Asbury Park, New Jersey, is a microcosm of the American experience, where the four big “R”s of American culture - Religion, Race, Real Estate, and Rock & Roll (or Ragtime, depending on your generation) - converge in surprising, sometimes tragic, sometimes triumphant forms. Now this seaside resort is undergoing yet another transformation in the 21st century – a transformation thoroughly in keeping with Asbury Park’s tradition of redemption and re-invention.

In this half hour documentary, producer Amber Edwards examines the city’s unique cultural history, with special attention to its role as an incubator for musical innovation, from rock and roll to rhythm & blues to jazz to ragtime.

Featuring appearances by:
• Author and critic Daniel Wolff (Asbury Park: A History of the Promised Land)
• Historian and author Helen Pike (Asbury Park’s Glory Days)
• Rick Benjamin, founder of the Paragon Ragtime Orchestra, and a specialist in the music of Arthur Pryor – an Asbury Park musical superstar long before Bruce Springsteen – who transformed the forbidden music of Ragtime into wholesome popular entertainment.

Listen to an original historic recording performed by Arthur Pryor as trombone soloist, accompanied by Pryor’s Band: his own composition, ”The Patriot”
Listen to a modern recording of a 1905 Arthur Pryor composition, “The Whistler and His Dog”, performed by the Paragon Ragtime Orchestra

• also visit
  www.cityofasburypark.com

Vintage postcard of an Asbury Park outside concert

New Jersey bathers circa 1919

Arthur Pryor,
composer, conductor, trombone player, early recording artist

Religion:
Asbury Park was founded in 1870, when the mile-long, untouched beachfront was purchased for $90,000 by James Bradley, a devout Methodist, who had been persuaded to buy the property as a buffer zone between the pious seaside tent city of Ocean Grove, NJ and its neighbor to the north, Long Branch, where you could indulge in dancing, drinking, gambling, and horse racing. Bradley had made his fortune as a brush manufacturer in New York City, and thought he could make Asbury Park into a successful enterprise as well, by attracting upscale, Protestant tourists with wholesome amusements and fresh saltwater air. He named his seaside utopia after Bishop Francis Asbury, the founder of the Methodist Church, but added the “Park” to denote it as a place for fun. It’s one of the inherent contradictions that has characterized Asbury Park ever since.

Real Estate:
James Bradley ran his town more like a kingdom than a city; he actually owned the boardwalk until 1905, and would personally patrol the beach to ensure that visitors were attired in suitable bathing costumes (no skin showing) and behaving properly (no alcohol, dancing, or public displays of affection.) Bradley donated prime tracts of real estate to Protestant churches, and he insisted on wide boulevards, multiple parks, and modern sanitation, which gave it a distinctively charming scale. It is still a city where you can walk everywhere and see the ocean from blocks away. Now, real estate developers are planning to build high rise residential condominiums along the beach front, and it’s an open question as to whether Asbury Park will retain its jewel-box quality for much longer.

Race:
Like most American cities, Asbury Park was segregated by race and class well into the 1960s. From the beginning, blacks and immigrants were relegated to their own district, in a separate, shadow city quite literally “across the tracks”. There, on the West Side, there were stores, restaurants, shopping – everything needed for an existence – and one of the most exciting music scenes on the Jersey Shore. Springwood Avenue is where ragtime was first heard in Asbury Park; where blues and jazz musicians flocked to hear and play the latest hot sounds, and where, during the golden age of Swing and Rhythm & Blues, there was a club on every block. Those clubs exist now only as memories, as nearly all the businesses and homes on the West Side were burned out and destroyed when riots swept through in 1970. To learn more about the artist who created the Springwood Avenue mural, visit bobmataranglo.com.

Ragtime:
At the turn of the century, ragtime was sweeping the country. It was irresistible music, this hybrid of African-American syncopation and European melodies. But ragtime was a forbidden taste to the upright Victorian tourists who vacationed in Asbury Park – it was associated with saloons and dance halls, after all, and was considered to be dangerous to one’s health. But when a young trombone virtuoso and composer named Arthur Pryor introduced ragtime to John Philip Sousa, the new music began to acquire a patina of respectability. Pryor later formed his own band and made Asbury Park his home base. Thousands of visitors flocked to the band shell every summer to hear Pryor and his band, who became hugely famous as performers, and also recording artists. While Pryor is little known today, he was truly Asbury Park’s first musical superstar.

Asbury Park Pier

Boardwalk in the 1950s

The Squires of Rhythm

“The Asbury Park Rag” sheet music

Dorian Parreott, saxophone player

“Tillie”, an iconic Asbury Park image