American roots music
American roots music is a broad category of music including country music, bluegrass, gospel, ragtime, jug bands, Appalachian folk, blues, Tejano and zydeco, and Native American music. The music is considered "American" because it is either native to the United States or here varied enough from its origins that it struck musicologists as something distinctly new; it is considered "roots music" because it served as the basis of music later developed in the United States, including rock and roll, rhythm and blues, and jazz.Roots musical forms reached their most expressive and varied forms in the first two to three decades of the 20th century. The Great Depression and the Dust Bowl were extremely important in disseminating these musical styles to the rest of the country, as Delta blues masters, itinerant honky tonk singers and Latino and Cajun musicians spread to cities like Chicago, Los Angeles and New York. The growth of the recording industry in the same approximate period was also important; increased possible profits from music placed pressure on artists, songwriters and label executives to replicate previous hit songs. This meant that fads like Hawaiian slack-key guitar never died out completely as rhythms or instruments or vocal stylings were incorporated into disparate genres. By the 1950s, all the forms of roots music had led to pop-oriented forms. Folk musicians like the Kingston Trio, Latin chachacha and salsa artists, blues-derived rock and roll and rockabilly, pop-gospel, doo wop and R&B (later secularized further as soul music) and the Nashville sound in country music all modernized and expanded the musical palette of the country.
Notable roots musicians include Woody Guthrie, Son House, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Leadbelly, Mahalia Jackson, and Washington Phillips. More recent musicians who occasionally or consistently play roots music include Keb' Mo', Bela Fleck, Iron & Wine, and Ricky Skaggs. Additionally, the soundtrack to the 2000 comedy film O Brother, Where Art Thou is exclusively roots music, performed by Alison Kraus, The Fairfield Four, Emmylou Harris, Norman Blake and others.
American roots music was the subject of a documentary series on PBS in 2001.
In the 19th century through the 20th century, it was the influence of the music of African-Americans which most set the United States apart from that of Western Europe. While African-Americans were looked down on by the majority of European-Americans and their culture was denigrated as low class, if not semi-barbaric as late as the 1930s, the music was wildly popular with the general public. The African banjo (a stringed instrument) became common in many styles of US music in the 19th century. Stephen Foster, by far the most popular American composer of that century, incorporated many African American rhythmic notions into his songs. The minstrel show was very popular, and was the first example of American music widely exported abroad.
Interestingly, some West-African melodies, such as "Lucy Long" and "Old Dan Tucker", were retained by white country musicians decades after they fell out of the repertory of the descendants of the Africans who brought the tunes over.
Prior to the late 19th century, U.S. music was dominated by occasional songs of great popularity. Exampes include "The Star Spangled Banner", "Dixie" "Jump Jim Crow", "Oh Susana", "Oh My Darling, Clementine", "The Old Folks at Home", "My Old Kentucky Home", "Battle Hymn of the Republic", "Just Before the Battle, Mother", and "When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again". African-American spirituals were also popular, and were even played for Queen Victoria in 1871; she is said to have been moved to tears by the performance.
Starting in the 1880s, Eastern European Jews immigrated to the US in large numbers. They brought with them klezmorim, or musicians who played at weddings and other community events. Soon, the United States became the international center for klezmer music, and it became a major influence on jazz and other genres.
Southern Texas was part of Mexico until the mid-1800s, after the Mexican War, and its Mexican-American inhabitants played a mixture of ranchera, bolero and polka music called conjunto. To some extent an American version of accordion-led Mexican música norteña, conjunto was popular throughout Mexican communities in Texas.
Modern Native American pow-wows arose around the turn of the 20th century. While some claim that powwow had been an integral part of indigenous cultures for centuries, some modern analysts believe that powwows were invented to appeal to tourists and had only a tangential relationship to genuine Native American traditions, which generally revolved around ceremonial dance music like the Ghost Dance, Zuni Shalako, Navajo Yeibichai and the Sun Dance of the Plains. The Native American Church, founded early in the 20th century, was a center of development for Native American gospel and Peyote Songs, a fusion of gospel and traditional music revolving around ceremonies in which hallucinogenic peyote is taken as a sacrament. In Arizona and Mexico, waila, or chicken scratch, music, had arisen as a fusion of native Tohono O'odham music with German polka and Mexican-American norteño.
In the later decades of the 19th century, the music industry became dominated by a group of publishers and song-writers in New York City that came to be known as Tin Pan Alley. Tin Pan Alley's representatives spread throughout the country, buying local hits for their publishers and pushing their publisher's latest songs. Song demonstrators were fixtures at department stores and music stores across the country, and traveling song demonstrators made circuits of rural areas. The industry was driven by the profits from the sales of sheet music. A piano was considered a must in any middle-class or higher home. Major 19th century Tin Pan Alley hits included "Only a Bird in a Guilded Cage" and "After the Ball Is Over".
Military style march music enjoyed great popularity, and most towns had brass bands that performed them. The most popular of the US march composers were John Philip Sousa, Henry Fillmore, and Karl King.
The roots of modern African-American music can be traced back to pre-contact Africa, with major influences from across Europe and indigenous Native Americans. Derived from literally hundreds of ethnic groups in West Africa, each with its own language or dialect and musical forms, African slaves were for a long time divided culturally. By the 1830s, though, the basic elements of the modern African-American musical identity were in place. This was a period called the Great Awakening, when the country was undergoing a religious revival that centered around outdoor worship gatherings (camp meetings), where hymns (camp songs) were sung. Though the African-Americans, still mostly enslaved, were not generally allowed to participate, they watched, and were inspired to use African vocal styles and rhythms with the English hymns. These songs were called Negro spirituals. While many were songs praising God or Jesus, others contained coded messages to fellow slaves and rhetoric symbolically demanding freedom. Songs like "Steal Away to Jesus" communicated an impending escape, while "Let My People Go" and "Go Down Moses" overtly concerned Biblical Hebrew slaves as a symbol for African slaves.
In the 1890s, more sophisticated African-American styles of the cakewalk and then ragtime music started to become popular. Originally associated primarily with poor African Americans, ragtime was quickly denounced as degenerate by conservatives and the classically trained establishment. In spite of the denigration, however, the style continued to gain widespread popularity and became mainstream; it was adopted by Tin Pan Alley at the start of the 20th century.
In the beginning of the 20th century, the Tin Pan Alley popular song dominated the nation's music. Songwriters like Harry Von Tilzer, George M. Cohan, and Irving Berlin produced many catchy melodies early in the new century. Trailing behind were four other significant genres. African American jazz and blues performers diversified their sound and managed to achieve some success among white Americans. Folk and country music dominated the sound of rural white performers, and both managed to achieve some mainstream success.
With the 20th century, the rise of the popular home phonograph began to give competition to the long dominant Tin Pan Alley sheet music publishers, and slowly became a significant force in American music by the 1910s. In the 1920s radio broadcasts of music came on the scene, and together with the recording industry surplanted the sheet music publishers as American music's driving force in the 1930s. In a parallel development, individual performers became more associated with hit songs in the public's mind than the songwriters.
In addition to jazz, blues, folk and country, music from the Caribbean region also briefly became popular during the first half of the twentieth century. Trinidadian calypso, Argentinian tango and Dominican merengue and other styles influenced American popular music. Hawaiian music (especially slack-key guitar) enjoyed an early vogue in the 1910s, influencing the developing genre of country music (this is the source of the steel guitar sound that is characteristic of modern country).
Eastern European Jews contributed klezmer music to American culture, with the earliest stars including Harry Kandel, Naftule Brandwein, Dave Tarras and Abe Schwartz. Kandel, a prominent clarinetist, set the stage for American klezmer.
Since the late 1800s, conjunto music had reigned in south Texas' Mexican-American communities. It was first recorded in the late 1920s, with artists like Narciso Martínez, Don Santiago Jiménez and Bruno Villareal leading the way.
The blues began in rural communities, primarily in the south. During the 1920s, classic female blues singers like Mamie Smith ("Crazy Blues") dominated the genre's sound. For most white Americans, these female singers were their first exposure to black music, or "race music" as it was then known. In the 1930s, local blues styles developed in Memphis, New Orleans, the mid-Atlantic coast, Texas, Kansas City and, most importantly, Chicago. A style of piano-playing based on the blues, boogie woogie was briefly popular among mainstream audiences and blues listeners.
At the heights of the Great Depression, gospel music started to become popular by people like Thomas A. Dorsey and Mahalia Jackson, who adapted Christian hymns to blues and jazz structures. By 1925, three main styles of gospel had become popular among mainstream audiences. Itinerant jackleg preachers like Blind Willie Johnson and Washington Phillips released recordings that are now collector's items but were then only marginally popular. Jubilee quartets like the Norfolk Jubilee Quartet and the Golden Gate Quartet were popular and sophisticated, but the most successful form of gospel was singing preachers like Reverend J. M. Gates, who passionately sung about the terrible consequences of disobeying God's laws.Pre-20th century
Tin Pan Alley
Military marches
African-American music
Ragtime
Early 20th century
Early popular music
Early foreign influences
Blues and gospel
 Billie Holiday |
Cajun and Creole music
Modern Cajun music began developing in the 1920s, drawing on traditional fiddlers and more modern accordionists. Joseph and Cleoma Falcon made the first recording, "Allons à Lafayette", in 1928. The song was a regional hit that paved the way for Cleoma's brother, Amédée Breaux's "Jolie Blonde", now often considered the Cajun national anthem. Amédée Ardoin, a black man, soon became the most popular Cajun star, howver. Louisiana's Creole population, made up of mixed African, French and Anglo heritage, had developed a form of dance music known as la la. Canray Fontenot was perhaps the most influental la la performer.
In the 1930s, oil was discovered in Louisiana and Anglos came to the state en masse. Cajun culture was denigrated and restricted, and hillbilly music and western swing became major influences on Cajun music. Luderin Darbone's The Hackleberry Ramblers and Harry Choates were the vanguard of this new wave of Cajun music, which incorporated English lyrics and a smooth style. By the 1940s, though a revival of traditional Cajun music had begun, led by Iry LeJeune, whose 1948 "La valse du pont d'amour" is considered a watershed in the field.
Country music
Country music evolved along somewhat the same lines as folk, but achieved much more mainstream success. Jug bands and other influences (including Hawaiian steel guitar, folk and the country blues) coalesced in the 1930s development of honky tonk, a rough form of country music.
At the beginning of the century, rural whites from the Appalachia were known as hillbillies, and their music soon came to be called hillybilly music. Protestant churches like the Old Regular Baptists and Holiness Pentecostal used music in their services, and this was one of the biggest influences on hillbilly music.
Hillbilly music was not widely recorded until the 1920s. Bristol, a city on the Virginia and Tennessee border, was the site of a two week recording session in 1927 that led to the discovery of the two biggest names in hilbilly music: The Carters and Jimmie Rodgers. The Carters were a trio playing autoharp and guitar, with clear, strong vocals and harmonies, while Rodgers sang a more worldly, blues-influenced music that has been called country blues. Rodgers sold millions of records in the 1930s During this period, hillbilly music became big business, and musicians began endorsing products as well as dding new instruments, like fiddles, banjos, mandolins and Hawaiian steel guitar. Some other important musicians of this era include Gid Tanner & the Skillet Lickers and Charlie Poole & the North Carolina Ramblers.
By the 1940s, brother duets, in which two brothers sang harmony with precision and clarity, had become popular and were known as close harmony. The Blue Sky Boys, Delmore Brothers, Monroe Brothers and, especially, the Louvin Brothers, were the most popular brother duet pairs.
Related topics
State-specific music:
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