Marshall Stearns papers, artifacts, and audio recordings

Marshall Winslow Stearns was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts to Harry N. and Edith Stearns on October 18, 1908. His father was a Harvard-trained attorney who also served in the Massachusetts State Legislature, while his mother graduated from Radcliff College, Harvard's academic counterpart for women. Marshall had two sisters, Margaret and Elizabeth. Stearns's interest in music was apparent by the time he entered high school when he and friends started a small band; he played drums and went on to guitar and the C-Melody saxophone. Stearns became acquainted with the recordings of early favorites Louis Armstrong, Red Nichols and Jelly Roll Morton and soon began buying records in what was to become a renowned collection well before he established the Institute of Jazz Studies in 1952.

Stearns completed his undergraduate degree at Harvard in 1931. Pursuant to his father's wish, he enrolled at Harvard Law the following year but only completed two years before deciding the law was not for him. He obtained his PhD in English from Yale University in 1942 for his work on the fifteenth-century Scottish poet Robert Henryson, the subject of his first book, published in 1949. He was also known as an authority on Geoffrey Chaucer and Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. (Stearns was working on a book on Thomas at the time of his death.) While at Yale, he met George Avakian, the future legendary Columbia Records producer, with whom he engaged in rigorous listening sessions.

Stearns's teaching career got underway at the University of Hawaii (1939-41), where in addition to teaching he reviewed classical records for a local Honolulu newspaper. He continued with appointments at Indiana University (1942-46), Cornell University (1946-49), New York University (1950-51) and Hunter College (1951-66). He was a visiting lecturer in medieval literature at Florida Keys Junior College in Key West at the time of his death in 1966.

For over 30 years Marshall Stearns wrote articles and reviews about jazz in the pages of Variety beginning in 1935, followed by a groundbreaking series on the history of jazz in Down Beat in 1936 and 1937, notable both for its comprehensiveness and its emphasis on the African-American pioneers of the music. Around this time, he also wrote articles for Tempo, a jazz Series publication that preceded Down Beat by a year. In addition to collecting records, Stearns subscribed to jazz and music publications, clipped articles on jazz from the mainstream press, and diligently read books on the cities where jazz thrived as well as books on African and Caribbean history to better understand the musical and cultural elements that coalesced to form jazz in the early part of the twentieth century.

Stearns's profile as an authority on jazz rose in the early 1950s with appearances on radio and television and extensive jazz education efforts and lecture/demonstrations, in addition to the founding of the Institute of Jazz Studies in his spacious apartment located at 108 Waverly in West Greenwich Village in 1952. He produced Jazz Goes to College, a multi-part program jazz history on New York radio station WNEW running between December 1950 and June 1951 for which most of the scripts and playlists survive in the collection. He made numerous appearances on television, including the Today Show with Dave Garroway (NBC), the multi-series The Subject Is Jazz (NBC), The Playboy Penthouse, The Garry Moore Show, and the General Electric Bake-off Presentation hosted by Ronald Reagan.

The first evidence in the Marshall Stearns Collection of his influential jazz pedagogy was as a faculty advisor to the Cornell (University) Rhythm Club when it presented the Dizzy Gillespie Orchestra in 1947 and the singer Josh White the following year. Over the next decade and a half Stearns developed curricula and lecture/demonstrations on the history and development of jazz and its leading figures; the music's ties to popular music and Tin Pan Alley, folk music, the blues, gospel music and spirituals, music of West Africa and the Caribbean, slave and work songs, and European classical music, among others; jazz's role in American culture; and jazz dance. Among the venues where Stearns presented and frequently interviewed famous musicians, critics and historians and others associated with the jazz scene were New York University, New School for Social Research, Cooper Union, the New York Historical Association, and the American Folklore Society.

From 1951 through 1958, Stearns coordinated roundtables and performances at Music Inn in Lenox, Massachusetts, featuring such diverse figures as Dave Brubeck, Leonard Bernstein, John Lee Hooker, Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry, Henry Cowell, Mahalia Jackson, Tony Scott, Billy Taylor, Randy Weston, Rex Stewart, Michael Olitungi and Candido, Pete Seeger, Langston Hughes, linguist and future California senator S.I. Hayakawa, Gunther Schuller, and Don Redman, among others. Stearns also arranged panels of musicians, critics and music business figures for the Newport Jazz Festival from the mid 1950s into the early 1960s when he also served on its board of directors. During this period, he was also active in the School of Jazz, which also took place at the Music Barn in Lenox.

Stearns took his platform international when he accompanied the Dizzy Gillespie Orchestra on its tour of the Near East in the spring of 1956 on behalf of the U.S. Department of State, the first of such tours that continued through the late 1970s that utilized jazz and jazz legends as diplomacy to effusive audiences overseas. Stearns lectured at each stop along the way and further ingratiated himself with the artists, for example, by making sure luggage and instruments arrived or getting meals for the musicians. The collection holds several rolls of film and prints by Stearns, in addition to his notes of his lectures and observations of the trip, ephemera and printed material documenting the historic official recognition of jazz as a major cultural export. He was also served as a musical consultant to the State Department cultural exchange program during this time.

In 1949, Stearns circulated a plan for establishing of an Institute of Modern Music, which he described as a library and archive primarily to the study of jazz and blues, but also envisioned a teaching component as well. He sought to test the waters with his proposal as far afield as Walter White, executive director of the NAACP and major foundations he hoped would support his vision of jazz and blues as major cultural expressions worthy of study. He incorporated the Institute of Jazz Studies in 1952 in his spacious apartment at 108 Waverly Place in West Greenwich Village, opened it up by appointment twice a week, and actively solicited donations of materials. Among the notables who served on his board were Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Langston Hughes and Ralph Ellison. Almost immediately, IJS was a magnet for jazz scholars and aficionados from across the globe, as abundant correspondence in the collection attests. Letters to Stearns and his staff raise questions of jazz history, express opinions on the state of the music, and demonstrate the growing appeal of jazz studies in the academy by the late 1950s.

Stearns's activities in research and programs produced two critically-acclaimed works of jazz history. The Story of Jazz (Oxford University, 1956), which got underway with a Guggenheim fellowship in 1951, begins with a review of West African music and his export with slavery to the West Indies and the United States on the way to its flowering as jazz in New Orleans resulting from the cultural and musical mixture of work songs, the blues, minstrelsy, spirituals, ragtime and European traditions. Stearns follows up with analyzing jazz styles that evolved quickly in an age of recording, broadcasting and national and international touring, and the parallel tracks that jazz and popular music traveled between the 1920s into the 1950s. The book, which was translated into at least twelve languages, was considered "the bible" of jazz history for its broad inclusiveness that framed the essentials of how jazz would be studied henceforth.

Far better documented in the collection is the posthumously published Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance (Macmillan, 1968) by Stearns and his second wife Jean Barnett Stearns. As with The Story of Jazz, the Stearnses trace the roots of jazz dance back to Africa and the West Indies, before its stylistic journey from minstrelsy and medicine shows, African-American vaudeville, dance palaces such as the Savoy Ballroom to Tin Pan Alley and Broadway. There are approximately 125 interviews conducted with dancers, in person and by correspondence, in addition to voluminous research files on dances and dancers and the different styles of music and venues. Jazz Dance was a groundbreaking work, but may remain the cornerstone of research into its topic in this more esoteric topic within jazz.

By the early 1960s, Stearns was already thinking of a more permanent home for the Institute to share its holdings with a wider audience. The growth of African-American studies programs and other trends in higher education augured well for the growing relevance of jazz studies and also in light of the fact that the original IJS had outgrown its space. Stearns was motivated as well by having suffered and survived a major heart attack. He preferred that his collection reside at a historically black college, but demurred at the offer from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, thinking it too remote to be a viable home. In one 1963 letter, Stearns revealed that the performing arts library at Lincoln Center had expressed interest, following reported rejections from Yale, his alma mater, and another from Howard University in Washington, D.C.

The prospect of acquiring IJS had many influential backers at Rutgers after Stearns approached the university. These included sociology professor Dr. Charles Nanry, president of Jazz Interactions in New York (one of the country's most active jazz societies), who went on to become the Institute's first curator. Another key figure was Dr. Will Weinberg, an assistant to university president Mason Gross. The Rutgers board of governors approved the acquisition on May 13, 1966, with the final agreement signed by President Gross and Jean Stearns on November 13, 1967. The agreement enshrined three principals stipulated by Stearns as a prerequisite for his donation: IJS would remain an autonomous unit within the university; the collection would be maintained and continually grow to reflect ongoing changes in jazz; and it would be continuously accessible in an environment welcoming to jazz scholars and enthusiasts.

At the time of its transfer, the collection valued at between $78,000 and $100,000, consisted of some 25,000 recording in all formats, 3,000 books, periodicals, photographs and films, memorabilia, musical instruments, sheet music, files on jazz musicians and topics, and around 25 antique photographs.

In August 1966, Marshall and Jean Stearns moved to Key West, Florida where he was a visiting lecturer that fall and putting the finishing touches on Jazz Dance. He died of a heart attack in the early morning hours of December 18, 1966 at age 58 and was buried there two days later. In addition to his widow, he was survived by a daughter, Elizabeth.

Among his organizational memberships or affiliations were the National Music Council, New York Historical Association, Newport Jazz Festival, the School of Jazz, National Council of Teachers of English, Modern Language Association, Institute of International Education (music panel), New York Folklore Society, and American Folklore Society.