Entry · catalog no. 1334
stride
/ /straɪd/ /STRYDE
noun; adjective · Harlem, New York City; Sea Islands ring-shout roots · 1920s
✓ Verified
1.
The Harlem piano style in which the left hand strides between a low bass note and a mid-range chord on alternating beats while the right hand carries melody, ornament and improvisation over the top.
“He plays stride, which means his left hand is doing the work of a rhythm section.”
2.
As a modifier, of that style or its players.
“Every stride pianist in Harlem came out to cut heads that night.”
Origin & Attribution
Made in Harlem in the 1910s and 1920s, with James P. Johnson its first master and generally called its father. Johnson, born in New Brunswick, New Jersey in 1894, came up on ragtime and then encountered the ring shout as Black Southerners carried it north from the South Carolina and Georgia Sea Islands during the Great Migration. He worked those rhythms into the piano, added what he called concert effects from his classical training, and produced something ragtime could not contain. His "Carolina Shout," composed around 1918 and cut in 1921, is generally reckoned the first jazz piano solo on record and became the test piece every Harlem pianist had to pass. Willie "The Lion" Smith, Fats Waller — Johnson's student — and Duke Ellington all came through it.
1918
James P. Johnson composes Carolina Shout
1921
Johnson records Carolina Shout, widely held to be the first jazz piano solo on record
1922
Johnson cuts Harlem Strut; the style becomes the standard of the Harlem rent-party circuit
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide
Harlem, New York City; Sea Islands ring-shout roots · 1920s
Spoken by
Harlem pianists and their students; rent-party and cutting-contest players; jazz musicians since
$STRIDEThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Steady108 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
40/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1918
in the culture
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
Hear it spoken
By region — how it actually sounds
@auntiereg
Atlanta, GA
@deltasoul
Memphis, TN
Contribute your pronunciation
Citations & Sources
■
James P. Johnson, Carolina Shout, OKeh Records
piano solo recording · 1921
■
James P. Johnson, Harlem Strut — added to the National Recording Registry, 2022
piano solo recording · 1921
■
+ Cite a sourceWillie The Lion Smith, Music on My Mind: The Memoirs of an American Pianist, Doubleday
memoir · 1964
See also