What Do You Know? pop styles and social groups
Hitting the Books! early commercial musics and the dawn of recording
Learning in Action opinions on jazz - 1920s to today
How Did You Do? feedback on your short essay
Making Connections leading up to rock and roll
What Do You Know?
Make a list of every style of popular music before rock and roll that you can think of. Then try to identify each with a particular economic class and/or racial identity. Are some styles easier to match with definable groups than others?
Hitting the Books!
The 1920s: New Forms
With the recording revolution in the 1920s, new forms of music
would appear in the mainstream consciousness. Many of these forms could not
have emerged before the 1920s simply because they did not lend themselves to
the sheet music medium. Styles like blues were dependent on variations in timbre
and pitch (i.e. the notes between the piano keys) that were impossible to print
on sheet music, let alone reproduce on the family piano.
But the cultural conditions of the 1920s were different as well. The Victorian
era, with its conservative views, was long over. World War I had shaken the
old traditions and beliefs with its technologically advanced warfare and shockingly
large death toll. Music listeners in the 1920s were more receptive to new sounds,
and this openness was manifested in a series of “crazes”, brief
flourishes of interest in cultural expressions that seemed exotic, dangerous
or transgressive. This included every area of art, including poetry (Ezra Pound
[1885-1972], Dorothy Parker [1893-1967]), literature (Ernest Hemingway [1899-1961],
F. Scott Fitzgerald [1896-1940]), visual art (Pablo Picasso [1881-1973], Edvard
Munch [1863-1944]) and music - not only the atonal music of Arnold Schoenberg
[1874-1951] and the mechanical noise of the Italian Futurists, but the African-American
forms of blues and jazz.
Blues
Blues music seems to have originated in the late 19th century.
It was an outgrowth of the work songs and field hollers of the slavery era,
which ended with Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in 1863.
These early African-American forms were dependent on a technique of call and
response. Very simply, this is a musical technique whereby one person sings
or plays a phrase and another person or group responds to it with an answer
phrase or a variation on the first phrase. Sometimes a single performer can
perform call and response on his or her own, as B.B. King responds to his vocal
phrases with guitar licks. Blues music has retained a core of call and response
to the present day.
The early development of blues is fairly mysterious because there are no recordings
of blues until 1920, and it was generally not documented on sheet music. Therefore
we really don’t know what blues sounded like before Mamie Smith’s
hit record of 1920, “Crazy Blues”. This record kicked off a blues
craze that saw blues recordings selling hundreds of thousands or even millions
of copies. With these sales figures, blues was definitely finding an audience
with both black and white listeners.
Blues records were released in increasing numbers throughout the twenties, most
of them adhering to a set model. A black female singer would perform with band
accompaniment (two or more backing musicians). These singers were generally
drawn from the ranks of vaudeville, travelling medicine shows, and the like.
The records themselves were professional, polished productions. This form of
blues is called classic blues today. It faded in popularity after the start
of the Great Depression in 1929. An excellent example of classic blues is “St.
Louis Blues” (1924) by Bessie Smith (1894-1937). Bessie Smith was already
a veteran of vaudeville and travelling shows when she recorded her most enduring
disc. She also recorded popular songs, including a few by Irving Berlin. She
died after a car crash while touring in Mississippi.
“St. Louis Blues” features Louis Armstrong (1898-1971), at the time
a budding jazz star, on cornet (a relative of the trumpet) and Fred Longshaw
playing a pedal-powered keyboard instrument called a reed organ. The song was
composed by W.C. Handy (1873-1958), a classically trained black musician who
was the first composer to publish blues sheet music. Smith sings the song in
a lilting yet strong-willed voice, with Armstrong answering her phrases in a
voice-cornet call and response.
Later in the 1920s another version of blues started to appear on record. Known
today as country blues, this a more rural, backcountry southern form, and was
thus more popular among Southern black listeners than the classic blues. Country
blues tended to be performed by solo male performers, who would most often accompany
themselves on guitar. As opposed to the recording studios where classic blues
records were cut, country blues was most often recorded “on location”,
by travelling talent scouts with portable recording equipment. Often these scouts
would set up their equipment in a hotel room for a few days, recording several
musicians and paying them a flat fee per song. Country blues was a rougher,
more irregular form than classic blues, but it was to survive the ravages of
the Great Depression where classic blues would not.
Jazz
Unlike most styles of music, the origins of jazz can be definitively
traced to a single geographic location - New Orleans, Louisiana. Jazz in New
Orleans was, like ragtime, a highly syncopated instrumental form. Instrumentation
was partly derived from the marching band, and it typically included clarinet,
trumpet, trombone, banjo, piano and drum set. The banjo, piano and drum set
would provide a strong, steady rhythmic base while the wind instruments played
simultaneously using a technique called collective improvisation. This is a
technique where more than one instrumentalist composes variations “on
the spot”, without the aid of sheet music or memorized tunes. The greatest
jazz improvisers, like Louis Armstrong and Sidney Bechet, were capable of amazing
flights of musical invention, and every performance was different.
New Orleans was, and is, a place of great ethnic and cultural diversity. This
is often cited as the reason that such a rich musical mix as jazz developed
there and not in, say, Boston. Certainly the rich Creole and Cajun syncretic
cultures had much to do with the musical and cultural mixes that created jazz.
But jazz was primarily a black form, even though the first recorded jazz band,
the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, was all-white. The 1923 recording of “Dippermouth
Blues” by King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band is a good example of the
classic New Orleans jazz sound.
Jazz was to be just as important as blues to the transformation of mainstream
tastes. Tin Pan Alley in particular took on features of jazz harmony and rhythm
and “hot” improvised solos became an integral part of mainstream
popular music up to the present day.
The sudden popularity of jazz in the 20s, especially among younger listeners,
caused a backlash reaction among those who defended “good taste”
in music. To 1990s sensibilities, the racist undertones of the anti-jazz rhetoric
are quite apparent.
“Its melodies all run to a pattern, and that pattern is crude and childish. Its rhythms are almost as bad; what is amusing in them is as old as Johann Sebastian Bach, and what is new is simply an elephantine hop, skip and jump. Nor is there anything charming in jazz harmony, once it has been heard a couple of times...the modulations, in the main, are simply those of a church organist far gone in liquor.”
“The dancing that goes with this noise is, if anything, even worse. It is the complete negation of graceful and charming motion....the coloured brethren and their ladies would stamp and wriggle, each sticking to a space of a few square feet...[in the past] the proud Aryan [i.e. white person] pursued the waltz and two-step, and ballroom dancing had sweeping linear patterns, and went to tripping and amusing tunes. But now the patterns are gone, and dancing everywhere degenerates to...a puerile writhing on a narrow spot“.
“Jazz originally was the accompaniment of the voodoo dancer, stimulating the half-crazed barbarian to the vilest deeds. The weird chant, accompanied by the syncopated rhythm, also has been employed by other barbaric people to stimulate brutality and sensuality” .
In the popular imagination,
the 20s were the “jazz age”. The author F. Scott Fitzgerald is often
credited with this idea, and it makes sense when jazz is used as a metaphor
for freedom of self-expression.
““Jazz” became a word describing style and attitude, newness,
ultramodernity. In the middle-class culture arguing about the immorality of
hooch-swigging, shimmying middle-class youth, jazz was colonialized as a word
used as a negative moral epithet”.
The 1920s is perhaps the
first decade where we can see a popular music reflecting the aspirations of
a society so aptly, if not helping to influence change.
Through the popularity and influence of blues and jazz in the 1920s, African-American
musical aesthetics began to infiltrate the mainstream consciousness. During
the Great Depression, which decimated many businesses including the record business,
both blues and jazz underwent transformations. Though classic blues waned in
the thirties, country blues continued to develop. The recordings of Robert Johnson
(1912-1938) in 1936-37 show a new direction for blues - Johnson’s hard-driving
guitar accompaniment and unfettered, soulful singing point towards new forms
in the 1940s, including Chicago blues, a direct precursor of rock and roll and
a vital urban form throughout the 1950s and 1960s.
Jazz metamorphosized into swing in the thirties, as collective improvisation
gave way to written-out arrangements with strategically placed improvised solo
sections, and small groups grew into 18-piece big bands. Mainstream America
embraced the white big bands of Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey, but bands like
that of the black pianist and bandleader William ‘Count’ Basie began
to forge a hard-swinging, rhythmic approach that owed much to the riffs of blues
music. A riff is a short musical phrase that is repeated, sometimes with variations,
as a primary structural factor in some styles of music. Riffs can have an exciting
cumulative effect over time. The Basie band featured a driving rhythm section
anchored by Freddie Green. Green (1911-1986), a rhythm guitarist, played in
a straightforward four-strums-to-the-bar style that kept the Basie band swinging
on hits like “One O’Clock Jump” (1936) and “Open the
Door, Richard” (#2 R&B, 1947). Basie’s big band went on to make
a series of legendary recordings backing Frank Sinatra.
Rhythm and Blues
Black popular music in
the 1940s was to be largely a fusion of the simplicity and emotion of blues
with the hard-driving rhythm and big band instrumentation of 1930s swing jazz.
The resulting form, rhythm and blues (R&B), was characterized by medium
to large bands with rhythm section (drum set, upright bass, piano, guitar) and
horns (saxophones, trumpets, trombones) with a male singer out front. Rhythm
and blues singing most typically took the form of a swaggering, shouting style.
Wynonie Harris (1915-1969) epitomized the 1940s R&B singing style with his
“Good Rockin’ Tonight” (#1 R&B, 1948), a Roy Brown composition
later reworked by Elvis Presley.
A particularly forward-looking and popular performer of the era was Louis Jordan
(1908-1975), whose small horn band provided swinging proto-rock and roll to
accompany Jordan’s often hilarious songs and raps, including “Five
Guys Named Moe” (#3 R&B, 1943), “Ain’t Nobody Here But
Us Chickens” (#1 R&B, 1947), and “Saturday Night Fish Fry”
(#1 R&B, 1949). His style, sometimes called “jump blues” was
to be seminal in the development of early rock and roll, and his easygoing vocal
delivery and streetwise lyrics were equally influential to artists like Chuck
Berry. Furthermore, his style is experiencing a resurgence in the late 90s,
with acts like Cherry Poppin’ Daddies and the Johnny Favorite Swing Orchestra.
An added ingredient of 1940s R&B was the electric guitar, introduced by
the Rickenbacker and Gibson guitar companies in the 1930s. Charlie Christian
(1916-1942), the black guitarist in the white bandleader Benny Goodman’s
big band, was to define the electric guitar as a featured solo instrument. His
horn-like guitar lines aided in the guitar’s popularity in R&B bands
as well as influencing electric blues guitarists like T-Bone Walker and B.B.
King and the guitarists in the harder blues bands coming together in Chicago,
Illinois.
Chicago was the northern destination for many southern blacks (especially from
Mississippi, Tennessee and Arkansas), who left to escape the oppressive sharecropping
system and to seek work in wartime defence plants. In the 1940s, formerly acoustic
country blues musicians like McKinley Morganfield, a.k.a. Muddy Waters (1915-1983),
began to arrive in Chicago, acquire electric guitars and amplifiers, and put
together small bands to play in nightclubs. These bands played rough, exciting
electric blues, often combining electric guitar with amplified harmonica, piano,
drum set and upright bass.
Most of the more popular Chicago groups recorded for an independent label named
Chess. Founded in 1947 by Polish emigres Leonard and Phil Chess (formerly Chez),
Chess’ roster included the legendary blues performers Muddy Waters, Little
Walter and Howlin’ Wolf, as well as later rock and roll stars Bo Diddley
and Chuck Berry. The Chess brothers had owned a string of businesses on the
south side of Chicago before starting their company. They had planned on focusing
on jazz, but they found that jazz just didn’t sell in high enough quantities.
So a switch to blues and R&B was made, and Chess became one of the most
important labels of the 50s.
Country Music
One more formerly marginal
musical form found commercial acceptance starting in the 1920s. Country music
was the music of white musicians living in rural sections of the southern U.S.
Ralph Peer (1892-1960), a travelling recording scout, was in Atlanta in June
1923 looking for blues musicians (he had supervised the recording of Mamie Smith’s
“Crazy Blues”) when it was suggested to him that he record a local
white folk musician named Fiddlin’ John Carson (1868-1949). The resulting
disc, “The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane”, was the first country
record recorded in the South and a huge success. It also established country
music, known at the time as “hillbilly” music, as a commercial genre.
The two most important country acts of the 1920s were Jimmie Rodgers and the
Carter Family. Together, they epitomized the basic values of country music mythology.
Rodgers (1897-1933), nicknamed “The Singing Brakeman” because of
an early career on the railroads, was both a singer and a blues-influenced songwriter.
He was encouraged in the latter pursuit by Ralph Peer, who supervised the recordings
of both Rodgers and the Carter Family. His influence on country music has been
inestimable, based on his huge output of songs, which, besides blues-derived
material, included parlour ballads, fragments of traditional song, railroad
and hobo narratives and novelty songs, as well as his warm performing style,
which translated well to records. In late 1927, he recorded “Blue Yodel”,
a worldwide million seller. He went on to record thirteen “Blue Yodel”s
in all. After suffering from tuberculosis for many years, the disease finally
claimed his life in a hotel room in New York. In 1961 he became the first artist
inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville. For many, Jimmie
Rodgers symbolized the country archetype of the rootless drifter.
The other end of the spectrum was represented by the Carter Family. The Carter
Family, A.P. (1891-1960), his wife Sara (1898-1979) and A.P.’s sister-in-law
Maybelle (1909-1978) symbolized traditional family values with their old-time
songs and harmony singing. A large part of their contribution was the fact that
they translated traditional Southern songs into a commercial context. Much of
the appeal of the group lay in Sara’s calm, deep-toned singing and Maybelle’s
innovative guitar technique, which involved plucking a melody on the bass strings
in alternation with strummed chords on the treble strings. The majority of the
Carters’ material was traditional folk ballads, collected from amateurs
by A.P., who would then publish them, often as his own compositions. A.P. was
typical of the music professional who exploits traditional forms for financial
gain, counting on the naivete and lack of business acumen of the rural residents
who contributed the music. This unflattering portrait conflicts with the Carters’
down-home image.
By the late 1940s, Hank Williams (1923-1953) was country’s biggest star,
racking up several million-selling records including “Hey, Good Lookin’”
(#2 C&W, 1951) and “Cold, Cold Heart” (#2 C&W, 1951). He
was influenced by Jimmie Rodgers and a black street singer named Tee-Tot as
a child in Greenwood, Mississippi. Williams grew up dirt-poor, and began to
perform and write songs as a teenager. He gradually climbed the ladder of the
still-new country music industry, and was a bona fide star by the late 1940s.
While many of his hit lyrics described the country music stereotypes of drinkin’
and cheatin’, he also recorded a series of religious spoken word discs
under the name Luke the Drifter. A heavy drinker, Williams wore himself down
at an early age and died in the back seat of a car on January 1. 1953. Like
Rodgers, Williams was a gifted songwriter influenced by the blues (and a man
with a penchant for self-destructive behaviour). His “Lovesick Blues”
(#1 C&W, 1949) was to foreshadow the fusions of country music and rhythm
and blues that characterized the music of Elvis Presley and other rockabillies.
Learning In Action
Write a 500 word essay dealing with the following questions: How has the public and critical opinion of jazz changed since the 1920s? Is jazz still considered a danger to the integrity of youth? Are there any modern parallels to the 1920s hysteria over the effects of jazz on young people?
How Did You Do?
Send me your essay for feedback.
Making Connections
In your notebook, write a short reflection on what you have learned so far. How is the stage being set for the explosion of rock and roll in the 50s? Certainly much was gained with rock and roll, but was anything lost? What do you think happened to these older forms of music?