Life in the 1930s

In the early 1920s, Leon Bismarck “Bix” Beiderbecke was an aspiring trumpeter who lacked direction and a definitive style to call his own. However in 1922, at the age of 19, he attended a concert in Chicago to see Louis Armstrong play with King Oliver. From that night forwarded, he absorbed the “Negro” style of jazz and swing music and created a unique and transcendent sound all his own.

Beiderbecke came from humble beginnings as the son of a poor merchant in Davenport, Iowa. At the age of the three he learned how to play the piano, and as a teenager he went to the Lake Forest Academy where he learned to play the cornet.   He left school after a year to pursue his career, where he lived a poor musician’s life, despite his hard work.  Life Magazine said, “his tone was ravishing, his taste sure, his improvisations amazingly rich.”  At the time, Beiderbecke was, “the most important of all white jazz influences.” Because of his exhausting work ethic (and also a penchant for binge-drinking), he died young at the age of 27. However, his influence on the genre was far-reaching and prevalent through most of the 20^th century.

The first major difference I noticed between this 1938 issue of Life Magazine and modern magazines is the size. Old Life magazines were noticeably larger, however not necessarily thicker. There were full color and black and white advertisements, most of which were drawings. The ads also had much more words, even long paragraphs, rather than the brief blurbs in today’s advertising. As far as the stories, they were generally shorter, with several short paragraphs surrounded by large pictures of the subject. The pictures, and headlines, were much less discreet and slightly vulgar, compared to today’s highly regulated stories.