Born into Jazz

This chapter presents a historiography of jazz music and dance in the first two decades of the twentieth century as the musical-cultural foundation from which the Nicholas Brothers emerged: Fayard Nicholas, born in Mobile, Alabama, on October 20, 1914, twelve weeks before the declarations of war by European countries that exploded into World War I; Harold Nicholas, born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, on March 17, 1921, in the wake of the Great War. In the span of time between the Nicholas brothers’ births, with its mixed moods of anxiety and optimism over what the future would bring, a new form of music emerged—jazz—that reshaped American culture and influenced European culture, with its sudden turns, shocks, and swift changes of pace. Fayard and Harold Nicholas were instrumental in bringing the black vernacular form of jazz tap dancing to its penultimate expression.