American music and musicians

A third leading swing band was that of Glenn Miller (1904–1944). From 1939 until 1942 the Miller Orchestra was the most popular dance band in the world, breaking record sales and concert attendance records. Miller developed a peppy, clean-sounding style that appealed to small-town midwestern people as well as to the big-city, East and West Coast constituency that had previously sustained swing music. In terms of sheer popular success, the Miller band marked the apex of the swing era, racking up 23 Number-One recordings in a little under four years.

Neither jazz nor its far-reaching influence on American music and culture ended in the 1930s, however. Swing, also known as big band music, grew out of and was strongly influenced by jazz. Beyond swing, every succeeding generation of musicians has defined its own style of jazz, responding to and challenging the aural legacy that began in New Orleans. Bebop, cool jazz, fusion jazz, soul jazz, and acid jazz are just a few of the varieties that have grown from the original tree of sound [10, p. 88-87].

Country music has always been about the relationship between the countryside and the city, home and migration, the past and the present. This is not surprising if we consider the main audience for this music during the 1920s: rural people whose way of life was being radically transformed by the mechanization of agriculture and changes in the American economy, and migrants who left home to find jobs and establish new lives in the city.

Early country music records provide us with a stereoscopic image of tradition in a period of rapid change: on the one hand, ballads and love songs, images of the good old days, family, hearth and home; and on the other, tales of broken love, distance from loved ones and restless movement from town to town.

Country and western music mushroomed in popularity after World War II. Although the South remained a lucrative area for touring performers, the wartime migration of millions of white southerners meant that huge and enthusiastic audiences for country and western music had also been established in the cities and towns of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and California. The postwar era saw the rapid spread of country music programming on radio, and by 1949 over 650 radio stations were making live broadcasts of country performers. In 1950 — when Capitol Records became the first major company to set up its country music operation in Nashville, Tennessee — it was estimated that country music accounted for fully one-third of all record sales nationwide.

In some ways, the range of country music styles during the postwar era resembles contemporaneous developments in rhythm & blues. There were country crooners, who specialized in a smooth, pop-oriented style; bluegrass musicians, who focused on the adaptation of traditional southern music in a package suitable to the times; and honky-tonk musicians, who performed in a hard-edged, electronically amplified style, and wrote songs about the trials and tribulations of migrants to the city and about gender roles and male/female relationships during a period of intense social change.

While some musicians thought to move country music onto the mainstream pop charts, others reached back into the musical traditions of the American South, refurbishing old styles to fit new circumstances.

While this “neotraditionalist” impulse took many forms, the most influential was probably the rise of bluegrass music, a style rooted in the venerable southern string band tradition. The pioneer of bluegrass music was Bill Monroe, born in Kentucky. Monroe started playing music at a young age and was influenced by his uncle (a country fiddler) and by a black musician and railroad worker named Arnold Schulz, whose influence can be seen in the distinctive bluesy quality of Monroe’s music; the interaction between white and black styles has long been an important aspect of country music. The Monroe Brothers played throughout the southeastern United States, creating a sensation with their vocal harmonies and virtuoso fiddle and guitar playing. In 1938 Bill started his own group, the Blue Grass Boys, and the following year joined the cast of the Grand Ole Opry (a hugely popular country music radio program. Its regular “member” artists were widely acknowledged as the genre’s elite. Since 1974 it has been broadcast from the Grand Ole Opry House, a 4,400 seat venue outside Nashville, Tennessee) [19, p. 66-74].

A third major direction in postwar country and western music is represented by honky-tonk — sometimes called “hard country” — a style that conveyed the sound and ethos of the roadside bar or juke joint. During the Great Depression the oil fields of Texas and Oklahoma provided a lucrative source of steady, well-paid work, attracting thousands of men from the American Southwest and farther afield. When Prohibition was repealed in 1933, the formerly illegal drinking establishments frequented by these men multiplied and became a major source of employment for country and western musicians. These honky-tonks, as the people who frequented them called them, provided relief, in the form of drinking and dancing, from the daily pressures of work on the oilfields. By the postwar period thousands of these rowdy nightspots were sprinkled across the American Southwest and beyond.

Country and western music was crucial to the profitability of honky-tonks. Many of them featured colorfully glowing jukeboxes, the mechanical record players that had grown rapidly in popularity during and after World War II. In adjusting to the honky-tonk milieu, country musicians made a number of changes in their performance practice. First, many of the old-time songs about family and the church seemed out of place in the new setting. Musicians began to compose songs about aspects of life directly relevant to many of their listeners: family instability, the unpredictability of male-female relationships, the attractions and dangers of alcohol, and the importance of enjoying the present. When the rural past was referred to, it was usually through a veil of nostalgia and longing. Honky-tonk vocal styles were often directly emotional, making use of “cracks” in the voice and stylistic features from black music, such as melisma and blue notes. Country musicians adapted traditional instruments and playing techniques to the rowdy atmosphere of the juke joint. The typical instrumentation of a honky-tonk band included a fiddle, a steel guitar, a “takeoff” (lead) guitar, a string bass, and a piano. The guitars were electronically amplified, and the musicians played with a percussive, insistent beat (sometimes called “sock rhythm”) well suited to dancing.

When today’s musicians talk about playing “good old country music,” they are most often referring to the postwar honky-tonk style rather than to the rural folk music of the South. Honky-tonk stars such as Ernest Tubb, Hank Williams, Lefty Frizzell, Hank Snow, George Jones, and Webb Pierce dominated the country and western charts during the early and mid-1950s. Although their fortunes declined after the emergence of rock ’n’ roll, honky-tonk music remains the heart and soul of modern country music.

In the 1960s, many of the younger country artists at this time, while not directly embracing the rockabilly styles of Elvis Presley or Buddy Holly, wanted to update the sound of their honky-tonk roots. They opted for a newly sophisticated approach to the vocal presentation and instrumental arrangement of country music, a highly influential approach that came to be known as “country-politan,” a fusion of “country” and “cosmopolitan”. Nashville was at the center of this development, and the style was also often called the “Nashville sound”. Patsy Cline (1932-63) began her career as a hit maker in 1957 with her recording of “Walking After Midnight,” which was successful on both the country and the pop charts. Her two big hits of 1961, “I Fall to Pieces” and “Crazy,” reflected a particular kind of sensibility: they were ballads of broad appeal, in no sense “teen” records, performed by Cline in a manner that, while sophisticated in phrasing and articulation, had sufficient hints of rural and bluesy infections to show where her roots lay. The crooning background voices gave these records a pop sheen, while the high-register piano remained evocative of the honky-tonk origins of this type of music. Cline continued to be a significant presence on both country and pop charts until her premature death in a plane crash in early 1963[17, p. 52-68].

The records made by rock’n’roller Elvis Presley from 1960 on (after he returned from a tour of duty in the army) reflected an increasingly eclectic set of influences, but the Nashville sound is especially prominent among them. Good illustrations of this would be his 1961 hit “Can’t Help Falling in Love” and his 1965 recording of “Crying in the Chapel,” originally a country hit in 1953.

It might seem surprising that the Nashville sound’s influence extended into rhythm & blues in the early 1960s, but given the constant interchanges between white and black musicians throughout the history of American popular music, this really shouldn’t strike us as unexpected. Two hits by Solomon Burke, “Just Out of Reach (Of My Two Open Arms)” and “Cry to Me,” sound for all the world like country records performed by a black vocalist, and a large number of similar-sounding records were made in the wake of their success, by Burke and by other artists associated with rhythm & blues. By the later 1960s the career of Charley Pride — an African American who set out to appeal principally to the country audience — was in full swing; by 1983 Pride had racked up an astonishing 29 Number-One country hits, thus illustrating once again how colorblind music and its audiences really can be some of the time. Notable in more recent years were a 1994 album entitled Rhythm Country and Blues, which paired R&B and country audiences for duets, and Burke’s 2006 album,   entitled   simply   Nashville — the U.S. city most associated with country music.

During the 1970s, country music became a huge business, reaching out to young and middle-class listeners while at the same time reinforcing its traditional southern and white working-class audience base. In 1974 the Grand Ole Opry moved from the run-down Nashville theatre where it had been broadcasting since 1941 into a multimillion-dollar facility, complete with a 110-acre theme park called “Opryland.” The generally conservative mood of the country — reflected in Richard Nixon’s landslide victory over George McGovern in the 1972 presidential election — reinforced country’s popularity among the American middle class.

Since that time, country music has continued to grow in popularity and influence. It remains both a significant cultural force and a large, profitable industry. The traditional approach represented by the Nashville sound continues to produce dozens of hits and artists yearly, and for many Americans the Nashville sound is country music. At the same, a range of styles that are usually lumped together, for marketing purposes, as “alt country” (alternative) provide a rich variety of sounds and approaches to music-making while maintaining their ties to the country tradition.

              3.2 Rhythm and Blues

R&B, as the “rhythm and blues” genre came to be known, was a loose cluster of styles, rooted in southern folk traditions and shaped by the experience of returning military personnel and hundreds of thousands of black Americans who had migrated to urban centers such as New York, Chicago, Detroit, and Los Angeles during and just after World War II.

The top R&B recordings of the late 1940s and early 1950s included swing-in-fluenced “jump bands”, Tin Pan Alley-style love songs performed by crooners, various styles of urban blues, and gospel-influenced vocal harmony groups. The reappearance of small independent record labels provided an outlet for performers who were ignored by major record companies. The development of portable tape recorders made record producers and studio owners out of entrepreneurs who could not previously have afforded the equipment necessary to produce master recordings. They visited nightclubs to find new talent, hustled copies of their records to local record store owners, and attempted to interest a major label in a particular recording or artist with crossover potential. By 1951 there were over 100 independent labels slugging it out for a piece of the R&B market [2, p.195-199].

Jump blues, the first commercially successful category of rhythm & blues, flourished during and just after World War II. During the war, as shortages made it more difficult to maintain a lucrative touring schedule, the leaders of some big bands were forced to downsize. They formed smaller combos, generally made up of a rhythm section and horn players. These jump bands specialized in hard-swinging, boogie-woogie-based party music, spiced with humorous lyrics and wild stage performances.

The most successful and influential jump band was the Tympany Five, led by Louis Jordan, who began making recordings for Decca Records in 1939. Jordan was tremendously popular with black listeners and able to build an extensive white audience during and after the war.

Jordan’s first big hit, “G.I. Jive,” reached Number One on Billboard’s “Harlem Hit Parade,” as the R&B chart was labeled in the earlier 1940s, held the top spot on the pop music charts for two weeks, and sold over a million copies.

As R&B artists like Jordan began to attract a more diverse audience, the separation between white and black fans was maintained in various ways. Sometimes white R&B fans sat in the balcony of a segregated theater or dance hall, watching the black dancers below in order to pick up the latest steps. At other times a rope was stretched across the middle of the dance floor to “maintain order.” Then, as at other times, the circulation of popular music across racial boundaries did not necessarily signify an amelioration of racism in everyday life.

If jump bands represented the hot end of the R&B spectrum, the cool end was dominated by a blend of blues and pop singing sometimes called the blues crooner style. The roots of this urbane approach to the blues reached back to a series of race made in the late 1920s and 1930s by pianist Leroy Carr and guitarist Scrapper Blackwell. Carr developed a smooth, laid-back approach to blues singing that contrasted sharply with the rough-edged rural blues recordings of Charley Patton and Blind Lemon Jefferson, and he attracted a national black audience. The late 1930s jazz recordings of the King Cole Trio, with its instrumentation of piano, bass, and guitar, were a more immediate influence on postwar blues crooners, although Cole’s later recordings took him well into the pop mainstream [6, p. 148-152].

The most successful blues crooner of the late 1940s and early 1950s was a soft-spoken Texas-born pianist and singer named Charles Brown. His smooth, sensitive, somewhat forlorn vocal style attracted attention, and he began to   develop   a   national   reputation with the release of “Drifting Blues.” In 1948 Brown left to form his own quartet and had a Number One R&B hit the following year with “Trouble Blues.” Over the next three years he recorded 10 Top 10 hits for Aladdin Records and became one of the most popular R&B singers nationwide. A handsome, dapper, gracious man, Brown projected an image of ease and sophistication. Brown was never able to break through to the pop charts — Columbia Records offered him a solo contract in 1947, but he turned it down out of loyalty to his band mates. But he was rediscovered by a new generation of R&B fans in the 1980s and went on to develop a successful international touring career, culminating in a Grammy nomination.

Another important thread in the tapestry of postwar rhythm & blues was vocal harmony groups. During the postwar era, young singers trained in the black church began to record secular material. Many of these vocal groups were made up of secondary school kids from the black neighborhoods of cities such as New York and Washington, D.C., and   interviews   with   the   singers indicate that these groups served a number of functions: a means of musical expression, an alternative or adjunct to urban gangs, and a route to popularity. Few members of these groups initially saw singing as a way to make a living; this perception changed rapidly after the first vocal R&B groups achieved commercial success.

The vocal harmony group most responsible for moving away from the pop-oriented sound of the Mills Brothers and creating a new, harder-edged sound more closely linked to black gospel music, was the Dominoes, led by vocal coach Billy Ward, a strict disciplinarian and savvy entrepreneur. In 1950 Ward started rehearsing with a number of his most promising students and a 17-year old tenor singer named Clyde McPhatter, whom he hired away from a gospel group. The Dominoes’ first big hit was “Sixty Minute Man.” But it was the Dominoes’ next big hit, “Have Mercy Baby,” that pushed vocal-group R&B firmly in the direction of a harder-edged, more explicitly emotional sound. “Have Mercy Baby” was the first record to combine the 12-bar blues form and the driving beat of dance-oriented rhythm & blues with the intensely emotional favor of black gospel singing. The song’s commercial success was due to the passionate performance of Clyde McPhatter. McPhatter, the son of a Baptist preacher and a church organist, was like many other R&B musicians insofar as the black church played a major role in shaping his musical sensibility. While in formal terms “Have Mercy Baby” is a 12-bar blues, it is essentially a gospel performance dressed up in R&B clothing. With a few changes in the lyrics, McPhatter’s performance would have been perfectly at home in a black Baptist church anywhere in America [18, p. 144].

The Dominoes were featured on some of the earliest rock ’n’ roll tours, which typically attracted a racially mixed audience. Although McPhatter soon left the Dominoes to form a new group called the Drifters, the impact of his rendition of “Have Mercy Baby” was profound and lasting — the record is a direct predecessor of the soul music movement of the 1960s, and of the recordings of Ray Charles, James Brown, and Aretha Franklin.

              3.3 Rock ‘n’ roll

The rise of rock’n’roll in the mid-1950s transformed the landscape of American popular music, further cementing the popularity of southern-derived styles ultimately derived from the blues and country music, and transforming the teenager into both a marketing concept and a cultural icon. Rock’n’roll records were played for dances at inner-city, primarily black, public schools, for parties at predominantly white suburban private schools, and for socials in rural settings catering to young people.

The advent of rock ’n’ roll music in the mid-1950s brought enormous changes to American popular music, changes whose impact is still being felt. Styles that had remained on the margins of pop music began to in-filtrate and eventually dominate the center. Rhythm & blues and country music recordings were no longer directed to specialized and regionalized markets; they began to be heard on mainstream pop radio, and many could be purchased in music stores nationwide.

The emergence of rock ’n’ roll was an event of great cultural significance. But several issues demand our attention: first, rock ’n’ roll was neither a “new,” nor indeed even a single musical style; second, the rock ’n’ roll era does not mark the first time that music was written specifically to appeal to young people; third, rock ’n’ roll was certainly not the first American music to fuse black and white popular styles.

The new audience was dominated by the so-called baby boom generation born immediately following World War II. It was a much younger target group than ever before, a large audience that shared specific characteristics of group cultural identity. These were kids growing up in the 1950s, a period of relative economic stability and prosperity marked by a return to socially and politically conservative ways. This was also the first generation to grow up with television; this new mass medium proved a force of incalculable influence.

Three prominent African Americans represent the rhythm & blues-based side of rock ’n’ roll. Chuck Berry was a songwriter/performer who addressed his songs to teenage America (white and black) in the 1950s; Little Richard cultivated a deliberately outrageous performance style that appealed on the basis of its strangeness, novelty, and sexual ambiguity; and Fats Domino’s work embodied the continuity of rhythm & blues with rock ’n’ roll. Domino was the earliest of the three to become an established performer, but all three crossed over to mainstream success within the first few months following the massive success of the white rocker Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock.”

The biggest rock ’n’ roll star to come from the country side of the music world was Elvis Presley. In 1955, RCA Victor, a major label, set about trying to turn the “hillbilly cat” into a mainstream performer without compromising the strength of his appeal to teenagers. They succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations. Although Presley’s television performances were denounced by authorities   as   vulgar,   the   shows were attended by hordes of screaming young fans and admired on the screen by millions. And Presley’s records racked up astronomical sales from 1956 on into the early 1960s, establishing him as the biggest-selling solo artist of rock ’n’ roll , and then as the biggest-selling solo recording artist of any period and style — a title he still holds at the beginning of the 21st century.

Presley’s extraordinary popularity established rock’n’roll as an unprecedented mass-market phenomenon. His reputation as a performer and recording artist endured up to his death in 1977 at the age of 42 — and continues beyond the grave. Presley made fine records at many points throughout his career, but his principal importance rests upon his achievements during the early years of rock’n’roll. In 1956 Presley cut a handful of records that changed the musical world for himself and for those around him, and the unbridled exuberance of his live performances during that era became the model for every kid who wanted to move mountains by strumming a guitar, shaking his hips, and lifting his voice.

The 1960s saw the rise of a new generation of electric guitarists who functioned as cultural heroes for their young fans. Their achievements were built on the shoulders of previous generations of electric guitar virtuosos — Les Paul, whose innovative tinkering with electronic technology inspired a new generation of amplifier tweakers; T-Bone Walker, who introduced the electric guitar to R&B music in the late 1940s; urban blues musicians such as Muddy Waters and B. B. King, whose raw sound and emotional directness inspired rock guitarists; and early masters of rock ’n’ roll guitar, including Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly. Beginning in the mid-1960s, the new guitarists — including Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Jef Beck, and the Beatles’ George Harrison — took these influences and pushed them farther than ever before in terms of technique, sheer volume, and improvisational brilliance [1, p. 287-294].

Jimi Hendrix was the most original, inventive, and influential guitarist of the rock era, and the most prominent African-American rock musician of the late 1960s. His early experience as a guitarist was gained touring with rhythm & blues bands. In 1966 he moved to London, where he joined up with two English musicians, bassist Noel Redding and drummer Mitch Mitchell, forming a band called the Jimi Hendrix Experience. The Experience was first seen in America in 1967 at the Monterey Pop Festival, where Hendrix stunned the audience with his flamboyant performance style. This sort of guitar-focused showmanship, soon to become commonplace at rock concerts, was not unrelated to the wild stage antics of some rhythm & blues performers (appendix A).