Square-dance culture was actively constructed as white during jazz’s rise

Evidence

One reason the Black bandleader Frank Johnson isn’t better known might be that the styles of music he perfected seem awfully close to what you might hear at a square dance or a hoedown, music that would come to seem synonymous with white culture. Synonymous enough that, in the 1920s, during jazz’s ascent, Henry Ford urged Americans to rally around the purported whiteness of the square dance; enough that more than two hundred years after Johnson’s birth, we’re only lately raising a critical eyebrow at country music’s assertion of white purity. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1135

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels Ford’s other demographic anxieties — anti-Semitism and nativism — as part of a broader project of racializing American identity in the 1920s.
• QUESTION: Who was Frank Johnson and how did his music get written out? Worth chasing his biography as a concrete case of the deviation-vs-design erasure mechanism.