page_title: Ford Dabney
section_title: Dabney's Syncopated Orchestra
hierarchical_section_title: Ford Dabney / Career / Dabney's Syncopated Orchestra
caption_attribution_description: Looking west at New Amsterdam Theater, 42nd St., New York, 1905
context_page_description: Ford Thompson Dabney was an American ragtime pianist, composer, songwriter, and acclaimed director of bands and orchestras for Broadway musical theater, revues, vaudeville, and early recordings. Additionally, for two years in Washington, from 1910 to 1912, he was proprietor of a theater that featured vaudeville, musical revues, and silent film. Dabney is best known as composer and lyricist of the 1910 song "That's Why They Call Me Shine," which for eleven decades, through 2019, has endured as a jazz standard. As of 2020, in the jazz genre, "Shine" has been recorded 646 times Dabney and one of his chief collaborators, James Reese Europe, were transitional figures in the prehistory of jazz that evolved from ragtime and blues — and grew into stride, boogie-woogie, and other next levels in jazz. Their 1914 composition, "Castle Walk" – recorded February 10, 1914, by Europe's Society Orchestra with Dabney at the piano – is one of the earliest recordings of jazz.
context_section_description: In 1917, Ford Dabney's Syncopated Orchestra began recording jazz. In August 1917, during their first session, they recorded 5 songs for Aeolian Vocalion, including "At the Darkdown Strutter's Ball," which featured vocalist Arthur Fields.
  Dabney and his instrumentalists were black and Fields was white. According to historian Tim Brooks, that recording was "an early, and unusual example of a white vocalist recording with a black orchestra. Though not the first example of interracial recording, it was progressive for its time." Dabney, from 1919 through 1922, as pianist and leader, recorded 28 songs with Vocalion and Paramount.
  Ziegfeld's Midnight Frolic
  Dabney, leading his own Syncopated Orchestra, was the musical director of Ziegfeld's Midnight Frolic for 8 years, from 1913 to 1921. The shows were in the Roof Garden Club of the New Amsterdam Theatre, where more risqué productions were presented. In that setting, his Syncopated Orchestra stands as the first black orchestra to play regularly in a Broadway Theater.
  In the summers, Dabney's orchestra performed at the Palais Royale in Atlantic City.
caption: The New Amsterdam Theatre in 1905
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