Unit 7 -- The American Musical

Unit 7 -- The American Musical

(up to the 1950s)

 

 

The American Musical

 

Forms of theater with music exist all over the world. The American style of musical has been a particularly important form of popular entertainment since the beginning of the 20th century. Like jazz, it is recognized internationally as a distinctly American and influential art form. The American musical developed out of a variety of musical and theatrical forms that preceded it in the 19th century (and earlier), including opera, operetta, minstrelsy, melodrama, pantomime, and ballet.

 

 

A musical typically involves some combination of spoken dialogue, songs and dancing, although these may be combined in various ways, and all elements may not be present--there are musicals without dialogue in which everything is sung and musicals without dancing. The libretto or book of a musical is the script containing the spoken dialog; the person who writes the libretto is called a librettist. The lyrics are the words of the songs, written by a lyricist, and the score is the music by the composer. The choreographer designs the dances. Musicals also require producers, directors, set designers, costume designers, lighting designers, stage crews, and of course the performers, who must excel simultaineously at three demanding crafts--singing, dancing and acting. The jobs of the creative team on a musical may be completely separate or one person may do two or more jobs--for example, the composer may also be the lyricist, the lyricist may also be the librettest, and many choreographers have also served as the directors of musical productions.

 

Historically, the Broadway theater district of New York City has been the center of American theatrical culture, and many musicals have either originated on Broadway or made their way there. The Hollywood film musical has also been and important counterpart to the stage musical, and Broadway and Hollywood musicals have exerted a good deal of influence on each other.

 

By the early 20th century, Broadway musicals could be said to come in two main types--operettas that mainly continued the European and "cultivated" styles and a brasher type of musical influenced by popular American styles such as ragtime and early jazz. Many shows combined elements of both types.



 

Operetta

 

An operetta is a light, usually comic, style of opera. It was a popular form of entertainment at various times and places in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, especially in France, Austria, Britain and the United States. Gilbert and Sullivan's operettas like The Pirates of Penzance, H.M.S Pinafore, and The Mikado were especially popular with British and American audinces.

From the turn of the century through the 1920s, an American style of operetta flourished on Broadway. These shows were usually set in exotic or fantistical locations with music strongly influenced by the European opera and operetta traditions. The composer Victor Herbert was well known for his operettas. Like many operetta composers, he was born and trained in Europe before settling the United States. Among his best-known works are Babes in Toyland (1903) and Naughty Marietta (1910). Here is a scene from the 1935 film version of Naughty Marietta. It stars Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald, who were popular stars of the 1930s known for doing these kinds of roles. Naughty Marietta is set in French colonial New Orleans and tells the story of a Princess who seeks the man who can finish her song--with him she will fall in love. That is exactly what happens in this scene.
 

Naughty Marietta by Victor Herbert

 

 

 

Musical Comedy



 

The musical comedy embraced the vernacular styles of American music that were popular at the time (especially ragtime and jazz), usually along with zesty, modern plots set in familiar or American locations such as New York City or the Wild West, and fast, zingy humor. The shows of George Cohan might be considered early examples of the musical comedy. Cohan, who started out in a family act on Vaudeville, was the librettist, composer, lyricist and star of his own shows. A patriotic Irish-American, he sometimes literally wrapped himself in the American flag on stage. His first big hit was Little Johnny Jones (1904). Here is James Cagney's spot-on portrayal of Cohan in a recreation of scenes from that show in the 1941 film Yankee Doodle Dandy.

 

 

 

The musical comedy reached its maturity and flourished most fully during the 1920s and 1930s. (It should be noted that in the meantime the operetta and musical comedy had a good deal of influence on each other, with some composers like Jerome Kern representing a more cultivated end of the spectrum and others like Irving Berlin more fully representing the vernacular). These shows had plots that are often  described as "flimsy," "silly," or "forgettable," but no one cared, because it was the songs and the performers that were the real draw. A really good show in this era was one that served as a showcase (a "vehicle") for stars like Ethel Merman and produced a couple of hit songs. As we already know, the songs from Broadway shows in this era became the Tin Pan Alley hits and jazz standards of the time. For the most part, it was the songs, not the shows themselves, that lived on in popular culture and memory. Popular composers and lyricists of musical comedy include George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart.

 

One of the few musical comedies of this era that is still commonly performed in full is Anything Goes, with music and lyrics by Cole Porter. It is a typical example of the form, with a modern setting (on a cruise ship), smart humor, and several musical numbers that became popular hits then and are classics now. Here is a performance of the title song from the 2011 revival (new production of an old show) of Anything Goes with Sutton Foster, one of Broadway's current biggest stars, taking a role originated by Ethel Merman in 1934.





 

Anything Goes by Cole Porter

 

 

 

The Musical Play

 

A new style of musical became prominent starting in the 1940s. Sometimes called musical plays, these shows had stronger plots with songs that were intended first and foremost to help tell the story (rather than using the show as an "excuse" to produce hit songs and put popular performers on stage). It's often said the that songs in these shows are integrated into the plot, because they help to reveal characters or move the story along in specific ways. Thus the term integrated musical is often applied to these works. This type of musical flourished from 1943 through the 1960s, a period known as the golden era of musicals. This idea of the musical play with integrated songs continues to be influential to the present day.

 

The integrated musical play is best exemplified by the work of composer Richard Rodgers and lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II, who popularized the form with the premier of Oklahoma! in 1943. Oklahoma! has gained legendary status as the "first" integrated musical--a status that is not really true. There were stage musicals, operettas, and film musicals with integrated songs before Oklahoma! (examples include Show Boat (1927) on Broadway, Snow White (1937) and The Wizard of Oz (1939) in Hollywood, and virtally any operetta). However, Oklahoma!, because if its success, did inaugurate a whole new era in the Broadway musical in which the integrated musical became the dominant style, which had not been the case before. After Oklahoma! other creative teams imitated the Rodgers and Hammerstein model, with varying degrees of success. Classic musicals of the "golden era" that ensued include Rodgers and Hammerstein's Carousel (1945), South Pacific (1949), The King and I (1951), and The Sound of Music (1959); Lerner and Loewe's My Fair Lady (1956); Frank Loesser's Guys and Dolls (1950); Adler and Ross's Damn Yankees (1955); Meredith Willson's The Music Man (1957); Jerry Herman's Hello, Dolly! (1964) and Bock and Harnick's Fiddler on the Roof (1964).

 

 The following two excerpts from Oklahoma! demonstrate the musical play as developed by Rodgers and Hammerstein. First, in "Oh, What a Beautiful Morning" Curly, the cowboy, is introduced in a solo song. This was a departure from the normal convention in musicals, which was to open with a splashy, spectacular opening number for the chorus. Rodgers and Hammerstein, had a simple, sincere story to tell, so they opened instead with the simple, folk-like song--at first Curly even sings a cappella, without orchestral accompaniment. Notice that the dialogue alternates with sections of the song so that we learn about the characters and the situation during this musical scene.

 

Oklahoma! by Rodgers and Hammerstein

 

 

 

In "Surrey with the Fringe on Top," we learn about the complicated relationship between Curly and his would-be girlfriend Laurie. Once again, the song is integrated with plot and character and alternates with dialogue. The character of the song changes as the dynamic between Curly and Lauried does.

 

 

 

Over time, the golden era musical became more and more daring in its treatment of serious themes. West Side Story (1957), with music by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, is an updated retelling of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Instead of rival families, two street gangs, the Puerto Rican sharks and the white ethnic Jets, battle it out in New York City. The ill-fated lovers are Tony and Maria. They meet at a dance in the gym. For this scene, Bersnstein composed Latin-inspired music, including the Cuban dance the Mambo, to evoke the Latin flavor of the story. At the time, Cuban and Puerto Rican musical styles were fusing with jazz in urban scenes like New York City. You can hear all of these influences along with Bernstein's training as a symphonic conductor and composer in this scene. (The following excerpts are from the movie version of West Side Story, which is pretty faithful to the stage version.)

 

West Side Story by Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim

 

 

 In the musical number "America," Bernstein borrows the Afro-Cuban rhythmic pattern of the son clave, which we have discussed before, along with other syncopated and polyrhythmic effects. This song also makes an important sympathetic (if many would say inauthentic) social statement about Puerto Ricans who have relocated to New York City.



 

 

This song has been criticized for presenting a stereotyped image of Puerto Rico and its current and former inhabitants. It should be noted that West Side Story is a musical about Hispanic Americans and heterosexual tragedy created by a team (director-choreographer Jerome Robbins and librettist Arthur Laurents along with Bernstein and Sondheim) who were all Jewish and basically gay. On one hand, the collaboration between these authors (with the best of intentions) and the performers, many of whom were in fact Hispanic, suggests much that is admirable about the cultural diversity of American culture. On the other hand, it raises legitimate and serious questions about who has the right to represent whom in words, music and image.

 

The "golden era" musical and its cohort, the Tin Pan Alley song, would face interesting challenges in the years after a significant sea change in popular music--namely the rise of rock and roll, which would quickly displace the musical and Tin Pan Alley from the center of American popular music. This new development will be the topic of our next unit.







Unit 6 -- The Post-War Era

The Post-War Era

(ca. 1945-1955)

 

The decade or so from the end of World War II to the mid-1950s might be seen as transitional between the previous swing era and the upcoming era of rock and roll. Diverse styles of music, popular with diverse audiences, were both a culmination of musical practices preceding this time period and the precursors of what was to come. What follows is a quick tour of some of the more influential categories of popular and cultivated music in the Post-War Era.

 

 

Popular Vocalists

 

As the height of the swing era and the big bands began to pass, popular vocalists came to the fore. They sang popular songs in a style influenced by swing jazz and using sweet orchestral arrangements utilizing the instruments of the Western orchestra, often heavy with strings. The songs included both old and new Tin Pan Alley and Jazz standards.

 

Crooning was an intimate style of singing made possible by the technologies of the microphone and recording, which continued to advance in quality during this era. Bing Crosby is the classic example of a crooner.

 

 

 

Frank Sinatra was the most sensational vocalist of the era and phenomenally popular with young audiences.

 

 

 

Nat "King" Cole achieved remarkable crossover appeal as an African American singer of popular standards.

 

 

 

 

Urban Folk Music

 

Urban folk musicians like the Weavers, led by Pete Seeger, continued the tradition of Woody Guthrie, performing folk and folk-inspired music with a leftist political orientation. "Goodnight Irene" is a song originally composed and recorded by the blues musician Leadbelly. It became popular in this version by the Weavers.

 

 

 

 

Rhythm and Blues

 

 

An important style of popular black music during this era was rhythm and blues (not to be confused with contemporary R&B). Much of this music was influenced by up-tempo jazz forms such as jump blues and boogie woogie. It was mostly marketed to black consumers (the term rhythm and blues basically replaced the term race records in the late 1940s), but some white listeners were starting to pay attention, too.

 

Louis Jordon is the best-known of the rhythm and blues musicians performing in the up-tempo style.

 



 

 

Big Mama Thornton was represents another example of rhythm and blues, which would be an important source of rock and roll.

 

 



 

 

 Yet another style of rhythm and blues involved slow tempo ballads sung by vocal groups that were the precursors to doo-wop.

 

Country and Western Music

 

Country music continued to grow in popularity. Electric guitars and drum kits became more common as more country musicians were playing in noisy bars and honky-tonks.

 

Hank Williams was a popular country musician of the time.

 

 

 

 

Avant-Garde Movements in Art Music and Jazz

 

Much of the important work being done in art music during this period was of a highly experimental nature. While some composers were crafting music in highly controlled systems, usually employing atonality (music that avoids a central pitch or conventional key based on the traditional scales), others were attracted to freedom and chance in music. John Cage is an example of the latter type. He experimented with silence in his most famouls piece, 4'33", in which a pianist sat at a piano for four minutes and thirty-three seconds without playing a note.

 



 

 

In the performance of this piece, the ambient sounds become part of the composition of the performance. In addition to silence, Cage experimented with chance--certain events in a performance would be determined by the role of dice or by consulting the I Ching,  the ancient Chinese book of divination. Cage was also know for using the prepared piano, in which a conventional piano is "prepared" by inserting bolts, pieces of rubber and other foreign objects into the strings to create a new kind of percussion instrument.

 



 

Here, Cage talks about his philsophy of music, sound and silence:

 



 

 

By the late 1940s, jazz musicians who had played supporting roles in the swing era were taking jazz in new and experimental directions as well. Bebop and other new styles of jazz were taking the genre in a more intellectual direction. Jazz began to take on more characteristics of a cultivated or "high art" music intended more for listening than dancing. A classic example of Bebop, with its small combos and fast improvised virtuosity (exceptional technical ability on an instrument) is Koko by Charlie "Bird" Parker and Dizzy Gillespie.

 

 



 

 

Avant-Garde movements developed in jazz, too, with musicians like John Coltrane and Charles Mingus experimenting with atonality, dissonance and free jazz. Jazz has undergone a remarkable journey at this point. Having started out as a style of popular music close to the folk traditions of African Americans and reviled by those who thought of it as low-down and dirty, jazz eventually developed into a style regarded as sophisticated and artistic--even highly intellectual in the view of many of those who played bebop and other late styles of jazz. It is partly because of this movemont of jazz in a high art or cultivated direction that it began to recede from the popular music scene, making way for other styles such as rhythm and blues, country, and rock and roll to dominate in the later 1950s and beyond.











Unit 5 -- The Swing Era and World War II

Unit 5 – The Swing Era and World War II

(ca. 1935-1945)

 

By the 1930s, jazz had become an important mainstream style of popular music in the United States. Jazz bands had been getting bigger and bigger, and by the time of the mid-1930s there was a new style of jazz called the big bands, or swing. The term swing refers to a particular rhythmic feeling in jazz (the word was used in earlier jazz as well) that results from a combination of a steady beat with flexible syncopation that compels one to dance or move physically to the music. Indeed, an important social function of swing jazz as popular music was to provide music for people to dance to.

Because the bands (also called orchestras) were larger, it was necessary for performances to involve more composed elements in the music—too many musicians improvising at once would have been unwieldy. The music for swing orchestras was largely composed ahead of time by a staff composer or arranger. Only the featured soloists in a performance had room to improvise. It was the bandleaders who were the real stars of this era—people like Duke Ellington who were usually composers and performers but were best known as the directors of their orchestras.

Below is a recording of Take the A Train, a piece played by Duke Ellington and his orchestra and composed by Billy Strayhorn. Billy Strayhorn was Ellington’s composer for many years and helped to define the sound of the orchestra as well as provide its signature tunes. When Ellington and Strayhorn first met at the suggestion of a mutual friend, Ellington gave Strayhorn directions to get to Harlem, where Ellington was based. One of the directions, once Strayhorn got to New York City, was to “take the A train.” This became the name of the tune Strayhorn wrote, and it became the trademark tune of the Duke Ellington Orchestra.

 

The form of the performance is typical of the big band era. It opens with Ellington himself playing an intro on the piano. Then the band plays the tune once. Notice that the tune is in the same AABA form that is typical of Tin Pan Alley songs. After the first statement of the tune, various soloists or sections of the large orchestra improvise or play variations on the tune, with the original chord sequence always serving as the organizing principle. Each repetition of the tune (or improvisation on it) is called a chorus.

 

You can read more about Duke Ellington here and Billy Strayhorn here. 

Here is a live performance of Take the A Train, with Ellington speaking at the beginning and introducing Strayorn.

 

 

Harlem in the Swing Era 

That Ellington was based in Harlem is not surprising. As in the 1920s, Harlem continued to be a capital of African American art, music, literature, philosophy and politics. Many of the prominent jazz musicians naturally had connections to this section of New York City, and many of the most famous jazz clubs were located there. The Cotton Club, the Savoy Ballroom and the Apollo Theater were among the most popular venues for jazz. It was fashionable in the 1920s and 1930s for whites in New York to travel uptown to Harlem for jazz-related entertainment—a practice they referred to as “slumming.” However things were still pretty segregated. Audiences for jazz and other performances were typically all-white or all-black. These were rules that were enforced, regardless of the racial makeup of the performing group. For example, Duke Ellington and other black musicians often performed at the Cotton Club, but only whites were allowed in the audience.

 

Country Music in the Swing Era

Country music also continued to grow in popularity during this era (the late 1930s to early 1940s), largely as a result of radio programs like The Grand Ole Opry, which had been making the music available to the masses over the airwaves since the 1920s. Traditional country music, continuing the work of the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers, was exemplified by Roy Acuff.

 

It was during this era that the idea of country and western music began to emerge. In the beginning country music had a mostly Southern image (its roots were deepest in Virginia and Tennessee). In order to appeal to a wider audience, many country musicians began grooming themselves as Western and began wearing cowboy hats and projecting much of a certain image that is still associated with country music today.

The singing cowboy was a popular phenomenon. Geny Autry is a typical example. He began as a musician influenced by country music but really became popular when he began appearing in his cowboy persona in movies.

 

An important development was a synthesis of country and jazz know as Western swing. This style was developed primarily in Texas and also incorporates elements of blues and Texas-Mexican (Tejano) music. The most famous was Bob Wills, whose band was called the Texas Playboys. This style of music would become influential outside of country music—in particular, it had an important influence on the development of rock and roll in the 1950s.

 

You can read more about Bob Wills here.

 

American Nationalism

We earlier noted that George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue and his opera Porgy and Bess, were part of an effort by American composers to create a distinctly American style of classical music (art music or cultivated music). Aaron Copland was another example of this American nationalist movement in cultivated music, though he approached it in a different way.

After pursuing a modernist style influenced by Igor Stravinsky and jazz in the 1920s, Copland turned to what is described as his populist style in the 1930s and 1940s. In works like Appalachian Spring, Rodeo, and Billy the Kid (all ballets), Copland drew on American folk music sources and impressions of rural America for his musical style. Although, he was a native New Yorker, he had a knack for writing music that sounds like the wide open spaces of Middle America. His “Hoedown” from Rodeo is a good example.

 

 

You can read more about Copland here.

The Context of the Great Depression and World War II

All of the music discussed above has an important relationship to the historical moment of the Depression and World War II. Swing, with its impulse to dance, was an important escape for people who were suffering hardship or had relatives at war. Both country music and Copland’s American nationalist works projected a nostalgic image of the United States that gave people an ideal image of the country to remind them what they were fighting for—whether that ideal (admittedly white-washed) image of the country ever actually existed or not, it served as inspiration in a time of need.

Unit 4 -- Blues and Country Music

The Blues and Country Music

(1910s-1930s)

At the risk of overstating things a little, we might think of jazz and Tin Pan Alley as being styles of music that came from the urban centers. Two other important genres of American popular music had deep roots in rural life—the blues and country music.

The Blues

There are accounts of music resembling what has come to be known as the blues at least as early as the late 19^th century. The blues songwriter W. C. Handy, known for his work in the 20^th century and discussed more below, reported having heard this music during his earlier travels as touring musician. However, it was not until the 1910s through the 1930s that a national audience began to be aware of the blues through Handy’s songs and the recordings of blues singers released in the 1920s and 1930s.

The blues, in its basic form, can be thought of as a type of African-American folk music based on simple song forms. The songs follow certain basic patterns in the lyrics, phrasing and chord structure and often deal with expressions of hardship—broken hearts, poverty, and other forms misery and adversity are common themes. The spiritual is an important source of the blues—its emphasis on the weariness of people in this world and their desire to escape it probably developed into the blues. A critical difference between spirituals and the early folk style of the blues is that spirituals are sacred, while the blues is secular.

Country Blues

The first blues were sung by itinerant, or traveling, musicians—usually men who played the guitar to accompany their singing. These were often working class black men in the South who had jobs on railroads or in other industries that required (or allowed, depending on your perspective) them to travel around. They would often play on street corners or in front of barber shops (important sites of social gathering for African Americans), accepting change from passers-by. Like many Southern blacks, these blues men were often living with poverty and discrimination—and they sang about it.

This type of blues is known as the country blues or folk blues. It was practiced all over the rural South, but one of the most important regions where it developed an influential style was the Mississippi Delta—a region with fertile soil along the Mississippi River extending from Memphis southward to through the state of Mississippi. This area had been a stronghold of slavery and the plantation culture. After the Civil War and into the 20^th Century, the Delta was the home of a huge population of poor blacks who, although no longer slaves, were nonetheless subject to an oppressive and discriminatory culture in which they worked for wealthy white plantations owners under exploitive conditions such as sharecropping, or else found jobs in modern industries such as railroad work. The style of the blues that came out of this hard environment is known the Delta blues.

Robert Johnson

Perhaps the most famous of the Delta blues men was Robert Johnson. Johnson is an enigmatic and figure—only two pictures exist of him, and his life’s story is surrounded by mythology and legend. It was said (and Johnson apparently encouraged the idea) that he had once sold his soul to the devil at a crossroads. You can read more about the life and work of Robert Johnson here.

Johnson’s “Crossroad Blues” is typical example of a country blues song. There were a few common forms of the blues, but the most recognized is the twelve-bar blues. In this form of the blues, each strophe (stanza or verse) of the song consists of three lines of lyric in the form AAB. In “Crossroad Blues,” for example, we get the following:

A – I went to the crossroad, fell down on my knees

A – I went to the crossroad, fell down on my knees

B – Asked the Lord above, “Have Mercy, save poor Bob if you please.”

The first line introduces an idea, the second line repeats it for emphasis, and the third line introduces a concluding thought. The chords that accompany these lines follow a predictable formula. Each line gets four measures for a total of twelve measures in each verse (hence the name twelve-bar blues. In the following diagram, each Roman numeral represents a measure of music occupied by that chord. The corresponding letter of the lyric that goes with each set of chords is given in parentheses.

(A)   – I         I          I          I

(A)   – IV     IV         I          I

(B)   – V      IV         I          I

If you have the musical background to understand these chord symbols, that’s great. If not, don’t worry. you will eventually recognize the chord sequence by sound, because it is used in many types of music influenced by the blues.

Here’s Robert Johnson singing the “Crossroad Blues.” Listen for the three-line lyric and twelve-bar chord sequence in each verse.

Classic Blues

Although the country blues is essentially part of the old folk tradition of the blues that goes back to the early 20^th century or earlier, recordings of this music, such as those by Robert Johnson, were not made until around the 1930s. The first style of blues that reached a national audience was the type known as the classic blues or city blues.

The classic blues differs from the country blues in several respects. Whereas the country blues is essentially a folk tradition, the classic blues songs were often written and published by professional composers and lyricists. As a result, it is influenced by the more complex forms and harmonies of Tin Pan Alley. Classic blues was often performed in a formal environment, such as on the theatrical stage as part of Vaudeville shows, unlike the country blues which was likely to be heard on a street corner. Whereas the country blues was usually performed by a man accompanying himself on the guitar, the classic blues songs were usually performed by women accompanied by a pianist or a jazz combo.

W.C. Handy

The musician and songwriter W. C. Handy had heard the blues while travelling around the South. In 1912, he published a song called “Memphis Blues,” based on his familiarity with the folk form of the blues. The “Memphis Blues” was a successful song and did much to bring the blues to the attention of a national audience. Handy also may have helped to standardize the form of the blues that has become familiar to us.

Bessie Smith was known as the “Empress of the Blues” and is surely the best-known of the classic blues singers. Her theatrical costumes and expressive singing style typify the classic blues woman. You can read about her life and work here.

Bessie Smith

In the following recording, Bessie Smith sings “St. Louis Blues,” another song by W. C. Handy. She is accompanied by Louis Armstrong on the trumpet (Armstrong’s involvement in this recording demonstrates that jazz and blues were considered closely related forms that significantly influenced each other). Notice that this song uses the same AAB lyric form as Robert Johnson’s “Crossroad Blues.” The twelve-bar chord sequence is a little more complex in Handy’s song, but is still basically recognizable as the twelve-bar blues. However, the song has a more complex construction with multiple sections and different melodies, reflecting the Tin Pan Alley influence that trained songwriters like Handy often brought to these songs. Notice how Smith’s and Armstrong’s performance displays many of the typical traits of African American musical practices we have seen before. There is a kind of call and response between Smith’s vocal and Armstrong’s trumpet (you can hear the call and response between Johnson and his own guitar in “Crossroad Blues” as well). Smith uses pitch-bend (sliding on notes) for expressive effect, creating what are called blue notes--pitches that are a little flat or bent that give the blues its expressive quality.

Race Records

Mamie Smith's "Crazy Blues"

In 1920, Mamie Smith recorded the song “Crazy Blues” on what is considered to be the first commercial blues recording. To the recording industry’s surprise, it was a big seller in the black community, establishing the viability of the African American market as a profitable niche for selling records. The branch of the recording industry that catered to black audiences was dubbed race records a name that may sound derogatory today, but was intended in a positive way at the time—a “Race man,” or “Race woman” was a person who took pride in their race. The term race record would continue to be applied to music for the African American market until the end of the 1940s when it was replaced by the term rhythm and blues.

Country Music

Country Music is the music primarily of rural Southerners of British-Isle descent, especially a group known as the Scots-Irish. Country music has its historical origins in British forms of folk music like the ballad and country dances. Early country music took root most deeply in the Southern hill country, particularly in states like Virginia and Tennessee. These Southern whites were different from the wealthy plantations owners of the low-country areas of the South. They were often poor and quite religious. When their music began to be recorded and broadcast on the radio, it was labeled hillbilly music. In contrast to the blues and “race music,” which sold in the black community on recording, country music was popularized and spread around the South by radio broadcast. Country music stations and radio programs like The Grand Ole Opry contributed to the popularity of country music among rural Americans beginning in the 1920s.

The Carter Family

As with the country version of the blues, the earliest recordings of country music are from around the 1930s. The Carter Family is representative of the early country style. Consisting of A. P. “Doc” Carter, his wife Sara, and his sister-in-law Maybelle, the Carter Family was from southwest Virginia and typical of many country groups in being a family act. Like many country musicians, they not only performed from a base of Anglo-American musical traditions, but were also influenced by black music, including the blues. “Can the Circle Be Unbroken” is one of their most famous recordings. The close vocal harmonies and guitar accompaniment with basic chords and a regular rhythm are typical of country style. The song shows the influence of the Anglo-American ballad in its form and narrative quality as well as white Southern gospel music and hymns in its statement of faith and melodic phrasing. Country music also often shows the influence of other sources such as Tin Pan Alley and the blues. The sentimental quality of “Can the Circle Be Unbroken,” with its emphasis on family and faith would have appealed to the experiences and values of many rural Americans.

Read more about the Carter Family here.

Jimmie Rodgers, in some respects, represents a different side of country music than the Carter Family. Whereas the Carters represent the faith and family side of country music, Rodgers typifies the loner, the rough-and-tumble rugged individual. Known as the “Singing Brakeman,” he resembles the country blues men in that he started out as an itinerant worker with a guitar before he was “discovered” by record producers. Rodgers wrote a series of songs called Blue Yodels that demonstrate the extent to which country musicians of the time were interacting with African American musicians and being influenced by their sounds. Listen for the combination of both blues and country influences in Rodgers’s “Blue Yodel No. 1 (T for Texas).”

There are tensions and contradictions in the country music of the 1920s and 1930s. The songs are often about traditional life, but the lives of rural people during this time were being upended in many ways—new technologies (including the radio, which spread the music) were bringing about many changes, including mechanized, industrialized farming. In the 1930s, the Great Depression further threatened people’s traditional way of life, causing economic hardships, problems with the banks, and loss of jobs and property. People were forced to leave their homes in search of work. The contrast between the Carter Family’s traditional values and Jimmie Rodgers’s anti-hero image goes hand-in-hand with a tension between tradition and modernism in rural life. This ambivalence about tradition and progress will emerge as a theme in country music that can still be observed today.