintaining a swinging groove underneath. It's novelty music played by people with serious chops, which is a harder trick than it sounds.

The title itself came from a lawsuit. Two music publishers each claimed authorship, and the case went to court, where the judge listened to the music and ruled that it was nothing more than barnyard imitations and therefore not copyrightable by anyone. Jazz received its first critical review from a federal judge, and the verdict was that it wasn't music at all. The genre has been proving judges wrong ever since.