Jack McCray’s local jazz tops

by Jack McCray
Charleston Currents
Nov. 3, 2008

Jack McCray, a writer based in Charleston and co-principal of the Charleston Jazz Initiative, offers these five little-known facts about Charleston’s place in jazz history:

1. Deep roots. With coastal South Carolina being the first place where Negro spirituals were documented, Charleston’s jazz roots are as deep as any other cradle of jazz.

2. Nurseries. A group home for boys and girls, the famed Jenkins Orphanage (1891-present), and a freedmen’s school founded after the Civil War, the Avery Normal Institute (1865-1954), combined resources in the late 19th century to plant the seeds that led to Jenkins’ becoming one of the most prominent jazz nurseries in America.