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AMERICAN HISTORY THROUGH MUSIC
Music provides the soundtrack of our lives. We listen to music
to pass time, to relax, and to set a mood. But as important as
music is to our lives, we seldom treat it as a window into history.
In fact, American popular music provides an index into certain
fundamental historical experiences, such as slavery and immigration.
Musical Traditions
Every group of Americans had its own distinctive musical traditions.
Native American Music: Music played an extremely important
role in Native American rituals and ceremonies. In contrast to
African and European musical traditions, Native American musics
tended to use only a limited number of pitches and made little
use of harmony. Choral singing, often accompanied by rattles
was common. Also common was a responsorial technique in which
a performer and a chorus sing back and forth to each other.
The question of Native American influence on contemporary
American music has not received the study it deserves. There
has been a tendency to underestimate the influence of Indian
music. But it seems likely that Native American music had a special
impact on cowboy songs and country music.
English Musical Culture: English folk tunes have left a lasting
legacy on American popular music. Such songs as "Yankee
Doodle," "My Country 'Tis of Thee, and the "Star
Spangled Banner" derive from English folk tunes.
The Puritans felt very uneasy about certain kinds of music.
The Puritans prohibited certain kinds of music, such as instrumental
and theater music, and carefully scrutinized the kinds of music
performed even in church. The kinds of music that grew out of
the Puritan tradition, such as hymns, tended to have a leaner,
more austere sound than their European counterparts.
African American Musical Traditions: African Americans contributed
richly to an evolving American music. It is on the sea islands
off the coast of Georgia and South Carolina, where many African
Americans lived apart from southern whites, that one can find
forms of African and African American music that are close to
their original forms, including hollers and work songs, that
coordinated work activities.
Africa has one of the most complex rhythmic musical cultures
in the world and one of the distinctive features of African American
music lies in its use of rhythmic syncopation and a strong beat.
Yet rather than singing on the beat, singers tended to sing or
embellish around the beat. Early African American music was characterized
by a remarkable rhythmic subtlety, distinctive vocal styles,
and the creation of the banjo, a distinctly African American
instrument that derives from African instruments.
Scottish and Irish Musical Traditions: Scottish and Irish
immigrants brought a great store of songs to America (including
Auld Lang Syne, the song we sing at New Year's).
Stephen Foster, the most popular American composer of the
mid-nineteenth century, wrote many of his popular songs in an
Irish idiom, emphasizing lyricism and pentatonic scale (five
note scale). His 1854 song, Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair,
is filled with nostalgic yearnings for home which typifies Irish
and Scottish songs of this period.
German Musical Cultures: Germans came to the United States
with highly developed musical skills. German immigrants were
very important in formal music education and in establishing
classical music institutions. Many German songs, such as O Tannenbaum,
became very popular. German men's choruses were "Americanized"
in the United States in the form of school glee clubs and barbershop
quartets.
One kind of Central European music that became very popular
in the mid-nineteenth century was the polka, which made the waltz
seem very old fashioned
Latin American Musical Cultures: Especially in the 20th century,
Latin American musics have had a very strong influence on American
popular music. Latin American musics themselves were formed out
of a blend of various ethnic groups' musics including Spanish
and African influences in the Caribbean and Indian and Spanish
musics in Mexico. Such musical forms as the tango came from Argentina,
the cha cha and mambo from Cuba, and reggae from Jamaica.
Hawaiian Music: Hawaiian music was particularly influential
in spreading a taste for the steel guitar, which eventually gave
us the electric guitar
New Hybrids and Genres
Exciting new hybrids and new genres arose in the mid-nineteenth
century. One of the first was the minstrel song which accompanied
theatrical entertainment featured black-faced performers. Even
African Americans who performed in minstrel shows were required
to use black face. Minstrel songs were the first songs recognized
internationally as distinctively American, and established a
long tradition of American popular music with a worldwide following.
Characteristics of minstrel songs included the use of dialect,
rhythmic vitality, simple harmonies, the use of syncopation,
and the banjo. Minstrel songs were also associated with a particular
dance of the period known as the cake walk. The most famous composer
of minstrel songs was Stephen Foster. His "Camp Town Races"
uses the same rhythm as a polka. In its use of syncopation, the
minstrel songs drew upon African American traditions.
After the Civil War a new genre that arose was the Negro spiritual,
a distinctive African American adaptation of white religious
music. The rhythmic and melodic elements of the spirituals make
this music very distinctive. Spiritual texts, such as "Go
Down Moses," took on new meaning when they were sung by
African Americans.
Both the minstrel song and the Negro spiritual helped give
American music a distinctive identity.
New Rhythms
By the late nineteenth century, the old minstrel songs and polka
rhythms seemed old fashioned. The public wanted new rhythms,
and was particularly attracted to marches, like John Philip Sousa's
Stars and Stripes Forever. Sousa's marches incorporated strong
syncopation and elements that seem related to Latin music, like
an Argentine tango. These new rhythms and strong syncopation
express a very distinctive American rhythmic sense
Meanwhile, startling musical developments were occurring within
the African American community.
African American musicians and composes took traditional march
forms and rhythms and created a new style with syncopated melodic
line known as ragtime. The most famous was Scott Joplin's Maple
Leaf Rag. This exhilarating music swept America and was associated
with popular new dance steps, many of which had animal names
like the Grizzly Bear and Turkey Trop and eventually the Fox
Trot. Scott Joplin from Sedalia, Missouri, and this new music
seemed to come up the Mississippi. It made its way to Chicago,
which became a major center for the dissemination of ragtime.
Another major kind of African Music arose in the Mississippi
Delta: the Blues. This was a musical genre cultivated by black
migrant workers. They sang about hard times and broken love affairs,
but the songs also had a hidden transcript attacking the caste
system of race relations known as Jim Crow. After World War II,
the Blues developed a new style of singing and instrumentation,
making use of the saxophone and the electric guitar.
At the same time that the blues and ragtime were sweeping
America, a new form of musical theater arose known as the Broadway
musical or musical comedy. Derived from European operettas, American
musical theater developed its own distinctive themes, characters,
and musical styles. One of the musical theater's originators
was Irving Berlin who made use of ragtime and blues in creation
of a new musical style.
Many of the outstanding talents of the musical theater were Russian
Jews and their children, including Berlin, George Gershwin, Richard
Rodgers, and Jerome Kern. These composers made extensive use
of slang and vernacular language. The harmonies, rhythms, and
melodies of the Broadway musical theater were distinctively American
and were extremely important in the formation of jazz.
Another important genre was the cowboy song, a genre that
emerged from working cowboys on the range. Its rhythms echo the
rhythms of a horse's gait, and these songs often use a rhymed
couplet and a refrain. The cowboy song provided a basis for country
and western music, which first emerged in the 1920s.
A distinct style that arose in the 1940s was bluegrass. Popularized
by a handful of musicians, especially Bill Monroe and his Bluegrass
boys, bluegrass was the urban music of displaced Appalachians.
It featured mandolins, fiddles, guitars, and banjos. High tenor
singing derived from rural church singing. It became especially
popular as a result of the television sit-com The Beverly Hillbillies.
Bill Monroe performed the theme music.
Rock 'n' Roll
At its birth, rock 'n roll was the bastard child of a heterogeneous
American culture. A product of post-World War II demographic
changes, especially the movement of southern blacks and whites
into the cities of the upper South and the North, rock 'n' roll
brought together distinct musical traditions and forged an entirely
new sound, combining black rhythm and blues, gospel, western,
and white country music. It lyrics and heavy beat challenged
the accepted standards of "good taste" in music. Openly
vulgar--the very term rock 'n' roll had been used in blues songs
to describe sexual intercourse--early black roll 'n' rollers
like Chuck Berry and Little Richard glorified sexuality.
The protests implicit in early rock 'n' roll were largely
coopted by middle-class American culture. Record producers, most
of whom were white, smoothed the jagged edges of rock 'n' roll.
Sexually explicit black recordings were rewritten and rerecorded--"covered"--by
white performers, then sold to white youths. By 1959, rock 'n'
roll had become an accepted part of mainstream culture.
In the early and mid-1960s, there was a growing sense that early
rock 'n' roll had lost its emotional edge, that it had accepted
the rewards of success in a capitalist society and been absorbed
into middle-class culture. Among a new generation of young people,
there was a sense that rock 'n' roll's harsh edge had degenerated
into songs that were sentimental, innocuous, filled with nonsense
lyrics. The result was the rise of an eclectic and diverse range
of new sounds that expressed a dissatisfaction with the prevailing
blandness of conventional culture: folk and protest songs, the
British sound, Motown, which coexisted alongside more innocuous,
less challenging "bubble-gum" sounds directed at the
preteen audience.
By the early 1970s, rock 'n' roll again seemed to be softening.
Tired of pre-packaged sounds, an important segment of the youth
audience was eager to recapture early rock 'n' roll's raw anarchistic
spirit. Reacting against the sentimentality, emotional excess,
and superstar mentality of late 1960s rock--rejecting the flower-power
idealism of the previous decade--a new sound crystallized in
lower Manhattan known as Punk. Featuring short, fast, acerbic
songs, this new sound was primarily the creation of white singers
like Patti Smith, the Ramones, and Talking Heads (and in the
mid-1970s by such English groups as the Sex Pistols). Often attacked
for its flirtation with Nazi imagery, its homophobia, its association
with heroin, and its seeming avoidance of explicit politics,
Punk did indeed have an important political dimension. By offering
anti-establishment and rebellious pose, it can be understood
as a youthful response to a deepening-sense of post-industrial
despair.
Since the mid-1970s, the defining characteristic of youth music
has been a proliferation of musical styles. Such sounds as heavy
metal, rasta, teeny bop, soul, reggae, hi-energy (gay disco),
grunge, hip-hop, African, hybrid, Salsa, and Tejano reflected
the "tribalization" of youth--the fracturing of youth
into a wide range of distinct segments. Yet these divisions should
not obscure the fact that since the early 1950s, music has been
a cauldron where diverse sensibilities and values have fused
together.
Nowhere is this more readily apparent than in the case of the
most controversial form of youth music: gangsta rap. Featuring
a macho swagger and blunt anger, gansta rap graphically chronicles
harsh inner city conditions: police brutality, crack epidemics,
random violence, poverty, racism, and other problems of urban
life. It depicted a bleak street life, urban paranoia, betrayal,
and a sense of impending death. Most shockingly, some songs featured
violence (often directed against women), gunplay, and cop killing.
In postmodern America, it is perhaps not surprising to discover
that gansta rap found its largest and most enthusiastic audience
among white suburban teenage boys. |
