In mid-1922 the magazine Vanity Fair coined the word “flapper” to describe the new “free’ young women who were beginning to embrace a more relaxed and libertine lifestyle, at least in the big cities and East Coast enclaves of sophisticated culture. These women “wore shorter skirts, cropped their hair and danced brazenly in public.” The music they danced to was new, too. Jazz music with its syncopated sounds was the successor to ragtime, and the Twenties became the Jazz Age as the fashionable set tried out dances such as the Charleston and the Lindy Hop.

In 1922, Louis Armstrong left New Orleans for Chicago to join King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band. At the same time, Al Jolson, a white singer and entertainer who often performed in blackface, was making hit song recordings such as April Showers and Toot, Toot, Tootsie (Goo’ Bye!). According to the St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture, “Jolson was to jazz, blues, and ragtime what Elvis Presley was to rock ‘n’ roll.”