Popular Music

I

Introduction

Popular Music, music produced for and sold to a broad audience. Types of popular music include jazz, music from motion pictures and musical comedies, country-and-western music, rhythm-and-blues music (R&B), rock music, and rap (or hip-hop). Shaped by social, economic, and technological forces, popular music is closely linked to the social identity of its performers and audiences. Early musical styles were also very influential in shaping popular music.

II

Development in America

The most popular songs in America during the late 18th century, as judged by reported sales of printed music, were written by professional English composers for performance in London parks (known as pleasure gardens) or for performance in English ballad and comic opera. The songs often had pastoral themes, were amorous in content, contained ethnic stereotypes, and included Irish and Scottish lyrics and melodies. By the early 19th century, Italian opera had also become popular in the United States. Songs by Italian composers such as Gioacchino Rossini, Vincenzo Bellini, and Gaetano Donizetti were published as sheet music. In addition, the Italian bel canto style of singing—light, clear, and intimate—was to have an influence on the development of the soft, sentimental type of singing known as crooning that became popular in the United States during the 1920s and 1930s.

Distinctive American styles of popular music emerged in the mid-19th century. Minstrel shows—performances in which white entertainers dressed in blackface and acted out crude parodies of African American behavior—were the dominant form of popular entertainment in the 19th century. The minstrel theater had a strong impact on the development of popular music in the United States. American performer Thomas Dartmouth Rice demonstrated the profitability of minstrel music with his song “Jim Crow” (1829), which was the first American song to become an international hit. Many minstrel songs were successful in sheet music form, and they became a dominant force in the development of 19th-century American popular song.

Stephen Collins Foster, who wrote more than 200 songs during the mid-19th century, was the first important composer of American popular song. His best-known songs include “Oh! Susanna” (1848), “Old Folks at Home” (1851), “My Old Kentucky Home” (1853), “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair” (1854), and “Beautiful Dreamer” (1864). Foster was a master at creating simple, compelling combinations of melody and text that subsequent popular composers would refer to as hooks (expressing the idea that the music “hooks” the listener's ear).

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III

Early 20th Century

Although sound recording was independently invented in 1877 by Thomas Edison in the United States and by Charles Cros in France, the primary means of disseminating popular music until the 1920s remained printed sheet music. By the late 19th century, the music-publishing business was centralized in New York City, particularly in an area of lower Manhattan called Tin Pan Alley. “After the Ball” (1892) by Charles K. Harris, the first popular song to sell 1 million copies—in this case, of sheet music—inspired rapid growth in the music-publishing industry. Composers were hired to rapidly produce popular songs by the dozens, and the techniques of Foster and the pleasure-garden composers were further developed. Songs had to be simple, memorable, and emotionally appealing to sell to large audiences. Vaudeville had replaced minstrel shows as the dominant live-entertainment medium, and singers such as Al Jolson and Sophie Tucker promoted Tin Pan Alley songs on cross-country tours. Ragtime pieces written by professional composers such as Scott Joplin represented another stage in the influence of African American music on mainstream popular music.

The golden age of Tin Pan Alley occurred during the 1920s and 1930s. The best-known songs of this period were produced by a small group of composers and lyricists based in New York City. In most cases, composers and lyricists worked in pairs: George Gershwin and Ira Gershwin, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart and beginning in 1943, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II. Tin Pan Alley songs were popularized in Broadway musical comedies, the successor to vaudeville, and by popular singers accompanied by dance orchestras.

Important technological changes also occurred during this period, including the rapid spread of commercial radio (introduced in 1922). The development of more affordable and better-quality gramophone discs made recordings more popular than sheet music in sales, and the introduction of amplification and electric recording led to the development of crooning, the intimate vocal style perfected by singers such as Bing Crosby and, later, Frank Sinatra. By the mid-1920s, almost 100 million records were produced each year in the United States.

The music industry also became interested in other types of music during this period, most importantly “race records” and “hillbilly” music, the precursors of rhythm-and-blues and country-and-western music. Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Robert Johnson, the Carter family, Jimmie Rodgers, and other influential Southern musicians recorded during the 1920s and 1930s. The African American influence on mainstream popular music became stronger during the Jazz Age, which preceded the Great Depression of the 1930s.

The dominant type of popular music from 1935 to 1945 was big band swing (see Jazz: The Big Band Era), a style modeled on the innovations of black jazz orchestras. In 1935 Benny Goodman sparked the popularity of the style with his band's recordings of arrangements by Fletcher Henderson, an African American bandleader whose success had been limited by racial segregation. The big band era ended after World War II (1939-1945), when pop singers became more popular than bandleaders, although the influence of swing music could still be heard in “jump band” rhythm and blues and western swing music.

Important shifts in popular music after World War II were tied to social and technological changes. The massive migration of Southern musicians and audiences to urban areas and the introduction of the electric guitar were particularly influential. These changes set the stage for the hard-edged Chicago blues of Muddy Waters; the honky-tonk, or “hard-country,” style of Hank Williams; and, in the mid-1950s, the rise of rock-and-roll music.

IV

1950s and 1960s

Rock and roll (or rock 'n' roll) grew out of the intermingling of several streams of postwar popular music, including “jump band” rhythm and blues, the recordings of blues “shouters” such as Big Joe Turner, gospel-based vocal styles (see Gospel Music), boogie-woogie piano blues, and honky-tonk music. Promoted by entrepreneurs such as Alan Freed—the first to use the term 'rock 'n' roll' to describe this category of music—and recorded by small independent labels, rock and roll was an unexpected success among a newly affluent teenage audience.

The pioneers of rock and roll came from varied backgrounds. Bill Haley, whose “Rock Around the Clock” (1955) was the first rock song to gain wide popularity, was a country-and-western bandleader from Pennsylvania; Fats Domino had already been playing New Orleans-style rhythm and blues for a decade; Chuck Berry was a hairdresser in St. Louis, Missouri; and Elvis Presley was a Memphis, Tennessee, truck driver. The market was fueled by mainstream versions of rhythm-and-blues songs performed by white crooners such as Pat Boone.

The peak period of rock and roll—defined by the exuberant recordings of Haley, Berry, Domino, Presley, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Buddy Holly—lasted from 1954 to 1959. The most successful artists wrote and performed songs about love, sexuality, identity crises, personal freedom, and other issues that were of particular interest to teenagers.

By the early 1960s most of what the music industry promoted as rock and roll was an imitation of the original form. Songs were now being written by professional composers, recorded with accompaniment by session musicians (professional musicians who perform principally on recordings), and sung by teenage crooners such as Fabian and Dion. Some of the techniques of Tin Pan Alley—particularly the idea of teaming lyricists with professional melody writers—were utilized in the 1960s by New York City songwriters such as Carole King and by the young entrepreneur Berry Gordy, based in Detroit, Michigan, whose Motown Records produced a string of hit records. The early 1960s also saw the development of distinctive regional styles in the United States, such as the sound of the southern California band the Beach Boys; the Greenwich Village urban folk movement that included Bob Dylan, the Kingston Trio, and Peter, Paul, and Mary; and the rough sound of Northwest groups such as the Sonics.

The so-called British Invasion began in 1964 with the arrival of the Beatles in New York City. British pop bands, raised on the influences of blues, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll, invigorated mainstream popular music, in part by reemphasizing long-standing aspects of American music. Each group developed a distinctive style: the Beatles combined Chuck Berry's guitar-based rock and roll with the craftwork of Tin Pan Alley composers; the Animals worked out a mixture of blues and rhythm-and-blues influences and produced a hit with an old Anglo-American ballad, “House of the Rising Sun” (1964); and the Rolling Stones incorporated aspects of Chicago urban blues into their distinctive, driving sound.

The late 1960s was a period of corporate expansion and stylistic diversification in the American record industry. A new youth-oriented popular market was defined by a broad category of rock music that included the influential studio experiments of the Beatles, San Francisco psychedelia, guitar heroes such as Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton, Southern rock, hard rock, jazz rock, folk rock, and other styles. Soul music, the successor to rhythm-and-blues music, covered a wide range of styles, including the gospel-based performances of Aretha Franklin, the deep funk and virtuosic stage techniques of James Brown, and the soulful crooning of Marvin Gaye. Country-and-western music—now firmly centered in Nashville, Tennessee—had a new generation of stars who combined elements of old country-and-western-music standards with rock and roll and mainstream popular song. Country singers Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, and Dolly Parton helped contribute to the rising popularity of country-and-western music.

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