Jazz grew in the red-light district called Storyville in New Orleans (1897 to 1917). The roots of jazz are broader, deeper and murkier than that, going back to work songs, chants, shouts, blues, hymns, gospel, Spanish and French influences, ragtime, marches and band music, light opera, classical music and African rhythms. But my main point here is that the influence of the progressive movement combined with the U.S. Army closed Storyville. The linked article tells the story, and Murray Rothbard’s essay on World War I as Fulfillment specifically mentions the features of the Selective Service Act that led to such closings. Prostitution was one of the excuses the reformers used, so I’ll put in a plug for Walter Block’s book Defending the Undefendable. Public health is a mistaken excuse for laws against prostitution that drive it underground or to the streets. Free market competition is an incentive to higher quality and more attention paid to health by brothel proprietors. The zeal of reformers to mind other people’s business has other roots than public health.

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