Jazz Music: Going Back To The 1920's

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Going back to the 1920s In the 1920s, there were lots of crime, violence, and bootlegging. There was also a new type of music called Jazz. Jazz music came from African Americans in the southern United States which included Ragtime and Blues. Younger people of this time thought that the jazz age was the bee’s knees and loved to dance to this new music. Hoppers would dance in Harlem which had some 500 dance joints. Jazz wasn’t like the other music produced, jazz was where people made the music as they played instead of playing off printed off music. Benny Goodman, what everyone called “the king of swing”, was playing jazz when he was teenager in the early 1920s. His “big band” helped make jazz popular with white audiences. “The Charleston was…show more content…
This was called prohibition, but with every law, there are rebellious people that still secretly do the opposite of the law. Bootlegging became very popular to get around prohibition. Bootleggers would go against the law and would have flasks of alcohol in their boots so they could have the giggle water they needed. People started to run out of the alcohol they had before so they turned to the homemade panther sweat called moonshine. People also started to use a system where they would go to Canada and squirrel and transport liquor over the great lakes. These people needed to be fast and silent about smuggling the alcohol into the United States so they had to use speed boats that were armor plated and sometimes had choppers on the boats to get rid of the lake patrols that would find the speed boats that were smuggling the liquor and chase them. When people did succeed in transporting the liquor into the United States, they would take the alcohol to places called speakeasies. Speakeasies were bars or juice joints that operated illegally so people could drink. With the success of bootlegging, a lot of people made a lot of dough. One person that was the most successful in bootlegging was a Chicago gangster by the name Al Capone (Scarface) who made about $60 million a year from bootlegging alone. With this much money, Capone soon was…show more content…
Gangs would be trying to supply liquor competitively with other local gangsters. Soon they found that it was easier to join forces and work together to make bootlegging bigger and easier. People would bump off anyone who would get in their way who was mainly patrols on the great lakes trying to prevent bootlegging and smuggling of alcohol. Gangsters were very easily avoiding dicks and able to supply their local joints. Soon there was a huge clash of other gangs that didn’t need the help or wanted anyone else involved in their bootlegging and crime. There were large gang wars all over the streets from people using machine guns like the chopper, to sawed-off shotguns to bump off unwanted gangs going into their hoods. Bimbos were all over the streets making sure that no other gangs or police were interfering with their crimes and squirreling alcohol. But with every crime, there will be soon police finally finding a way to catch you and put you away. This happened to the gangster Capone in 1931, but he was not arrested for all of his crimes and bootlegging, it was for in fact from Capone evading his income-taxes. Soon after Capone was arrested in 1931, prohibition was lifted in 1933 and alcohol was legalized in the United States

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