Musical Essays by Ralph Berton

Virtually all of Berton's shorter essays on music and related subjects, written throughout his career dating from the 1940s through the 1980s, are contained in Box 5. Folder #1 contains Berton's early ruminations on jazz as an art form, Art and Jazz. Folder #2 contains a fragment of an early manuscript for his 1958 Harper's magazine article on Bix Beiderbecke, which became the basis of his book-length published memoir, Remembering Bix. Folder #2 also contains Berton's Brabble, Berton's ruminations on teaching a course in jazz appreciation at the college level, which contains several important pedagogical insights quite useful to jazz educators and others teaching introductory humanities courses at the university level. Folder #3 contains manuscripts for Berton's Corner, Berton's regular column for the collector's magazine Goldmine, to which he was a regular contributor in the 1980s. Folder #5 contains an article from the late 1950s on the relationship between jazz and the emerging popularity of folk music. That same folder contains an article about Joe Springer and the relationship between talent and fame. Folders #6 and #7 contain articles from the 1940s that were written in conjunction with his activity as a jazz disc jockey in that period. Folder #17 contains a list of Records Everyone Should Have, a list of 78 rpm recordings compiled in conjunction with his radio program during the 1940s. Folder #18 contains the manuscript of a Berton essay entitled The Snob Itch and the Jazzman, which addresses the issue of the urge of jazz musicians to be taken seriously and on the same plane as classical musicians, a theme to which Berton would return again and again. Folders #19 and #20 contain the manuscripts of editorials that Berton wrote for Sounds & Fury, a slick music magazine of which Berton was executive editor during the early 1960s