Blues Music example essay topic

As be-bop had been a reaction to swing, the development of rock 'n' roll from African-American blues and southern hillbilly traditions was a reaction against the ballads, dance numbers, and novelty tunes of the early 1950's. With the coining of the term by Cleveland radio announcer Alan Freed in 1954, rock 'n' roll was young people's music, a rebellion against the standards of parents, schools, and authority in general. Ballads and speeded-up versions of the twelve-bar blues often contained vague sexual references, and performers like Elvis Presley became immensely popular as much for their audience appeal as the quality of their music. Throughout its history, rock has been attacked for its presumed contributions to juvenile delinquency, protest, and drug use, but it has remained an enduring and constantly developing aspect of American and international musical culture.

By the mid-1960's, rock music, along with ballads and talkin' blues pieces from America's folk traditions, had become an important part of the civil rights, anti-Vietnam War, and feminist movements. Starting with the early social commentary of Bob Dylan and Barry McGuire, performers as diverse as folk singers Joan Baez, Tom Paxton, and Pete Seeger and rock and soul musicians Country Joe MacDonald and James Brown used popular music to articulate a message of protest. By the end of the decade, rock music, whether or not it carried a specific protest message, was part of the counterculture. Rock musicians, influenced by blues, jazz, and Indian music and philosophy, created eclectic works that were inappropriate because of their length and textual content for AM radio, where young people were accustomed to finding the latest music. A 1966 ruling by the Federal Communications Commission fcc opened large blocks of FM airtime to programmers who played music that was too long or too sexually or politically explicit for the AM radio band. Thus FM "alternative" radio became the medium through which new popular music reached its audience.

Because it provides better reception, much classical music was also broadcast on FM. The avant-garde of the 1950's and 1960's continued to search for new varieties of musical expression. Composers experimented with nontraditional instruments, such as the prepared piano used by John Cage, new instruments, such as those used by Harry Patch, and electronic sound, such as that generated at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in New York. Groups like the Contemporary Chamber Ensemble presented to small but enthusiastic audiences compositions that sometimes included performers scattered through the hall, the use of noise and silence as part of the music, and tape recorders, speakers, and a stopwatch among the instruments. Early commercially recorded electronic records, such as Switched-On Bach released by Walter Carlos in 1969, were painstakingly generated, one line at a time, on a Moog synthesizer. Synthesizers, now smaller and able to play more than one note at a time, became performing instruments.

Electronic music, uncommon in the concert hall, pervaded rock, popular music, and commercials. Since the 1960's, composers and performers have felt less comfortable with stylistic labels and the boundaries they imply. For example, the compositional style of Leonard Bernstein, with its roots in jazz and the Broadway stage, Jewish liturgical music, and American ethnic music of many varieties, has long defied precise description. Composers such as Philip Glass and Steve Reich rejected the "minimalist" label in the early 1980's; they saw their works simply as individual creative expression rather than the product of any school or philosophy. Many musical artists fused elements of rock and jazz or jazz and concert music.

Such "cross-over" artists found new ways to express themselves without being inhibited by stylistic boundaries, and performance artists utilizing music maintained a multidisciplinary focus. Similarly, the debate over musical nationalism that seemed important early in the century became less relevant in an era of international study, performance, recording, and satellite broadcasts. In the 1950's and 1960's, Bernstein brought music to millions, and the symphony orchestra concert, opera performance, and ballet became staples on public television. Rap and contemporary protest singers owed a historical debt to the talkin' blues folk singers of earlier decades, and Americans heard electronic music everywhere. The blurring of boundaries contributed to an eclecticism in modern music that succeeded in large part in realizing Edward Var " ese's idea of music as "organized sound".

Irving L owens, Music in America and American Music (1978); Virgil Thomson, American Music since 1910 (1970); Barbara L. Tisch ler, An American Music: The Search for an American Musical Identity (1986). Blues, and rhythm and blues, were too adult, sexual, angry, and solely identified with black culture to be acceptable either emotionally or commercially without adaptation. Major record companies had for years been producing records for black audiences called race records. The emergence of rock 'n' roll signified a slight weakening in resistance to black culture. The unadulterated black rock 'n' roll that Haley transformed can be heard in the sexually adult work of such artists as Hank Ballard and the Midnight ers (Work with Me, Annie) or Big Joe Turner (Shake, Rattle, and Roll), the latter song adapted by Haley for white audiences and the former transformed into Dance with Me, Henry. Blues The heart of jazz, the blues is a musical form now standardized as 12 bars, based on the tonic, dominant, and subdominant chords.

The blue notes are the flatted third and seventh. A statement is made in the first four bars, repeated (sometimes with slight variation) in the next four, and answered or commented on in the last four. In vocal blues the lyrics are earthy and direct and are mostly concerned with basic human problems-love and sex, poverty, and death. The tempo may vary, and the mood ranges from total despair to cynicism and satire. Basing his songs on traditional blues, W.C. Handy greatly increased the popularity of the idiom. Important vocal blues stylists include Blind Lemon Jefferson, Leadbelly, Lightnin's am Hopkins, Robert Johnson, Gertrude (Ma) Rainey, Bertha (Chippie) Hill, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington, and Muddy Waters.

See G. Schuller, Early Jazz (1968) and The Swing Era (1989); A. McCarthy et al., Jazz on Record: The First Fifty Years (1969); F. Kof sky, Black Nationalism and the Revolution in Music (1970); M. Williams, The Jazz Tradition (1970); D. Kennington, The Literature of Jazz (1971); L.G. Feather, ed., The New Edition of the Encyclopedia of Jazz (1972); H. Panassie, The Real Jazz (1960, repr. 1973); J. Berndt, The Jazz Book (1984); W. Balliest, 56 Portraits in Jazz (1986); G. Giddens, Visions of Jazz: The First Century (1998); B. Kern feld, ed., The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz (1998). For blues see C. Keil, Urban Blues (1966); P. Oliver, Aspects of the Blues Tradition (1970); A. Murray, Stomping the Blues (1976); G. Giddings, Riding on a Blue Note (1981). For ragtime see W.J. Schafer and J. Riedel, The Art of Ragtime (1974). In the 1930's, Paul Robeson raised nationalist theory to new heights. With his command of African languages, folklore, and anthropology, Robeson propounded a conception of culture that recognized the self-generative activity, largely African in origin, that had produced the spirituals and prepared the way for blues and jazz.

Despite such achievements, he was convinced that black culture was being strangled in America, that it could truly flower only when values were the issue, not the color of one's skin. No narrow nationalist, Robeson regarded Africa as an artistic and spiritual frontier on which problems common to humanity might be worked out, and he urged his people to search for values there that might, in combination with the technology of the West, advance that process. Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (1967); Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (1987). It will probably never be solved when the blues music really came into existence. It happened in a small area around the Mississippi-river called "the delta" where they grew cotton. The early blues with attachment to the black farm workers in the South was called country-blues.

In connection with the big interest for blues music at the late twenties several record-companies made tours to the small towns in the South. The common instrument on these records was the guitar and the music was usually executed by one or two musicians and the song played an important part. Among the most important country-blues musicians were Robert Johnson and Blind Lemon Jefferson. Blind Lemon Jefferson (1897-1929) Robert Johnson (1911-1938) Chicago-blues In the years after the Second World War a radical reconditioning of the blues music happened. Muddy Waters who came from Mississippi developed in Chicago a way to transform the country blues instrumental technique to ensemble technique.

His blues band was consisted of two electric guitars, harmonica, piano, bass and drums. A line of the best Chicago blues musicians were attached to the Muddy Water's Blues band. In Texas it was Ligtnin' Hopkins and T-Bone Walker and in Detroit John Lee Hooker, who developed the blues music. The blues music became electrically amplified and the music developed a marked dance rhythm which fitted the clubs in the black ghetto.

Muddy Water (1915-1982) Ligtnin' Hopkins (1912-1982) T-Bone Walker (1910-1975) John Lee Hooker (1920 -) This document is written by Van Petersen, all use of this document may freely be distributed and edited. Please feel free to email if any content is used. This documentation original home is web.