Music is a huge world of different styles, periods, and amazing ways that people expressed themselves. In my opinion, there aren't many true aspects of the culture of the USA that did not already exist in another country or was brought here by immigrants, but one of the definite purely American cultural pieces is jazz.
Before jazz, some of the only ways people could listen to music was if they went to a town parade, could scrounge up enough money to go to a classical music concert, or learn an instrument on their own. As we all know, music has evolved immensely over the ages, and jazz, when it first was introduced, was very unconventional, but people loved it. Jazz was a huge part of the Roaring 20's as well.
Of course, when anything is new or there is a change, there are groups of people against it. I can speak from experience and the experience of my friends that a lot of older and middle-aged people do not like the newer music that is coming out. This happens with every generation's genre of music. When rock and roll first came out there were people that despised it and there were people that loved it. Same with hip-hop, rap, and today's modern pop music.
Jazz in the 20's gave many opportunities to young musicians and even allowed black people to show that they were just as intelligent and talented as white people. We have many famous artists from that time period such as my personal favorite Benny Goodman, and others that are very well known even after 100 years of their debut. We have Louis Armstrong, George Gershwin, Bix Beiderbecke, and King Oliver.
In my opinion, jazz was a very influential music genre in its time and one of the most American things in existence.
Jazz was very much one of the most influential genres of music during this era, in fact it is very interesting how this type of music directly influenced many different aspects of the African American Culture itself. The identity of this culture became urbanized and much more respected with the art of jazz music.
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