American music

Unique forms and styles of music have developed in America. Ragtime, blues, jazz, country-western, rock ‘n’ roll, and the musical are all American-born.

Some music historians, in fact, see the development of American music as a continual dialogue between the cultivated and the vernacular, between the “serious” music of high art and the music heard on street corners or in dance halls. In the early 19^th century, popular music consisted largely of songs with homegrown lyrics grafted on to melodies borrowed from England. By the middle of the century, composers like Stephen Foster, often influenced by the music brought from Africa by black slaves, were writing the first truly American popular songs. By the end of the century, white and black styles had merged in the syncopated rhythms of ragtime. Ragtime was the first black American music to gain wide popularity. Composer Scott Joplin (1868-1917) helped develop ragtime from simple parlor piano music into a serious genre. Ragtime is most important for its association with the blues, which them inspired jazz, America’s most original music form.

In the 19^th century the dominating popular music coexisted with regional pockets of folk music kept alive by the nation’s many immigrant groups – Scots, Irish, Jews, Germans, Poles. French-Canadians, Italians, Hispanics. Since popular songwriters have always looked for fresh approaches, each of these ethnic musics would eventually contribute its flavor to the rich stew of contemporary American music.

As the 20^th century progressed, the line between pop and serious music became blurred. George Gershwin (1898-1937), for example, was a pop composer whose music has always been admired in cultivated circles. Classical styles influenced Hollywood film composers. In the 1930s, a leftish populism proclaimed the value of the pop and folk traditions, and serious composers (Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson) incorporated folk melodies in their work.

The blues evolved from American folk songs and church music. Sung by soloists or featuring solo instruments, blues music often expresses disappointment or regret.

Jazz, now recognized as a world-wide art form, originated around the turn of the century among black musicians in the American South. The music was inspired by African culture but evolved directly from spirituals, ragtime, and blues. Jazz is characterized by improvisations and a lively attention to rhythm, something famous jazz musician Duke Ellington (1899-1974) called “swing”.

By 1920, jazz has spread from the South, and in the 1930s, it reached its heyday of mass popularity as big band music. Louis Armstrong (1900-1971), a trumpeter and soloist, was one of the first well-known jazz singers. Other early jazz leaders were Duke Ellington, “Dizzy” Gillespie and Charlie Parker.

Nowadays jazz has moved to new frontiers. In the 1960s and 1970s, jazz musicians began combining the rhythms of rock ‘n’ roll and electronic instruments with traditional elements of jazz to form a blend of music called “fusion”.

The influence of jazz is found in many types of American music. The music of George Gershwin, one of America’s most popular song writers and composers, was strongly influenced by jazz. The concerto “Rhapsody in Blue” and the opera “Porgy and Bess” were two of his works which incorporated jazz.

Another popular type of music which came out of the American South is country-western. However, its cultural origin and musical sounds are totally different from jazz. It was created by the rural people of the Appalachian Mountain region who were by and large isolated from the industrial growth and urbanization of mush of America. They began with the English and Scottish ballads of their immigrant ancestry and built upon them, often with the instruments they made themselves. The distinctive sound of country music depends on the guitar, banjo and fiddle. Lyrics focuses on their poverty, their God, their crops, their families.

The first recording of a country music song, “Sally Goodin”, by a fiddle player named Eck Robertson, appeared in 1922. In 1925 a Nashville, Tennessee, radio station started a weekly broadcast of live performances by country fiddlers. Then in the late 1950s, with the rise of rock ‘n’ roll and the popularity of traditional country music on the wane, Chet Atkins (an innovative guitarist and record producer) added back-up singing ensembles and string sections to the recording. He took some of the twang out of the voiced\s and created what came to be called the Nashville Sound.

In the 1930s another native American-born art form emerged. The musical was a new form of entertainment which combined acting, music, and ballet. The musical was inspired by the Anglo-Irish musical theater, the central European operetta, and the American vaudeville minstrel show. Basically entertaining in character, most early screen musicals were lavish and glamorous escapist fantasies. Later musicals, such as Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Oklahoma” and Sondheim and Bernstein’s “West Side Story”, included serious themes and social criticism.

Rock ‘n’ roll developed as a mixture of black blues and white country-western. The music quickly won intense and sustained appeal with young people not only in America, but all over the world. Early rock musicians as Elvis Presley and Bob Dylan were idolized by millions of teenagers.

Today among the music’s myriad subgenres are the black variants, soul music and funk, heavy metal and its opposite, soft rock; the hybrids, country rock; folk rock and rockabilly; the Caribbean influences, reggae and salsa; and the most recent attempts to recapture rock’s rhythmic power, rap music and art rock.