Unit 3 -- Jazz and Tin Pan Alley

 

Unit 3 – Jazz and Tin Pan Alley

(The Early 20^th Century, ca. 1900-1930)

Now we move into the 20^th Century. Two genres will be of central concern to us in the first few decades of the century—jazz and Tin Pan Alley. First, however, let’s consider some important factors influencing the course of music at the beginning of the 1900s—new music technologies and the song and dance crazes inspired by the popularity of ragtime music.

 

New Technologies



 

A wax cylinder grammophone from the Columbia Grammophone

Company. The cannisters shown were used to store the wax

cylindars on which the sound was recorded.

New technologies began to change the way music was composed, performed, recorded and disseminated in the 20^th century.  First was the phonograph, invented in the 19^th century by the Thomas Edison and others. In the early days, phonographs were used to record music and other sound performances on wax cylinders—these eventually were replaced by the disc-shaped records we are more familiar with today. Many middle class homes had phonographs by the early 20^th century. Now, in addition to sheet music which could be played on the parlor piano, recordings of professional musicians could be enjoyed by anyone in the home. The early phonographs were rudimentary in their recording technology. The development of electronic microphones a bit later improved the sound quality and also made possible radio broadcasts, which really helped to spread a variety of music to listeners across the country.

 

The Ragtime Craze, Popular Songs, and Syncopated Dances (1900-1910) 



Published in 1899, "Hello

Ma Baby" was a big hit at the

turn of the century.

Unfortunately, this "coon song"

was also hugely popular.

After the success of ragtime piano music, like Scott Joplin’s Maple Leaf Rag, which broke records for sheet music sales at the turn of the century and became an international hit, the whole country was crazy for ragtime during the decade between about 1900 and 1910. White Americans became fascinated with the syncopated rhythms of ragtime. Syncopation was still a novelty to many people who were more accustomed to European style music with its straightforward, steady rhythms. Many popular songs of the day incorporated the common types of syncopation from ragtime piano music. These songs could be written by either black or white composers. Many of them were known as coon songs, and played up the African American roots of the ragtime style, using many of the same offensive images (in both the lyrics and sheet music art) that had been employed in the 19^th century minstrel show. This practice demonstrates the ongoing influence of minstrelsy and its attitudes.

The new fascination with syncopation also led to the popularity of a variety of new popular dances in the first decade of the century. The waltz, which had been popular as both a song and dance style was replaced by ragtime inspired dance crazes like the fox-trot. The syncopation in these dances is mild to us today, as it also was to most African Americans at the time, but to many, dancing these new-fangled dances to syncopated music made them feel wild and free, and a little bit risqué!  All of this excitement paved the wave for the popularity of the next style of music that would take the country by storm. It was a music that African Americas had already been cultivating—jazz.

 

Early Jazz (1910s-1920s)

Jazz refers to a variety of musical styles and genres that grew out of the African American community by the second decade of the twentieth century. Jazz may be vocal or instrumental, and it may be played by a soloist or a jazz band. A Precise definition of jazz is elusive, but like ragtime, it is a synthesis of African American syncopation with European American instruments, forms and harmonic practices.

Jazz developed out of a rich melting pot of people, culture, and music in New Orleans. Because of this, the early style of jazz is often referred to as the New Orleans style. New Orleans was a unique place. Having originated as a French colony and also belonging to the Spanish for a time, Louisiana was a place where different attitudes and concepts about race were held than in much of the United States where an English heritage prevailed. African slaves, Afro-Caribbean escaped slaves, Creoles of mixed European and African ancestry, and free blacks from uptown mixed relatively freely. The interactions of their various African and European musical practices led to the development of jazz. Much like ragtime, jazz grew out of a synthesis of African syncopation with European instruments and song and dance forms. In the case of jazz, it was the community marching band or dance band that took on the syncopated, improvised qualities of African American music to emerge as what we now call jazz.

King Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton and Louis Armstrong are some of the jazz musicians who were active in New Orleans between about 1914 and 1920. After World War I and the closing of Storyville—the red light district where jazz musicians got much of their paid work—many of these jazz pioneers moved north to Chicago. It was here that their music began to be recorded and jazz was spread to a larger audience. New York and Kansas City also became important centers of jazz.

Louis Armstrong

Of these early jazz musicians, Louis Armstrong had the longest and most varied career. His early work is exemplary of the New Orleans or early jazz style. He made several recordings as Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five. Armstrong’s ensemble was a typical early jazz band. Usually there would be a rhythm section consisting of various combinations of drums, piano, banjo or guitar. The rhythm section kept the beat while other instruments (usually a trumpet or cornet, a clarinet, and a slide trombone) improvised on syncopated melodies. It was typical for a performance to alternate sections of music in which a solo instrument was featured with section for the whole group to improvise together. Because all the instrumentalists were basically improvising independently of each other at the same time, these group improvisations created a raucous  effect that is particularly associated with the New Orleans style.

Listen for the all of these qualities in the following recording of "Heebie Jeebies" by Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five. "Heebie Jeebies" is the name of the tune which serves as the basis for the musicians' improvisations. After a short piano introduction, Armstrong plays a trumpet solo improvising on the tune. This is followed by a clarinet solo improvising its own take on the same melody. Then Armstrong sings the words of "Heebie Jeebies," but also incorporates scat, nonsense syllables common in sung jazz. This is the closest we get to hearing the song in its original form. Finally, the whole group plays together in collective improvisation with the trumpet, clarinet and trombone playing competing melody lines.
 

Louis Armstrong's Hot Five, a typical early jazz band.

Read more about Louis Armstrong's life and work here.

People were enthralled by this new music.  The 1920s became known as the Jazz Age. In Manhattan, mostly white people from downtown would travel up to Harlem to hear jazz and watch African Americans perform. Jazz became a symbol of everything that was modern and American. Its rise coincided with the Harlem Renaissance, the flowering of black literature, philosophy and politics in the same decade. Harlem was the capital of African America, and its influence on popular music and entertainment was great.

As jazz styles became popular, many people began to get in on the act, including white musicians who played and recorded jazz. Ironically, considering that jazz originated in the black community, the first jazz band to release a recording was a group of white jazz musicians, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band. Their recording of the “Jass Band One-Step” was a big hit in 1917.

 

In the early days, the spelling of jazz was not yet standardized, so one will often encounter spellings like jass or jaz. The word seems to have been an African American slang term for sex that was applied to the music because of its physically suggestive rhythms. Indeed, many people were attracted to jazz because of its association with fun, rebellion and the high life generally. More conservative observers, in both the white and black communities, criticized jazz as immoral—a music that induced people to dance, drink, and be naughty. They had said much the same thing about the ragtime music that preceded jazz, and people would make many of the same charges against rock and roll a generation later.

Concert Jazz

It wasn’t long before certain attempts were made to “mainstream” jazz, or make it more acceptable to more “polite” society. Paul Whiteman was a white concert musician who presented jazz-inspired music played by large orchestras and somewhat toned down for conservative audiences.

George Gershwin

George Gershwin did much to raise the profile of jazz as a serious and uniquely American art form in which Americans of all races could and should take pride. Like Whiteman, Gershwin was not African American—he was the son of Russian Jewish immigrants. Primarily a composer of popular songs in Tin Pan Alley style (discussed below), Gershwin, in spite of his own lack of formal education in classical music, had high ambitions to prove that jazz, this new music invented by black Americans, could be successfully combined with the European classical tradition. He was one of a whole generation of American composers in the early 20^th Century who were actively preoccupied with creating a new, truly American version of the classical music inherited from Europe.

In 1924, on a concert organized by Paul Whiteman, Gershwin himself gave the premiere performance of his composition Rhapsody in Blue. This piece was basically similar in concept to the Romantic piano concerto in the European classical music tradition, but with a looser structure (rhapsody means a piece in free form). The piece is composed for orchestra, with the piano as a featured solo instrument. Gershwin played the piano part at the first performance.

The following performance of Rhapsody in Blue features Leonard Bernstein, the great American composer and conductor, playing the roles of both conductor and soloist. The piece opens with a famous clarinet solo with a strongly jazz influenced ascending scale (notice how the pitch bends just as in other examples we’ve heard of African American and jazz performances with both voices and instruments). Gershwin’s music combines the syncopated rhythms of jazz with the formal traditions of European classical music.

Jazz musicians might note that what Gershwin has written here is not true jazz, and they would likely be right. A fundamental feature of jazz (according to many) is that it’s improvised. It’s probably must useful to think of a piece like Rhapsody in Blue as creating an American style of cultivated music in the classical tradition by incorporating elements inspired by jazz. Gershwin is given a great deal of credit for combining classical and jazz styles effectively and for helping to raise the status of jazz as a uniquely American art form worthy of people’s respect and admiration.

You can read more about the life and work of George Gershwin here.

Latin Jazz

The Latin American influence on American popular music had already been felt during the dance crazes of the early twentieth century, when the tango was one of the exotic dance styles, along with ragtime and the fox-trot, that so fascinated people during the pre-jazz days of early syncopation. Latin influence made itself felt in the jazz era, too.

As was the case in North American, African slaves had been brought Latin America during colonial times, including the islands of the Caribbean. In certain places, like Cuba, the polyrhythms of West African music were retained more than they had been in English North America. The result was a dense layering of rhythmic patterns in different instruments that can be heard in Latin American popular music and the Latin jazz that is influenced by it.

A distinct feature of Afro-Cuban music is the clave pattern—a rhythmic pattern played on an instrument of the same name—the claves. Here’s a person demonstrating the clave rhythm.

 

 

Here's what the clave looks like written out. It comes in two forms--the first has three notes followed by two notes (the 3-2 clave); the other has two notes followed by three notes (the 2-3 clave). In either case it becomes a repeated cycle of five notes in this pattern.

 

In Cuban music, the other instruments organize their rhythms around this basic pattern.

One of the first Latin popular hits in the United States was the song “El Manicero” (“The Peanut Vendor”) as recorded by the Cuban bandleader Don Azpiazú and his Havana Casino Orchestra in 1930. This recording shows the influence of traditional Afro-Cuban music. Listen for the 2-3 clave pattern at the beginning, where you can hear it clearly over the piano part. Notice that it continues through the whole song. Notice also the layering of different rhythmic parts in the instruments.

 

“El Manicero” became a huge hit in the United States, starting a whole popular vogue for Latin Jazz and dance music. The term rumba began to be applied, rather loosely, to any style of Latin music (or Latin-sounding imitations) that were novel to North American listeners.

 

Tin Pan Alley

Music publishing offices in Tin Pan Alley

Tin Pan Alley refers broadly to the kind of music published by the American sheet music industry from the late 19^th to mid-20^th century. It gets its name from a section of Manhattan in New York City where many of the popular music publishers had their offices. On these blocks, there were buildings filled with tiny offices, and each office had a piano in it. During the day, in each little office, people called song-pluggers would be demonstrating songs on all of these pianos – sometimes it would be a composer trying to get a publisher to accept a new song for publication; other times, a representative of the publisher trying to get performers to sing the song in public or record it. The noise of all of these pianos going at once sounded like the banging of tin pans from the street, especially when the windows were open in the summer.

 

Tin Pan Alley songs actually covered a wide variety of types, and followed musical fashions which changed over time. Many of the most successful songs published by Tin Pan Alley publishers were ones that had originally appeared in Broadway or Hollywood musicals. The most popular songs from these musicals sold well as sheet music. They would then be taken up by jazz musicians, who would record them in Jazz style. Many of the most popular songs of the 1920s and 1930s followed this pattern of being written for a show or movie, popularized by jazz recording artists (like Louis Armstrong), and bought in the form of both recordings and sheet music for people to enjoy at home. There is thus a close relationship of Tin Pan Alley to both Broadway and jazz.

Tin Pan Alley songs were very much the music of the urban middle class, and they dealt with middle class topics like home and romantic love. Some of the most successful Tin Pan Alley composers were George Cohan, Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Cole Porter, and Richard Rodgers (who worked with the lyricist Lorenz Hart in the days before he teamed up with Oscar Hammerstein II). All of these composers wrote many of their songs for Broadway and Hollywood, and all but two (Cohan and Porter) were members of New York City’s Jewish immigrant community (more on this phenomenon below).

Ethel Merman and chorus girls from
the original Broadway production of
Girl Crazy (1930)

Tin Pan Alley songs tended to follow certain forms (one might even say formulas). The most common was a freely composed verse followed by a more memorable refrain (commonly called a chorus).  “I Got Rhythm” by George Gershwin is a typical example of a Tin Pan Alley song. He composed it in 1930 for the Broadway musical Girl Crazy. The lyrics are by his brother, Ira Gershwin, with whom he usually collaborated, and it was sung initially by Ethel Merman in the show.

As you listen to the following recording by Judy Garland, listen for the form (overall organization of the song). After the verse, you will hear a chorus composed of four phrases. The first musical phrase (which we will label A) is repeated (with different words the second time) and then followed by a contrasting phrase, or bridge (which we will label B). Then to round things off, the A phrase is repeated one more time (again with different words). We could outline the whole thing as follows:

Verse (“Days can be sunny . . .”)
 

Chorus

     A (“I got rhythm . . .”)

     A (“I got daisies . . .”)

     B (“Old man trouble . . .”)

     A (“I got starlight . . .”)

This AABA form is probably the most common of all Tin Pan Alley song forms.

 

Notice that after Garland gets through the song once, the orchestra takes a turn on the chorus, and then Garland sings it again with some vocal embellishments. This is a normal way of handling these songs in performance. Often, performers would skip the verse and go straight into the chorus, which was the more memorable part of the song, which people wanted to hear. (It also contains the hook, or part of the song that really grabs your attention and sticks in your brain; the hook is usually also the title of the song, in this case, “I got rhythm”).

For interest, here is Ethel Merman singing the same song, but with a long instrumental introduction before the verse. Her style of singing is the same brash, belted, in-your-face style she would have used when she premiered the song on Broadway, and which was common in the theater, where one had to sing loudly enough to be heard over the orchestra without a microphone. (This is a later recording, so although her vocal style gives a good idea of how the song was originally presented, the orchestral arrangement is influenced by a later, big band style of jazz).

 



Irving Berlin,a popular Tin Pan

Alley composer-lyricist

Finally, these next two examples might help give you a sense of the life-span of a Tin Pan Alley song. Irving Berlin composed the words and music of “Blue Skies” for the 1926 Broadway show Betsy. It was the hit song from that show, and the sheet music was published for purchase by the public that same year. Because of its popularity, the filmmakers of the 1927 film The Jazz Singer, decided to include the song in their movie. (The Jazz Singer was the first full-length “talkie,” or sound film with dialogue and music synchronized to the image—an important landmark in both film and popular music history, since it was a musical.) Here is Al Jolson, the star of The Jazz Singer, performing the song in a scene from the movie. His vocal performance is very typical of the Vaudeville and early Broadway singing style in which many Tin Pan Alley songs would have been sung initially in the theater. Try to identify the AABA form of the song (following the common convention, Jolson skips the verse Berlin wrote for the song, launching right into the hook of the chorus on “Blue skies smiling at me . . .”)


A popular Tin Pan Alley song like “Blue Skies” would quickly become a jazz standard –one of the standard songs performed and improvised upon by jazz musicians, both instrumentalists and singers. Here’s a recording of Ella Fitzgerald singing “Blue Skies” as a jazz standard in the 1950s. Notice that she also skips the verse, going straight into the AABA chorus. After the initial statement of the song, she does a scat improvisation on the tune, in just the same manner that jazz musicians in the earlier examples of this unit would improvise solos upon whatever tune formed the basis of their performance.

 

 

The late date of this version indicates the longevity of the most popular Tin Pan Alley songs. They formed the core of mainstream popular music for several decades in the early to mid-20^th century. Indeed this symbiotic relationship of musicals (both theater and film), Tin Pan Alley, and jazz was the dominant practice and model of the popular music industry from at least the 1920s until somewhat after World War II (whereas after the World War II, musicals styles influenced by blues and country—most notably rock and roll—came more to the fore).

               

The Black-Jewish Relationship in American Popular Music 

It has been noted that many of the most successful Tin Pan Alley composers were Jewish. The precise reason for their prominence in this field continues to be debated and discussed by music historians, but it is clear that the large Jewish immigrant communities of New York provided a steady stream of aspiring songwriters, and that songwriting became one road to success for many of the children and grandchildren of Jewish immigrants seeking to share in the American dream. Some, like Gershwin, came from affluent families, while others, like Berlin, came from poverty.

These Jewish songwriters from immigrant families were profoundly committed to assimilating as Americans. The songs they wrote conformed to dominant images of American life (mostly, they don’t “sound Jewish”), but at the same time, they helped create the very idea in people’s minds of what “American music” was—after all, these songs were among  the most popular of the time. One of the ways in which Jewish songwriters and composers created an American-sounding music was by incorporating the style traits of African American music in their own work. We can see this, for example, in the jazz influence on Gershwin’s work in both Rhapsody in Blue and “I Got Rhythm.”

Jewish songwriters and composers are rightly given credit for helping to legitimize jazz, blues and other styles of black music in the minds of non-black Americans. Their status as people who were an ethnic minority, but could more easily pass for “white,” allowed Jewish composers to “speak for” African Americans—implicitly making the case that black Americans were valuable contributors to American music and culture. There is a flip side to this, however, in which it must acknowledged that Jewish musicians and composers received the primary benefits from their borrowing of African American musical styles. It must therefore be acknowledged that the relationship between black and Jewish musicians has been a complex one. Nonetheless, adoption of black musical styles by Jewish musicians has generally been seen as positive and ultimately beneficial to both races, rather than deliberately exploitative. Many fruitful collaborations between Jews and black arose from this relationship.

For example, Gershwin’s 1935 opera Porgy and Bess is based on a novel about a black community in South Carolina. Before he began work on the opera, Gershwin spent some time living in an actual black community in South Carolina—getting to know the residents, learning about their musical traditions, and participating in performances with them as research for the opera. Although Porgy and Bess has occasionally been criticized for its stereotyped dialect and depiction of poor Southern blacks, it was meant to be a sympathetic at the time, and its continuing success over the years has provided black operatic singers with important work. The roles in Porgy and Bess are still considered to be among the best roles (with the best songs) specifically for black opera singers. During the opera’s first tour in 1936, the all-black cast was even able to strike an early blow for civil rights when they refused to perform in the National Theater in Washington, DC, until the theater agreed to desegregate, allowing black audience members to sit in the same sections as white audience members.

The symbiotic relationship between Jewish composer and black performer reaches full fruition in performances of Gershwin’s songs by black jazz musicians. Like Tin Pan Alley songs, the songs from Porgy and Bess became popular with black jazz musicians, and their recordings have contributed greatly to the continuing popularity of Gershwin’s songs among many in the African American community. Some of the best-known songs from Porgy and Bess are “Summertime,” “Bess You Is My Woman Now,” “I Got Plenty O’ Nuttin’,” and “It Ain’t Necessarily So.”

Here’s a performance of “I Got Plenty O’ Nuttin’” from the opera, followed by a jazz performance of the same song by Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald.

 

Unit 2 -- Colonial, Revolutionary and 19th Century Music

While much of the music which will concern us comes from the 20th century, we will benefit from understanding the roots of that music in the “streams of influence” that contributed to the changing landscape of American music in the period from earliest colonization in the 17^th century to the end of the 19th century. Of particular interest to us from these first 300 years will be the Native American, European American, and African American streams, with the Latin American influence becoming more apparent later on.

Native American Music

The first people in what is now in the United States were Native Americans. Theirs is the original American music. Although we don’t have surviving examples of Native American music from the time before Europeans arrived, we do have the example of contemporary performances by living Native Americans who are very committed to keeping these traditions alive.

Much Native American music includes chanted vocals over a steady, percussive beat. Some of the words convey the meaning of the song, while others are nonsense syllables, or vocables, meant to access the spirit world through their musical sounds rather than convey any kind of linguistic meaning.

Exactly what influence Native American music has had on later American music is difficult to say. Europeans encountering Native Americans for the first time clearly did not “get” their music. Early descriptions by Europeans characterize the sounds as “savage” an incomprehensible—assessments based on their inability to understand the musical language of a foreign culture. There is little evidence that European musicians adopted Native American musical practices in significant or authentic ways. On the other hand, there is evidence that African American folktales incorporated elements of Native folklore through a process of interaction between blacks and Native Americans. It is reasonable to speculate that Native American music has similarly influenced the course of American music, but the historical details are difficult to trace.

In any case, modern performances of Native American music and dance certainly constitute an ongoing part of music in the United States that is important to the cultural heritage of a particular community. We might wonder whether these modern performances, carried on at events such as tribal powwows and competitions, can be assumed to bear reliable resemblance to the music of Native Americans at the time that European settlers arrived 400 years ago. What’s important to Native American performers themselves, however, is that these performances allow them to carry on a cultural tradition that connects them with nature, their ancestors and their community through a shared practice. It is more important that this is an ongoing, living tradition of communal performance, and not so much whether songs or sounds are being transmitted in some “pure” form from centuries ago.

European American Music

The first successful English settlements were established at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607 and Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1620. The musical traditions the English setters brought with them included songs, dances and sacred music (music for church and worship) from Europe. During the colonial era,  they continued to cultivate these types of music, adapting them to their new environment and developing what is best described as a European-American music—not simply European music imported across the ocean, but a new American version of it.

A broadside ballad

One of the most important song types the English brought with them was the ballad. Ballads are popular songs that tell a story. They were often sold and distributed in the form of lyrics (words to the song) printed on large sheets of paper called broadsides (for this reason they are also called broadside ballads). The most popular ballads had lyrics that were familiar to people and were set to well-known melodies that were easy to sing. In addition to the standard lyrics, however, the ballads published on broadsides might have alternate lyrics satirizing or commenting on current events or politics.

Here’s a typical example of the traditional English ballad. Listen to the story it tells and notice the simple, singable melody.

The ballad tradition lives on in modern times in country music songs, which are well known for their narrative qualities.

The dances brought from Europe included stately, aristocratic ones like the minuet as well as more folk-like country dances, such as those resembling square dances. These popular and formal dances were an important part of secular (non-religious) life for English and European colonists (this is in contrast to Native and African Americans, for whom dance was also a religious activity). Dances for couples and dances for groups were both common.

Here’s a video about colonial dance reenactment. Instruments commonly used for these dances would have included the harpsichord (the common keyboard instrument of the time) and the fiddle (violin).

The early colonists found themselves in a wild and rugged country where they formed small communities mostly focused on the basics in life. It took some time for any kind of professional music community to develop, so in the early Colonial Era, home and amateur music-making were most important. This reality is reflected not only in the importance of popular songs and dances that could be performed in the family or community, but also in the fact that some of the most famous early American musicians were politicians and founders who happened also to be amateur instrumentalists and composers. Thomas Jefferson played the violin, and Francis Hopkinson of Philadelphia, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, is often credited as the first composer of the United States.

When professional music scenes did emerge, they were centered mainly in the largest cities in the new colonies—Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Charleston (at the time, the largest and most important city in the South). In these cities there were performances of opera, classical music, and musical plays, reflecting the European heritage of the colonies. There was also an important opera scene in New Orleans in French colonial Louisiana. In the beginning, professional musicians were mainly people who were trained in music in Europe before immigrating to the colonies.

Many of the colonists came to North America in search of religious freedom. Some of the most important music composed during the Colonial Era is sacred music—music for church and worship. William Penn’s liberal policies about religious freedom allowed the Moravians of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, to develop a unique tradition of sacred music. The first book published in the colonies was the Bay Psalm Book (1640), a collection of Protestant Hymns. Perhaps the most famous composer of the Colonial Era was William Billings, a New Englander who cultivated a style of religious music similar in many respects to European sacred choral traditions, but with a uniquely rugged and rustic American flavor. Here’s a sample:

Another important tradition inherited from England was that of military and marching bands. During the Revolutionary war, the fife and drum combination was typical (a fife is a kind of flute). In addition to providing conventional music for patriotic purposes, drums were also used to sound military signals—rhythmic patterns that coded military commands. The familiar tune “Yankee Doodle” was a popular song during the Revolution.

African American Music

Most of the slaves who were brought to the new world came from countries on the west coast of Africa. The music they brought with them was the music of West Africa, which they continued to practice and adapt to their new cultural environment over the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries.

West African music is based on a foundation of percussion. In a typical instrumental ensemble, the various drums, rattles, cowbells and other percussive instruments combine in complex layers of polyrhythm (the practice of performing more than one meter or rhythm simultaneously). Each instrument has its own independent rhythm which combines with the patterns of the other instruments to create a large-scale composite rhythm that might be heard by the listener, even though it is not played by any single musician. Out of this polyrhythmic texture, there arise rhythmic accents that are off the beat, or on the weak beats, creating the feeling known as syncopation.

Over this foundation of polyrhythmic percussion, there is often singing. West African vocal style includes not only sung pitches as would be recognized in European singing, but also shouting, hollering, grunting, use of the falsetto (high register of the voice), and any number of other effects the human voice is capable of creating. A common practice on West African music that is inherited by African American music is call and response, in which a soloist sings or shouts a musical phrase which is followed by a group response.

aAfrican music takes place within a communal context. There is always music during community and ritual observances, and everyone participates. Some play instruments, some dance, some sing. There is no separation of performers and audience as in much modern and Western music. A common practice is the circle dance, in which participants stand in a circle and take turns dancing in the center. Dance itself forms part of the music, as rattles and other noise makers attached to the body sound in rhythm to the performance. These performances are improvised, based on tradition and learned by example.

Here's a baby-naming ceremony from Mali, which includes many typical traits of traditional West African performance.

       

At first, African slaves in the new world retained their African religious, spiritual and ritual traditions. Over time, they adopted Christianity, but tended to combine it with African beliefs and practices. In African religion, dancing, shouting, and "getting the spirit" were indispensable parts of the religious experience. White European-American society, however, strongly disapproved of this type of behavior in the church. In order to worship in their own fashion, African Americans would sneak off into the woods or to someone's house after the regular church service and participate in a ring shout. In a ring shout, the worshipers would firm a circle (reminiscent of the circle dances of Africa). Moving in the same direction through circle, they would sing, shout, stomp and clap while performing religious songs of their own choosing in praise of the Christian God.

The religious songs they were likely to sing in these observances were spirituals -- African American folk songs on sacred themes. These songs were hybrids of Christian hymns with African American musical practices, including expressive, flexible singing, syncopated melodies, and call-and-response forms. Many of these songs seem to have served a dual function, with the words expressing in code what could not be expressed explicitly--the desire of slaves to escape slavery. Spirituals with references to "salvation" and "escape" from a world of troubles would only be hear by white masters as songs about going to heaven when one dies, but the slaves may also have understood the message as a dream of escaping from slavery--a dream that became more and more  intensely felt as the time of the Civil War approached. Some spiritual lyrics may even have encoded directions for following the Underground Railroad.

Here's a recording of a performance of an African American spiritual in the traditional folk style. It is probably very similar to the style in which slaves and free blacks would have sung in the nineteenth century.

Another important type of African American folk music was the work song. The purpose of a work song is to help with physically demanding types of work, such as the type  black slaves wer forced to do in the fields of Southern plantations. The beat of the song established a rhythm to help the workers keep moving in time and keep working. The following is an example of a work song. It's a recording of prison inmates from the 1940s, but as with the previous example, the style of the singing and rhythm are probably pretty close to the sound of work songs during the era of slavery. Notice that, just as in West African performance, this song has a foundation of percussion (supplied by the work the men are doing) with vocals in call-and-response laid over the steady rhythm.

IThese African American folk songs constitute a new and vital musical practice in the United States. However, some black slaves also performed music fully in the European tradition for the entertainment of their masters. Often, slaves that worked in the house (as opposed to the field) were well trained on European instruments such as the violin. They might provide the music for dancing at a party hosted by the master. Like property, a black musicians might be lent by his master to a neighboring plantation owner for an evening. These talented slaves must have been highly prized. When such a slave escaped, the master might put out on ad seeking his return. In addition to a physical description, the ad would state that the runaway slave was likely to be travelling with a fiddle or a guitar and that he could be seen to play it exceptionally well.
 

Popular Music in the 19th Century
 

During the 19th century, the African and European musical roots of the United States had more and more influence on each other. A number of types of music emerged during the 19th century that combined these cultures in new ways. Some of the types of music that were popular with white Americans incorporated at least the idea of a cultural link with African Americans. Some of these musical fusions were more authentic that others. At least one, the minstrel show, is downright offensive and exploitative by today's standards in its cartoonish portrayal of black Americans. However, we must give it some consideration, because its historical influence, however unfortunate, is too large to ignore.

The Minstrel Show

By the middle of the 19th century, the United States was becoming increasingly diverse. That diversity was being explored--though not very accurately--on the American stage in the form of the minstrel show.

A minstrel show consisted of a variety of musical and dramatic acts. There were songs, skits, and parodies of well-known plays or European operas. It was in many ways the first uniquely American style of musical theater--the predecessor to the kinds of shows that would appear on Broadway in the 20th century.



A white actor in and out of blackface makeup.
 

But the minstrel show was something else besides. The characters portrayed in these entertainments reflected the diverse types of people that were making up the new nation, but far from realistic, these portrayals were crude stereotypes. There were caricatured representations of city slickers, country bumpkins, woman suffragists (played by men in these all-male productions), and various kinds of ethnic immigrants (Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, etc.). But most of all, minstrel shows always included a variety of stereotyped African American characters. 



The minstrel character Jim Crow.

These characters were performed by white male actors in blackface. The actors would apply makeup made out of burnt cork (this was called "blacking up" or "corking up") to create an outlandish effect that was a completely non-realistic representation of African Americans. These characters would sing songs and tell stereotyped jokes in phony black dialect. One of the most popular characters that appeared in many shows was called Jim Crow, created by the songwriter and performer Thomas Dartmouth Rice. His signature song was "Jump Jim Crow." The segregationist laws that were established in most parts of the country after the Civil War were named for this character (Jim Crow laws, the Jim Crow era).



Stephen Foster

The songs these characters sang were often of idealized nostalgia for Southern plantation life, constituting an idealized fantasy to be enjoyed by (mostly Northern) whites. The South was portrayed as an exotic, romantic location, to which black former slaves longed to return! Many of the most popular songs of the 19th century originated in the minstrel shows. The songwriter Stephen Foster composed many of the better quality ones. With some updating, they continue to be performed today, some of the most famous titles being "Oh, Susannah," "Swanee River," "Beautiful Dreamer," and "Jeannie With the Light Brown Hair." Here is a performance of his song, "Old Folks at Home." The singer is accompanying himself on the guitar, in a style much like that of the time. Notice that at one point the song uses the word "darkie," a rather sentimentalizing (and patronizing) term for black people at the time. In many modern performances the words are changed from "Oh, darkies . . . " to "Oh, Lordy, how my heart grows weary . . . "

The first widely successful minstrel troupe was the Virginia Minstrels (they were based in New York City, but the "Virginia" in the name was meant to evoke the Southern flavor of the entertainment). Minstrelsy was an immensely popular form of entertainment from around the 1840s until the Civil War, and continued to be influential well into the early 20th century. After the Civil War and emancipation, there were black minstrel troupes, too. This fact may seem surprising, but it demonstrates how pervasive this form of entertainment was--that black actors and musicians looking for work often had no choice but to participate in the minstrel show.

 

Patriotic Marches and Dance Bands

 

The minstrel show demonstrates an attempt by white Americans to acknowledge the presence of African Americans in their popular entertainment, but minstrel show songs are really still the music of white Americans with a European heritage who were more fascinated by black people than actually knowledgeable about their culture and experiences.

 

A another type of European American music that continued to be popular in the late 19th century was the tradition of band music and patriotic marches (we saw an earlier manifestation of this in the Yankee Doodle example above). Many towns and communities in the United States had amateur and professional  bands that were usually composed of mostly wind and percussion instruments and played dance music and marches for entertainment. (There were versions of these bands in black communities as well--their music developed into ragtime and jazz.)

 

A famous composer of patriotic marches was John Philip Sousa. His marches were written for large, professional concert bands or military bands and continue to be well-known. They are often performed for patriotic or nationalistic events. Perhaps his most famous march is "Stars and Stripes Forever." Notice the prominence of large numbers of wind and percussion instruments in the following recording of "Stars and Stripes Forever." Like most marches, it has a strong, steady beat in duple meter.



 

 

The Popular Spiritual

 

If the minstrel show was mainly a white fantasy about black music and culture, the spiritual continued to be one of the most authentic expressions of black musical and cultural life.
After the Civil War and emancipation, many colleges and instititions of learning were founded for African Americans. Many of these colleges had music schools, where students were trained primarily in European classical music. However, they also brought their own traditions with them, and black music was naturally combined with European forms. Many of these colleges had choirs that specialized in singing versions of the traditional spirituals. These performances combined the tunes and lyrics of the folk spiritual (like "Been in the Storm So Long," discussed above) with European four-part choral harmony (rather like William Billings's sacred choral music, also discussed above).

The Fisk Jubilee Singers

The most famous of these choirs was the Fisk Jubilee Singers, a group of students from Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. At a time when the college was in financial trouble and seemed doomed to close its doors, the director of the Fisk Jubilee Singers had the ambitious idea of taking the choir on tour around the country and using the money they raised to save the school. It might sound like a crazy movie plot, but it worked! The Fisk Jubilee Singers were were a hit in the United States--people flocked to hear these beutiful "negro" melodies sung in rich harmonies by the choir. They eventually toured in Europe as well. The proceeds from these performances allowed the college to thrive, and Fisk University continues to be an important traditionally black college today.

The Fisk Jubilee Singers continue to perform. Here's a recording of the group from the 20th century--it's obviously not the original group, but the style of singing is similar.



 

 The Fisk Jubilee Singers were the most popular, but not the only, black choir singing spirituals in the late 19th century. The height of popularity of this style of spiritual singing was around the 1890s. The interest in sprituals among white Americans of the time was the first instance of something that will happen again and again in American music. For the first time an authentic black music (unlike minstrelsy) took hold and became widely popular among people of all races in the United States. This will happen again with ragtime, jazz, blues, rock and roll, and rap, but it all began the spiritual.

 

 

Ragtime

 

Ragtime was the next type of music to come out of the African American community and achieve wide popularity across the country and the world. Ragtime is a style of piano music cultivated by African American musicians, in which syncopated rythms are combined with European musical forms. Like the spiritual, it as a synthesis of African and European musical traits.

 

Ragtime seems to have been most thouroughly developed in the late 19th century in the Midwest, especially in the region around the state of Missouri. After emancipation, a new genereation of free blacks, including Scott Joplin (1867/8-1917), were able to find work as professional musicians. Many, like Joplin, were highly trained in European classical music, but spent much of their time playing in bars, nightclubs, and houses of prostitution, since these were the primary venues in which black musicians could get work at the time.

 

Scott Joplin
 

In these environments, these musicians would play tunes on the piano--often familiar ones, but they would improvise on them in a highly syncopated style, incorporating the rhythmic complexity of the the African roots of black music. This was called "ragging" a tune. The left hand would play a steady duple or quadruple beat much like the steady beat of a European march--in fact, this aspect of ragtime may come directly out of the community marching band tradition discussed above. Over this steady beat in the left hand, the right hand plays a melody with a syncopated rhythm--this is the African aspect.

 

In the following example of someone playing Joplin's "The Entertainer," listen and watch for the steady beat on the left hand (lower notes) and the syncopated rhythm, with accents on the offbeat, in the right hand.

 

The version of ragtime played in bars and nightclubs was improvised music, and probably much more spirited and "ragged" around the edges than this. What Joplin and others did was to take the ragtime style and use it as the basis of written music compositions--pieces of music that were intended to be small works of art, like the sonatas composed and published by European composers for others to read and play from sheet music. Joplin always insisted that his rags were intended to be played in a slow and dignified manner, though few others have actually played them that way. In this way, the ragtime pieces published by Joplin are not only a synthesis of black and European American influences, but also stradle the line between popular and classical music--the style is inspired by popular music, but the artistic intentions behind these composed pieces are closer to the concept of European classical music.

 

Joplin's most famous rag (an individual piece of ragtime music is called a rag) was the "Maple Leaf Rag," named for one of the night clubs where he played in Missouri. Joplin published this piece in 1899, and it took the country by storm. It set records for the sale of sheet music up to that time in history and was played by amateur musicians in the both the United States and Europe. This piece and other ragtime music became so popular on both sides of the Atlantic, that for the first decade of the 20th century, all of popular music began to be influenced, starting a ragtime craze not only in instrumental and dance music, but even in ragtime-style songs. Joplin is considered by many to be the first African American composer to achieve international fame. (While we're at it, we might as well mention that this African American was one of the fist American composers of any race to achieve international fame.) You can read more about the life and work of Scott Joplin here.

 

Listen to this recording of the "Maple Leaf Rag." (Try not ot be distracted by the bouncing balls!) This piece is a bit more complex than "The Entertainer," but notice agian the steady beat established by the left hand bass notes and chords set against the intricate syncopated right hand melody.

 

 

 

This is the end of Unit 2!