I’m told that two different TV series are in development about jazz and prostitution in New Orleans. That kind of combination is irresistible to the entertainment industry. After all, sex sells, and jazz is the obvious soundtrack for the sinful lifestyle. Put the two together and you have the makings of a hit show.

Some will even tell you that jazz is inseparable from transgressions, both moral and legal. According to this account, the music was born in the brothels of New Orleans, came of age in the illegal speakeasies of Chicago in the 1920s, and reached maturity nurtured by organized crime in Harlem, Kansas City, and other corrupt communities in the 1930s. Religious authorities have often given credence to this interpretation, condemning jazz as a gateway to a dissolute life. Many Catholics even saw Pope Pius X’s attack on instruments “that may give reasonable cause for disgust or scandal” as a specific warning against the evils of the saxophone.

I prefer a different view of jazz history—one that emphasizes its origins in spirituals and religious services. This lineage is just as valid as the TV show version, and certainly deserves to be better known. Buddy Bolden, credited (by legend) as the originator of jazz, was a regular churchgoer. According to one friend, “That’s where he got his idea of jazz music.” Louis Armstrong, baptized a Catholic but ecumenical in religious matters, also turned to spirituals for inspiration. He single-handedly transformed “When the Saints Go Marching In” from Christian hymn to the very emblem of the jazz life. The other founding father of jazz, Jelly Roll Morton, is famous for inventing the whole mythos of jazz and prostitution, but was also a “very devout Catholic,” according to his longtime companion Anita Gonzales. His burial marker excludes all musical imagery, instead featuring an elaborate rosary with all fifty-nine beads clearly demarcated.

Then we arrive at the greatest jazz composer of them all, Duke Ellington—a man who seemed, to his fans, as secular as they come. He rose to fame as bandleader at Harlem’s Cotton Club, run by gangster Owney Madden, where well-heeled white patrons would go “slumming” and enjoy (in the words of a Harold Arlen song that made its debut at the club):

drums that’ll start thump-thump-thumpin’ in my heart . . .
horns that’ll blow-blow-blow-blow the blues apart . . .
thrills that’ll break the Ten Commandments with a wham!
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