A few more words about music

As our esteemed commenter discusses, the history of music is entwined with the history of culture and, in the U.S. in particular, the history of ethnicity and caste. The U.S. has been extremely fertile musically, birthing several new musical genres which have become globally influential. I would say there are three main tributaries that came together to create the river of American music. The most important is of course the musical tradition of west Africa. The second is European art music -- you know, the stuff that's now ossified in Symphony Hall -- and the third the folk music of the British isles. 

Enslaved Africans presumably heard European chamber music coming from the big house, or while they worked as servants at parties and weddings and so on. Their enslavers probably didn't think anything of the call and response chants they heard coming from the field or the songs from the slave quarters in the evening, but the slaves started to put the sounds together and developed new forms that put their traditional scales, syncopation and polyphony over a modified version of European harmonies. After abolition, African American music developed into early forms of blues and gospel. Of course white people didn't listen to any of it and presumably considered the music barbaric.

In New Orleans, a city where there had been many free Black people even before abolition,  many people of mixed heritage, and a relatively prosperous Black entrepreneurial and professional class, people had access to musical instruments, and opportunities to perform for pay (most famously, but not exclusively, in brothels) jazz emerged in the early 20th Century. I won't get into the details of the origins of jazz or the musical influences it incorporated -- see the above paragraph which gives the main idea -- but I will add that improvisation and spontaneity were also essential elements. As I said yesterday, the music had so much vitality and force that by the 1920s, it emerged from the ghetto to become the dominant form of popular music in the U.S. 

At this point I have to specifically mentioned the trumpeter Louis Armstrong, who pretty much single-handedly developed the art of improvising new melodies over chord changes, which became a defining characteristic of jazz. While he became one of the most famous musicians in the world, African American jazz performers still could not stay in the hotels, or sit in the audiences in the  venues where they played for white audiences. And white musicians like Glen Miller  and Benny Goodman appropriated jazz, made it into dance music, and made the really big bucks. Meanwhile, other genres of African American music persisted, that white people continued to scorn. Rural people maintained and developed the blues, which in the 1920s was seldom recorded. A recorded genre called race music grew out of blues, ragtime and church music and eventually developed into Rhythm and Blues, but white people didn't buy the records.

Which brings us to Elvis, of course. As Memphis record producer Sam Phillips famously said in 1954, "If I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars." Along came Elvis, and the rest is history. 

Just to finish up for now, the folk music of the British isles was the music of poor and rural white people, as the blues was for similarly situated black people. It evolved into what we now call country music, which still has a pretty much exclusively white audience as such, but has also influenced rock and pop. So we have a genre called Rockabilly. Bruce Springsteen, whose early album The Wild, The Innocent and the E Street Shuffle was heavily influenced by jazz and blues, could go on to record a pure white folk music album (the Seeger Sessions); and meanwhile famous English rock bands play what is essentially the electrified blues that went up the river from the Mississippi delta to Chicago. 

So the moral of this story is that the confluence of musical cultures in the U.S. is what created the most commercially important musical forms of today. But the commercial rewards did not flow proportionately to the communities that contributed. Big Mama Thornton got one check for $200 for her recording of Hound Dog, while Elvis probably made millions. She died impoverished in a flop house. Eric Clapton and the Allman Brothers play the music of Robert Johnson, who never had a nickel. I had a conversation with a friend recently about the relative affluence of John Coltrane and Al Hirt. Granted, one important difference  is that Hirt was trying to sell records whereas Coltrane was trying to find the innermost truth, but still. Nowadays many, if not most (I haven't been counting) of the most commercially successful American musicians are Black, so maybe times have changed. But don't forget history.