American popular music is the nation’s heartbeat and its unbreakable soul. It’s John Lee Hooker’s deep growls and John Coltrane’s passionate cascades. It’s Hank Williams’ yodel and Elvis’ pout. It’s Beyoncé and Bob Dylan, Duke Ellington and Patti Smith. It’s a feeling as much as a form – always a foot-stomping, defiant good time, whether folks are boot scooting to bluegrass, sweating to zydeco, jumping to hip-hop or stage-diving to punk rock.
The South is the mother of American music, most of which has roots in the frisson and interplay of black-white racial relations. The blues developed after the Civil War, out of the work songs, or ‘shouts,’ of enslaved people and out of the ‘call and response’ pattern of black spiritual songs, both of which were adaptations of African music.
Improvisational and intensely personal, the blues remain at heart an immediate expression of individual pain, suffering, hope, desire and pride. Nearly all subsequent American music has tapped this deep well.
At the turn of the 20th century, traveling blues musicians, and particularly female blues singers, gained fame and employment across the South. Early pioneers included Robert Johnson, WC Handy, Ma Rainey, Huddie Ledbetter (aka Lead Belly) and Bessie Smith, who some consider the best blues singer who ever lived. At the same time, African American Christian choral music evolved into gospel, the greatest singer of which, Mahalia Jackson, came to prominence in the 1920s.
After WWII, blues from Memphis and the Mississippi Delta dispersed northward, particularly to Chicago, in the hands of a new generation of musicians such as Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy, BB King, John Lee Hooker and Etta James. In the 1960s and 1970s, the blues influenced a wave of rock bands like Cream and the Allman Brothers.
Today’s generation of blues players include the likes of Bonamassa, Warren Haynes (a longtime player for the Allman Brothers), Tedeschi Trucks Band, Alabama Shakes, the Marcus King Band, Shemekia Copeland and the sometimes-blues players the Black Keys.
Down in New Orleans, Congo Sq – where enslaved people gathered to sing and dance from the late 18th century onward – is considered the birthplace of jazz. There, ex-slaves adapted the reed, horn and string instruments used by the city’s often French-speaking, multiracial Creoles – who preferred formal European music – to play their own African-influenced music. This cross-pollination produced a steady stream of innovative sounds.
The first variation was ragtime, so-called because of its ‘ragged,’ syncopated African rhythms. Beginning in the 1890s, ragtime was popularized by musicians such as Scott Joplin, and was made widely accessible through sheet music and player-piano rolls.
Dixieland jazz, centered on New Orleans’ infamous Storyville red-light district, soon followed. In 1917 Storyville shut down and New Orleans’ jazz musicians dispersed. In 1919 bandleader King Oliver moved to Chicago, and his star trumpet player, Louis Armstrong, soon followed. Armstrong’s distinctive vocals and talented improvisations led to the solo becoming an integral part of jazz throughout much of the 20th century.
The 1920s and ‘30s are known as the Jazz Age, but music was just part of the flowering of African American culture during New York’s Harlem Renaissance. Swing – an urbane, big-band jazz style – swept the country, led by bandleaders Duke Ellington and Count Basie. Jazz singers Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday combined jazz with its Southern sibling, the blues.
After WWII, bebop (aka bop) arose, reacting against the smooth melodies and confining rhythms of big-band swing. A new crop of musicians came of age, including Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk. Critics at first derided such 1950s and ‘60s permutations as cool jazz, hard-bop, free or avant-garde jazz, and fusion (which combined jazz and Latin or rock music) – but there was no stopping the postmodernist tide deconstructing jazz. Pioneers of this era include Miles Davis, Dave Brubeck, Chet Baker, Charles Mingus, John Coltrane, Melba Liston and Ornette Coleman.
Early Scottish, Irish and English immigrants brought their own instruments and folk music to America, and what emerged over time in the secluded Appalachian Mountains was fiddle-and-banjo hillbilly, or ‘country,’ music. In the Southwest, steel guitars and larger bands distinguished ‘western’ music. In the 1920s, these styles merged into ‘country and western’ music and became centered on Nashville, TN, especially once the Grand Ole Opry began its radio broadcasts in 1925. Classic country artists include Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton.
Country music influenced rock and roll in the 1950s, while rock-flavored country was dubbed ‘rockabilly.’ In the 1980s, country and western achieved new levels of popularity with stars like Garth Brooks, George Strait, Alan Jackson and Randy Travis, and introduced elements of pop, with artists like Shania Twain and Faith Hill dominating the charts.
On today’s country scene, male artists like Eric Church, Luke Bryan and Blake Shelton often dominate the Billboard charts, due to the conservative gatekeepers of country radio. Still, innovative female artists like Margo Price and Kacey Musgraves are earning critical acclaim, as well as alt-country artists like Chris Stapleton and Jason Isbell.
The tradition of American folk music was crystallized by Woody Guthrie, who traveled the country during the Depression singing politically conscious songs. In the 1940s, Pete Seeger emerged as a tireless preserver of America’s folk heritage. Folk music experienced a revival during 1960s protest movements, but then-folkie Bob Dylan ended it almost single-handedly when he plugged in an electric guitar to shouts of ‘traitor!’
Folk has seen a resurgence in the 21st century, particularly in the Pacific Northwest. Iron and Wine’s mournful tunes channel pop, blues and rock, while Joanna Newsom, with her extraordinary voice and unusual instrumentation (she plays the harp), adds a new level of complexity to folk. Indie folk singers making waves in recent years (and expanding the boundaries of the genre) include Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, Laura Gibson, Lord Huron, Father John Misty and Angel Olsen.
Most say rock and roll was born in 1954 the day Elvis Presley walked into Sam Phillips’ Sun Studio and recorded ‘That’s All Right.’ Initially, radio stations weren’t sure why a white country boy was singing ‘black music,’ or whether they should play it. Two years later Presley scored his first big breakthrough with ‘Heartbreak Hotel.’
Musically, rock and roll was a hybrid of guitar-driven blues, black rhythm and blues (R&B), and white country-and-western music. R&B evolved in the 1940s out of swing and the blues and was then known as ‘race music.’ With rock and roll, white performers and some African American musicians transformed ‘race music’ into something that white youths could embrace freely – and oh, did they.
Rock and roll instantly abetted a social revolution even more significant than its musical one: openly sexual, as it celebrated youth and dancing freely across color lines, rock scared the nation. Authorities worked diligently to control ‘juvenile delinquents’ and to sanitize and suppress rock and roll, which might have withered if not for the early 1960s ‘British invasion,’ in which the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, emulating Chuck Berry, Little Richard and others, shocked rock and roll back to life.
The 1960s witnessed a full-blown youth rebellion, epitomized by the drug-inspired psychedelic sounds of the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane, and the electric wails of Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix. Ever since, rock has been about music and lifestyle, alternately torn between hedonism and seriousness, commercialism and authenticity.
Punk arrived in the late 1970s, led by the Ramones and the Dead Kennedys, as did the working-class rock of Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty. As the counterculture became the culture in the 1980s, critics prematurely pronounced ‘rock is dead.’ Rock was saved (by the Talking Heads, REM, Nirvana, Sonic Youth, Pavement and Pearl Jam among others) as it always has been: by splintering and evolving, whether it’s called new wave, heavy metal, grunge, indie rock, skate punk, hardcore, goth, emo or electronica.
In the early 2000s guitar groups the Killers, the Strokes, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and the White Stripes were dubbed the saviors of rock for their stripped-back sound that saw the genre established as the commercial mainstream. While American rock music may be waiting for its next big revival, it’s not going anywhere soon.
From the ocean of sounds coming out of the early 1970s – funk, soul, Latin, reggae, and rock and roll – young DJs from the Bronx in NYC began to spin a groundbreaking mixture of records together in an effort to drive dance floors wild. And so hip-hop was born. Groups such as Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five were soon taking the party from the streets to the trendy clubs of Manhattan and mingling with punk and new wave bands including the Clash and Blondie.
As groups like Run-DMC, Public Enemy and the Beastie Boys sold millions, the sounds and styles of the growing hip-hop culture rapidly diversified. The confrontational ‘gangsta rap’ of Niggaz With Attitude (aka NWA) came out of Los Angeles, and the group got both accolades and bad press for its daring sounds and social commentary – which critics called battle cries for violence – on racism, drugs, sex and urban poverty.
Come the turn of the millennium, what started as some kids playing their parents’ funk records at illegal block parties had evolved into a multibillion-dollar business and the second-most popular music genre in the USA. Russell Simmons and P Diddy stood atop media empires, and stars Queen Latifah and Will Smith were Hollywood royalty. A white rapper from Detroit, Eminem, sold millions of records.
Hip-hop is sometimes seen as a wasteland of commercial excess – glorifying consumerism, misogyny, homophobia, drug use and a host of other social ills. But just as the hedonistic days of arena rock and roll gave birth to the rebel child of punk, the evolving offspring of hip-hop and DJ culture are constantly breaking the rules. Today, rap/hip-hop is the most popular music in the USA, and major players include Drake, Kendrick Lamar and Cardi B. Drawing critical acclaim are rising stars such as Danny Brown, Anderson .Paak and Kamaiyah.