This is an old revision of this page, as edited by TUF-KAT(talk | contribs) at 01:18, 19 May 2008(→1903: Walker and Williams would go on to star in many major productions, and would "revolutionize black theater".<ref>Southern, pg. 304</ref>). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.
Revision as of 01:18, 19 May 2008 by TUF-KAT(talk | contribs)(→1903: Walker and Williams would go on to star in many major productions, and would "revolutionize black theater".<ref>Southern, pg. 304</ref>)
This is a timeline of music in the United States from 1876 to 1924.
1876
"Home on the Range" is first published; it is the earliest song known to depict a "romanticized image of the cowboy".[1]
Sisters Anna and Emma Hyers, and their father, form a concert tour company, Hyers Sisters Comic Opera Co.,[2] then work with playwrights Pauline Hopkins and Joseph Bradford to produce the "first full-fledged musical plays... in which African Americans themselves comment on the plight of the slaves and the relief of Emancipation without the disguises of minstrel comedy", beginning with this year's Out of Bondage (also known as Out of the Wilderness).[3]
1877
Late 1870s music trends
The golden age of Chinese theatre in the United States begins.[4]
The DakotaDrum Dance is introduced to the Native Americans of the Great Lakes region; this is a set of beliefs that revolve around a legendary woman named Turkey Tailfeather Woman, who is said to have escaped from the American military and received instructions to build and use a large, ceremonial drum while in hiding. The religion based around this drum will spread throughout the region, and the drum itself will become the ancestor of the big drum used in modern powwow ceremonies.[6]
Ned Harrigan and Tony Hart transition from the variety show to the musical play, with stories centered around characters with distinct ethnic backgrounds. Their work established "ethnic groups as major characters in the American stage".[14]
Gussie Lord Davis has his first hit with "We Sat Beneath the Maple on the Hill", making him the first African American songwriter to succeed in Tin Pan Alley.[17]
The Thomas B. Harms music publishing company is established solely to publish popular music, then referring to parlor music.[7]
Music and Some Highly Musical People: Remarkable Musicians of the Colored Race, With Portraits, by James M. Trotter is the first revisionist look at the minstrel show, chronicling the "extraordinary breadth of black musicianship".[20]
Tony Pastor becomes an established theater owner on 14th Street in New York City, where he becomes the first person "to bid... for women customers in the variety theater," bringing that field out of "disreputable saloons" and transforming it "into decent entertainment that respectable women could enjoy".[21]
A chorded zither called the autoharp is patented in the United States.[5]
Rev. Marshall W. Taylor's Plantation Melodies, Book of Negro Folk Songs becomes the first collection of spiritual, put together by an African American.[24]
The Chinese Exclusion Act greatly limits the immigration of Chinese people to the United States, amid a wave of anti-Chinese sentiment, leading to a reduction in Chinese musical practices.[4]
Norwegian American choirs begin to form organizations, putting together festivals and other periodic gatherings to celebrate Norwegian culture and music.[26]
C. C. Perkins and J. S. Dwight publish the first history of a musical society in the United States, concerning the Handel and Haydn Society of Boston.[29][30]
John Slocum, who began preaching revelations the year before, is seen as being healed by his wife Mary's prayers; the Slocums' followers come to create the Shaker Church, of which music is an integral part.[31]
F. L. Ritter publishes the first comprehensive music history of the United States, Music in America.[32]
The Freeman, an Indianapolis, Indiana-based periodical, is founded, soon becoming the primary trade paper for African American theatrical groups.[33]
A Hawaiian schoolboy named Joseph Kekuku is credited with inventing the Hawaiian guitar, in which strings are melodically picked and stopped by a metal bar, with the guitar held across the lap.[37]
(Approximate) Wovoka, a medicine man of the Northern Paiute, articulates the messianic message of the Ghost Dance spiritual movement, which fused Christian (particularly Presbyterian and Mormon) teachings with those of Wovoka's father, Ta'vibo, which revolved around traditionalism and resurrection.[39]
Several Swedish American choirs join together to form the Union of Scandinavian Singers, which becomes a major part of the Swedish American music industry.[26]
The General Allotment (Dawes) Act establishes the reservation system and distributes land to Native American families, destroying the traditional social setup of many indigenous cultures, leading to a reduction in traditional music and dance.[15]
W. S. B. Matthews' A Hundred Years of Music in America is the first attempt at a history of "popular and the higher music education" in the country; it hails Lowell Mason as the founder of American music.[29][45]
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra forms, with income from backers who pledged $1000 for each of three years. The backers formed an Orchestral Association, which hired a music director. Many cities subsequently used the same model, including Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Cincinnati and Minneapolis.[18][19]
Leopold Vincent publishes the Alliance and Labor Songster, a pioneering early collection of labor songs.[53]
Carnegie Hall is built in New York City as a venue for classical performances.[54]
Changes in copyright law now make it impossible to publish foreign music without payment to the original composer or publisher.[55]
John Philips Sousa forms a band that set a new standard for American professional bands, having left the U.S. Marine Band.[58] He will bring the "professional symphonic band movement to the peak of its popularity".[19]
Charles K. Harris premiers "After the Ball", a waltz typical of the time,[7] which is said to be the most popular song of the decade,[59] and the "biggest hit of the century".[60] It is interpolated into a play, and the sheet music is said to have sold more than five million copies.[7]
Harry L. Freeman first "attracts attention... with his first opera," Epthelia; he will become known for combing secular and sacred African American music with traditional Western opera.[61]
Early 1890s music trends
The end of the Irish-American dominance in musical theater.[62]
Alice Fletcher begins her prolific scholarly career with a study of the music of the Omaha tribe of Native Americans.[64][65] The study, done with the assistance of Francis La Flesche, took ten years to complete.[29]
Jane Adams' Hull House in Chicago is the first music school connected to the settlement work.[68]
Philosopher Richard Wallaschek sparks the "origins" controversy when he puts forth the claim that African American spirituals are primarily derived from European music. This will not be solved conclusively until the 1960s, when scholars showed that spirituals were "grounded in African-derived music values yet shaped into its distinctiveness as a direct result of the North American sociocultural experience".[69]
The first Chinese opera theater in New York City is opened in Chinatown.[4]
The first Indonesian music performance in the United States is believed to occur at this year's Columbian World Exposition in Chicago.[70] At the same event, an ensemble of musicians with a dancer known as Little Egypt, is the first exposure to Middle Eastern culture for many Americans,[71] while a group of hula dancers leads to an increased awareness of Hawaiian music among Americans throughout the country.[37]
Ruthven Lang's Dramatic Overture is presented by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, marking the first time that institution had performed the work of an American woman composer.[73]
Violinist Joseph Douglass achieves wide recognition after performing at the Chicago World's Fair. He will become the first African American violinist to conduct a transcontinental tour, and the first to tour as a concert violinist.[74][75]
Mid 1890s music trends
The massacres of numerous Armenians in Turkey leads to the first wave of large-scale Armenian immigration to the United States, and the beginning of Armenian American music.[71]
The public exhibition of motion pictures, almost always with live music played locally, begins.[76]
1894
The Standard Quartette of Chicago becomes the first commercial recording of an African American singing quartet.[77]
The Octoroon becomes the first "important black (theatrical) production".[7]
Charles L. Edwards publishes Bahama Songs and Stories, featuring spirituals collected in the Bahamas, much of the population of which, at the time, was descended from African American slaves.[80]
Alice Fletcher makes the first known recordings of the Ghost Dance, specifically the songs of two Southern Arapaho men who were visiting Washington DC, Left Hand and Row of Lodges.[31] Some of her previous research had inspired Frances Densmore, who began series of very successful lectures on Native American music.[81]
The first permanent orchestras are established in Cincinnati and Pittsburgh.[19]
With The Wizard of the Nile, Victor Herbert launches a string of forty successful operettas, several of which have become staples of the American repertoire and produced a "lasting heritage of popular songs".[83]
Edward McDowell's Indian Suite is premiered; it is an influential work that incorporates aspects of Native American music.[85] He is also offered the first music professorship at Columbia Universty, whose nominating committee praises him as "the greatest musical genius America has produced".[86]
Six booking agents pool their resources to form the Syndicate, which came to control theaters in New York and across the country.[87]
The first "distinctively syncopated songs (are) published under the 'ragtime' label".[88]
Homer A. Norris publishes Practical Harmony on a French Basis, a precursor and harbinger of American classical music's upcoming move from a German-oriented style to a French one.[92]
Late 1890s music trends
The first music festival celebrating Finnish American culture are organized by various Finnish temperance societies.[26]
Will Marion Cook's Clorindy, or the Origin of the Cakewalk and Bob Cole's A Trip to Coontown are the first musicals "written, directed and performed by African American artists".[7]Clorindy, a ragtimeoperetta, introduced "syncopated 'hot' music to Broadway" and starred Ernest Hogan.[61]A Trip to Coontown is the "first full-length musical play written and produced by blacks on Broadway".[95][96]
Puerto Rico becomes a part of the United States, leading to the arrival of numerous immigrants and with them, Puerto Rican music in New York City and elsewhere.[97]
The first African American nationalist composer, Harry T. Burleigh, "to achieve national distinction as a composer, arranger, and concert artist" begins composing.[99]
The wildly popular "My Wild Irish Rose" continues the popular Irish song tradition within the United States.[19]
Eubie Blake's "Charleston Rag" is published; it is his "first and most famous ragtime piece", and it will establish his career as one of the top composers of Eastern ragtime.[102]
African-English composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor attends a concert held by the Fisk Jubilee Singers, inspiring him to create a collection of African-derived melodies, arranged for the piano. The Bamboula becomes the most popular, and his works make a "marked impression on the American public, particularly in black communities".[103]
Violinist and cornetist Helen May Butler's Ladies Military Band begins touring, bucking "stereotypes of the time by showing that women could endure the rigors of touring life and lease enough paying customers to survive in the music business".[105]
The vaudeville musical theater format begins to take shape.[106]
Pat Chappelle organizes an African American theater touring company, based out of Fort Gibson, Mississippi, to produce musicals, beginning with A Rabbit's Foot. It becomes phenomenally successful, and would go on to employ many of the early African American blues and vaudeville performers, including Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey.[108]
The first African American to publish a collection of original songs is Charles Albert Tindley, a "pivotal figure in the history of black church music".[111][112]
Charles Ives begins a private career as a composer, forging a new style that was "radically forward-looking in style yet rooted in American musical traditions and celebrating American life."[115] He will become the "most spectacular amateur in musical history".[116]
Oscar Sonneck becomes head of the Music Division of the Library of Congress. He will do "as much as anyone to shape the directions of musicology in the United States".[29]
Ma Rainey incorporates blues into her stage show, eventually becoming one of the most famous performers of the genre in the country.[117]
The United Daughters of the Confederacy of Alabama begin working to change the words to "Dixie", to make them more favorable to the Southern cause. The introduction of new versions at the United Confederate Veterans convention caused an uproar and was denounced as sacrilege. Any hope of changing the words ended when the song's author, Daniel Emmett, died eleven days later.[123]
Hazel Harrison is invited to perform at the prestigious Royal Theatre in Berlin. She will become the "first black woman to make a stir in the musical world as a pianist".[126]
Most blues performers born before this year generally considered themselves musicians whose repertoire included a wide variety of musical styles; those born later will mostly view themselves as playing a distinct genre.[127]
The first large-scale Filipino immigration to the United States begins, thus beginning the Filipino American musical tradition.[128]
Arthur Farwell publishes Folk-Songs of the West and South, a collection of songs that include "The Lone Prairee", which Farwell called the first cowboy song to be printed, both words and music".[129]
Freddie Keppard becomes bandleader of the Olympia Band, soon becoming one of the most prominent jazz trumpeters in that city. He will later turn down a recording contract, fearing it will make his music too easy to steal; the contract will instead be given to the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, who will become national stars.[133]
The first African American orchestra in the nation to be incorporated to be incorporated is in Philadelphia.[134]
The migration of Japanese-Hawaiians to the mainland United States is banned, preceding a ban on labor emigration in Japan, effectively isolating Japanese Americans on the mainland and in Hawaii, both from each other and from Japan itself.[35]
Florenz Ziegfeld launches the show that will become known as Ziegfeld's Follies, which "enlarged the scope of entertainment with every kind of extravagant presentation, including current topics, comedy routines, and of course, the ever-present gorgeous girls.[138]
1908
Arturo Toscanini becomes the conductor of the Metropolitan Opera; he is lauded for "his energy, the command he brought to the podium, his demands for perfection, and his uncanny musical memory."[139]
Scott Joplin publishes the education School of Ragtime, "a landmark in the development and diffusion of classic ragtime".[140]
The first black bandmasters are appointed to the U.S. Army, for the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry and the Twenty-Fourth and Twenty-Fifth Infantry regiments.[125]
1909
A copyright law is passed to secure royalties for composers on the sale of recordings and public performances.[141] It also required publishers of music to allow mechanical reproduction by anybody if they allow any individual to do so; furthermore, the law is the "first time in the country's history (that a) price for the use of a piece of private property was codified by federal law", requiring payment of two cents to the copyright holder from the creator of each piano roll, recording cylinder and phonograph record.[55]
John Lomax publishes a collection of cowboy songs, Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, a ground-breaking publication that launched his career[145]; he is shortly afterwards elected president of the American Folklore Society.[146] This collection is the first of American folk songs to be printed with the music.[13]
The Mexican Revolution spurs a wave of immigration, mostly to states with large Mexican populations, like Colorado and New Mexico; these immigrants bring with them contemporary Mexican culture and helped to revitalize the indigenous music of the Hispanic Southwest.[148]
Vassily Andreyev brings his balalaika and domra orchestra to the United States, inspiring a similar orchestra, supported by the Russian Orthodox Church, to form in St. Louis, followed by Chicago and New York in the next two years.[149]
R. Nathaniel Dett becomes the "first black pianist to make a transcontinental tour of the nation".[150]
Irving Berlin's "That Mysterious Rag" is the first ragtime song to not revolve around explicitly black lyrical themes. Berlin shifts to describing his work in this style as "syncopated", rather than "ragtime".[153] His "Alexander's Ragtime Band" is "conspiciously representative" of the Tin Pan Alley songwriters.[154]
Charles Griffes moves away from a German Romantic style and towards a more free-form style that comes to include French, East Asian and other influences.[155]
The first permanent orchestra is established in San Francisco.[156][19]
Henry Cowell's Adventures in Harmony is premiered in San Francisco, an early use of tone clusters in the field of classical music.[158]
Mary Carr Moore compoes Narcissa, with a libretoo by her mother, Sarah Pratt Carr, which is "very likely the first grand opera to be composed, scored, and then conducted by an American woman".[159]
A private performance of Treemonisha by Scott Joplin is the first of an African American "folk opera written by a black composer".[160]
Within a week of the sinking of the Titanic, songs have been composed about the disaster, one being a ballad being sold by a black, seemingly blind, preacher to A. E. Perkins.[167]
Cyrus H. K. Curtis gives the first public recital of organ music in the United States, in Portland, Maine.[168]
George Whitefield Chadwick's opera The Padrone is rejected by the Metroplitan Opera on the basis that it was "probably too real to life" in its portrayal of "life among the humble Italians". The opera takes place in "the seamy side of Boston (which) Chadwick was the first to dramatize... musically and realistically".[169]
John Stillwell Stark publishes Standard High-Class Rags, a collection of ragtime songs arranged for small orchestra. It will eventually become known as The Red-Backed Book of Rags, "and as such it (will be) a wellspring of the 1970s ragtime revival".[170]
A series of concerts begin to be held in New York, sponsored by the Clef Club and the Music School Settlement for Colored; these attract large, mixed-race audiences, and inspire other similar concerts in cities around the country. The most remarkable feature is the use of mandolin, banjo and other elements of African American folk culture by the Clef Club Symphony Orchestra.[173]
1913
The word jazz is used in print for the first time, in San Francisco in reference to "speed and excitement" in a game of baseball.[174]
Frances Densmore's research constitutes the most extensive description of traditional Ojibwe music,[6] and the "largest collection ever published from one tribe".[175]
Ragtime is a major part of a brief craze for social dancing, which spurs the rise of two well-known dancers, Vernon and Irene Castle. They work with James Reese Europe, whose band becomes the first African American ensemble to receive a recording contract, recording "Down Home Rag" this year.[90]
The Italian Luigi Russolo publishes L'arte dei rumori, "in which he (views) the evolution of modern music as parallel to that of industrial machinery", a basis for futurism, a movement "identified with technology and the urban-industrial environment... "seeking to enlarge and enrich the domain of sounds in all categories".[176] The foremost proponent of futurism in the United States is Leo Ornstein, who composes Dwarf Suite this year; it is the first of his "anarchistic" and highly dissonant pieces.[177]
James Mundy begins founding community groups in Chicago, and staging "mammoth concerts" at the Coliseum and Orchestra Hall. Choruses led by Mundy and J. Wesley Jones will sing at "all important occasions in Chicago that called for the participation of blacks" into the 1930s, when the duo's choruses attracted wide attention for their rivalry.[180]
Jewish American choirs begin springing up in urban areas across the country, many of them associated with socialism.[188]
James P. Johnson publishes "Carolina Shout", the song that will make him famous and launch his career as one of the big composers of Eastern ragtime.[189]
The United States begins to become an "outpost where new European works were seldom heard into an important international center for the presentation of new music."[191]
The Panama-Pacific Exposition is held in San Francisco, and Hawaiian performances lead to unprecedented interest for Hawaiian music, as well as the ukulele and the Hawaiian guitar, which eventually becomes the steel guitar used primarily in country music. The song "On the Beach at Waikiki" is usually credited with sparking the craze.[37]
The Original Dixieland Jass Band first performs in New York City; the band consists of white New Orleanians who became sensationally successful.[197]. From a modern perspective, it is clear that the line between jazz, blues and ragtime was too fluid to point to a single origin of jazz, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band was, at the time, perceived as "something new and different", and their performances and recordings were pivotal events in the early history of jazz.[198]
Harry T. Burleigh arranges a series of spirituals, artistically composed to fit within the Western classical hymn and aria traditions,[199] in Jubilee Songs of the United States of America. He is the first to arrange a spiritual for solo voice,[125] and is also credited with "starting the practice of closing recitals with a group of spirituals".[112]
Lucie Campbell becomes the music director of the National Baptist Convention's Sunday School and the Union Congress of the Baptist Young People; during her career, she will compose a number of important hymns, including "Heavenly Sunshine", "Something Within", "He Understands, He'll Say 'Well Done'" and "The King's Highway".[200]
English folklorist Cecil Sharp begins collecting Scottish and English folk songs in the Appalachians; many of the songs he documents adhere more closely to traditional British music than actual music in Britain.[202]
The first Lithuanian American song festival is held, predating the first similar festival in Lithuania by eight years.[26]
A bookstore in New York is opened by Myron Surmach, becoming one of the major institutions of the Ukrainian American music industry. [203]
Ernest Bloch comes to America. His subsequent work will mark "the crux of the Hebraic impact in America's art music".[204]
Sherman Clay begins publishing Hawaiian sheet music in San Francisco, greatly improving distribution for Hawaiian music on the mainland, while Ernest Ka'ai publishes a ukulele instruction book, The Ukulele: A Hawaiian Guitar and How to Play It, the first of many to come throughout the following decade.[37]
Cecil Sharp begins collecting folk songs from the southern Appalachian region, and is surprised to discover that the "cult of singing (British) traditional songs is far more alive than it is in England, or has been, for fifty years or more".[205]
Emma Azalia Hackley becomes one of the first African Americans to record, though the results are never released.[206]
Nathaniel Clark Smith begins his teaching career at Lincoln High School in Kansas City, Missouri. He will go on to pioneer the African American "master teacher" phenomenon, in which a public school teacher contributes an "enormous amount of time to developing the skills of talented young people". Smith becomes a local legend, and his students include many of the "leading jazz and concert artists" of the mid-20th century.[207]
The Original Dixieland Jazz Band makes the first recordings to be considered jazz, though the band's style developed "performing for a white audience that (had) little knowledge of black music making"; the band's recordings, though historically important for their earliness, were unable to impress black audiences or jazz enthusiasts.[209][182][125]
English folk song collector Cecil Sharp publishes an anthology of songs from western North Carolina, Folk Songs of the Southern Appalachians, with Olive Dame Campbell; this is the "first major scholarly collection of the mountain people's music".[210]
The October Revolution in Russia leads to political change, soon resulting in state support for professional, virtuoso balalaika orchestras; these groups come to be seen as "role models" by similar groups in the United States.[149]
The Supreme Court rules that the "public performance of music contributed to the ability of an establishment to make profits even if no special admission was charged for that music".[55]
With the United States' entry into World War 1, warrior customs among the Plains Native Americans are briefly revived, as many ceremonies and rituals are allowed, after many years of being banned, for the duration of the war.[15]
The wind ensembles that have dominated local community bands since the Civil War begin to decline in importance.[212]
More than 60,000 African Americans from Texas, Arkansas, Alabama, Louisiana and Texas move to Chicago, especially in the city's South Side. The black population boom "ushered in the city's jazz age, widening the market for black musical entertainment", including cabarets, dance halls, and vaudeville and movie theaters.[213]
Tin Pan Alley songwriters capitalize on the Hawaiian music fad, creating songs with thematic elements evoking Hawaii.[37]
Charles N. Daniels' "Mickey (Pretty Mickey)" is one of the first pieces of music written expressly for a film, for the movie of the same name starring Mabel Normand.[55]
The first permanent professional orchestra is established in Cleveland.[19]
The Million Dollar Theater is opened in Los Angeles, eventually becoming one of the premier avenues for Spanish language performances in the Western hemisphere.[124]
A Kansas woman named Nora Holt becomes the first African American to complete a Master's Degree education in music, from the Chicago Musical College.[215]
Charles Tomlinson Griffes' Sonata for Piano is considered his "most original... most complex and ambitious work", and a "powerfully creative and consistently conceived work that (stands) as a peak for neo-Romantic expression in American music for piano".[217]
Shanewis by Charles Wakefield Cadman is a "most notable" of the Native American-themed operas then popular; it will run for eight shows in two seasons, setting a new American record for opera.[218]
1919
Popular bandleader James Reese Europe is murdered; he becomes the first African American honored with a public funeral in New York City.[219]
Tin Pan Alley publishes songs that spark a fad for blues-like music; these songs include syncopated foxtrots like "Jazz Me Blues", pop songs that were marketed as blues like "Wabash Blues", as well as actual blues songs.[198]
Prohibition begins, driving the consumption of alcohol into secret clubs and other establishments, many of which became associated with the developing genre of jazz.[220]
The first permanent orchestra is established in Los Angeles.[156][19]
Carl Seashore's Measures of Musical Talent is a system of assessing musical aptitude that becomes widely adopted.[34]
Merle Evans begins leading the Ringling-Barnum Band, becoming the most famous circus bandleader in the country, especially known for leading the other performers with one hand while simultaneously playing the cornet.[221]
James Sylvester Scott publishes three rags, "which are among the most demanding of all published piano ragtime": "New Era Rag", "Troubadour Rag" and "Pegasus: A Classic Rag".[222]
George Gershwin's "Swanee", performed by Al Jolson, becomes a "tremendous hit" and Gershwin's "big breakthrough".[223]
VaudevilleanMamie Smith records "Crazy Blues", the first blues song commercially recorded by an African American singer; the song is a surprising commercial success that opens a "new market for African American music".[198][182] It is followed by a string of hits by African American singers.[117][127][224]
A paper shortage contributes to a cost increase and a downturn in the sheet music publishing industry.[225]
Joseph Patek forms a family band that will become one of the longest-lasting and most influential Czech-Texan groups.[226]
Early 1920s music trends
In jazz bands, the cornetist becomes more and more frequently assigned to the melody of a piece, rather than shifting that responsibility among various instrumentalists.[227]
American audiences begin to turn away from predominately German classical music towards works by the like of Frenchman Erik Satie and the Russian Alexander Scriabin.[228]
Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg begins advocating serialism, a composition technique that will come to dominate American classical music later in the 20th century.[230]
A printers strike and paper shortage decimates the music publishing industry by raising costs, as customers are beginning to focus more on recordings than sheet music.[55]
The Norfolk Jazz Quartet begins recording for OKeh, becoming "one of the earliest and most popular group to emerge" from the Tidewater area of Virginia, a fertile region for African American singing quartets.[232]
Jimmy Dorsey moves to Chicago for the second time in his life, this time hoping to make his way in the burgeoning blues and jazz scenes; he is electrified by the singing of W. M. Nix, thus beginning his career as a pioneering gospel singer.[234]
The Penn Hotel becomes the first African American-owned hotel in Baltimore; it is on Pennsylvania Avenue, then a major center for black culture and business, and where the Douglass Theater, later more famously known as the Royal Theatre, is opened as one of the finest African American theaters in the country. The Royal Theatre will become one of the major stops on the black entertainment circuit.[235]
Eck Robertson and Henry Gilliland show up at Victor Records offices, dressed in Confederate Army uniforms, and demand to record their music. The first recording to be released from the subsequent sessions will be Robertson's "Sallie Gooden", which is the first recording of what is now called country music.[237][238]
Francis La Flesche begins producing an important musicological study of the Osage tribe, entitled The Osage Tribe.[29]
The Grand Street Follies in Greenwich Village is the first revue "to be controlled largely by women", specifically director Agnes Morgan and composer Lily Hyland. This is the beginning of 'intimate revue', a type of show that is "literate, sophisticated, witty, amusing, satirical, and topical".[240]
James D. Vaughn forms a record label to expand the audience for the gospel quartets he manages, an influential point in the early history of the gospel industry.[241]
The New Orleans Rhythm Kings, the "most significant and influential of the early white jazz bands", record for Gennett, producing records that "had a direct impact on the young white musicians who developed what became known as the 'Chicago Style'."[242]
Trixie Smith, a popular blues singer, recorded "My Man Rocks Me (With One Steady Roll)", one of the earliest uses of the term rock and roll in popular music.[243]
The first Southern radio station to broadcast rural white music is WSB in Atlanta.[221]
Rural folk performers begin to perform for local radio stations in Atlanta and Fort Worth.[229][5]
1923
Spanish folk songs recorded by Charles Fletcher Lummis and transcribed by Arthur Farwell in the mid-1900s are finally published in an anthology called Spanish Songs of Old California.[109]
Arnold Schoenberg, an innovative experimental composer of the period, begins to be performed more frequently in New York City after this year's production of Pierrot Lunaire.[244]
Ralph Peer of OKeh records fiddling and singing from Fiddlin' John Carson in Atlanta; he is convinced to release the singing records by a local distributor, and Carson's songs become a surprise hit.[229] This is an important part of the early evolution of country music.[245]
Jelly Roll Morton makes his first recordings, as a jazz band member and as a solo pianist, and begins publishing songs through the Melrose Brothers Music Company.[246] Morton is the "first to perceive and define the distinction between ragtime and jazz, insisting that the latter, whatever its sources or borrowings, was a new type of music that transformed what it absorbed".[247] He is working with the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, the first Chicago-based white jazz band to record, using a black group (King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band) as a model. Morton's recording with the New Orleans Rhythm Kings constitutes the first "interracial recording sessions".[248][249]
King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band, performing at the Lincoln Gardens in Chicago, records with Gennett Studios, resulting in a set of recordings that are "landmark(s) in the history of jazz... the first major set of recordings by black jazz musicians". After this point, the music of "black jazz performers as well as white was preserved and circulated on record."[250]
The first national school band competition is held.[34]
The radio station WBAP in Fort Worth, Texas becomes one of the first to gain an overwhelming response with rural white music, specifically square dance music.[221]
A new style of popular black-performed blues emerges, consisting of often self-composed songs, accompanied by a piano, exemplified by the work of singers like Clara Smith, Victoria Spivey, Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey.[127] Smith's first recording, "Down Hearted Blues", is recorded this year, and becomes a "sensational" success, selling more than ten million copies and turning Smith into a star.[251]
George Gerswhin accompanies singer Eva Gauthier at a concert that is an "important event in America's musical history" because it helped to bridge the gap between popular and classical music.[253]
1924
The end of the Tin Pan Alley-led fad for blues and blues-like songs among mainstream listeners.[198]
George Gershwin premiers Rhapsody in Blue, an historically significant piece[254] that fused three strands of American music: modernist classical music, instrumental jazz and popular blues; the piece "played a role in defining American musical modernism" in the 1920s[255], though it was "probably the most successful work in the movement to bring jazz into the concert hall", it is "better known today through lush arrangements for full symphony orchestras that have necessarily smoothed out the vernacular idiosyncrasies of its original performance style.[214]
George and Ira Gershwin's Lady Be Good! opens on Broadway; the musical, the duo's first hit,[258] was a "groundbreaking... absorption of Jazz Age lingo (and the composers') felicitous skill at setting vernacular speech to music".[259]
The most popular of the early Lithuanian American performers, Antanas Vanagaitis, comes to the United States with a performance group.[26]
Immigration Act of 1924 formally enacts a restriction on Japanese immigration that had effectively been in place since 1908; this is said to constitute the end of issei, or the first generation of Japanese immigration.[35] The same bill has similar effects in other communities, making it a common marker separating different forms of immigrant culture and music, such as among Arab Americans.[71]
Bascom Lamar Lunsford, a regionally famous passionate advocate for Appalachian music, becomes the first person to record old-time banjo music, with "Jesse James" and "I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground", both for Okeh.[263]
WLS begins broadcasting the National Barn Dance, a popular radio program that exposed new audiences to traditional Southern and Appalachian music.[264]
Rudolf Friml's Rose-Marie is an "immensely successful operetta that (marks) a turning point in the American musical theater". It will be the largest-grossing show until Oklahoma! in the 1940s.[266]
Bix Beiderbecke joins the Wolverine Orchestra, making his first recordings; he will go on to leave a "more enduring mark" than any white composer or performer in Chicago in the era.[268]
References
Abel, E. (2000). Singing the New Nation: How Music Shaped the Confederacy, 1861-1865. Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania: Stackpole Books. ISBN 0811702286. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |middle= ignored (help)
Crawford, Richard (2001). America's Musical Life: A History. W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 0-393-04810-1.
Erbsen, Wayne (2003). Rural Roots of Bluegrass: Songs, Stories and History. Pacific, Missouri: Mel Bay Publications.
Koskoff, Ellen (ed.) (2000). Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, Volume 3: The United States and Canada. Garland Publishing. ISBN 0-8240-4944-6. {{cite book}}: |first= has generic name (help)
Miller, James. Flowers in the Dustbin: The Rise of Rock and Roll, 1947-1977. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0684808730.
D. Lankford, Jr., Ronald (2005). Folk Music USA: The Changing Voice of Protest. New York: Schirmer Trade Books. ISBN 0825673003.
Darden, Robert (1996). People Get Ready: A New History of Black Gospel Music. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group. ISBN 0826417523.
Bird, Christiane (2001). The Da Capo Jazz and Blues Lover's Guide to the U.S. Da Capo Press. ISBN 0306810344.
H. Wiley Hitchcock (1984). The New Grove Dictionary of American Music, Volume II: E - K. Macmillan Press. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
^ abcRiis, Thomas L. "Musical Theater". The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music. pp. 614–623.
^ abcZheng, Su. "Chinese Music". The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music. pp. 957–966.
^ abcdSeeger, Anthony and Paul Théberg, "Technology and Media", pgs. 235 - 249, in the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music
^ abRomero, Brenda M. "Great Lakes". The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music. Densmore, Frances (1913). "Chippewa Music". Bureau of American Ethnology. 2 (53). Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution.. pp. 451–460. {{cite book}}: templatestyles stripmarker in |others= at position 1 (help)
^ abcdefghijkCockrell, Dale and Andrew M. Zinck, "Popular Music of the Parlor and Stage", pgs. 179 - 201, in the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music
^ abcdefghLevy, Mark. "Scandinavian and Baltic Music". The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music. pp. 866–881. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
^ abcdefBlum, Stephen. "Sources, Scholarship and Historiography" in the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, pgs. 21-37
^Perkins, C. C. (1883). History of the Handel and Haydn Society of Boston, Massachusetts. Boston: Stone & Forell. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthor= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
^ abcdLevine, Victoria Lindsay. "Musical Interactions". The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music. Howard, James H. (1955). "The Pan-Indian Culture of Oklahoma". Scientific Monthly. 18 (5): 215–220.. pp. 480–490. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help); templatestyles stripmarker in |others= at position 1 (help)
^Reyes, Adelaida. "IDentity, Diversity, and Interaction". The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music. Baker, Theodore (1881). Uber die Musik der nordamerikanischen Wilden. Liepzig: Breitkopf u. Härtel.. pp. 504–518. {{cite book}}: templatestyles stripmarker in |others= at position 1 (help)
^ abRomero, Brenda M. "Great Basin". The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music. Herzog, George (1935). "Plains Ghost Dance and Great Basin Music". American Anthropologist. 38 (3): 403–419.. pp. 420–427. {{cite book}}: templatestyles stripmarker in |others= at position 1 (help)
^ abMaultsby, Portia K. "Overview". The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music. pp. 572–591. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
^Diamond, Beverly. "Indonesian Music". The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music. pp. 1011–1023. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
^ abcRasmussen, Anne K. "Middle Eastern Music". The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music. pp. 1028–1041.
^Caldwell Titcomb (1990). "Black String Musicians: Ascending the Scale". Black Music Research Journal. Center for Black Music Research - Columbia College Chicago and University of Illinois Press. pp. 107–112. Retrieved May 17. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help); Unknown parameter |accessyear= ignored (|access-date= suggested) (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
^Steiner, Fred. "Film music". New Grove Dictionary of Music, Volume II: E - K. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
^Southern, pg. 303; Southern notes that A Trip to Coontown was actually off Broadway at a "rather obscure theater on Third Avenue".
^Sheehy, Daniel. "Overview". The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music. pp. 718–733. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
^Abel, pgs. 50-51; William Lewis Cabell, the United Confederate Veterans' Vice-President denounced it as sacrilegious onstage at the convention, while others voiced similar sentiments to the newsmagazine Confederate Veteran
^ abLoza, Steven. "Hispanic California". The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music. pp. 734–753.
^Crawford, pg. 546; Crawford points out that this leads to dancing becoming an integral part of popular music in the United States, and that more than 100 new dances were introduced between 1912 and 1914.
^"Black Music Concerts in Carnegie Hall, 1912-1915". The Black Perspective in Music. 6. 1978. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |[ages= ignored (help)
^Crawford, pg. 569; Crawford notes that the event was so controversial that it was still a topic of conversation among the Harvard University faculty in 1919, when Virgil Thomson began studying there.
^Crawford, pg. 604; Quotes in original, cited to Helen Myers, ed. (1993). Ethnomusicology: Historical and Regional Studies. New York: Norton.
^Cowdery, James R. and Anne Lederman, "Blurring the Boundaries of Social and Musical Identities", pgs. 322 - 333, in the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music
^Steiner, Fred. "Film music". New Grove Dictionary of Music, Volume II: E - K. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
^ abcPreston, Katherine K. "Snapshot: Four Views of Music in the United States". The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music. pp. 554–569. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
^Wolfe, Charles K. and Jacqueline Cogdell DjeDje, "Snapshot: Two Views of Music, Race, Ethnicity, and Nationhood", pgs. 76-86, in the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music
^Levine, Victoria Lindsay. "Northeast". The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music. Morgan, Henry Louis (1962 [1852]). League of the Ho-dé-no-sau-nee or Iroquois. Secaucus, New Jersey: Citadel Press. {{cite book}}: Check date values in: |year= (help)CS1 maint: year (link). pp. 461–465. {{cite book}}: templatestyles stripmarker in |others= at position 1 (help)
