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American popular music

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The United States has produced many of the most popular musicians and composers in the modern world. Beginning with the birth of recorded music, American performers have continued to lead the field of popular music, which, out of "all the contributions made by Americans to world culture... has been taken (most) to heart by the entire world" [1]. The country has seen the rise of many popular styles, including ragtime, the blues, jazz, rock, R&B, doo wop, gospel, soul, funk, heavy metal, punk, disco, house, salsa, grunge and hip hop.

The first major American popular songwriter, Stephen Foster

American popular music, being well-known across the world, has had many milestones. Most histories of popular music start with American ragtime or Tin Pan Alley [2]; David Clarke, however, in The Rise and Fall of Popular Music, traces popular music back to the European Renaissance and through broadsheet ballads and other popular traditions [3]. Other authors typically begin with popular sheet music, tracing American popular music to spirituals, minstrel shows and vaudeville, or the patriotic songs of the American Civil War [4].

Of especial importance are a handful of performers who did more than anyone to create American popular music. Louis Armstrong's "virtuosity (which) inspired awe among his followers" helped make him a "giant figure" in the world of jazz, and a major foundation for later popular styles [5]. Later, following the white teen swing phase, a number of vocalists like Ella Fitzgerald and the Ink Spots became very popular, especially among the youth. A number of Italian-American crooners also found a major youth audience, including Dean Martin, Tony Bennett, Perry Como, Frankie Laine and, most famously, the "first pop vocalist to engender hysteria among his fans" Frank Sinatra[6]. Elvis Presley and Bill Haley, responsible for popularizing rock and roll, also deserve special note for changing the whole of popular music [7], both within and without the United States.

The era of the modern teen pop star, however, began in the 1960s. Bubblegum pop groups like The Monkees were chosen entirely for their appearance and ability to sell records, with no regard to musical ability. Pop groups like these remained popular into the 1970s, producing such acts as the Partridge Family and The Osmonds. By the 1990s, there were numerous varieties of teen pop, including boy bands like *NSYNC and the Backstreet Boys, while female diva vocalists like Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears also dominated the charts.

The 1960s, however, also saw a sea change in American popular music. Performers like Bob Dylan were singer-songwriters who wrote their own songs with poetic, deeply personal or topical lyrics. By the 1970s, songwriting had become a standard skill for most popular musicians. Meanwhile, a new range of alternative music genres evolved beginning in the early 1970s; these included the largely British heavy metal and progressive rock fields, as well as more solidly American styles like hardcore punk and later, alternative rock. Though these styles were not popular in the sense of mainstream, they were commercially recorded and are thus examples of popular music as opposed to folk or classical music.

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Ragtime

Main article: Ragtime

Ragtime was a style of music based around the piano, using syncopated rhythms and chromaticisms [8]. It is primarily a form of dance music written in 2/4 or 4/4 time, and utilizing a walking bass, that is, the bass note played legato on the 1-3 beats with a staccato chord played on the 2-4 beats. Much ragtime is written in Sonata form, with four distinct themes and a modified first theme appearing in the work.

Ragtime's historical origins are debated. The most simplistic analysis is that ragtime is a refined and evolved form of the African American cakewalk dance [9]. Gunther Schuller sees it as a mixture of African elements with the 2/4 pattern of European marches [10], while others point to the importance of jigs and other dance styles among the music of large African American bands in many northern cities during the end of the 19th century. Donald Clarke considers ragtime the culmination of coon songs, used first in minstrel shows and then vaudeville, the cakewalk and dances like the waltz and polka [11]; he also suggest that ragtime's distinctive sound may have come from an attempt to imitate the banjo using the keyboard [12]. The first published ragtime song was "Georgia Camp Meetin'", by Kerry Mills, in 1897, though it was 1899's "Maple Leaf Rag" that established and popularized the ragtime style [13]. "Maple Leaf Rag" was written by Scott Joplin, the most famous ragtime performer [14]. Later still, ragtime became an important part of early popular recorded music, jazz, blues and rock and roll.

Tin Pan Alley

Main article: Tin Pan Alley

Tin Pan Alley was an area in New York City that was a center for music publishing. Numerous professional songwriters lived in the area, churning out songs ready for mainstream America during a time that music, like other aspects of American culture, was becoming a national rather than a regional affair [15]. Tin Pan Alley was originally in an area called Union Square, and it had become the major center for music publishing by the mid-1890s [16]. The songwriters of this era wrote formulaic songs, many of them sentimental ballads [17]. Some of the most notable publishers included Willis Woodward, the Witmark house of publishing, Charles K. Harris, and Edward B. Marks and Joseph W. Stern. Stern and Marks began writing together as amateurs in 1894, with "The Little Lost Child"; the song became a hit after it attracted the attention of popular stage performer Della Fox [18]. However, Paul Dresser was, in the words of David Ewen, the "richest contributor of sentimental ballads to Union Square" [19]. He was an original composer, less maudlin, less cloyingly sentimental and less cliche-ridden than his contemporaries [20].

In addition to the popular, mainstream ballads and other clean-cut songs, some Tin Pan Alley publishers focused on rough songs like "Drill Ye Tarriers" in 1888, believed to have been written by an unskilled laborer turned stage performer named Thomas F. Casey [21]. 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" [22]. The first popular coon song was "New Coon in Town", introduced in 1883 [23], and was followed by a wave of coon shouters like Ernest Hogan and May Irwin.

Musical theater

Main article: minstrel show, vaudeville, Broadway theatre

During the 19th century, a popular tradition of minstrel shows spread across the United States. These were theatrical productions featuring singing, dancing and comic performances. Minstrel shows generally used African American musical instruments and dance, and performed with their faces stained black, a technique called blackface [24]. Minstrel shows were generally advertized as though the music of the shows was in an African American style, though it was usually much more British in all manner except the instrumentation. Many of the songs of the minstrel shows remain well-remembered, 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" [25].

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 theater called the extravaganza arose, beginning with Charles M. Barras' The Black Crook [26]. These were lavishly-designed productions, with elaborate sets and outrageously complex stage effects. Extravaganzas were criticized by the newspapers and churches of the day, who complained that the shows were far too sexually titillating, with women singing baudy songs dressed in thin, 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 [27]. Later, extravaganzas took elements of burlesque performances, which were satiric and parodic productions that was very popular at the end of the 19th century [28].

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 vaudeville. This form was innovated by producers like Tony Pastor who tried to encourage women and children to attend his shows; they were hesitant because the heater had long been the domain of a rough and disorderly crowd [29]. By the early 20th century, vaudeville was a respected entertainment for women and children, and songwriters like Gus Edwards wrote songs that were popular across the country [30].

The early 20th century also saw the growth of Broadway theatre, a group of theatres specializing in musicals. Broadway became on the preeminent locations for musical theater in the world, and produced a body of songs that led Donald Clarke to call the era (app. 1914 to 1950), the golden age of songwriting. The need to adapt enjoyable songs to the constraints of a theater and a plot enabled and encouraged a growth in songwriting [31] and the rise of composers like George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern. Most of these songwriters were Jewish, descended from Jews who fled the persecution of the Russian Empire [32].

Blues

Main article: Blues

File:Robertjohson.jpg
Robert Johnson

Early forms of the blues evolved in and around the Mississippi Delta in the Southern United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The earliest blues-like music was a "functional expression, rendered in a call-and-response style without accompaniment or harmony and unbounded by the formality of any particular musical structure" [33]. This pre-blues music was adapted from the field shouts and hollers performed during slave times, expanded into "simple solo songs laden with emotional content" [34].

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, Victoria Spivey and Mamie Smith grew very popular; the first hit of this field was Mamie Smith's "Crazy Blues". At the same time, record companies like Paramount Records and OKeh Records launched the field of race music, which was mostly blues targeted at African American audiences. The most famous of these acts went on to inspire much of the later popular development of the blues and blues-derived genres, including Charley Patton, Blind Lemmon Jefferson, Son House, Mississippi John Hurt, Lonnie Johnson, Blind Blake and the legendary Robert Johnson.

By the end of the 1940s, however, pure blues was only a minor part of popular music, having been subsumed by offshoots like rhythm & blues and the nascent rock and roll style. Some styles of electric, piano-drived blues, like the boogie-woogie, retained a large audience. At the end of the 1950s, however, a resurgence in interest in roots music led to the creation of a British blues scene that helped spawn the British Invasion of the United States. This was followed by a number of popular blues-rock acts like Janis Joplin, Canned Heat and Jimi Hendrix, who used psychedelic elements in their music. Blues-rock fusionists continued to maintain a steady and devoted fanbase, especially artists like Stevie Ray Vaughan and Bonnie Raitt; the blues also continued exerting an influence on later styles, especially the grunge music trend of the early 1990s.

Country music

Main article: Country music

Country music is primarily a fusion of African American blues and spirituals with Appalachian folk music, adapted for pop audiences and popularized beginning in the 1920s. Rebee Garofalo cited country music historian Bill C. Malone as tracing the origins of country to rural Southern folk music, which "was a blending of cultural strains, British at its core, but overlain and intermingled with the (music of the) Germans of the Great Valley of Virginia, the Indians of the backcountry; Spanish, French and mixed-breed elements in the Mississippi Valley; the Mexicans of South Texas, and, of course, blacks everywhere" [35]; Garofalo then goes on to add later influences on commercial country as including "German and Swiss yodelers, Italian mandolin players, and Hawaiian string bands" [36]. June Skinner Sawyers stresses the importance of the "balladry and tunes brought to the United States by Anglo-Celtic immigrants" and notes the influence of Irish dance music on Appalachian folk music, concluding that early hillbilly music was "primarily... Americanized interpretations of English, Irish, Scots, and Scots-Irish traditional music, shaped by African-American rhythms, and containing vestiges of nineteenth-century popular song, especially those of the minstrel tradition" [37]. Sawyers also notes the prevalence of a kind of high-pitched, nasal singing style, the result of fusing arrangements and material from both rural whites and blacks; this bears more than casual similarities to the similarly often unaccompanied and highly-ornamented melodies of traditional Irish sean-nós singing [38].

The instrumentation of the earliest country revolved around the European-derived fiddle and the African-derived banjo, with the guitar being later added [39]. Though the fiddle was imported from Europe, country music fiddling styles used African elements like a call-and-response format, improvised music and syncopated rhythms. According to Reebee Garofalo, the guitar entered country bands' repertoire through the interest of many white musicians in the fingerpicking style of African American playing, which was in turned based on West African techniques; Rolling Stone's Rock of Ages, however, attributes the guitar's rise entirely to its cheap availability, a factor that Garofalo considers as well, which facilitated the spread among the peoples of Appalachia, who adapted "their traditional melodies to fit the intonation of the readily available guitar, with its fixed frets" [40]. Later still, specialized string instruments like the ukulele and steel guitar became commonplace due to the popularity of Hawaiian musical groups in the early 20th century [41].

File:Carter Family.jpg
The Carter Family, "Can the Circle Be Unbroken" album cover

The roots of country music are generally traced to August 1, 1927, when music talent scout Ralph Peer recorded Jimmie Rodgers and The Carter Family, both very different performers in style, though both are also considered the foundation of country. 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. In addition, "those 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" [42].

File:HankWilliamsSr.jpg
Hank Williams

During World War 2, the materials used to produce records were scarce, and the record companies responding by cutting production to focus entirely on mainstream music, and thus country remained little recorded and even less promoted. After the war, however, 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 [43]. Major labels had had some success promoting two kinds of country acts: Southern novelty acts like Tex Williams and performers like Frankie Laine, who mixed pop and country in the "melodramatic or sentimental modes of conventional popular" music [44]. This period also saw the rise of two new major labels, Mercury Records, home of Frankie Laine, and MGM, which signed Hank Williams, a pioneering white country singer who had learned the blues from a black street musician named Tee-Tot, in northwest Alabama [45].

Hank Williams recorded for MGM between until 1953, when he died; by that time, he had produced eleven singles that sold at least a million copies each and pioneered the Nashville sound. He remains renowned as one of country music's greatest songwriters, and a "folk poet", known for his "honest, straightforward lyrics, and catchy, well-crafted tunes" as well as a "honky-tonk swagger, working-class sympathies, use of (the) 'backbeat', (making) him one link in the music chain that joins Jimmie Rodgers, Texas hillbillies like Bob Wills and Ernest Tubb, and Elvis Presley" [46].

The Nashville sound was a popular kind of country music that arose in the 1950s, a fusion of popular big band jazz and swing with the lyricism of honky tonk country [47]. Throughout the decade, the roughness of honky tonk was gradually eroded as the Nashville sound grew more pop-oriented, eventually becoming known as countrypolitan.

The popular success of Hank Williams' recordings (and those of the performers that covered his songs) had convinced record labels that country music could find mainstream audiences. Record companies then tried to strip the rough, honky-tonk elements from country music; "just a few years after his death... (a musician) as unapologetically rural as Hank Williams would have been shown the door... Nashville's response to (the rise of Elvis Presley's rockabilly fusion of country and R&B) was to nurture artists who could cross between country and pop, leading to the birth of the Nashville sound" [48].

It was Chet Atkins, head of RCA's country music division, that did the most to innovate the Nashville sound. He "relied on country song structures but abandoned all of the hillbilly and honky tonk instrumentation... Similarly, Owen Bradley created productions ... that featured sophisticated productions and smooth, textured instrumentation. Eventually, most records from Nashville featured this style of production and the Nashville sound began to incorporate strings and vocal choirs" [49]. By the early part of the 1960s, however, the Nashville sound had become perceived as too watered-down by many more traditionalist performers and fans, resulting in a number of local scenes like the Lubbock sound and, most influentially, the Bakersfield sound.

Bluegrass

Main article: Bluegrass music

Bluegrass developed in the 1940s, a fusion of old-time Appalachian folk music with blues, jazz and other styles. Bill Monroe, leader of the first bluegrass band (the Blue Grass Boys, for whom the genre is named), is known as the "father of bluegrass music". At its root, bluegrass was originally acoustic country music played using a banjo, and drew on earlier country string band traditions; soon, Monroe began working with Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs. It was Scrugg's "unusual three-finger banjo-picking style" that fueld the development of modern bluegrass [50].

Bluegrass relies on acoustic stringed instruments; the fiddle, banjo, acoustic guitar, mandolin, and upright bass are sometimes joined by the dobro (also known as a resophonic guitar or steel guitar), and a bass guitar, which is occasionally substituted for the upright bass. This instrumentation originated in rural black dance bands and was being abandonded by those groups (in favor of blues and jazz ensembles) when picked up by white musicians [51].

Besides instrumentation, the distinguishing characteristics of bluegrass include vocal harmonies featuring two, three, or four parts, often featuring a dissonant or modal sound in the highest voice (see modal frame); an emphasis on traditional songs, often with sentimental or religious themes; and improvised instrumental solos.

Later 20th century

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 styles like the Lubbock Sound and Bakersfield Sound. The Bakersfield Sound was innovated in Bakersfield, California in the mid- to late 1950s, by performers like Wynn Stewart and Buck Owens, who used elements of Western swing and rock, such as the breakbeat, in his music, along with a "honky-tonk nasal vocal style" [52]. He was followed by a wave of performers like Buck Owens and Merle Haggard, who popularized the sound.

In the early 1970s, Haggard was part of a new sound that was also a reaction against the pop-country of the day. This was outlaw country, a style that included such mainstream stars as Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings [53]. 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 [54].

The 70s also saw country influence the pop stars of the early part of the decade, especially John Denver, Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton, while country rock and Southern rock fusions continued unabated [55]. Rock and country fusions drew on both the alternative sounds of pioneer Gram Parsons and the more pop-oriented bands like The Eagles. There were also numerous Southern boogie bands, mostly indistinguishable from other hard rock groups aside from a "truculent identification with the South", including the Allman Brothers Band and Lynyrd Skynyrd [56].

By the middle of the 1980s, however, 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 Dwight Yoakam and the new traditionalists Emmylou Harris and Ricky Skaggs [57], 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.

The predominant sound in recent country music, however, is pop music with only very limited elements of country. This includes many of the best-selling artists of the 1990s, including Clint Black, Shania Twain, Faith Hill and the first of these crossover stars, Garth Brooks [58].

Jazz

Main article: Jazz

Jazz is a kind of music characterized by blue notes, syncopation, swing, call and response, polyrhythms, and improvisation. Though originally a kind of dance music, jazz has now been "long considered a kind of popular or vernacular music (and has also) become a sophisticated art form that has interacted in significant ways with the music of the concert hall" [59].

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, while ragtime musicians would "rag" a tune by giving a syncopated rhythm and playing a note twice (at half the time value). The earliest jazz bands adopted much of the vocabulary of the blues, including bent and blue notes and instrumental "growls" and smears otherwise not used on European instruments.

Jazz has roots in West African cultural and musical expression, and in African American music traditions including blues and ragtime, as well as European military band music; Jean Ferris notes the influences from the "steady beat and stirring tempo of European march and dance tunes (to the) subtle and complex syncopations of black African and Caribbean (styles)" [60]. After originating in African American communities near the beginning of the 20th century, jazz gained international popularity by the 1920s.

Jazz's roots come from the city of New Orleans, Louisiana, population by Cajuns and black Creoles, who combined the French-Canadian culture of the Cajuns with their own styles of music in the 19th century. Black musicians took advantage of the cheap instruments available due to generally decreasing prices on such products as well as the end of the American Civil War and the subsequent availability of surplus instruments from military bands [61]; with these instruments, they formed bands that played for funerals, parades and other celebrations. The key figures in the development of the new style were flamboyant trumpeter Buddy Bolden and the members of his band. Bolden is remembered as the first to take the blues — hitherto a folk music sung and self-accompanied on string instruments or blues harp (harmonica) — and arrange it for brass instruments. From New Orleans, jazz travelled first to Chicago, and then around the country.

Louis Armstrong

Though jazz had long since achieved some limited popularity, it was Louis Armstrong, who became one of the first popular stars and major forces in the development of jazz. Armstrong was an extraordinary improviser, capable of creating endless variations on a single melody; he also popularized scat singing, an improvisational vocal technique in which nonsensical syllables or words are sung or otherwise vocalized, often as part of a call-and-response interaction with other musicians onstage. Both scat singing and musical variation remain an important part of jazz, with the improvised repetition of musical phrases possibly the most important, defining characteristic of the genre.

Swing

Main article: Swing

Swing is characterized by a strong rhythm section, usually consisting of double bass and drums, medium to fast tempo, and the distinctive swing common to all forms of jazz. Swing is primarily a kind of 1930s jazz fused with elements of the blues and the pop sensibility of Tin Pan Alley [62]. Swing used bigger bands than other kinds of jazz had, which led to the use of bandleaders that tightly arranged the material, discouraging improvisation, which had previously been an integral part of jazz.

A typical swing song featured a strong, anchoring rhythm section in support of more loosely tied wind, brass, string, and vocal sections. The level of improvisation varied depending on the arrangement, the band, the song, and the band-leader. The most common style consisted of having one soloist at a time taking center stage, and take up an improvised routine, with bandmates playing support. As a song progressed, multiple soloists might play for periods of various lengths; it was far from uncommon to have two or three band members improvising at any one time.

Swing became a major part of African American dance, and came to be accompanied by a popular dance called the swing dance. Swing, both the music and the dance, became very popular across the United States, among both white and black audiences. David Clarke called swing the first "jazz-oriented style (to be) at the centre of popular music... as opposed to merely giving it backbone" [63]. By the end of the 1930s, vocalists became more and more prominent, eventually taking center stage, especially following the American Federation of Musicians strike, which made recording with a large band prohibitively expensive [64].

Bebop

Main article: Bebop

Charlie Parker

Bebop (or bop) is a form of jazz characterized by fast tempos, improvisation based on harmonic structure rather than melody and use of the flatted fifth, a technique long a part of the blues though not common elsewhere. Instead of using improvised solos over chord change, bebop compositions were based on existing chord progression from popular songs, requiring performers to "chart new harmonic paths and make them work" [65]. Bebop composers and improvisers, particularly Charlie Parker, stylistically employed frequent use of upper chord tones, i.e., ninths, elevenths, and thirteenths, creating a more colorful and rich harmonic sound than past jazz styles. As the bebop language developed, these "altered chords" were used less for coloration than as fundamental building blocks of new harmonic "spaces." The soloist's implied switch from an original to a reconstructed space created a narrative of "liberation."

Bebop was developed in the early and mid-1940s, later evolving into styles like hard bop and free jazz. Thelonius Monk, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie are generally considered the primary innovators of the style, which arose in small jazz clubs in New York City [66]. Hard bop is characterized by each altered chord implying a scale or mode. The capacity to improvise over a complex sequence of altered chords using only the implied scales requires a mental agility of a mathematical, problem-solving kind that is another hallmark of bebop.

Gospel

Main article: Gospel

Christian spirituals and the rural blues music were the origin of what is now known as gospel. Beginning in about the 1920s, African American churches began to feature early gospel in the form of worshipers "testifyin'", or proclaiming one's religious devotion in an improvised, often musical or semi-musical manner. Modern gospel began with the work of composers, most importantly Thomas A. Dorsey, who "(composed) songs based on familiar spirituals and hrmns, fused to blues and jazz rhythms" [67].

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.

By the 1950s, it had become popular in mainstream America. Its top star was Mahalia Jackson, a singer whose fame rivalled any other African American to that date. She was perhaps the first black musician to make black music that all kinds of Americans listened to. She also became associated with the Civil Rights Movement, meeting with Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph Abernathy in 1955, then participating in the Montgomery bus boycott [68].

Later in the 1950s and the early part of 60s, gospel was secularized in tone by performers like Sam Cooke. The result was called soul music. The secularization caused some protest among the gospel community, who viewed it as an appropriation of religion for personal profit and, in many minds, glorifying immoral behavior. Elements of gospel appropriated for rock included various "rhythms (and) vocal styles, from dance steps to stage-diving, were first conceived on the gospel circuit... Elvis Presley, Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis -- among many other American singers -- (learned) at the feet of gospel's own legends" [69]

R&B

Main article: R&B

R&B, an abbreviation for rhythm and blues, is a style of music that arose in the 1930s and 40s, which was, at the time, "huge rhythm units smashing away behind screaming blues singers", according to Amiri Baraka, who "had to shout to be heard above the clanging and strumming of the various electrified instruments and the churning rhythm sections [70]. R&B was recorded during this period, but not extensively and was not widely promoted by record companies, who felt it "unsuitable for the mainstream because of its insistent rhythms and suggestive content" [71]. Without label support, independent record labels like Modern Records, Atlantic Records and Aladdin Records.

It was the bandleader Louis Jordan who did more than anyone to innovate the sound of early rhythm and blues. His 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 like Wynonie Harris, John Lee Hooker and Roy Milton.

Many of the most popular R&B songs were not, however, performed in the rollicking style of Jordan and his contemporaries. They were instead performed by white musicians, in a more palatable, mainstream style, and turned into pop hits [72]. 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 [73]. Over time, producers in the R&B field turned to gradually more rock-based acts like Little Richard and Fats Domino.

Doo wop

Main article: Doo wop

Doo wop is a kind of vocal harmony music performed by groups who became wildly popular in the 1950s. The earliest hits during this decade were songs like "Earth Angel" by The Penguins and "Crying in the Chapel" by The Orioles, though there are examples in a similar style dating back to the late 1930s, including The Ink Spots and the Mills Brothers [74]. Though usually considered a kind of rock, doo wop is more precisely a fusion of vocal gospel and jazz with the blues and pop music [75], and it became "the first form of rock & roll to take shape, to define itself as something people recognized as new, different, strange, theirs" (emphasis in original) [76].

As doo wop grew more popular, more innovations were added, including the use of a bass lead vocalist, a practice which began with Jimmy Ricks of The Ravens [77]. Doo wop performers were originally almost all black, but a few white or integrated groups soon became popular. These included a number of Italian-American groups like Dion & the Belmonts and Frankie Valli & the Four Seasons, while others added female vocalists and even formed all-female groups in the nearly-universally male field; these included The Queens and The Chantels [78].

Contemporary R&B

By the 1960s, the term rhythm and blues was no longer in wide use; instead, terms like soul music were used. 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 in the 1980s, when sultry funk singers like Prince became very popular [79], alongside dance-oriented pop stars like Michael Jackson and a wave of female vocalists like Tina Turner and Whitney Houston.

The same approximate period also saw the development of hip hop music from its roots on the streets of New York to a form of popular music. Hip hop came to influence contemporary R&B, first in the form of a style called new jack swing and then in a related series of subgenres called hip hop soul and neo soul. New jack swing was a a kind of vocal music, often featuring rapped verses and drum machines, most popularly exemplified by the band Boyz II Men [80]. Hip hop soul and neo soul developed later, in the 90s, the former being a mixture of R&B with hip hop beats and the images and themes of gangsta rap, while neo soul is a more experimental, edgier and generally less mainstream combination of 60s and 70s-style soul vocals with hip hop beats and occasional rapped verses.

In the 2000s, contemporary R&B began producing many of the United States' biggest stars, including Mariah Carey, Justin Timberlake and Gwen Stefani. Their sound was based largely on pop music with R&B rhythms and a danceable sound.

Rock and roll

Main article: Rock and roll

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, rock's exact origins and early development have been hotly debated. Rock historian Reebee Garofalo cites Robert Palmer as noting that the style's influences are quite diverse, and include the Afro-Caribbean "Bo Diddley beat", elements of "big band swing" and Latin music like the Cuban son and "Mexican rhythms" [81]; she also discusses George Lipsitz, who claims that America's urban areas formed a "polyglot, working-class culture (where the) social meanings previously conveyed in isolation by blues, country, polka, zydeco and Latin musics found new expression as they blended in an urban environment" [82].

Elvis Presley

Rock and roll first entered popular music through a style called rockabilly, which fused the nascent rock sound with elements of country music. Black-performed rock and roll had previously had limited mainstream success, and some observers at the time were aware that a white performer who could credibly sing in an R&B and country style would be a success. Sam Phillips, of Memphis, Tennessee's Sun Records, was the one who found such a performer, in Elvis Presley, who became one of the best-selling musicians in history, and brought rock and roll to audiences across the world [83].

Presley's success was preceded by 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 [84].

Rock music: 1960s

Main articles: Surf, psychedelia and folk-rock

The 1960s saw a tremendous change in rock music, as well as in popular music in general, both in the United States and in the United Kingdom and elsewhere in the world [85]. Perhaps the most important change was the shift from professionally-composed songs to the era of the "singer-songwriter", as well as an understanding of the opular musician as an artist. These changes led to the rise of musical movements that were connected to politically activist goals, such as Civil Rights and the opposition to the Vietnam War. At the same time, rock music began diversifying greatly, spreading across the globe and mutating into numerous subgenres in the United States.

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 rockwith 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" [86].

File:Beachboys1.jpg
The Beach Boys

Inspired by the lyrical focus of surf, if not the musical basis, The Beach Boys began their career in 1961, soon launching a string of hits like "Surfin' USA". Their sound was not instrumental, nor guitar-based, but was full of "rich, dense and unquestionably special" "floating vocals (with) Four Freshman-ish harmonies riding over a droned, propulsive burden" [87]. The Beach Boys' songwriter Brian Wilson grew gradually more eccentric, experimenting with new studio techniques as he became associated with the burgeoning counterculture.

The counterculture was a youth movement that included political activism, especially in opposition to the Vietnam War, and the promotion of various hippie ideals. The hippies were associated primarily with two kinds of music: the folk-rock and country rock of people like Bob Dylan and Gram Parsons, and the psychedelic rock of bands like Jefferson Airplane and The Doors. This movement was very closely connected to the British Invasion, a wave of bands from the United Kingdom who became very popular throughout much of the 1960s. The first wave of the British Invasion included bands like The Zombies and the Moody Blues, followed by the legendary hard-driving rock bands like the Rolling Stones, The Who and, most famously, The Beatles. The sound of these bands was "hard-driving rock and roll", with The Beatles' came coming from songs that were "essentially note-for-note reproductions of... African American rock 'n' roll classics" by Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Smokey Robinson, The Shirelles and the Isley Brothers [88].

File:This Machine Kills Fascists.gif
Woodie Guthrie

Folk-rock drew on the sporadic mainstream success of groups like the Kingston Trio and the Almanac Singers, while Woodie Guthrie and Pete Seeger helped to politically radicalize rural white folk music [89]. The popular musician Bob Dylan rose to prominence in the middle of the 1960s, fusing folk with rock and making the nascent scene closely connected to the Civil Rights Movement. He was followed by a number of country-rock bands like The Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers, folk-oriented singer-songwriters like Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell, who remained politically activist even after Dylan had begun focusing more on music; 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 Carol King.

File:Old jerry garcia.jpg
Jerry Garcia, Grateful dead frontman

Psychedelic rock was a hard, driving kind of guitar-based rock, closely associated with the city of San Francisco, California, which also produced the pioneering blues-rock singer Janis Joplin, who was originally from Port Arthur, Texas [90]. 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" [91]; 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 like LSD for spiritual and philosophical purposes [92].

Mainstream rock

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)|rock music]], an umbrella category which would eventually include diverse styles like heavy metal music, punk rock and, sometimes even hip hop music. During the 70s, however, most of these styles were evolving in the underground music scene.

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 James Taylor, Carole King and others, all known just as much for the lyric ability as for their performances [93]. The same period saw the rise of bluesy Southern rock and country rock bands like the Allman Brothers Band and Lynyrd Skynyrd [94]. In the 1970s, soft rock developed, a kind of simple, unobtrusive and mellow form of pop-rock [95], exemplified by a number of bands like America and Bread, most of whom are little-remembered today; many were one-hit wonders. In addition, harder-rocking arena rock bands like Chicago and Styx also saw some major success.

By the end of the decade, disco, a form of electronic dance music, was popular. Disco's time was short, however, and was soon replaced with a number of genres that evolved out of the alternative punk rock scene, like New Wave. Bruce Springsteen became a major star, first in the midto late late 70s and then throughout the 80s, with dense, inscrutable lyrics that celebrated the poor and working class and anthemic songs that resonated with the middle and lower classes [96].

By the end of the 1980s, pop-rock largely consisted of the radio-friendly hair 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 [97]. 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 [98].

In the early 1990s, gangsta rap and grunge music rose to the top of the American charts. By the middle of the decade, however, pop-rock bands had returned with a pop punk feel, including bands like the Caribbean-influenced Sublime, the anthemic rock of Green Day and the sophomoric, light-hearted sound of The Offspring and blink-182. Later still, hard-edged garage rock bands like The Strokes and The White Stripes became very popular, especially into the early 2000s, while the charts remained dominated by hip hop and R&B groups.

Main articles: Punk rock, alternative rock

Punk was a kind of rebellious rock music that began in the United Kingdom in the 1970s, then spread to the United States.

Hardcore 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 [99]. Hardcore exploded in the American metropolises of Los Angeles, Washington, DC, New York and Boston and most American cities had their own local scenes by the end of the 1980s.

Alternative rock is a diverse grouping of rock subgenres that developed from the early 1980s anti-corporate rock of the tail end of the punk rock boom. More specifically, it is made up mostly of genres that appeared in the 1980s and became popular or well known by the 1990s, such as indie rock, post-punk, gothic rock, and college rock. Most alternative bands were unified by their collective debt to punk, which laid the groundwork for underground and alternative music in the 1970s. Though the genre is considered to be rock, some of its genres were influenced by folk music, reggae and jazz music among other genres.

In the United States, many cities developed their own alternative rock scenes, like Minneapolis, Minnesota, Athens, Georgia, Washington, D.C. and, most influentially, Seattle, Washington. The most prominent American bands of this era include Fugazi, Hüsker Dü and Sonic Youth [100].

File:RollingstovecoverCobain.jpg
Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain

Grunge music is an independent-rooted music genre that was inspired by hardcore punk, thrash metal, and alternative rock. Grunge has a "dark, brooding guitar-based sludge" sound [101], drawing on elements of earlier bands like Sonic Youth and their use of "unconventional tunings to bend otherwise standard pop songs completely out of shape" [102]. With the addition of a "melodic, Beatlesque element" to the sound of bands like Nirvana, grunge became wildly popular across the United States [103].

Grunge became commercially successful in the late 1980s and early 1990s, peaking in mainstream popularity between 1991 and 1994. Bands from cities in the U.S. Pacific Northwest such as Seattle, Washington, Olympia, Washington, and Portland, Oregon, were responsible for creating grunge music and later made it popular with mainstream audiences. The supposed Generation X, who had just reached adulthood as grunge's popularity peaked, were closely associated with grunge, the sound which helped "define the desperation of (that) generation" [104].

"Come As You Are"
This song is by Nirvana, who did more than any other group to bring grunge into the mainstream.
Problems playing this file? See media help.

Soul

Main article: Soul

Latin music

Main article: Latin music in the United States

Tejano

Main article: Tejano music

Salsa music

Main article: Salsa music

Heavy metal and progressive rock

Main articles: Heavy metal music and progressive rock

Electronic music

Main article: Electronic music, disco, house music and techno music

Hip hop

Main article: Hip hop music

Hip hop is a cultural movement, of which music is a part (as are graffiti art and breakdancing). The music is itself composed of two parts, rapping, the delivery of swift, highly rhythmic and lyrical vocals, and DJing, the production of instrumentation either through sampling, instrumentation, turntablism or beatboxing [105].

Hip hop arose in the early 1970s in Harlem, New York City. Jamaican immigrant DJ Kool Herc is widely regarded as the progenitor of hip hop; he brought with him the practice of toasting over the rhythms of popular songs (the root of modern dub music and ragga). 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 break of songs (when the rhythm speeds and climaxes), thus producing a repeated beat that the emcees rapped over [106].

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 "Rappers Delight" by the Sugarhill Gang and the major celebrities of the scene, like LL Cool J and Kurtis Blow. Other performers experimented with politicized lyrics and social awareness, while others performed fusions with jazz, heavy metal, techno, funk and soul.

Hip hop began to diversify in the latter part of the 1980s. New styles appeared, like alternative hip hop and the closely related jazz rap fusion, pioneered by rappers like De La Soul and Guru. The crews 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.

Gangsta rap is a kind of hip hop, most importantly characterized by a lyrical focus on macho sexuality, physicality and a dangerous, criminal image. Craig Werner notes that black hip hop performers were pressured into projecting images that fit into "white stereotypes of black life as primal, sexual violent... (as) hip-hop gained popularity, musicians who'd actually lived something resembling the life they sang about... faced the temptation (of) catering to the fantasies of the young white men who made up the majority of gangsta rap's audience" [107].

File:Dr.Dre.JPG
Dr. Dre

Though the origins of gangsta rap can be traced back to the mid-1980s raps of Philadelphia's Schoolly D and the West Coast's Ice-T, the style is usually said to have begun in the Los Angeles and Oakland area, where Too $hort, NWA and others found their fame. This West Coast rap scene spawned the early 1990s G-funk sound, which paired gangsta rap lyrics with a thick and hazy tone, often relying on samples from 1970s P-funk; the best-known proponents of this sound were the breakthrough rappers Dr. Dre and Snoop Doggy Dogg.

International and social impact

American popular music has become extremely popular internationally. Rock, hip hop, jazz, country and other styles have fans across the globe. BBC Radio DJ Andy Kershaw has noted that North Korea is the only country in which he never heard country music [108], 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" [109] and Reebee Garofalo claims that the impacts of rock and roll "transformed the very concept of what popular music was" [110]. American popular music has inspired many popular genres in other countries, from the British blues to Bongo Flava and Australian country music, and has played an important part in the evolution of reggae, raï, highlife and Afrobeat, among other very popular styles.

The social impacts of American popular music have been felt both within the United States and in foreign countries. Beginning as early as the extravaganzas of the late 19th century (assuming one considers the term popular music to extend to that field), American popular music has been criticized for being too sexually titillating and sometimes for encouraging violence, drug abuse and generally immoral behavior. Criticisms have been especially targetted at African American styles of music as they began attracting white, generally youthful audiences; blues, jazz, rock and hip hop all fall into this category.

References

  • "Nashville sound/Countrypolitan". Allmusic. June 6. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= and |year= / |date= mismatch (help)
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  • . ISBN 0205137032. {{cite book}}: Missing or empty |title= (help); Unknown parameter |Author= ignored (|author= suggested) (help); Unknown parameter |Publisher= ignored (|publisher= suggested) (help); Unknown parameter |Title= ignored (|title= suggested) (help); Unknown parameter |Year= ignored (|year= suggested) (help)
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  • "Band Music From the Civil War Era". Library of Congress. June 13. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= and |year= / |date= mismatch (help)
  • . ISBN 0030592070. {{cite book}}: Missing or empty |title= (help); Unknown parameter |Author= ignored (|author= suggested) (help); Unknown parameter |Publisher= ignored (|publisher= suggested) (help); Unknown parameter |Title= ignored (|title= suggested) (help); Unknown parameter |Year= ignored (|year= suggested) (help)
  • . ISBN 0292710968. {{cite book}}: Missing or empty |title= (help); Unknown parameter |Author= ignored (|author= suggested) (help); Unknown parameter |Publisher= ignored (|publisher= suggested) (help); Unknown parameter |Title= ignored (|title= suggested) (help); Unknown parameter |Year= ignored (|year= suggested) (help); cited in Garofalo
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  • Template:Journal reference novolume; cited in Garofalo
  • "Hank Williams". PBS' American Masters. June 6. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= and |year= / |date= mismatch (help)
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  • "Nashville Sound". Roughstock's History of Country Music. June 6. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= and |year= / |date= mismatch (help)
  • . ISBN 0306810077. {{cite book}}: Missing or empty |title= (help); Unknown parameter |Author= ignored (|author= suggested) (help); Unknown parameter |Publisher= ignored (|publisher= suggested) (help); Unknown parameter |Title= ignored (|title= suggested) (help); Unknown parameter |Year= ignored (|year= suggested) (help)
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Notes

  1. ^ Ewen, pg. 3
  2. ^ Garofalo is an example
  3. ^ Clarke, pgs. 1-19
  4. ^ 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
  5. ^ Ewen, pg. 153-154
  6. ^ Garofalo, pg. 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".
  7. ^ Garofalo, pg. 149
  8. ^ ‘’Rolling Stone’’, pg. 20 ’’The most popular Afro-American innovation around the turn of the century was ragtime, a piano-based music with strongly syncopated rhythms and chromaticisms.’’
  9. ^ Garofalo, pg. 26
  10. ^ Schuller, Gunther, pg. 24, cited in Garofalo, pg. 26 Ragtime employed ‘’the polymetric... approach of the African native forced into the simple 2/4 pattern of European marches’’.
  11. ^ Clarke, pgs. 56-57
  12. ^ Clarke, pg. 57 (R)agtime may have begun with attempts to imitate the banjo on the keyboard.
  13. ^ Ewen, pg. 142
  14. ^ Garofalo, pg. 26 Garofalo calls Joplin the ‘’most famous practitioner’’ of ragtime.
  15. ^ Clarke, pg. 51
  16. ^ Ewen, pg. 94
  17. ^ Ewen, pg. 94 (T)hese 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.
  18. ^ Ewen, pg. 95
  19. ^ Ewen, pg. 98
  20. ^ Ewen, pg. 98 Less disposed toward clichés than so many of his rivals, elss inclined to stretch an emotion to the point of maudlin and cloying sentimentality, Dresser was a composers whose finest ballads have a winning charm and a lingering fragrance.
  21. ^ Ewen, pg. 101
  22. ^ Ewen, pg. 101
  23. ^ Ewen, pg. 101 and Clarke, pg. 62Ewen attributes "New Coon in Town" to Paul Allen, though Clarke attributes it to J. S. Putnam, though both agree on the year, 1883
  24. ^ Ewen, pg. 65
  25. ^ Ewen, pg. 69
  26. ^ Ewen, pg. 79
  27. ^ Ewen, pg. 81
  28. ^ Ewen, pg. 82
  29. ^ Ewen, pg. 86
  30. ^ Ewen, pg. 89
  31. ^ Clarke, pg. 95
  32. ^ Clarke, pgs. 102-103
  33. ^ Garofalo, pg. 44
  34. ^ Ferris, pg. 229
  35. ^ Ewen, pg. 15
  36. ^ Malone, pg. 4, cited in Garofalo, pg. 45
  37. ^ Garofalo, pg. 45 As country music evolved into a commercial enterprise, its list of sources broadened to include the influence of German and Swiss yodelers, Italian mandolin players, and Hawaiian string bands.
  38. ^ Sawyers, pg. 191
  39. ^ Sawyers, pg. 198
  40. ^ Barraclough, Nick and Kurt Wolff. "High an' Lonesome" in the Rough Guide to World Music, Volume 2, pg. 537 Barraclough and Wolff do not purport to explain the European and African roots of the guitar and banjo, only the change from the ubiquitous fiddle-and-banjo to include the guitar.
  41. ^ Rolling Stone, pgs. 19-20 Ward, Tucker and Stokes do not cite any explanation for the spread of the guitar aside from the price, which cost between $2.70 and $10.80 through the Sears, Roebuck & Co 1900 catalogue; they also give low prices for pianos, violins and banjos. When these inexpensive musical instruments found their way into the most remote areas of the nation, they inalterably changed centuries of musical traditions. The English/Scottish people of Appalachia, whose ballads had mostly been sung unaccompanied and who used the fiddle as a lead instrument for dancing, began to adapt their traditional melodies to the intonation of the readily available guitar, with its fixed frets. Soon, they started playing guitar chords behind the modal dance melodies that squeezed around them like a tight pair of shoes.
  42. ^ Garofalo, pg. 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.
  43. ^ Collins, pg. 11
  44. ^ Garofalo, pg. 74
  45. ^ Gillett, pg. 9, cited in Garofalo, pg. 74
  46. ^ Werner, pg. 60
  47. ^ Garofalo, pg. 75
  48. ^ Roughstock
  49. ^ PBS American Masters
  50. ^ Allmusic
  51. ^ Rolling Stone, pg. 51 Monroe was always a hard guy to get along with, and two of the best musicians who had ever played with him, a guitar-and-banjo duo named Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, exited his band to make a more modern, stremalined form of bluegrass music fueled by Scrugg's unusual three-finger banjo-picking style.
  52. ^ Merwe, pg. unavailable
  53. ^ Collins, pg. 75
  54. ^ Clarke, pg. 487
  55. ^ Collins, pg. 178
  56. ^ Garofalo, pg. 283
  57. ^ Garofalo, pg. 282
  58. ^ Garofalo, pg. 283
  59. ^ Garofalo, pg. 458
  60. ^ Garofalo, pg. 459
  61. ^ Ferris, pg. 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.
  62. ^ Ferris, pg. 233 Their hot new dance music combined the steady beat and stirring tempo of European march and dance tunes with the subtle and complex syncopations of black African and Caribbean effects.
  63. ^ Ferris, pg. 233
  64. ^ Garofalo, pg. 71
  65. ^ Clarke, pgs. 200-201
  66. ^ Garofalo, pg. 72
  67. ^ Ferris, pg. 243
  68. ^ Clarke, pg. 268
  69. ^ Broughton, Viv and James Attlee. "Devil Stole the Beat" in the Rough Guide to World Music, Volume 2, pg. 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)
  70. ^ Werner, pgs. 4-5
  71. ^ Broughton, Viv and James Attlee. "Devil Stole the Beat" in the Rough Guide to World Music, Volume 2, pg. 569 Many of rock'n'roll's characteristics, from rhythms to vocal styles, from dance steps to stagediving, were first conceived on the gospel circuit -- and it's perhaps no surprise that it started early, with Elvis Presley, Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis -- among many other American singers -- learning at the feet of gospel's own legends. (emphasis in original)
  72. ^ Baraka, pg. 168, cited in Garofalo, pg. 76
  73. ^ Garofalo, pg. 76, 78
  74. ^ Rolling Stone, pgs. 99-100 Ward, Stokes and Tucker call cover versions the ants at the increasingly sumptuous rhythm-and-blues picnic.
  75. ^ Rolling Stone, pgs. 101-102Ward, Stokes and Tucker cite Diddley and Berry, singling out Berry's "Maybellene" for staying in the Top Ten for weeks.
  76. ^ Garofalo, pgs. 96-97, 121
  77. ^ Garofalo, pg. 121
  78. ^ Marcus, pg. , cited in Garofalo, pg. 121
  79. ^ Garofalo, pg. 122
  80. ^ Garofalo, pg. 131
  81. ^ Garofalo, pg. 367
  82. ^ Werner, pg. 326
  83. ^ Palmer, pg. 48; cited in Garofalo, pg. 95
  84. ^ Lipsitz, pg. 214 ; cited in Garofalo, pg. 95
  85. ^ Garofalo, pg. 131
  86. ^ Gillett, pg. 38; cited in Garofalo, pg. 132
  87. ^ Garofalo, pg. 185
  88. ^ Szatmary, pgs. 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.
  89. ^ Rolling Stone, pg. 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.
  90. ^ Garofalo, pg. 201 Garofalo specifically lists "Roll Over Beethoven" by Chuck Berry, "Long Tall Sally" by Little Richard, "Twist and Shout" by the Isley Brothers, "Money" by Barrett Strong, "Boys" and Baby It's You" by The Shirelles, "You've Really Got a Hold on Me" by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles and "Chains" by The Cookies.
  91. ^ Garofalo, pg. 196
  92. ^ Clarke, pgs. 476-477
  93. ^ Garofalo, pg. 218
  94. ^ Garofalo, pg. 218 The Grateful Dead combined the anticommercial tendencies of white middle-class youth with the mind-altering properties of lyseric acid diethylamide (LSD).

singersongwriter}} Szatmary, pg. 202

  1. ^ Szatmary, pg. 186
  2. ^ Garofalo, pg. 265
  3. ^ Garofalo, pg. 271
  4. ^ Garofalo, pgs. 402-403
  5. ^ Garofalo, pg. 406
  6. ^ Blush, pgs. 12-13
  7. ^ Garofalo, pgs. 446-447
  8. ^ Garofalo, pg. 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.
  9. ^ Garofalo, pg. 451 From (Glenn Branca's) group they learned to use unconvential 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.
  10. ^ Szatmary, pg. 285 Recording the songs that would become Nevermind, Nirvana added a melodic, Beatlesque element, which had shaped Cobain, Novoselic, and new drummer Dave Grohl.
  11. ^ Szatmary, pg. 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.
  12. ^ Garofalo, pgs. 408-409
  13. ^ Vibe, pg. unavailable
  14. ^ Werner, pg. 290
  15. ^ Kershaw, pg. 167
  16. ^ Gillett, pg. i, quote from Garofalo, pg. 4
  17. ^ Garofalo, pg. 94
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