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.

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.