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.