ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests the alignment of jazz and cars are found upon the role of Fordist mass production in the parallel proliferation of both jazz and cars in the American mainstream: while cars rolled off Ford and GM assembly lines and into newly-paved driveways across the country, jazz made its way into American homes through the emergent technologies of radio and the recording industry. It focuses particularly on American journalism and on F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, a novel that deals with the anxiety of the perceived decline of American ethnic purity and the pursuant degeneration of American morality. It also examines the various ways in which the automobile began to symbolize both social status in particular and more broadly American social norms and American citizenship. It examines the impact of an increasingly globalized market on the intersection between car culture, car advertising and jazz music through the 1960s.
