Crossroads of a Nation: Missouri's Indelible Role in American History

(warm gentle music) - As we explored in part two of this series, two Missouri road projects claimed the distinction of being the first in the new national system of highways in the 1950s.

But long before modern interstates brought efficiency to cross-country travel, America was stitched together by smaller character-rich roots.

Chief among them was the legendary Route 66, the mother road that captured the spirit of adventure and the heartbeat of a changing nation.

(warm gentle music) (traffic drones faintly) - Route 66 is so fascinating.

It's a 2,400-mile piece of America's collective memory.

And I think today, a lot of times when you look at Route 66, they sort of say, "Oh, it's a southwest thing, it's a California thing."

But all that magic came out of the Ozarks.

These are the individuals who first came up with the idea that we are going to make this highway the crossroads of the nation.

We're gonna make this a destination in itself.

And it's a pretty fascinating story of how they did that.

(rustic music) Before numbered federal highways came in 1926, getting around was nearly impossible.

If you left St.

Louis headed to Springfield, Missouri in the 19-teens, you had absolutely no idea what you were going to encounter on that way.

You would hit dirt roads before you even left St.

Louis City, Watson Road going south out of St.

Louis was still a dirt road into the 1930s.

By the time you actually got to Springfield, it could have taken days.

You could have gotten lost on all of these old trails.

This was a huge crisis as cars were increasingly becoming a part of life, that we needed good roads for people to drive on.

When the Federal Highway System is created in 1926, all of these entrepreneurs all along the Missouri roadside see opportunity.

People like John Woodruff in Springfield, Illinois.

He gathers the Missouri highway engineers, he gathers people like Cy Avery in Tulsa, another one of these early entrepreneurs who saw the highway as the future of business.

And they all come together in Springfield, Missouri on April 30th, 1926.

They are actually interested in getting Highway 60 up to that point.

They haven't thought about 66 at all.

But the highways in divisors of tens, Interstate 10, Interstate 20, Interstate 30, were supposed to go coast to coast.

And here's this highway going southwest from Chicago to LA.

The Highway Department absolutely would not allow them to have 60.

So they're poring over the unused highway numbers.

62?

No, that doesn't do anything.

When for some reason on that day, 66 jumps out at them.

Maybe it's the sort of alliteration, the snappiness of the number repeated.

Something about it, they realize, "This is the magic we need."

And they send a telegram to Washington D.C.

that afternoon saying, "If it's okay with you, we prefer 66."

And on that day, that single telegram, the most famous highway in American history is born.

- I don't know if it's because 66 is very, you know, aesthetically pleasing on a sign or whatever, or it's fun to say or whatever.

But that highway number takes on a kind of pop cultural popularity that other highway numbers in that era don't.

You know, "Get your kicks on Route 66."

You get popular songs, Nat King Cole, and people like that, that are singing about this highway and you eventually get a TV show named after the road.

You know, we Americans may not love anything quite like a road trip, just being out on the open road.

And so I think Route 66 just kind of takes on a life of its own in a lot of ways.

The Interstate Highway System, the Eisenhower system, replaced all that, but there's still people who come from around the world to drive Route 66.

And they come right through Missouri.

- If you're one of these families who is operating a small cabin court with your neon sign plopped right outside, making it year after year off of people who just need a place to stop and pull over off of Route 66.

As soon as the interstate comes through, they realize this is the beginning of the end.

People are flying past at 60, 70 miles an hour.

You are 10 miles away from the new interstate.

All of that economy that they had vanishes overnight.

- For a lot of these businesses along Route 66, it does spell the end for them.

They go out of business.

They struggle to survive.

Whole towns struggle as a result of these highways.

And it's another reminder that there often aren't these clear-cut stories, because the arrival of the highway system made cross-country transportation faster, easier, more affordable, and it opened it up to large numbers of people.

It's just that it came with a cost.

(birds chirp) - Mid-20th-century America was booming full of optimism and technological evolution.

As the Interstate Highway System replaced charming, yet inefficient routes another form of transportation was coming into being, a way for humans to ascend into space.

The Space Race was on.

And once again, Missouri played a critical role.

(gentle music) - In the aftermath of World War II, the United States emerged as an unequaled economic force in the world.

It's at a moment when Americans have a deep support for a large and powerful government that's doing all of these interesting and exciting things and tremendous support for the space program.

- The United States and the Soviet Union suddenly in the 1950s find themselves in this race and it becomes a race to the stars.

Both are eyeballing each other, not knowing what is going to happen next.

To the awe and terror of the United States, the Soviet Union beats us to the punch.

In October of 1957, they launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite placed into orbit.

The embarrassment only deepens when a Russian dog named Laika gets to space before an American does.

And in response, the United States announces the launch of NASA and a huge new project.

Project Mercury will put Americans into orbit, test the effects on their bodies with plans for much bigger projects coming in the future.

And the most important part of that, it will return them back to earth safely.

They're gonna need the brightest minds they can possibly find to make this happen.

And they find them at the McDonnell Aircraft Corporation in St.

Louis.

James S. McDonnell was the kind of guy who never stopped tinkering with things.

He had built a huge company manufacturing airplanes during World War II and before Project Mercury was even announced, he had already started tinkerings with plans for a space capsule design.

So when NASA comes looking for a company that can build these new capsules for Project Mercury, James S. McDonnell hits them with a 400-page prospectus.

He already has it figured out.

These capsules that they're designing have to do unbelievable things.

Each one of the Project Mercury space capsules has more than 10,000 separate component parts.

It has to have a heat shield that can withstand sub-zero temperatures and also temperatures of 3,000 degrees.

They have titanium welds on them less than a hundredth of an inch thick.

These are unbelievably precise machines, and McDonnell has to produce 15 of them across the course of a very short amount of time.

In 1961, when astronaut Alan Shepherd becomes the first American to go into orbit, he peaks at about 115 miles roughly where the Northern Lights occur and parachutes back safely into the middle of the ocean.

This is a huge moment for American space exploration.

Project Mercury just wanted to try to get an American into space, see if it was possible if somebody could reach orbit.

Project Gemini will put two people into space for up to two weeks at a time, and it will have them doing science experiments out in outer space.

How are they gonna handle food?

How are they gonna handle waste disposal?

How are they gonna handle mentally being in space for that long?

So McDonnell is selected once again to create the Gemini space capsules.

It's amazing for me to think about when astronaut Ed White steps outside of the Gemini IV capsule and takes the first space walk in human history that he's stepping outside of a St.

Louis-made product.

- Mid-Century America conjures up images of backyard barbecues, coolers full of cold beer, and music on the radio.

It as American as apple pie.

Right?

Well, much of that American flavor was cooked up in Missouri.

The first cocktail party?

Held in St.

Louis in 1917.

"The Joy of Cooking," the most famous cookbook of all time?

Irma Rombauer created it as a widowed St.

Louisan.

And barbecue, of course, it is as American as it gets.

Have you ever heard of KC Masterpiece?

Exactly.

So how did that famous Kansas City flavor develop?

Well, first things first, pit masters had to have access to lots of quality meat.

(rustic music) - So the stockyards started right in about the mid to late 1800s.

We were pretty much a steak town at that point.

There were a lot of cuts of meat that were not being used.

They were being thrown away.

And there is tell that a lot of the barbecue pit masters of the day would go and retrieve those scraps, which would be the brisket and the ribs, (chuckles) and they would take them back and they would make them something delicious by cooking them for hours and hours.

I mean, you could cook 'em from 12 to 24 hours, right?

So this is long, slow cooking that will make that kind of tough meat, the collagen, infuse it, soften it, make it delicious.

And so they were taking these really tough cuts and making them something really special and people would come and eat them.

It was cross-cultural.

I mean, you know, we saw Blacks and whites together even during segregation, eating barbecue, which not a lot of foods that were able to do that kind of cultural diversity and integration at the time.

- While there have been many pit masters who have made their mark on American barbecue, the man widely credited as the father of Kansas City barbecue is none other than Henry Perry.

(light music) - Henry was born in Shelby County, Tennessee.

We think he came in 1907.

He had been going up and down.

He was working as a cook.

He'd worked as the railroad was being built.

He was also a cook there.

So he came into town and he worked in a saloon.

That's the first time we see him.

But it isn't long before he ends up over in the Garment District in an alley with what we think is probably a pit or a cart.

Again, not really sure exactly what the conveyance was, but he was selling barbecue.

Now what is that?

What did that look like?

We don't really know, but we do know that a lot of people would take public land and they would dig and build a pit, and those pits were sometimes three feet deep, 10 feet wide, about three feet wide.

So you're talking about my living room is a pit, (laughs) and you could cook barbecue there.

He cooked possum, raccoon, rabbit sausage.

We know that from his advertisements in the newspaper.

He appears to have had a great success.

He had four different restaurants at one time.

He moved from the Garment District into the 18th and Vine area, which was very much a bustling and prosperous for the Black community area for entrepreneurs.

From there, he continued to train other people who would to this day claim some of the proteges that worked with him and some of the influences are seen in our restaurants in Kansas City today.

Old Kentuck was this wonderful place that was owned and then bought by George Gates.

So at this point, we start to get a really burgeoning barbecue community.

When he bought it, they sold some barbecue, but it was mostly a gambling spot and a night place.

And Arzelia Gates didn't really like that.

So she actually convinced them that they needed to get more into the barbecue business and changed over time what that had been about.

And they kind of inherited their cook.

They didn't really know much about barbecue, but there was a man named Arthur Pinkard who kind of came with the deal.

And Arthur had been cooking and he had actually worked with Henry Perry at one point.

And if you go into the Gates restaurants, you will actually often see right in the entryway a picture of Arthur Pinkard.

He had, you know, that part and process in trying to make what is now considered another great barbecue house, one of the two main ones.

You know, we have Arthur Bryant's and we have Gates, and they both descend directly from Henry Perry.

- Most barbecue enthusiasts are almost certainly familiar with names like Gates, and of course Arthur Bryant's.

It was at Arthur Bryant's where burnt ends gained international fame thanks to a piece by Calvin Trillin in "Playboy" back in the early '70s.

(upbeat music) - Burnt ends were the thing that you throw away.

If you know what a brisket looks like, there's two parts, right?

It's a big muscle and it has the point and the flat.

Now the point comes to a point, right?

What's gonna cook fastest?

That piece.

Arthur was also known for running his pits very hot.

And so he tended to burn those edges just a little bit.

And when the men who he employed were slicing, they would slice that off and they would put that in a little container and people knew they could reach over and try a little bit of that.

So Calvin Trillin is a hometown boy.

He remembers as a kid reaching in, grabbing a piece, popping into his mouth.

It was the most delicious thing he'd ever tasted.

Years later, he comes home, he has a bit of nostalgia.

He goes to Arthur Bryant's, has a great meal, of course, with the burnt ends.

Ends up talking to Arthur, has an interview with him and writes a piece for "Playboy," I believe it was in 1972.

And he declares Arthur Bryant's the best restaurant in the whole world.

And I talked to him years later, and it was a little bit tongue-in-cheek he said, you know, a little wink-wink.

- That article in "Playboy" made burnt ends iconic, a taste of Kansas City that would soon be available on menus across the globe.

And what goes better with barbecue than ice cold beer, the ubiquitous light crisp lager style of beer that is taken for granted today but back when lager beer emerged in the US it was a marvel.

And while there were many brewers creating this style, only one brewery became the king.

- By the mid 20th century, Budweiser was the largest-selling beer in the world, and it was produced in this city where there were all of these other breweries.

And it kind of begs the question, how did Missouri especially, but St.

Louis in particular, how did they become the beer capital of the world?

And answering that question is a really interesting story.

So when the US acquired St.

Louis, there were actually very few breweries in the United States.

There was all of this prescriptive writing that said that beer was a kind of bad thing to consume, that it was unhealthy, that it was a low-class thing.

Most Americans consumed spirits, whiskey, gin, things like that.

But also producing beer was really, really difficult.

It not only requires a lot of expertise about the fermentation process, but you need a lot of raw materials to produce a lot of heat, you need to maintain a lot of pressure, which was very difficult to do.

So there are very few breweries in the early US.

In the mid-19th century it's German brewers who start bringing this to the US and this is why that immigration to St.

Louis from the German-speaking principalities is so important.

(jaunty music) - Adam Lemp sets up his brewery and grocery store in downtown St.

Louis in the 1840s.

He starts off making lager beer.

And the big story here is that lager beer needs a certain set of circumstances to ferment properly.

You need certain cool temperatures, you need to have them for a long period of time.

Adam Lemp goes out south of St.

Louis and he finds a system of caves underneath the city.

In that cave that he bought in south St.

Louis, he had exactly what he needed.

He basically had a natural refrigerator just steps away from the Mississippi River's supply of ice and water.

It was the perfect setup to brew lager beer.

He's certainly one of the first people brewing lager anywhere in the United States.

The Lemp Brewery becomes one of the largest in the city, the first brewery in the country with coast-to-coast distribution from one single source here in St.

Louis.

And it becomes a kingpin of the brewing industry across the second half of the 19th century.

But right next door to the Lemp Brewery is a new challenger arising.

Eberhard Anheuser purchased a failing brewery in 1861.

At the same time, Adolphus Busch is coming across from Germany and setting up his life here in St.

Louis.

They don't go in initially planning to make beer, but the timing is right.

And they stumble upon this failing brewery that they're able to purchase and they start brewing beer.

Anheuser-Busch is born in that moment in the 1870s.

They debut Budweiser, which gives beer a name that is both easy for non-Germans to pronounce, but also feels very German to the people that they were trying to get to drink their beer.

And soon they have a coast-to-coast hit on their hands.

Anheuser-Busch becomes the largest brewery in the country in the 20th century and St.

Louis' legacy as a beer empire is cemented.

- It is immigration that makes beer a possibility, in this case, the immigration of Germans.

But the other part of it that's so important, as St.

Louis grew, Anheuser-Busch was able to grow with the city.

It isn't just that they to brew for the city, but in a city that had always understood itself in relation to others through complex high-speed transportation, the Busch family quickly recognized the value of nationwide sales routes, nationwide sales advertising.

So it isn't just the beer that they brewed, but their business sense, their notion of how you build a national business where you can sell your goods around the country and around the world.

But this of course means nothing to Anheuser-Busch when prohibition actually becomes law.

So what's this company gonna do?

Because legally they can't produce anymore.

Well, it's actually the same business acumen that had made them a profitable company enables them to pivot and they take a product that they're already producing, yeast for brewing, and they start becoming a wholesale yeast manufacturer.

The end of prohibition is really not only when Anheuser-Busch gets back into business, but when it cranks up its business, that's when it's able to become, especially after World War II, this global juggernaut with sales around the world.

- Beer, barbecue, Route 66, all we're missing from this all-American lineup is a little baseball, right?

Our national pastime has long reflected the highs and lows of American culture.

And like so much else, it was not immune to segregation.

The Negro leagues were born right in the heart of Kansas City, creating space for legendary talent, including a young Jackie Robinson who played for the Kansas City Monarchs before breaking Major League Baseball's color barrier.

- The Negro leagues were established here in Kansas City on February 13th, 1920 by Andrew "Rube" Foster.

Rube led a contingent of eight independent Black baseball team owners into a meeting at the Paseo YMCA.

Out of that meeting came the birth of the Negro National League, the first successful organized Black baseball league.

The Negro leagues would then go on to operate amazingly for 40 years from 1920 until 1960.

Now that surprises most of my visitors because most of them can relate the fact that Jackie Robinson breaks Major League Baseball's color barrier in 1947.

And I do think the consensus is, "Well, if Jackie breaks the color barrier in 1947, if there was a Negro league, surely it must have ended in and around that time."

Well, the Negro leagues would operate for another 13 years.

Why?

Because it took Major League Baseball 12 years before every Major League team had at least one Black baseball player.

(lively music) Ooh, opening day here in Kansas City.

It was spectacular.

There would be a marching band that would start at the corner of 18th and Vine here in the historic 18th and Vine jazz district, and they would march up to 22nd and Brooklyn, the site of the old ballpark where the Monarchs played.

Behind them, 17,000 plus, standing room only, and everybody dressed to the nines to see the great Kansas City Monarchs play.

It was a spectacle.

This wasn't a recreational event, oh no.

This was a social event.

You went to see and you went to be seen.

And then everybody would spill out after the game and come right back here to 18th and Vine and patronize all of those segregated Black businesses.

So the restaurants and the jazz clubs, they were absolutely jumping.

And so the Monarchs here was something that obviously was intrinsically ours, but it was shared with everyone.

So you saw a lot of white patrons coming to those games, and particularly in the '40s during World War II, where we saw white fan base grow exponentially in not only here in Kansas City, but in Negro league ballparks across the country because the superstars of the Negro leagues were too old, they didn't get called into service.

So the Satchel Paiges, the Cool Papa Bells, the Josh Gibsons, they're still playing and they're playing great baseball.

And the thing about it is, Negro Leagues has always had a white fan base.

And in more places than not, we sat side-by-side in those stadiums.

There was no separation.

We were sitting side-by-side, which was virtually unheard of.

(mellow music) Jackie's connection to Kansas City is little-known, but very profound.

You see, Jackie comes here in 1945.

I do believe that the majority of my guests believe that Jackie just walked out of nowhere and started playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers.

But his real rookie season was here in Kansas City in 1945.

When Jackie comes here to join the Monarchs, there was no fanfare surrounding him.

He was just another ball player trying to make the great Kansas City Monarchs roster.

But they knew that he was different than they were.

And the great Buck O'Neil would surmise it in this fashion.

He would say, "We had become acclimated to segregation, but not Jackie Robinson."

So you gotta remember, he's Pasadena, California, he's UCLA, this whole Jim Crow thing didn't sit well with him whatsoever.

But beyond that, that was it.

And five months later, he was gone.

He had literally disappeared.

His teammates had no idea where he was.

Of course, we now know that he was meeting with Branch Rickey where the two of them would make the monumental decision that Jackie would become the chosen one to break Major League Baseball's then six-decade-long self-imposed color barrier.

Well, here at the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, we make the rather bold assertion that Jackie's breaking of the color barrier wasn't just a part of the civil rights movement, that it was actually the beginning of the civil rights movement in this country because this is 1947, this predates those more noted civil rights occurrences.

So this is before Brown versus the Board of Education.

This is before Rosa Parks' refusal to move to the back of the bus.

As old Buck O'Neil would so eloquently say, "Dr.

Martin Luther King Jr.

was merely a sophomore at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia when Jackie signed his contract to play in the Dodgers organization."

And, of course, our very own president, Harry S. Truman, born right up the road from where this museum operates, would not integrate the armed forces until a year after Jackie.

So for all intents and purposes, this is what started the ball of social progress rolling in our country.

Baseball.

And our country literally jumped on the coattail of baseball.

(lively music) Historic 18th and Vine in its heyday was as recognized street cross section as there was anywhere in the world because you had that intrinsic mixture of jazz and baseball radiating from this one street corner.

Anybody who was anybody, if they made their way to Kansas City, they had to come to 18th and Vine.

And my dear friend, the late great Buck O'Neil, the founder of this great museum, legendary Negro Leaguer in his own right, he would say that when he came to join the Kansas City Monarchs in 1938, he said, "I knew that I was coming to the heart of America," but when he got to 18th and Vine, he said, "I never knew I was coming to the center of the universe," because that was 18th and Vine.

And he would also say that if you were Black and you had a relative that lived here in Kansas City, but you hadn't seen him in a while, if you stood on the corner of 18th and Vine on a Friday night or a Saturday night, they got to walk by there.

But that was 18th and Vine.

It was alive, it was thriving, it was jumping.

This was during that critical period of segregation because what segregation did, it forced us to have our own, we had no choice.

You are in Kansas City at that time.

There was only about 13 blocks that Black folks could operate in in Kansas City.

You couldn't really live outside those 13 blocks.

But as I tell our guests here at the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, within those 13 blocks, you had everything you needed.

So much so that others wanted to come in and get some of it, particularly as it related to the jazz music scene.

If there's a bittersweet aspect to the overall story of the Negro leagues, it lies in the fact that you can directly parallel the rise and fall of the Negro leagues with the rise and fall of Black economy.

And the Kansas City Monarchs were really at the heart of this.

Everybody loved the Kansas City Monarchs, didn't matter what color you were.

(crowd cheering) - At 18th and Vine, the crack of the bat met the wail of a horn, Kansas City's heartbeat and a cradle of jazz now recognized by UNESCO.

But the music did not stop there.

From ragtime and blues to Ozark-born country, Missouri's place at the crossroads of rivers, railroads, and cultures made it a wellspring of American sound.

(upbeat music) - Missouri was a point of departure for the migration west.

And so those travelers, we needed to, well, be entertained.

And so St.

Louis and and Kansas City, Missouri, you know, provided them with everything they needed for the long trek west, plus a good time when they stopped off in those two burgs.

Kansas City was a pretty wild place.

It was known for corruption, political corruption, run by a political boss named Tom Pendergast and the Pendergast machine fostered gambling saloons at a time when prohibition was enforced, there was actually no prohibition in Kansas City, prostitution and a lot of nightclubs.

And these nightclubs provided the employment for musicians so musicians flocked to Kansas City.

And that's really what started the Kansas City jazz tradition was Pendergast.

He's responsible for it.

Ironically, he went to church every day and presided over one of the most corrupt governments in the nation.

(jaunty music) So Kansas City became a destination, and that's reflected in Kansas City being a destination in song.

Blind Boone, the great ragtime composer, wrote a "Strains from the Flat Branch," which is, "Carrie's gone to Kansas City, she done gone and I'm going too."

Jim Jackson, 1929, "Kansas City Blues" talking about, "I'm going to Kansas City."

And, of course, the most infamous song "Kansas City."

And so there's this whole tradition here of lawlessness and music and just craziness.

- Radio was one way that all these new musical styles found their way to listeners' ears.

But so was the phonograph.

And believe it or not, the oldest musical recording that still survives to this day was made in St.

Louis.

(warm music) - All the way up until the fall of 1877, there had been plenty of people who had solved the problem of capturing sound.

They had captured sound waves in an ashed piece of paper.

There were all sorts of different inventions that could do this, but until that moment, nobody had solved the problem of playing back sound.

And that's when Thomas Edison stepped in with his phonograph.

The way a phonograph worked was you wrapped a piece of tinfoil around a cylinder.

You turned a crank on one end and then shouted as loud as you could at a small needle that would scratch the sound vibrations into that piece of tinfoil, making a sound recording wrapping around and around.

In the fall of 1877, he patents this new invention.

Just six months later in 1878, Thomas Mason, a St.

Louis newspaper editor, has purchased one of the first 10 photographs in existence.

He paid $95 for it in 1878, an incredible sum of money at that time.

And he was showing it off in downtown St.

Louis.

"Look at this novelty, the talking machine."

And he made dozens of recordings across that summer.

For some reason, the recording made on June 22nd, 1878, managed to survive the test of time.

You know, anybody who's ever struggled to get a piece of tinfoil off of the roll in their kitchen without it becoming a crumpled mess knows how fragile one of these wonders would've been, this piece of recorded sound.

That one managed to survive all that time.

On the recording you hear a man's voice, presumed to be that of Thomas Mason, but obviously unverifiable because we don't have any other sound recordings to judge it against, singing "Mary Had a Little Lamb" and having a cornet solo play and then it ends with a hearty bout of human laughter, which is one of the most wonderful sounds you can imagine being captured.

(performer laughs) When you hear it today it sounds almost eerie.

It sounds ancient and archaic.

But when looking at this thing, it's amazing to think about.

This is a common ancestor to every piece of recorded sound you have ever heard.

(record hissing softly) - Not long after that historic recording, a man named Scott Joplin was about to make history of his own as the most famous ragtime composer and a pioneer of a bold new sound that pushed music forward with rhythms the world had never heard before.

(energetic music) - Ragtime is a syncopated piano music that was very popular in the 1890s up through about 1920.

And it was not an improvised music, it was written out.

And these piano professors thrived from the publishing.

It was first identified as ragtime in 1893 when Scott Joplin and a lot of the other piano professors went to Chicago for the World's Fair.

And a reporter described this new ragged-time music, so it became ragtime.

- You can imagine the marching bands and classical music that people were used to at the time.

And here all of a sudden is this music that is leaping across a piano keyboard doing all of these strange and exciting things.

A key to ragtime is what's called syncopation.

That's the magic of ragtime.

The left hand keeping the steady movement going forward while the right hand does all sorts of exciting and unexpected things.

("The Entertainer") Scott Joplin is a fascinating figure.

He's a classically trained pianist and a complete prodigy.

Even as a young child people see how great this guy is at playing the piano.

He needs to make money though.

So he moves to the rail town of Sedalia, Missouri, a place where there are lots of bars and people sitting in them, and he gets a job as the house pianist at the Maple Leaf Club in Sedalia.

It's there that he attracts the attention of a guy named John Stillwell Stark.

On the surface, John Stark is not the guy you would think of being at the forefront of cutting-edge young Black music in America.

He's a middle-aged white former ice cream salesman, but he's listening to Joplin play and realizes that this is an absolute hit.

This music is incredible.

He makes a deal with Scott Joplin that he would publish a rag of his and Scott Joplin would get a 3-cent cut of every piece of sheet music that they sold.

(upbeat music) That became "The Maple Leaf Rag," one of the most famous ragtime recordings of all time.

The money they made on it allowed both of them to move to the much larger city of St.

Louis where John Stillwell Stark opens up the Stark Publishing Company.

He would publish nearly every major ragtime composer that came through in the early 1900s, some incredible names, and basically, you know, set part of the stage for this to become a national phenomenon.

Ragtime transcended race and class boundaries.

It was largely young Black composers making it, but they were selling sheet music that let people in their middle-class parlors actually play this music.

So you had white, middle, and upper-class families playing ragtime while in neighborhoods nearby, young Black composers were the ones actually making it in the saloons and hotels and things around town.

This was music for having a good time, for young people to blow off steam.

This was party music.

- Where ragtime is party music borne of saloons and made for good times, the blues is a musical form from a much different space.

(laid-back music) - Blues is based on the call and response in the churches and in the fields where the preacher would call and the congregation would respond, where the work boss would call and the workers would respond.

So it's a back and forth.

And it's a feeling, the blues is a feeling and it tells a story, usually sad stories and stories of oppression.

- "The Saint Louis Blues" is fascinating because it was the most famous song connected to St.

Louis today.

It was made by a guy who spent six months here and had an absolutely horrible time.

W. C. Handy was a musician from Memphis.

He was on his way to the Chicago World's Fair in 1893, but ended up running out of money and made a detour to St.

Louis because he had heard such good things about the music scene here, thought he could make some money.

Shortly after arriving in St.

Louis, he finds himself shirtless and penniless and sleeping underneath the Eads Bridge.

It was there one night in 1893 that he hears people playing what he called the strangest music, these repeated verses over and over.

We would instantly recognize it as the blues today, but to W. C. Handy, he had no words for what this would be.

(stark music) That experience held on with him for more than a decade.

And finally in 1914, he was back in Memphis doing much better.

All of that came flooding back to him.

The idea of sleeping on the levee in St.

Louis and you don't know pain until you've experienced that situation.

And those memories became the basis for the lyrics of "St.

Louis Blues."

Almost immediately this song was a massive hit.

It's one of the 20th century's most recorded songs of all time.

- Blues provided the foundation for Kansas City jazz.

Some of the more notable Kansas City jazz compositions "Jumpin' the Blues," you know, "Swinging the Blues," they're all based in the blues.

And Charlie Parker, a lot of his compositions are based upon blues.

He wrote a song called "K.C.

Blues."

So it's the foundation for the music, the blues and the ragtime and the band music, that's where it all comes from.

(rowdy music) "The Boss of the Blues," Big Joe Turner, he was the father of rock and roll.

And Jesse Stone talked about how he and Big Joe Turner were rock and rolling down on 12th Street here in Kansas City in the 1930s.

Rock and roll comes out of that tradition.

- Jazz took the sounds of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and fused them into something wholly unique and uniquely American.

And Missouri, positioned at the confluence and crisscrossed with roads and rail lines, became a gathering place for people, cultures, and rhythms that shaped this new sound.

(mellow music) - Kansas City Jazz and St.

Louis jazz evolved from band music, ragtime, and the blues.

And those are three indigenous musical forms to Missouri.

Scott Joplin, of course, got his start here in Missouri, playing in Sedalia at the Maple Leaf Club.

Ma Rainey, the mother of the blues, first heard the blues in Eastern Missouri.

She was traveling with a tent show and after the show, a young woman came up and sang a mournful song.

And Ma Rainey picked up on that and turned it into the blues.

- With blues, a lot of those people were coming up from the Mississippi Delta and places further south on the rail lines.

If you look at a rail map of the central United States and all of the blues singers who come to St.

Louis, you can trace them back to these small towns in the Delta.

(upbeat music) Jazz, on the other hand, traveled a lot by the river.

In St.

Louis, you had the Streckfus Steamboat company.

They went all the way down to New Orleans, all the way east to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and all the way up to St.

Paul, Minnesota.

These massive excursion boats would take people up and down the river system.

And while he's going up and down the rivers, he's collecting all the greatest jazz musicians he can find from these places.

Louis Armstrong spent three years playing on a Streckfus excursion boat headquartered in St.

Louis.

He said the experience was like going to a floating conservatory.

- One of the things that distinguishes Kansas City jazz is a four-beats-to-the-floor rhythm section.

They played four/four time, and you have the sections riffing, and then you have the soloists taking wing and it gives it a strong sense of swing and it's rooted in the blues.

And then, of course, Basie, When he became a band leader in 1936, he really revolutionized the swing movement with his new sound coming out of Kansas City.

And he's the most influential musician to come out of Kansas City.

(laid-back music) Charlie Parker is the culmination of Kansas City jazz.

He is one of the most influential figures in music.

There's music before Charlie Parker, and there's music after Charlie Parker.

He changed everything.

His mom worked the nights, so when she would leave, Charlie would make his rounds and he would hang out in behind the clubs like the Reno Club, the Sunset, and all these clubs on 12th Street where Count Basie was holding court and other jazz greats were playing.

And he, you know, really came of age musically in the jam sessions that occurred in those clubs.

And then 1936, he was sat in at the Reno Club on a jam session and faltered while playing "Honeysuckle Rose."

Well, Jo Jones, the drummer, threw a cymbal at his feet and humiliated him publicly.

So he retreated from the scene and practiced at his mother's house 12 to 14 hours a day.

And then the next summer he went to Musser's Ozark Tavern down near Eldon, Missouri.

He spent the summer down there and he woodshedded that whole summer.

And he came back a musically transformed musician by the time he was 16, 17 years old.

He created the following both here in Kansas City and nationally, but he was also a hot mess.

You know, he was a heroin addict by the time he was 16 years old.

He was on his way to a gig at Musser's in the Ozarks and there was a wreck and the car flipped over five to six times and he broke his ribs and his back and the doctor gave him heroin to ease the pain because he thought it was safer than morphine.

And so he developed a taste for narcotics and he struggled with it for the rest of his life.

He lived in Kansas City for 20 years and he only lived to be 34.

But during his short life, he changed the course of music.

(mellow music) Miles Davis is the most influential jazz musician of all time because he was on the forefront of so many different movements.

You know, he was playing bebop with Charlie Parker and then of course he forms the cool school with his birth of the cool recordings where they play around space.

It's like the anti-bebop.

They're playing around space rather than filling up space.

He was truly a musical visionary.

He was also a very tortured individual, like Bird, you know.

There's this dance between genius and creativity and madness, and both he and Charlie Parker danced that dance - While jazz, ragtime, and even to an extent the blues are borne of urban spaces, country music was born in the hills and hollers of the Appalachian and Ozark mountains.

(gentle music) - In the 19-teens and '20s, you have the beginnings of real deep interest in American folk music.

And the Ozarks becomes one of those places that's considered kind of a repository for old, especially British folk music passed down from generation to generation to generation, and they've survived in these places like the hollers of Appalachia and the Ozarks, not only because of the ethnic makeup, the heritage of these people, but because a lot of these places are off the beaten path.

It's that old music that has survived through oral tradition generation after generation that becomes Ozarks' music.

And that music then we know is kind of the basis for what becomes known as hillbilly music, what we call country music today.

(water splashing softly) - As Ozark music grew in popularity, the first National Folk Festival was held in St.

Louis in 1934.

And in Springfield, a radio show called Corns a Cracking brought down-home sounds into living rooms across the country while the "Ozark Jubilee" helped propel country distinctly into the American mainstream.

(jaunty music) - In the 1950s, Springfield had a television show called "Ozark Jubilee."

It was filmed at the Jewell Theatre, which sat directly off of Route 66 in the heart of downtown Springfield.

A guy named Ralph Foster put this together.

He realized TV was the future.

We couldn't just play music on the radio anymore.

We needed to show people music.

And he put together this show pulling the greatest performers from around the Missouri Ozarks getting these national stars to come on the show.

Patsy Cline was on "Ozark Jubilee" 11 times.

Carl Perkins made his national television debut on "Ozark Jubilee" in Springfield playing "Blue Suede Shoes," which he and Elvis were simultaneously making a huge hit at that time.

- The "Ozark Jubilee" is really one of the great stories of the Ozarks in the mid-20th century.

It was a time in the 1950s when television hadn't become so bi-coastal yet.

I mean, most of the stuff came out of either New York or Los Angeles, some out of Chicago, but there were still these kind of crazy ideas that people in Middle America had, that, "Hey, we can do do TV too."

- The show's producer Si Siman recalled counting 42 different state license plates parked on Route 66 outside the Jewell Theatre in one single night.

- Even though Nashville probably doesn't want to admit it, it's the granddaddy of all country music TV shows.

It really is.

(upbeat music) - St.

Louis not only produced some of the most important and most remarkable musicians of the 20th century, but every one of them really created and defined the genres they worked in.

So Chuck Berry really helped to invent rock and roll as we understand it.

Tina Turner helped to invent the notion of the female front lady, of the singer as we think about it.

Miles Davis, of course, is the person who imagined a whole form of jazz into being.

And Nelly helped to create hip hop.

And they all come outta St.

Louis and I don't know what's in the water, but there's clearly something.

And the city fuels this kind of artistic creativity, which is pretty remarkable.

- I interviewed Johnnie Johnson, who's Chuck's pianist, and he told me Chuck Berry was an African American who played country music.

He had a wide appeal.

Chuck Berry was the father of rock and roll along with Joe Turner, and they both come from Missouri.

Figure that.

So really Missouri is in the forefront of musical development from the blues, ragtime, swing music, bebop, rock and roll, rhythm and blues.

(mellow music) - When Nelly comes up in the early 2000s, this is a brand new sound that is totally foreign to hip hop.

It becomes known as the St.

Louis Bounce.

This idea of sort of playing into your Midwestern roots.

Hip hop up to that point was a East Coast/West Coast thing, and all of a sudden you have this guy from St.

Louis.

Where's that?

And he's injecting children's rhymes that he's heard on the streets, sort of humorously like leaning in with like chicken clucks in his songs.

That whole idea of taking until what was then a hindrance, a Midwest regional identity, and turning it into solid gold is something that is pure Missouri.

(warm gentle music) - Pure Missouri.

A land shaped by rivers and railways, by conflict and creativity.

Across this three-part journey, we've traced Missouri's story from the deep roots of its Indigenous peoples to the edge of civil war through battlegrounds, both military and moral, and into the rhythms of everyday life that help define a nation.

As a crossroads of America, Missouri has always been more than just a place on the map.

It's where cultures collide, ideas ignite, and the spirit of a country finds its voice, whether through courtrooms, campfires, or a crackling jukebox on Route 66.

Missouri isn't just a crossroads, it's a current carrying the sounds, struggles, and soul of a nation ever forward.

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