What Was the Jazz Age? Meaning, Dates and Culture of the 1920s

The Jazz Age was the period in the United States from the end of World War I to the stock market crash of October 1929, in other words the 1920s, when jazz became the new popular dance music and gave its name to a whole urban culture of speakeasies, flappers, new dances and looser social rules. F. Scott Fitzgerald made the name stick with his 1922 story collection Tales of the Jazz Age, and in a 1931 essay he dated the era from the May Day riots of 1919 to the crash of October 1929. Some accounts stretch it into the early 1930s, to the end of Prohibition in 1933.

Where the Name Came From

The phrase “jazz age” was already in use before 1920, but F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) is the writer who popularized it. His first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), made him famous at 23. Two years later he called his second story collection Tales of the Jazz Age; its eleven stories include “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” and “May Day,” and one section is titled “My Last Flappers.” The Great Gatsby (1925), set on Long Island in 1922, is his portrait of the era, with its parties, speakeasies and new money.

In November 1931 Fitzgerald looked back in “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” an essay for Scribner’s Magazine that opens with his own dates: “The ten-year period that, as if reluctant to die outmoded in its bed, leaped to a spectacular death in October, 1929, began about the time of the May Day riots in 1919.” In the same essay he gave a short definition of the word itself: “The word jazz in its progress toward respectability has meant first sex, then dancing, then music.”

When Was the Jazz Age?

The Jazz Age covers the 1920s. Many accounts start it right after World War I, in 1919 or 1920, with the start of Prohibition and the vote for women, and end it with the Wall Street crash of October 1929, as Fitzgerald did. Others let it run into the early 1930s, until Prohibition ended and the swing era began. The main dates:

• 1919: the May Day riots, Fitzgerald’s starting point; the Eighteenth Amendment is ratified in January.
• 1920: Prohibition takes effect on January 17; the Nineteenth Amendment, giving women the vote, is ratified on August 18.
• 1922: Fitzgerald publishes Tales of the Jazz Age.
• 1923: James P. Johnson’s “The Charleston” is heard in the Broadway show Runnin’ Wild.
• 1925: The Great Gatsby and Alain Locke’s anthology The New Negro are published; Josephine Baker opens in Paris.
• 1926: the Savoy Ballroom opens in Harlem; Langston Hughes publishes The Weary Blues.
• 1927: Duke Ellington’s band opens at the Cotton Club on December 4.
• 1929: the stock market crashes in October.
• 1931: “Echoes of the Jazz Age” appears in Scribner’s Magazine.
• 1933: Prohibition is repealed on December 5.

Why the 1920s Were Called the Jazz Age

Jazz was the newest sound in the country, and young people adopted it as their own. It came out of the Black communities of New Orleans, moved north to Chicago and New York with musicians such as King Oliver and Louis Armstrong, and reached a national audience through records, dance halls and, by the end of the decade, radio. For the young, dancing to jazz in clubs and speakeasies went together with short skirts, cigarettes in public and open talk about sex; for many of their parents it stood for a breakdown of morality. That link between a music and a way of living is what the name captures.

The music itself changed fast during the decade, from the collective New Orleans style to Armstrong’s solos and the arranged orchestras of Fletcher Henderson and Duke Ellington. We cover that story, with the records to hear, in our guide to jazz music in the 1920s, and the blues and jazz vocalists of the decade in our list of 1920s jazz singers.

Prohibition and the Speakeasy

The Eighteenth Amendment banned the production, transport and sale of alcohol, and Prohibition began on January 17, 1920. The law was widely ignored. Organized gangs took over the liquor supply in many cities, and illegal bars, the speakeasies, many of them owned by criminals, became the lively venues of the Jazz Age, with live bands playing dance tunes, novelty songs and show tunes. Estimates for New York City alone run into the tens of thousands.

Gangsters also ran some of the best-known jazz venues. Harlem’s Cotton Club was owned by Owney Madden, a leading New York underworld figure, who used it to sell his beer. Fitzgerald himself doubted that Prohibition caused the era’s change in manners: in “Echoes of the Jazz Age” he wrote that the young generation’s new intimacies “would have come about with or without prohibition.” Prohibition ended when the Twenty-first Amendment was ratified on December 5, 1933.

The Great Migration and the Harlem Renaissance

The Jazz Age depended on a movement of people. In the first Great Migration, between 1910 and 1940, about 1.6 million Black Americans left the rural South for northern industrial cities, pushed by segregation and lynching and drawn by industrial jobs. The Chicago Defender, carried south by Pullman porters, urged readers to come north. Chicago’s South Side and Harlem in New York gained the musicians, audiences and clubs that made both cities centers of jazz.

Harlem became the home of the Harlem Renaissance, a movement in literature, music, art and politics that was known at the time as the New Negro Movement, after Alain Locke’s 1925 anthology The New Negro. Its high point fell between about 1924 and 1929. Langston Hughes, an early writer of jazz poetry, published his first collection, The Weary Blues, in 1926, and that year in The Nation he argued in “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” that Black artists should draw on their own culture without shame, writing that “jazz to me is one of the inherent expressions of Negro life in America.” Claude McKay’s novel Home to Harlem (1928) put the neighborhood’s nightlife on the page, and W. E. B. Du Bois disliked it for exactly that. On Broadway, the all-Black musical Shuffle Along (1921) brought jazz to mixed audiences and ran for 504 performances.

Flappers, Dance Halls and New Freedoms

The flapper became the image of the era: a young woman with bobbed hair and a knee-length skirt who listened to jazz, drank, smoked in public, drove a car and ignored the old rules of decent behavior. Fitzgerald noted in his essay that the girls of the war generation “dramatized themselves as flappers.” The Nineteenth Amendment, ratified on August 18, 1920, gave women the vote, and more women worked outside the home after the war. The automobile also mattered: Fitzgerald pointed to the “mobile privacy” it gave young couples away from their parents.

Dancing was where the new freedoms were most visible. The Charleston, a dance with African American roots, spread through the 1923 Broadway show Runnin’ Wild and peaked in 1926 and 1927; the Black Bottom, which also came out of the Black South, became a national craze, danced most famously by Ann Pennington in a 1926 Broadway revue. In Harlem the Savoy Ballroom opened on March 12, 1926. It held up to 4,000 dancers, had a double bandstand so the music never stopped, and kept a no-discrimination policy at a time when some of Harlem’s most popular clubs admitted only white customers.

The Racial Paradox of the Jazz Age

The music that named the era was created by Black Americans, yet some of its most famous rooms kept Black people out. The Cotton Club, where Duke Ellington’s band played from December 1927, was a whites-only club with rare exceptions for Black celebrities, and its floor shows traded on racist “jungle” and plantation imagery. The broadcasts from the club made Ellington famous nationwide, and the Black musicians who played Harlem’s white-only clubs became part of the mainstream music scene. The singers and players who lived through this are profiled in our overview of Black jazz singers.

The commercial side showed the same split. The most popular dance band of the 1920s was Paul Whiteman‘s white orchestra, which the press called the “King of Jazz.” Record companies sold most Black blues and jazz in separate “race records” series aimed at Black buyers, a name Okeh coined in 1922, and few Black artists were marketed to white listeners.

The Jazz Age Abroad

Jazz crossed the Atlantic almost at once. The Original Dixieland Jazz Band, the white New Orleans group that made the first jazz record in 1917, toured Britain in 1919. In Paris, Josephine Baker (1906-1975) opened on October 2, 1925 in La Revue nègre at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées and became a star overnight; the show spread jazz and Black American culture across Europe. Ada “Bricktop” Smith, an American singer, ran her Paris nightclub Chez Bricktop from 1924, and Cole Porter and Fitzgerald were among its customers. France had its own name for the decade, the années folles, or crazy years.

How the Jazz Age Ended

The Wall Street crash of October 1929 and the Depression that followed ended the boom that had paid for the parties. Fitzgerald put it bluntly in 1931: “Somebody had blundered and the most expensive orgy in history was over.” His own fortunes fell with the era, as readers and magazines turned away from the stories that had made him famous. Prohibition lasted until December 1933, and the music did not stop: by the mid-1930s the arranged dance bands that grew out of the 1920s had become the swing era, the next chapter in our guide to the main types of jazz.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does Jazz Age mean?

Jazz Age is the name for the 1920s in the United States, taken from the music that defined the decade’s popular culture. It stands for the whole mood of the period: jazz and dancing, speakeasies during Prohibition, flappers, cars and looser social rules, backed by an economic boom that ended with the 1929 crash.

Who coined the term Jazz Age?

The term is usually credited to F. Scott Fitzgerald. The phrase was already in use before 1920, but Fitzgerald popularized it with his 1922 short story collection Tales of the Jazz Age and looked back on the era in his 1931 essay Echoes of the Jazz Age.

When did the Jazz Age start and end?

The Jazz Age took place in the 1920s. Fitzgerald dated it from the May Day riots of 1919 to the stock market crash of October 1929, and many histories use roughly 1920 to 1929. Some extend it to the early 1930s, when Prohibition was repealed in 1933 and the swing era began.

Is the Jazz Age the same as the Roaring Twenties?

The two names describe the same decade and are often used interchangeably. Roaring Twenties stresses the prosperity, new technology and break with tradition of the 1920s in cities across the Western world, while Jazz Age points to the music and youth culture, especially in the United States.