AMERICAN POPULAR MUSIC 1) STREAMS OF TRADITION: THE SOURCES OF POPULAR MUSIC 3 broad streams: the European-American stream (ballads,

the English ballad opera; Irish, Scotish, and Italian songs; dance music country music) the African-American stream (riffs, polyrhythmic textures, timbres) the Latin American stream (the Cuban habanera ragtime; the tango; the rumba; the salsa; the samba; Mexican music) 2) POPULAR MUSIC: 19th AND EARLY 20th CENTURIES the minstrel show -the first distinctively American form of popular culture -an expression of a predominnatly white urban youth culture, which sought to express its independence by appropriating black style -mainly white performers who blackened their skin and carried out parodies of African-American music, dance, dress, and dialect -it emerged from working-class neighbourhoods where interracial interaction was common -Thomas Dartmouth Rice: Jim Crow (1829) the 1st international American song hit; a hybrid dialect a veritable explosion of blackface performance (audience and practitioners racially mixed) -from the 1840s through the 1880s bleckface became the predominant genre of popular culture in the US moving into the mainstream of mass popular culture, in the process losing much of its original rebellious energy Dance Music and Brass Bands -from the beginnibgm American popular music has been closely bound up with dance -upper classes: ballroom dancing; the typical setting = the ball -from the Civil War through the 1910s, brass band concerts were one of the most important musical apsects of American life 3) POPUALR JAZZ AND SWING Jazz Jazz music was the anthem for the first well-defibed American youth culture. Jazz = a symbol of sensuality, freedom, and fun transcending the boundaries of region, ethnicity, and class -emerged in New Orleans around 1900 (a hybrid musical culture unlike that in an yother American city: a gateway between the US and the Caribbean, its socially stratified population, its strong residues of colonial French culture) -jazz emerged from the confluence of New Orleanss diverse musical traditions (ragtime, marching bands, the rhythms used in Mardi Gras and funerary processions, French and Italian opera, Caribbean and Mexican music, Tin Pan Alley songs, African-American song traditions, both sacred the spirituals- and secular the blues) Louis Armstrong -the New Orleans-born cornetist and singer

-commonly credited with establishing certain core features of jazz (its rhythmic drive or swing; the emphasis on soloinstrumental virtuosity) -hemigrated to Chicago to join the nad of his mentor King (Joe) Oliver the first real jazz records -in 1924 he joined Fletcher Hendersons band in NYC, pushing the band in a hotter, more improvisatory style that helped to create the synthesis of jazz and ballroom dance music that would later be called swing -by the 1930s the best known black musician in the world Dance mMusic in the Jazz Age -a new subculture emerged from the white upper and middle classes, symbolized by the ..jazz babies or ,,flappers (emancipated young women with short skirts and bobbed hair) and ,,jazzbos or ,,sheiks (young men whose cool yet sensual comportment was modeled on the film star Rudolph Valentino) -this movement involved a blend of elements dfrom high culture and from popular culture -the intensification of African-American influence on the musical tastes and buying habits of white Americans -but the world of dance orchestras remained strictly segregated -African-Amercian musicians with increasing frequency in fancy downtown cabarets and hotel ballroms (only as employees) -Harlems famous Cotton Club_ Duke Ellington developed a styles that he called ,,jungle music, featuring dense textures and dark, glowing timbres The King of Jazz -the most successfuk dans band of the 1920s: the Ambassador Orchetsra, led by Paul Whiteman (he popularized a less improvised, more ,,respectable form of jazz) A classical musician Swing -beginning in 1935, a new style of jazzinspired music called ,,swing (initially developed in the late 1920s by black dance bands in NY, Chicago, and Kansas City) transformed American popular music -first used for the fluid, ,,rocking rhythmic momentum created by well-played music -used by extension to refer to an emotional state characterized by a sense of freedom, vitality, and enjoyment -the cultural values and social changes of the New Deal era: the basic ethos = unfettered enjoyment, ,,swinging, ,,having a ball -the ,,founding moment = the summer of 1935 when a danc band led by a young jazz clarinetist named Benny Goodman embarked on a tour of California; the King of Swing a fine improviser the first prominent white bandleader to hire black layers Swing era bands: - the blues (12-bar structure, three-chord pattern, blue notes, call-and-response patterns ) remained a mainstay of swing music; the band led by the jazz pianist William ,,Count Basie (Kansa-City style) -the Duke Ellington Orchestra,led by Edward Kennedy ,,Duke Ellington (an experimenter: he devised unusual musical forms, combined instruments in unusual ways, and created complex, distinctive tone colors) -the Miller Orchestra (Glenn Miller); from 1939 until 1942 it was the most popular dance band in the world