American popular music

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

American popular music (also referred to as "American Pop") is

United States of America and is a part of American pop culture. Distinctive styles of American popular music emerged early in the 19th century, and in the 20th century the American music industry developed a series of new forms of music, using elements of blues and other genres. These popular styles included country, R&B, jazz and rock. The 1960s and 1970s saw a number of important changes in American popular music, including the development of a number of new styles, such as heavy metal
, punk, soul, and hip hop.

American popular music is incredibly diverse, with styles including

classical music
.

American popular musical styles have had a significant influence on

global culture
.

Early popular music

Head and shoulders of clean-shaven white male with solemn expression, looking into the camera.
The first major American popular songwriter, Stephen Foster

American folk singer

African-American style, though this was often not true.[3] According to the historian of music, Larry Birnbaum, the music in minstrel shows was of mainly European origin, and was based on English, Irish, and Scottish folk music.[4] Similarly the author Richard Carlin states that while minstrel shows used the banjo, an instrument of African origin, and popularized black culture, minstrel music was largely an amalgamation of European dance tunes.[5] Andrew Stott states that many of the songs that initiated the "craze for blackface" were of European origin.[6]

Five figures in blackface, playing musical instruments in a lively, exaggerated manner.
Sheet music cover for "Dandy Jim from Caroline" by Dan Emmett, London, c. 1844.

The first popular music published for private consumption in America came from Ireland in 1808 with

Hutchinson Family.[10]

The first extremely popular minstrel song was "Jump Jim Crow" by Thomas "Daddy" Rice, which was first performed in 1832 and was a sensation in London when Rice performed it there in 1836. Rice used a dance that he copied from a stable boy with a tune adopted from an Irish jig. Popular white performers of minstrel music included George Washington Dixon and Joel Sweeney whose tunes followed Scottish and Irish melodies.[11] The African elements included the use of the banjo, believed to derive from West African string instruments, and accented and additive rhythms.[2] Beginning in 1843 the Virginia Minstrels became the first group to popularize the minstrel show format, and by 1850 minstrel shows had spread across the entire United States.[11]

Many of the songs of the minstrel shows are still remembered today, especially those by

Daniel Emmett and Stephen Foster, the latter being, according to David Ewen, "America's first major composer, and one of the world's outstanding writers of songs".[3] Foster's songs were typical of the minstrel era in their unabashed sentimentality, and in their acceptance of slavery. Nevertheless, Foster did more than most songwriters of the period to humanize the blacks he composed about, such as in "Nelly Was a Lady", a plaintive, melancholy song about a black man mourning the loss of his wife.[4] In 1851 Foster's song "Old Folks at Home" would become a runaway national hit.[12]

The minstrel show marked the beginning of a long tradition of African-American music being appropriated for popular audiences, and was the first distinctly American form of music to find international acclaim, in the mid-19th century. As Donald Clarke has noted, minstrel shows contained "essentially black music, while the most successful acts were white, so that songs and dances of black origin were imitated by white performers and then taken up by black performers, who thus to some extent ended up imitating themselves". Clarke attributes the use of blackface to a desire for white Americans to glorify the brutal existence of both free and slave blacks by depicting them as happy and carefree individuals, best suited to plantation life and the performance of simple, joyous songs that easily appealed to white audiences.[5] It was only during the

a capella group, the Fisk Jubilee Singers in 1871.[4] After the Civil War minstrel shows performed by actual black troupes spread through the country and black composers such as James A. Bland had national success in the 1870s with songs such as Carry Me Back to Old Virginny and Oh, Dem Golden Slippers.[4][11] The post-Civil War period also saw the peak in popularity of professional band music, led by directors such as Patrick Gilmore and John Philip Sousa.[9] Sousa, known for his composition of military marches, achieved great fame in the United States and Europe with the United States Marine Band.[9]

Sheet music for "Dixie"

Blackface minstrel shows remained popular throughout the last part of the 19th century, only gradually dying out near the beginning of the 20th century. During that time, a form of lavish and elaborate theater called the extravaganza arose, beginning with Charles M. Barras' The Black Crook.[6] Extravaganzas were criticized by the newspapers and churches of the day because the shows were considered sexually titillating, with women singing bawdy songs dressed in nearly transparent clothing. David Ewen described this as the beginning of the "long and active careers in sex exploitation" of American musical theater and popular song.[7] Later, extravaganzas took elements of burlesque performances, which were satiric and parodic productions that were very popular at the end of the 19th century.[8]

Like the extravaganza and the burlesque, the variety show was a comic and ribald production, popular from the middle to the end of the 19th century, at which time it had evolved into

Gus Edwards wrote songs that were popular across the country.[10] The most popular vaudeville shows were, like the Ziegfeld Follies, a series of songs and skits that had a profound effect on the subsequent development of Broadway musical theater and the songs of Tin Pan Alley.[13]

Tin Pan Alley

Tin Pan Alley was an area on and surrounding West 28th Street.[14] in New York City, which became the major center for music publishing by the mid-1890s. The songwriters of this era wrote formulaic songs, many of them sentimental ballads.[11] During this era, a sense of national consciousness was developing, as the United States became a formidable world power, especially after the Spanish–American War. The increased availability and efficiency of railroads and the postal service helped disseminate ideas, including popular songs.[citation needed]

Tin Pan Alley on West 28th Street.

Some of the most notable publishers of Tin Pan Alley included

Joseph W. Stern. Stern and Marks were among the more well-known Tin Pan Alley songwriters; they began writing together as amateurs in 1894.[12]

In addition to the popular, mainstream ballads and other clean-cut songs, some Tin Pan Alley publishers focused on rough and risqué. Coon songs were another important part of Tin Pan Alley, derived from the watered-down songs of the minstrel show with the "verve and electricity" brought by the "assimilation of the ragtime rhythm".[13] The first popular coon songs were "The Dandy Coon's Parade" by Joseph P. Skelly in 1880 and "New Coon in Town", introduced in 1883 by J.S. Putnam, and these were followed by a wave of coon shouters like Ernest Hogan and May Irwin.[4][14] Famous black composers of coon songs included Bert Williams, George W. Johnson and Irving Jones [15] . [4] Additionally the first time the word "rag" appears in sheet music is in reference to the instrumental accompaniment in Ernest Hogan's 1896 song "All Coons Look Alike to Me", showing a connection between the two genres.[4]

Broadway

The early 20th century also saw the growth of

musicals. Broadway became one of the preeminent locations for musical theater in the world, and produced a body of songs that led Donald Clarke to call the era, the golden age of songwriting. The need to adapt enjoyable songs to the constraints of a theater and a plot enabled and encouraged growth in songwriting and the rise of composers like George Gershwin, Vincent Youmans, Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern.[15] These songwriters wrote songs that have remained popular and are today known as the Great American Songbook.[16]

Foreign operas were popular among the upper-class throughout the 19th century, while other styles of musical theater included operettas, ballad operas and the opera pouffe. The English operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan were particularly popular, while American compositions had trouble finding an audience. George M. Cohan was the first notable American composer of musical theater, and the first to move away from the operetta, and is also notable for using the language of the vernacular in his work. By the beginning of the 20th century, however, black playwrights, composers and musicians were having a profound effect on musical theater, beginning with the works of Will Marion Cook, James Reese Europe and James P. Johnson; the first major hit black musical was Shuffle Along in 1921.[16]

Imported operettas and domestic productions by both whites like Cohan and blacks like Cook, Europe and Johnson all had a formative influence on Broadway. Composers like Gershwin, Porter and Kern made comedic musical theater into a national pastime, with a feel that was distinctly American and not dependent on European models. Most of these individuals were Jewish, with Cole Porter the only major exception; they were the descendants of 19th century immigrants fleeing persecution in the Russian Empire, settled most influentially in various neighborhoods in New York City.[17] Many of the early musicals were influenced by black music, showing elements of early jazz, such as In Dahomey; the Jewish composers of these works may have seen connections between the traditional African-American blue notes and their own folk Jewish music.[17]

Broadway songs were recorded around the turn of the century, but did not become widely popular outside their theatrical context until much later. Jerome Kern's "They Didn't Believe Me" was an early song that became popular nationwide. Kern's later innovations included a more believable plot than the rather shapeless stories built around songs of earlier works, beginning with Show Boat in 1927. George Gershwin was perhaps the most influential composer on Broadway, beginning with "Swanee" in 1919 and later works for jazz and orchestras. His most enduring composition may be the opera Porgy and Bess, a story about two blacks, which Gershwin intended as a sort of "folk opera", a creation of a new style of American musical theater based on American idioms.[18]

Ragtime

Ragtime was a style of dance music based around the piano, using syncopated rhythms and chromaticisms;[19] the genre's most well-known performer and composer was undoubtedly Scott Joplin. Donald Clarke considers ragtime the culmination of coon songs, used first in minstrel shows and then vaudeville, and the result of the rhythms of minstrelsy percolating into the mainstream; he also suggests that ragtime's distinctive sound may have come from an attempt to imitate the African-American banjo using the keyboard.[20] According to musical historian, Elijah Wald, ragtime constitutes the first true pop genre in America, as earlier American music such as minstrel show music was distinguished by its association with blackface and comedy, rather than by having any unique style or sound.[18]

Due to the essentially African-American nature of ragtime, it is most commonly considered the first style of American popular music to be truly black music; ragtime brought syncopation and a more authentic black sound to popular music. Popular ragtime songs were notated and sold as sheet music, but the general style was played more informally across the nation; these amateur performers played a more free-flowing form of ragtime that eventually became a major formative influence on jazz.[21]

Early recorded popular music

King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band, who played in a more authentic New Orleans jazz style.[22]

Blues had been around a long time before it became a part of the first explosion of recorded popular music in American history. This came in the 1920s, when classic female blues singers like Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith and Mamie Smith grew very popular; the first hit of this field was Mamie Smith's "Crazy Blues". These urban blues singers changed the idea of popular music from being simple songs that could be easily performed by anyone to works primarily associated with an individual singer. Performers like Sophie Tucker, known for "Some of These Days", became closely associated with their hits, making their individualized interpretations just as important as the song itself.[23]

At the same time, record companies such as

Robert Johnson.[19]

Popular jazz (1920–1935) and swing (1935–1947)

Jazz artist Rudy Vallée

music of the concert hall".[24] Jazz's development occurred at around the same time as modern ragtime, blues, gospel and country music, all of which can be seen as part of a continuum with no clear demarcation between them; jazz specifically was most closely related to ragtime, with which it could be distinguished by the use of more intricate rhythmic improvisation, often placing notes far from the implied beat. The earliest jazz bands adopted much of the vocabulary of the blues, including bent and blue notes and instrumental "growls" and smears.[citation needed] Jazz artist Rudy Vallée became what was perhaps the first complete example of the 20th century mass media pop star.[20] Vallée became the most prominent and, arguably, the first of a new style of popular singer, the crooner.[20]

Paul Whiteman was the most popular bandleader of the 1920s, and claimed for himself the title "The King of Jazz." Despite his hiring many of the other best white jazz musicians of the era, later generations of jazz lovers have often judged Whiteman's music to have little to do with real jazz. Nonetheless, his notion of combining jazz with elaborate orchestrations has been returned to repeatedly by composers and arrangers of later decades.[citation needed]

Whiteman commissioned Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue", which was debuted by Whiteman's Orchestra.

In the 1920s, the music performed by these artists was extremely popular with the public and was typically labeled as jazz. Today, however, this music is disparaged and labeled as "sweet music" by jazz purists. The music that people consider today as "jazz" tended to be played by minorities. In the 1920s and early 1930s, however, the majority of people listened to what we would call today "sweet music" and hardcore jazz was categorized as "hot music" or "race music."[citation needed]

The largest and most influential recording label of the time, The Victor Talking Machine (RCA Victor after 1928) was a restraining influence on the development of "sweet jazz" until the departure of Eddie King in October 1926. King was well known as an authoritarian who would not permit drinking on the job or severe departure from the written music, unless within solos acceptable by popular music standards of the time. This irritated many Victor jazz artists, including famed trumpeter Bix Beiderbecke. Sudhalter, in Lost Chords, cites an example of a 1927 recording by the Goldkette Orchestra in which musicians were allowed considerable freedom, and remarks "What, one wonders, would this performance have been if Eddie King had been in charge, and not the more liberal Nat Shilkret. Since the Victor ledgers show no less than five recording sessions in January and February 1926, when King actually conducted Goldkette's Orchestra, comparison between the approach of Goldkette and King is readily available.[citation needed]

An early genre of American pop music was the

swing dance, which was very popular across the United States, among both white and black audiences, especially youth.[citation needed
]

Blues diversification and popularization

In addition to the popular jazz and swing music listened to by mainstream America, there were a number of other genres that were popular among certain groups of people—e.g., minorities or rural audiences. Beginning in the 1920s and accelerating greatly in the 1940s, the blues began rapidly diversifying into a broad spectrum of new styles. These included an uptempo, energetic style called

spirituals with blues structures called gospel music. Later than these other styles, in the 1940s, a blues, R&B and country fusion eventually called rock and roll developed, eventually coming to dominate American popular music by the beginning of the 1960s.[citation needed
]

Country music is primarily a fusion of African-American blues and spirituals with

The Carter Family. Their recordings are considered the foundation for modern country music. There had been popular music prior to 1927 that could be considered country, but, as Ace Collins points out, these recordings had "only marginal and very inconsistent" effects on the national music markets, and were only superficially similar to what was then known as hillbilly music.[30] In addition to Rodgers and the Carters, a musician named Bob Wills was an influential early performer known for a style called Western swing, which was very popular in the 1920s and 30s, and was responsible for bringing a prominent jazz influence to country music.[citation needed
]

Rhythm and blues (R&B) is a style that arose in the 1930s and 1940s, a rhythmic and uptempo form of blues with more complex instrumentation. Author Amiri Baraka described early R&B as "huge rhythm units smashing away behind screaming blues singers (who) had to shout to be heard above the clanging and strumming of the various electrified instruments and the churning rhythm sections.[31]. R&B was recorded during this period, but not extensively, and it was not widely promoted by record companies that felt it was not suited for most audiences, especially middle-class whites, because of the suggestive lyrics and driving rhythms.[32] Bandleaders like Louis Jordan innovated the sound of early R&B. Jordan's band featured a small horn section and prominent rhythm instrumentation and used songs with bluesy lyrical themes. By the end of the 1940s, he had produced nineteen major hits, and helped pave the way for contemporaries including Wynonie Harris, John Lee Hooker and Roy Milton.[citation needed]

Christian spirituals and rural blues music were the origin of what is now known as gospel music. Beginning in about the 1920s, African-American churches featured early gospel in the form of worshipers proclaiming their religious devotion (testifying) in an improvised, often musical manner. Modern gospel began with the work of composers, most importantly Thomas A. Dorsey, who "(composed) songs based on familiar spirituals and hymns, fused to blues and jazz rhythms".[33] From these early 20th-century churches, gospel music spread across the country. It remained associated almost entirely with African-American churches, and usually featured a choir along with one or more virtuoso soloists.[citation needed]

Rock and roll is a kind of popular music, developed primarily out of country, blues and R&B. Easily the single most popular style of music worldwide,

son and "Mexican rhythms".[34] Another author, George Lipsitz claims that rock arose in America's urban areas, where there formed a "polyglot, working-class culture (where the) social meanings previously conveyed in isolation by blues, country, polka, zydeco and Latin music found new expression as they blended in an urban environment".[35]

1950s and 1960s

The middle of the 20th century saw a number of very important changes in American popular music. The field of pop music developed tremendously during this period, as the increasingly low price of recorded music stimulated demand and greater profits for the record industry. As a result, music marketing became more and more prominent, resulting in a number of mainstream pop stars whose popularity was previously unheard of. Many of the first such stars were Italian-American crooners like

Rudy Vallee, Tony Bennett, Perry Como, Frankie Laine and, most famously, the "first pop vocalist to engender hysteria among his fans" Frank Sinatra.[36] One of the most successful crooners was Bing Crosby. Crosby cited popular singer Al Jolson as one of his main influences. Crosby was in turn cited by Perry Como.[23] Crosby also influenced this singing of Frank Sinatra,[24] Crosby and Sinatra sung together in the 1956 film High Society.[25]

The era of the modern teen pop star, however, began in the 1960s. American pop musical examples from the 1960s include

Bubblegum pop groups like The Monkees were chosen entirely for their appearance and ability to sell records, with less regard to musical ability. The same period, however, also saw the rise of new forms of pop music that achieved a more permanent presence in the field of American popular music, including rock, soul and pop-folk. By the end of the 1960s, two developments had completely changed popular music: the birth of a counterculture, which explicitly opposed mainstream music, often in tandem with political and social activism, and the shift from professional composers to performers who were both singers and songwriters.[citation needed
]

Rock and roll first entered mainstream popular music through a style called

Bill Haley, a white performer whose "Rock Around the Clock" is sometimes pointed to as the start of the rock era. However, Haley's music was "more arranged" and "more calculated" than the "looser rhythms" of rockabilly, which also, unlike Haley, did not use saxophones or chorus singing.[38]

R&B remained extremely popular during the 1950s among black audiences, but the style was not considered appropriate for whites, or respectable middle-class blacks, because of its suggestive nature. Many popular R&B songs instead were performed by white musicians like Pat Boone, in a more palatable, mainstream style, and turned into pop hits.[39] By the end of the 1950s, however, there was a wave of popular black blues-rock and country-influenced R&B performers gaining unprecedented fame among white listeners; these included Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry.[40] Over time, producers in the R&B field gradually turned to more rock-based acts like Little Richard and Fats Domino.[27]

Doo wop is a kind of vocal harmony music performed by groups who became popular in the 1950s.

The Queens and The Chantels.[44]

The 1950s saw a number of brief fads that went on to have a great impact on future styles of music. Performers such as

chachachá and boogaloo. Though their success was again sporadic and brief, Latin music continued to exert a continuous influence on rock, soul and other styles, as well as eventually evolving into salsa music in the 1970s.[citation needed
]

Country: Nashville Sound

Beginning in the late 1920s, a distinctive style first called "old-timey" or "hillbilly" music began to be broadcast and recorded in the rural South and Midwest; early artists included the Carter Family, Charlie Poole and his North Carolina Ramblers, and Jimmie Rodgers. The performance and dissemination of this music was regional at first, but the population shifts caused by World War II spread it more widely. After the war, there was increased interest in specialty styles, including what had been known as race and hillbilly music; these styles were renamed to rhythm and blues and country and western, respectively.[46] Major labels had some success promoting two kinds of country acts: Southern

novelty performers like Tex Williams and singers like Frankie Laine, who mixed pop and country in a conventionally sentimental style.[29] This period also saw the rise of Hank Williams,[30] a white country singer who had learned the blues from a black street musician named Tee-Tot, in northwest Alabama.[47] Before his death in 1953, Hank Williams recorded eleven singles that sold at least a million copies each and pioneered the Nashville sound.[citation needed
]

The Nashville sound was a popular kind of country music that arose in the 1950s, a fusion of popular

Lubbock sound and, most influentially, the Bakersfield sound.[citation needed
]

Throughout the 1950s, the most popular kind of country music was the Nashville Sound, which was a slick and pop-oriented style. Many musicians preferred a rougher sound, leading to the development of the

Bakersfield Sound. The Bakersfield Sound was innovated in Bakersfield, California in the mid to late 1950s, by performers like Wynn Stewart, who used elements of Western swing and rock, such as the breakbeat, along with a honky tonk vocal style.[49] He was followed by a wave of performers, among them Buck Owens and Merle Haggard, who popularized the style.[citation needed
]

Soul

Soul music is a combination of R&B and gospel that began in the late 1950s in the United States. Soul music is characterized by its use of gospel techniques with a greater emphasis on vocalists, and the use of secular themes. The 1950s recordings of

James Brown are commonly considered the beginnings of soul music. Solomon Burke's early recordings for Atlantic Records codified the style, and as Peter Guralnick writes, "it was only with the coming together of Burke and Atlantic Records that you could see anything resembling a movement".[50]

The

Motown Record Corporation in Detroit, Michigan became successful with a string of heavily pop-influenced soul records, which were palatable enough to white listeners so as to allow R&B and soul to crossover to mainstream audiences.[35] An important center of soul music recording was Florence, Alabama, where the FAME Studios operated. Jimmy Hughes, Percy Sledge and Arthur Alexander recorded at Fame; later in the 1960s, Aretha Franklin would also record in the area. Fame Studios, often referred to as Muscle Shoals, after a town neighboring Florence, enjoyed a close relationship with Stax, and many of the musicians and producers who worked in Memphis also contributed to recordings done in Alabama.[citation needed
]

In Memphis,

Sly & the Family Stone began to expand upon and abstract both soul and rhythm and blues into other forms. Guralnick wrote that more "than anything else ... what seems to me to have brought the era of soul to a grinding, unsettling halt was the death of Martin Luther King in April 1968".[51]

1960s rock

Among the first of the major new rock genres of the 1960s was surf, pioneered by Californian Dick Dale. Surf was largely instrumental and guitar-based rock with a distorted and twanging sound, and was associated with the Southern California surfing-based youth culture. Dale had worked with Leo Fender, developing the "Showman amplifier and... the reverberation unit that would give surf music its distinctively fuzzy sound".[52]

Inspired by the lyrical focus of surf, if not the musical basis,

Four Freshman-ish harmonies riding over a droned, propulsive burden".[53] The Beach Boys' songwriter Brian Wilson grew gradually more eccentric, experimenting with new studio techniques as he became associated with the burgeoning counterculture.[37]

The counterculture was a youth movement that included political activism, especially in opposition to the Vietnam War, and the promotion of various

Isley Brothers.[54] Later, as the counterculture developed, The Beatles began using more advanced techniques and unusual instruments, such as the sitar, as well as more original lyrics.[41]

Outdoors, Joan Baez is sitting next to Bob Dylan who is playing an acoustic guitar, ca 1960s.
Joan Baez and Bob Dylan

Folk-rock drew on the sporadic mainstream success of groups like the

Flying Burrito Brothers and folk-oriented singer-songwriters like Joan Baez and the Canadian Joni Mitchell. However, by the end of the decade, there was little political or social awareness evident in the lyrics of pop-singer-songwriters like James Taylor and Carole King, whose self-penned songs were deeply personal and emotional.[citation needed
]

Psychedelic rock was a hard, driving kind of guitar-based rock, closely associated with the city of San Francisco, California. Though Jefferson Airplane was the only psychedelic San Francisco band to have a major national hit, with 1967's "Somebody to Love" and "White Rabbit", the Grateful Dead, a folk, country and bluegrass-flavored jam band, "embodied all the elements of the San Francisco scene and came... to represent the counterculture to the rest of the country"; the Grateful Dead also became known for introducing the counterculture, and the rest of the country, to the ideas of people like Timothy Leary, especially the use of hallucinogenic drugs including LSD for spiritual and philosophical purposes.[56]

1970s and 1980s

Following the turbulent political, social and musical changes of the 1960s and early 1970s, rock music diversified. What was formerly known as rock and roll, a reasonably discrete style of music, had evolved into a catchall category called simply rock music, an umbrella term which would eventually include diverse styles like heavy metal music, punk rock and, sometimes even hip hop music. During the 1970s, however, most of these styles were not part of mainstream music, and were evolving in the underground music scene.[citation needed]

The early 1970s saw a wave of singer-songwriters who drew on the introspective, deeply emotional and personal lyrics of 1960s folk-rock. They included

Allman Brothers Band and Lynyrd Skynyrd.[57] In the 1970s, soft rock developed, a kind of simple, unobtrusive and mellow form of pop-rock, exemplified by a number of bands like America and Bread, most of whom are little remembered today; many were one-hit wonders.[58] In addition, harder arena rock bands like Chicago and Styx also saw some major success.[citation needed
]

Head shot of Willie Nelson, with gray beard and long red hair and wearing a beret, smiles while looking at the camera.
Willie Nelson

The early 1970s saw the rise of a new style of country music that was as rough and hard-edged, and which quickly became the most popular form of country. This was outlaw country, a style that included such mainstream stars as Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings.[59] Outlaw country was very rock-oriented, and had lyrics that focused on the criminal, especially drug and alcohol-related, antics of its performers, who grew their hair long, wore denim and leather and looked like hippies in contrast to the clean-cut country singers that were pushing the Nashville sound.[60]

By the mid-1970s,

The Bee Gees. Disco's time was short, however, and by 1980 was soon replaced with a number of genres that evolved out of the punk rock scene, like new wave. Bruce Springsteen became a major star, first in the mid to late 1970s and then throughout the 1980s, with dense, inscrutable lyrics and anthemic songs that resonated with the middle and lower classes.[61]

1970s funk and soul

In the early 1970s, soul music was influenced by psychedelic rock and other styles. The social and political ferment of the times inspired artists like

]

By the end of the 1970s, Philly soul, funk, rock and most other genres were dominated by disco-inflected tracks. During this period, funk bands like

electro music and funk, soul music became less raw and more slickly produced, resulting in a genre of music that was again called R&B, usually distinguished from the earlier rhythm and blues by identifying it as contemporary R&B.[citation needed
]

1980s pop

By the 1960s, the term rhythm and blues had no longer been in wide use; instead, terms such as soul music were used to describe popular music by black artists. In the 1980s, however, rhythm and blues came back into use, most often in the form of R&B, a usage that has continued to the present. Contemporary R&B arose when sultry funk singers like

By the end of the 1980s, pop-rock largely consisted of the radio-friendly glam metal bands, who used images derived from the British glam movement with macho lyrics and attitudes, accompanied by hard rock music and heavy metal virtuosic soloing. Bands from this era included many British groups like Def Leppard, as well as heavy metal-influenced American bands Mötley Crüe, Guns N' Roses, Bon Jovi and Van Halen.[63]

The mid-1980s also saw Gospel music see its popularity peak. A new form of gospel had evolved, called Contemporary Christian music (CCM). CCM had been around since the late 1960s, and consisted of a pop/rock sound with slight religious lyrics. CCM had become the most popular form of gospel by the mid-1980s, especially with artists like Amy Grant, Michael W. Smith, and Kathy Troccoli. Amy Grant was the most popular CCM, and gospel, singer of the 1980s, and after experiencing unprecedented success in CCM, crossed over into mainstream pop in the 1980s and 1990s. Michael W. Smith also had considerable success in CCM before crossing over to a successful career in pop music as well. Grant would later produce CCM's first No. 1 pop hit ("Baby Baby"), and CCM's best-selling album (Heart in Motion).[citation needed]

In the 1980s, the country music charts were dominated by pop singers with only tangential influences from country music, a trend that has continued since. The 1980s saw a revival of honky-tonk-style country with the rise of people like

new traditionalists Emmylou Harris and Ricky Skaggs,[64] as well as the development of alternative country performers like Uncle Tupelo. Later alternative country performers, like Whiskeytown's Ryan Adams and Wilco, found some mainstream success.[citation needed
]

Birth of the underground

During the 1970s, a number of diverse styles emerged in stark contrast to mainstream American popular music. Though these genres were not largely popular in the sense of selling many records to mainstream audiences, they were examples of popular music, as opposed to

techno that later became a major part of popular music worldwide.[citation needed
]

Hip hop

toasting over the rhythms of popular songs. In New York, DJs like Kool Herc played records of popular funk, disco and rock songs. Emcees originally arose to introduce the songs and keep the crowd excited and dancing; over time, the DJs began isolating the percussion breaks (the rhythmic climax of songs), thus producing a repeated beat that the emcees rapped over.[citation needed
]

Rapping included greetings to friends and enemies, exhortations to dance and colorful, often humorous boasts. By the beginning of the 1980s, there had been popular hip-hop songs like "

Public Enemy and N.W.A did the most during this era to bring hip hop to national attention; the former did so with incendiary and politically charged lyrics, while the latter became the first prominent example of gangsta rap.[citation needed
]

Salsa

Salsa music is a diverse and predominantly

Salsa music always has a 4/4

meter. The music is phrased in groups of two bars, using recurring rhythmic patterns, and the beginning of phrases in the song text and instruments. Typically, the rhythmic patterns played on the percussion are rather complicated, often with several different patterns played simultaneously. The clave rhythm is an important element that forms the basis of salsa. Apart from percussion, a variety of melodic instruments are commonly used as accompaniment, such as a guitar, trumpets, trombones, the piano, and many others, all depending on the performing artists. Bands are typically divided into horn and rhythm sections, led by one or more singers (soneros or salseros) .[67]

Punk and alternative rock

Joey and Dee Dee Ramone in concert, 1983

Punk was a kind of rebellious rock music that began in the 1970s as a reaction against the popular music of the day – especially

The Ramones, Sex Pistols, Blondie and the like.[citation needed
]

Hardcore punk was the response of American youths to the worldwide punk rock explosion of the late 1970s. Hardcore stripped punk rock and New Wave of its sometimes elitist and artsy tendencies, resulting in short, fast, and intense songs that spoke to disaffected youth. Hardcore exploded in the American metropolises of Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., New York and Boston and most American cities had their own local scenes by the end of the 1980s.[70]

college radio, fanzines, and word-of-mouth, alternative bands laid the groundwork for the breakthrough of the genre in the American public consciousness in the next decade.[citation needed
]

Heavy metal

Heavy metal is a form of music characterized by aggressive, driving rhythms and highly amplified distorted guitars, generally with grandiose lyrics and virtuosic instrumentation. Heavy metal is a development of blues, blues rock, rock and prog rock. Its origins lie in the British hard rock bands who between 1967 and 1974 took blues and rock and created a hybrid with a heavy, guitar-and-drums-centered sound. Most of the pioneers in the field, like Black Sabbath, were English, though many were inspired by American performers like Blue Cheer and Jimi Hendrix.[citation needed]

Dark photo of a rock band performing outside.
Bon Jovi performing in 2001

In the early 1970s, the first major American bands began appearing, like

Poison, Bon Jovi, Mötley Crüe, and Ratt. The 1987 debut of Guns N' Roses, a hard rock band whose image reflected the grittier underbelly of the Sunset Strip, was at least in part a reaction against the overly polished image of hair metal, but that band's wild success was in many ways the last gasp of the hard-rock and metal scene. By the mid-1980s, as the term "heavy metal" became the subject of much contestation, the style had branched out in so many different directions that new classifications were created by fans, record companies, and fanzines, although sometimes the differences between various subgenres were unclear, even to the artists purportedly belonging to a given style. The most notable of the 1980s metal subgenres in the United States was the swift and aggressive thrash metal style, pioneered by bands like Anthrax, Megadeth, Metallica, and Slayer.[citation needed
]

1990s

Perhaps the most important change in the 1990s in American popular music was the rise of

Emocore and Post-hardcore became more known with bands such as At the Drive-In and Fugazi.[citation needed
]

P-funk; the best-known proponents of this sound were the breakthrough rappers Dr. Dre and Snoop Doggy Dogg.[citation needed
]

2000s

By the end of the 1990s and into the early 2000s pop music consisted mostly of a combination of pop-hip hop and R&B-tinged pop, including a number of boy bands. Notable female singers also cemented their status in American and worldwide popular music, such as

Madonna, Akon and Lady Gaga. In the late 2000s into the early 2010s, pop music began to move towards being heavily influenced by the European electronic dance music scene, taking root in the college crowd through producers like David Guetta, Calvin Harris, Swedish House Mafia and Skrillex.[citation needed
]

Hip hop/pop combination had also begun to dominate 2000s and early 2010s. In the early 2010s, prominent artists like

Machine Gun Kelly, and Macklemore began to dominate the mainstream music scene.[citation needed
]

The predominant sound in 1990s country music was pop with only very limited elements of country. This includes many of the best-selling artists of the 1990s, like Clint Black, Shania Twain, Faith Hill and the first of these crossover stars, Garth Brooks.[75]

On the other hand a guitar revival took place and raised a new generation of alternative guitar bands often described as

White Stripes, The Strokes, and The Killers
.

International and social impact

American popular music has become extremely popular internationally. Rock, pop, hip hop, jazz, country and other styles have fans across the globe. The combination of parts of international and American popular music has been attempted between the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s. However, the results of synthesis were for the most part unsuccessful.

]

Rock has had a formative influence on popular music, which had the effect of transforming "the very concept of what popular music" is.[78] while Charlie Gillett has argued that rock and roll "was the first popular genre to incorporate the relentless pulse and sheer volume of urban life into the music itself".[79]

The social impacts of American popular music have been felt both within the United States and abroad. Beginning as early as the extravaganzas of the late 19th century, American popular music has been criticized for being too sexually titillating and for encouraging violence, drug abuse and generally immoral behavior.[citation needed]

See also

Notes

  1. ^ Garofalo is an example of starting with Tin Pan Alley, in a chapter that also contains the coverage of ragtime
  2. ^ Ewen is an example, covering national ballads and patriotic songs, folk music, songs of the Negro, minstrel show and its songs and extravaganza to vaudeville
  3. ^ Ewen, p. 69. Ewen claims Dan Emmett was a "popular-song composer", then goes on another, and even more significant, was his contemporary, Stephen Foster—America's first major composer, and one of the world's outstanding writers of songs.
  4. ^ Clarke, pp. 28–29. Clarke notes the song "Massa's in the Cold Ground" as a clear attempt to sentimentalize slavery, though he notes that many slaves must have loved their masters, on whom they depended for everything. Clarke also notes that songs like "Nelly Was a Lady" describe the black experience as ordinary human feelings; they are people as real as the characters in Shakespeare.
  5. ^ Ewen, p. 81. When Milly Cavendish stepped lightly in front of the footlights, wagged a provocative finger at the men in her audience, and sang in her high-pitched baby voice, "You Naughty, Naughty Men" – by T. Kennick and G. Bicknell—the American musical theater and the American popular song both started their long and active careers in sex exploitation.
  6. ^ Ewen, p. 94. Ewen claims New York was the music publishing center of the country by the 1890s, and says the ‘’publishers devised formulas by which songs could be produced with speed and dispatch... Songs were now to be produced from a serviceable matrix, and issued in large quantities: stereotypes for foreign songs, Negro songs, humorous ditties, and, most important of all, sentimental ballads.
  7. ^ Ewen, p. 101. Ewen is the source for both "Drill Ye Tarriers" and the nature of coon songs
  8. ^ Ewen, p. 101, and Clarke, p. 62. Ewen attributes "New Coon in Town" to Paul Allen, though Clarke attributes it to J. S. Putnam – both agree on the year, 1883
  9. ^ Clarke, pg. 95 Clarke dates the golden age as c. 1914–50
  10. ^ Clarke, pp. 56–57. Coon songs came out of minstrelsy, and were already established in vaudeville, when all this culminated in ragtime... ragtime may have begun with attempts to imitate the banjo on the keyboard.
  11. ^ Ferris, p. 228. Conceived as dance music, and long considered a kind of popular or vernacular music, jazz has become a sophisticated art form that has interacted in significant ways with the music of the concert hall.
  12. ^ Clarke, pp. 200–201. From 1935 until after the Second World War a jazz-oriented style was at the centre of popular music for the first time (and the last, so far), as opposed to merely giving it backbone.
  13. ^ Garofalo, p. 45. The ukulele and steel guitar were introduced to this country by the Hawaiian string bands that toured the country after Hawaii became a U.S. territory in 1900.
  14. ^ Collins, p. 11. In addition, Collins notes that early pseudo-country musicians like Vernon Dalhart who had made their name recording 'country music songs' were not from the hills and hollows or plains and valleys. These recording stars sang both rural music and city music, and most knew more about Broadway than they did about hillbillies. Their rural image was often manufactured for the moment and the dollar. In contrast, Collins later explains, both the Carter Family and Rodgers had rural folk credibility that helped make Peer's recording session such an influential success; it was the Carter Family that was Ralk Peer's tie to the hills and hollows, to lost loves and found faith, but it took Jimmie Rodgers to connect the publisher with some of country music's other beloved symbols—trains and saloons, jail and the blues.
  15. ^ Broughton, Viv, and James Attlee. "Devil Stole the Beat" in the Rough Guide to World Music, Volume 2, p. 569: Its seminal figure was a piano player and ex-blues musician by the name of Thomas A. Dorsey (1899–1993), who began composing songs based on familiar spirituals and hymns fused to blues and jazz rhythms. (emphasis in original)
  16. ^ Garofalo, p. 72. The first pop vocalist to engender hysteria among his fans (rather than simple admiration or adoration) was an Italian American who refused to anglicize his name—Frank Sinatra, the "Sultan of Swoon".
  17. ^ Rolling Stone, pp. 99–100. Ward, Stokes and Tucker call cover versions the ants at the increasingly sumptuous rhythm-and-blues picnic.
  18. ^ Szatmary, pp. 69–70. Also a guitar enthusiast who had released a few undistinctive singles on his own label in 1960, Dale worked closely with Leo Fender, the manufacturer of the first mass-produced, solid-body electric guitar and the president of Fender Instruments, to improve the Showman amplifier and to develop the reverberation unit that would give surf music its distinctively fuzzy sound.
  19. ^ Rolling Stone, p. 251. Though the Beach Boys' instrumental sound was often painfully thin, the floating vocals, with the Four Freshman-ish harmonies riding over a droned, propulsive burden ("inside outside, U.S.A." in "Surfin' U.S.A."; "rah, rah, rah, rah, sis boom bah" in "Be True to Your School") were rich, dense and unquestionably special.
  20. Smokey Robinson and the Miracles and "Chains" by The Cookies
    .
  21. ^ Garofalo, p. 218. The Grateful Dead combined the anticommercial tendencies of white middle-class youth with the mind-altering properties of lyseric acid diethylamide (LSD).
  22. ^ Garofalo, p. 448. Garofalo describes a sampler called Sub Pop 200 as an early anthology of the dark, brooding guitar-based sludge that came to be known as grunge.
  23. ^ Garofalo, p. 451. From (Glenn Branca's) group they learned to use unconventional tunings to bend otherwise standard pop songs completely out of shape, a trademark of Sonic Youth that, in Seattle, resonated as well as the dark side of their musical vision.
  24. ^ Szatmary, p. 285. Recording the songs that would become Nevermind, Nirvana added a melodic, Beatlesque element, which had shaped Cobain, Novoselic, and new drummer Dave Grohl.
  25. ^ Szatmary, p. 284. Grunge, growing in the Seattle offices of the independent Sub Pop Records, combined hardcore and metal to top the charts and help define the desperation of a generation.; in context, this presumably refers to Generation X, though that term is not specifically used.
  26. ^ Kershaw, p. 167, from the Rough Guide to World Music, Part Two, "Our Life Is Precisely a Song", p. 167. Kershaw specifically notes that North Korea was the only country in which he never heard country music
  27. ^ Ewen, p. 3. Of all the contributions made by Americans to world culture—automation and the assembly line, advertising, innumerable devices and gadgets, skyscrapers, supersalesmen, baseball, ketchup, mustard and hot dogs and hamburrgers—one, undeniably native has been taken to heart by the entire world. It is American popular music.
  28. ^ Garofalo, p. 94. Suffice it to say, lest we get lost in history, that the music that came to be called rock 'n' roll began in the 1950s as diverse and seldom heard segments of the population achieved a dominant voice in mainstream culture and transformed the very concept of what popular music was.
  29. ^ Gillett, p. i, quote from Garofalo, p. 4. Garofalo quotes Gillett as Rock and Roll (sic) was perhaps the first form of popular culture to celebrate without reservation characteristics of city life that had been among the most criticized.

References

  1. ^ Gilliland, John (1969). "Play A Simple Melody: American pop music in the early fifties" (audio). Pop Chronicles. University of North Texas Libraries.
  2. .
  3. ^ "Blackface Minstrelsy | American Experience | PBS". www.pbs.org. Archived from the original on December 12, 2023. Retrieved October 11, 2023.
  4. ^ .
  5. .
  6. .
  7. ^ a b Cockrell 1998, p. 179.
  8. .
  9. ^ a b c Cockrell 1998, p. 161.
  10. ^ Cockrell 1998, p. 180.
  11. ^ .
  12. .
  13. ^ "The History of Tin Pan Alley". Sound American. Archived from the original on September 26, 2023. Retrieved October 11, 2023.
  14. ^ "American Music | Tin Pan Alley American Popular Music Project". Tinpanalley.nyc. Archived from the original on January 30, 2023. Retrieved January 6, 2023.
  15. ^ Jasen, David A. Spreadin' Rhythm Around: Black Popular Songwriters 1880-1930. Routledge. p. 1895. Retrieved January 21, 2024.
  16. ^ "The Great American Songbook | Songs, Composers, & Foundation | Britannica". www.britannica.com. Archived from the original on July 26, 2023. Retrieved October 11, 2023.
  17. ^ "An Overview of Jewish Music". www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org. Archived from the original on November 10, 2023. Retrieved October 11, 2023.
  18. ^ Wald 2011, p. 25.
  19. ^ "Robert Johnson Blues Foundation". Robert Johnson Blues Foundation. May 8, 2023. Archived from the original on September 27, 2023. Retrieved October 11, 2023.
  20. ^ a b Whitcomb, Ian. "The Coming of the Crooners". Sam Houston University. Archived from the original on June 7, 2010. Retrieved June 24, 2010.
  21. ^ "Fred Waring History". Penn State University Libraries. September 28, 2016. Archived from the original on October 8, 2023. Retrieved October 11, 2023.
  22. .
  23. . Tape 3, side B.
  24. .
  25. ^ Gilliland 1969, show 22.
  26. ^ Gilliland 1969, show 44.
  27. ^ Gilliland 1969, show 6.
  28. ^ Gilliland 1969, show 11, track 5.
  29. ^ Gillett, p. 9; cited in Garofalo 1997, p. 74
  30. ^ Gilliland 1969, show 9.
  31. ^ "Hank Williams". PBS' American Masters. Archived from the original on May 26, 2005. Retrieved June 6, 2005.
  32. ^ Gilliland 1969, show 10.
  33. ^ "Nashville sound/Countrypolitan". Allmusic. Archived from the original on March 1, 2011. Retrieved June 6, 2005.
  34. ^ Gilliland 1969, shows 15–17.
  35. ^ Gilliland 1969, shows 25–26.
  36. ^ Gilliland 1969, show 51.
  37. ^ Gilliland 1969, show 37.
  38. ^ Gilliland 1969, shows 41–43.
  39. ^ Gilliland 1969, shows 27–30.
  40. ^ Gilliland 1969, show 49.
  41. ^ Gilliland 1969, shows 35, 39.
  42. ProQuest 1194587
    .
  43. ^ Plasketes, George (October 1995). Cross Cultural Sessions: World Music Missionaries in American Popular Music. Popular Culture Association in the South. pp. 49–50.

Further reading

External links