The Golden Shovel

The Golden Shovel, presumably a bar or pool hall where the Pool Players meet when they should be in school, symbolizes the multifaceted connotations of jazz culture as it existed in the mid-twentieth century. The name is an oxymoron. “Golden” calls to mind the exalted, “high-culture” associations of jazz, a music that could be heard on the hallowed stage of a place like Carnegie Hall. “Shovel,” meanwhile, has more common, working-class associations, as a tool that literally allows one to dig into the dirt. The Golden Shovel thus symbolizes the intertwining of these two threads in the development of jazz culture.

School

School symbolizes traditional authority and “straight” society. The Pool Players have “Left school” (4), demonstrating their rejection of traditional societal expectations for people of their age. They suggest that their being “real cool” (3) stems from this rejection of school. Because the word “cool...