Short on rent, tenants threw house parties that fueled jazz culture

On a Saturday night in New Orleans at the turn of the last century, households opened their homes to strangers. For a small charge paid at the door, anyone could walk into the living room and find food, drink, and a band squeezed into the corner.

The spread was generous and the music was loud. Neighbors ate, drank, danced, and listened while the hosts collected cash. For households short on the rent, the night was a practical solution, a way to earn some extra cash without leaving home.

That is the story historian Imogen Willits tells about the fish fry, a home turned into a club for one night. The fish fries had a huge impact on the development of jazz culture, Willits says, in part because they “were such a big part of the social scene” in New Orleans “that there was always work for musicians.”

The same idea reappeared in Harlem in the 1920s. Tenants opened their apartments on Saturday nights for rent parties, charging entry to cover the rent and offering music and dancing until morning.

Langston Hughes, who wrote about going to them as often as he could, said they beat the professional venues. “The Saturday night rent parties that I attended were often more amusing than any nightclub,” he wrote.

His description captures the crowding and improvisation. The parties unfolded, Hughes wrote, in small apartments where the guests seldom lived, with a piano joined by “a guitar or an odd cornet or somebody with a pair of drums walking in off the street, and the dancing and singing and impromptu entertaining went on until dawn came in at the windows.”

Getting in was informal. Hosts scribbled an address on a business card and left stacks in shops, pubs, and hairdressers. A guest picked one up and followed it that night to someone’s door.

Hughes collected the cards from the parties he attended. Decades after the music faded and the dawn light left those living rooms, they ended up in an archive at Yale.