Unlike the Bohemian culture of Paris in the 1920’s and ’30’s, that of Birmingham, Alabama, bespoke itself not through painting and literature, but through music. Its voice was not that of sissy expatriates who had left their country to dwell with the loathsome frog, but rather that of men— men—who had stayed right where they belonged.

Most of these men earned their daily bread working in the mines from which were wrested,iron ore, coal, or limestone, or in the mills where -those wrested things were transformed into steel. The music of these men depended usually upon the color of their skin. Both country music and the blues had flourished in Birmingham since the 19th century, but in the years after World War I, the true music of Birmingham became the boogie.