As I am reading W. H. Kenney’s Jazz on the River I am also listening to the audiobook of Michael Massing’s Fatal Discord: Erasmus, Luther, and the Fight for the Western Mind. Martin Luther, when he wasn’t blowing up Catholicism or excoriating the Jews, wrote many significant hymns that became central to Lutheran worship and helped to create a musical culture in Germany that was exported to the U.S. by German immigrants in the 19th century. One group of such immigrants, the Streckfus family, saw the decline of the packet boat industry along the Mississippi River in the 1890s and, perhaps because of that German musical culture, conceived the idea of converting their vessels into excursion boats featuring live orchestras and huge dance floors. It was on Streckfus steamers that Fate Marable spent fifty years leading Black orchestras, introducing New Orleans jazz to white audiences and teaching scores of notable jazz musicians (with Louis Armstrong at the top of that list) to read music fluently enough to make them employable when they (part of the Great Migration of Black Americans out of the South) moved on to a bit of fame, if not fortune, in Chicago and New York. And another German immigrant, Bix Beiderbecke, growing up on the Mississippi shore in Davenport, Iowa, caught the jazz bug after hearing the riverboat orchestras, and became one of the first notable white jazz musicians. Martin Luther, no doubt, would have been appalled by Beiderbecke’s music.