Arts & Architecture
MUSIC
Blues
Willie Dixon said it best: ‘the blues is the roots, and everything else is the fruits.’ He meant that all US music starts with the blues. And the blues started in the South. That’s where the genre developed out of the work songs, or ‘shouts,’ of black slaves and out of black spiritual songs and their ‘call-and-response’ pattern, both of which were adaptations of African music.
By the 1920s, Delta blues typified the sound. Musicians from Memphis to Mississippi sung passionate, plaintive melodies accompanied by a lonely slide guitar. 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.
After WWII many musicians headed north to Chicago, which had become a hub for African American culture. And here the genre took a turn – it went electric. A new generation of players such as Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy, BB King and John Lee Hooker plugged in to amps, and their screaming guitars laid the groundwork for rock and roll.
Jazz
Down in New Orleans, Congo Sq, where slaves 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 multiracial Creoles – who themselves preferred formal European music – to play their own African-influenced music. This fertile cross-pollination produced a steady stream of innovative sound.
The first variation was ragtime, so-called because of its ‘ragged,’ syncopated African rhythms. Next came Dixieland jazz, centered on New Orleans’ infamous Storyville red-light district. In 1917 Storyville shut down, and the musicians dispersed. Key player Louis Armstrong moved to Chicago to blow his trumpet, and set the tone for decades to come.
The 1920s and ’30s are known as the Jazz Age, and New York City’s Harlem was its hot spot, where Duke Ellington and Count Basie led their swingin’ big bands. In the 1950s and ’60s, Miles Davis, John Coltrane and others deconstructed the sound and made up a new one that was cool, free and avant-garde. NYC, New Orleans and Chicago remain the core of the scene today.
Country
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 Nashville became its center, especially once the Grand Ole Opry began its radio broadcasts in 1925.
Something about the ‘cry a tear in your beer’ twanging resonated with listeners, because country music is now big business. Singer-songwriters such as Shania Twain, Tim McGraw and Taylor Swift have sold millions of albums. Subsequent riffs on the genre include bluegrass, rockabilly and alt country. The South remains the genre’s boot-wearin’ stronghold.
Rock
Most say rock and roll was born in 1954 the day Elvis Presley walked into Sam Philips’ Sun Studios 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 him. It wasn’t until 1956 that Presley scored his first big breakthrough with ‘Heartbreak Hotel,’ and in some ways, America never recovered from the rock and roll aftermath.
Musically, rock 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 musicians (and some African American musicians) transformed ‘race music’ into something that white youths could embrace freely – and boy, did they.
Rock morphed into the psychedelic sounds of the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane, and the electric wails of Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan and Patti Smith. Since then, rock has been about music and lifestyle, alternately torn between hedonism and seriousness, commercialism and authenticity. Woodstock exemplified the scene in 1969, transforming a little patch of upstate New York into a legend.
Punk arrived in the late 1970s, led by the Ramones and the Dead Kennedys, as did the working-class rock of Bruce Springsteen (the pride of New Jersey). But it wasn’t long before a new sound on the block took over the ‘outlaw’ mantle: rap. In the east, New York and Detroit became spawning grounds. Jay Z and Eminem are its current frontmen.
LITERATURE
The ‘Great American Novel’ has stirred the imagination for more than 150 years. Edgar Allan Poe told spooky short stories in the 1840s, and is credited with inventing the detective story, horror story and science fiction. Four decades later Samuel Clemens, aka Mark Twain, also made a literary splash. Twain wrote in the vernacular, loved ‘tall tales’ and reveled in absurdity, which endeared him to everyday readers. His novel Huckleberry Finn (1884) became the quintessential American narrative: compelled by a primal moment of rebellion against his father, Huck embarks on a search for authenticity through which he discovers himself. The Mississippi River provides the backdrop.
The Lost Generation brought American literature into its own in the early 20th century. These writers lived as expatriates in Europe post-WWI and described a growing sense of alienation. Plain-speaking Midwesterner Ernest Hemingway exemplified the era with his spare, stylized realism. Minnesotan F Scott Fitzgerald eviscerated East Coast society life with his fiction. Back on home turf, William Faulkner examined the South’s social rifts in dense, caustic prose, and African Americans such as poet Langston Hughes and novelist Zora Neale Hurston undermined racist stereotypes during New York’s Harlem Renaissance.
After WWII, American writers began depicting regional and ethnic divides, experimented with style and often bashed middle-class society’s values. The 1950s Beat Generation, with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William S Burroughs at the center, was particularly hard-core.
Today’s literature reflects an ever-more-diverse panoply of voices. Toni Morrison, Amy Tan, Ana Castillo and Sherman Alexie have all written best sellers and given voice to, respectively, African American, Asian American, Mexican American and Native American issues, among many others.
FILM & TELEVISION
The studio system actually began in Manhattan, where Thomas Edison – inventor of the industry’s earliest moving picture technology – tried to create a monopoly with his patents. This drove many independents to move to a suburb of Los Angeles, where they could easily flee to Mexico in case of legal trouble – and ta-da, Hollywood was born.
While most of the movie magic still happens on the west coast, New York retains its fair share of film and TV studios. ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MTV and HBO are among the Big Apple’s big shots, and many visitors come expressly to see David Letterman, Dr Oz or their other favorite talk show taping. Many filmmakers and actors prefer New York to the west coast – Robert DeNiro, Spike Lee and Woody Allen most famously – so keep an eye out on local streets. Other film-friendly cities include Miami and Chicago, and one you normally wouldn’t think of: Wilmington, North Carolina, which hosts enough studios to earn the nickname ‘Wilmywood’.
As YouTube, Blip.tv and their ilk have entered the industry, the networks have responded by creating more edgy, long-narrative serial dramas, as well as cheap-to-produce, ‘unscripted’ reality TV: what Survivor started in 2000, the contestants and ‘actors’ of American Idol, Project Runway and The Jersey Shore keep alive today, for better or for worse.
THE GOLDEN AGE OF AMERICAN TELEVISION
By the 21st century, cable TV was targeting all manner of niche audiences and producing sophisticated, complex dramas that surpassed most risk-averse Hollywood fare. The result? Some might say that the 2000s, not the mid-20th century, have proved to be the ‘golden age’ of American TV. Shows that give an Eastern USA perspective include:
THEATER
Eugene O’Neill put American drama on the map with his trilogy Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), which sets a tragic Greek myth in post-Civil War New England. O’Neill was the first major US playwright, and is still widely considered to be the best.
After WWII two playwrights dominated the stage: Arthur Miller, who famously married Marilyn Monroe and wrote about everything from middle-class male disillusionment ( Death of a Salesman, 1949) to the mob mentality of the Salem Witch Trials ( The Crucible, 1953); and Tennessee Williams, whose explosive works The Glass Menagerie (1945), A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) dig deep into the Southern psyche.
Edward Albee gave the 1960s a healthy dose of absurdism, and David Mamet and Sam Shepard filled the ’70s and ’80s with rough and tough guys. These days Pulitzer Prize winner Tracy Letts writes family dramas that are often compared to O’Neill, bringing the scene full circle.
Broadway is where shows get star treatment. During the 2010/2011 season, the famed NYC district sold over a billion dollars in tickets – a new record even as costly productions like ‘Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark’ closed and reopened amid bad reviews and artistic feuds. But it’s away from Broadway’s bright lights, in regional theaters such as Chicago’s Steppenwolf, Minneapolis’ Guthrie and hundreds more, where new plays and playwrights emerge that keep the art vital.
PAINTING
In the wake of WWII, the USA developed its first truly original school of art: abstract expressionism. New York painters Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Mark Rothko and others explored freely created, non-representational forms. Pollock, for example, made drip paintings by pouring and splattering pigments over large canvases.
Pop art followed, where artists drew inspiration from bright, cartoony consumer images. Andy Warhol was the king (or Pope of Pop, as he’s sometimes called). Minimalism came next, and by the 1980s and 90s, the canvas was wide open – any and all styles could take their place at the arts table. New York remains the red-hot center of the art world, and its make-or-break influence shapes tastes across the nation and around the globe.
ARCHITECTURE
In 1885, a group of designers in Chicago shot up the pioneering skyscraper. It didn’t exactly poke the clouds, but its use of steel framing launched modern architecture.
Around the same time, another Chicago architect was doing radical things closer to the ground. Frank Lloyd Wright created a building style that abandoned historical elements and references, which had long been the tradition, and instead he went organic. He designed buildings in relation to the landscape, which in the Midwest were the low-slung, horizontal lines of the surrounding prairie. An entire movement grew up around Wright’s Prairie Style.
European architects absorbed Wright’s ideas, and that influence bounced back when the Bauhaus school left Nazi Germany and set up in the USA. Here it became known as the International Style, an early form of modernism. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was the main man with the plan, and his boxy, metal-and-glass-type behemoths rose high on urban horizons, especially in Chicago and New York City. Postmodernism followed, reintroducing color and the decorative elements of art deco, beaux arts and other earlier styles to the region’s sky-high designs.
Today architects are being challenged to ‘go green,’ and the creativity unleashed is riveting, transforming skylines and changing the way Americans think about their built environments.