Music in the United States underwent many shifts and developments from 1900 to 1940. The country survived both World War I and the Great Depression before entering World War II in December 1941. Americans endured great loss and hardship but found hope and encouragement in music. The genres and styles present during this period were Native American music, blues and gospel, jazz, swing, Cajun and Creole music, and country. The United States also took inspiration from other cultures and parts of the world for her own music. The music of each region differed as much as the people did. The time also produced many notable singers and musicians, including jazz figure Louis Armstrong, blues and jazz singer Mamie Smith, and country singer Jimmie Rodgers.
Modern Native Americanpow wows arose around the turn of the 20th century. While some claim that pow wow had been an integral part of black cultures for over 10 centuries, some modern analysts believe that pow wows were invented to appeal to tourists and had only a tangential relationship to genuine Native American traditions, which generally revolved around ceremonial dance music like the Ghost Dance, ZuniShalako, Navajo Yeibichai and the Sun Dance of the Plains. The Native American Church, founded early in the 20th century, was a center of development for Native American gospel and Peyote song, a fusion of gospel and traditional music revolving around ceremonies in which hallucinogenicpeyote is taken as a sacrament. In Arizona and Mexico, waila, or chicken scratch, music, had arisen as a fusion of native Tohono O'odham music with Germanpolka and Mexican-American norteño.
Jazz, blues, folk, country, and gospel, music from the Caribbean region also briefly became popular during the first half of the twentieth century. Trinidadiancalypso, Argentiniantango and Dominicanmerengue and other styles influenced American popular music. Hawaiian music (especially slack-key guitar) enjoyed an early vogue in the 1910s, influencing the developing genre of country music (this is the source of the steel guitar sound that is characteristic of modern country).
The blues began in rural communities, primarily in the south. During the 1920s, classic female blues singers like Mamie Smith ("Crazy Blues") dominated the genre's sound. For most white Americans, these female singers were their first exposure to black music, or "race music" as it was then known. In the 1930s, local blues styles developed in Memphis, New Orleans, the mid-Atlantic coast, Texas, Kansas City and, most importantly, Chicago. A style of piano-playing based on the blues, boogie-woogie was briefly popular among mainstream audiences and blues listeners.
At the heights of the Great Depression, gospel music started to become popular by people like Thomas A. Dorsey and Mahalia Jackson, who adapted Christian hymns to blues and jazz structures. By 1925, three main styles of gospel had become popular among mainstream audiences. Itinerant jack leg preachers like Blind Willie Johnson and Washington Phillips released recordings that are now collector's items but were then only marginally popular. Jubilee quartets like the Norfolk Jubilee Quartet and the Golden Gate Quartet were popular and sophisticated, but the most successful form of gospel was singing preachers like Reverend J. M. Gates, who passionately sung about the terrible consequences of disobeying God's laws.
Jazz
Billie Holiday
Jazz was more urban than the blues. Relying more on instrumentation, the sound was well-suited for listeners unfamiliar with the genre's conventions. It drew primarily on New Orleans blues, but also incorporated influences from Jewish-American musicians and composers like Benny Goodman and George Gershwin. In the 1920s, jazz bars became popular among white Americans, particularly young ones. As with ragtime before, and most major genres since, jazz was blamed for the moral degeneracy of the youth that visited these bars and listened to the music. In spite of the controversy, jazz emerged as the dominant sound of the country in the late 1920s in popularized forms that some called watered down, like swing music and big band. Though these, like jazz proper, were blamed for crime and delinquency, they had become mainstream by the 1930s. In the 1940s, pure jazz began to become more popular, along with the blues, with artists like Ella Fitzgerald ("A-Tisket, A-Tasket") and Billie Holiday ("Strange Fruit") becoming nationally successful.
New Orleans jazz was and remains the most influential form of roots jazz. The major underpinnings of the style were in place by 1900 or a bit before, when New Orleans, Louisiana produced musicians like Buddy Bolden, Jelly Roll Morton and Kid Ory. The most distinctive characteristic of New Orleans jazz is the influence of the marching brass bands. The first recordings of the genre were by the Original Dixieland Jass Band from 1917. The 1920s saw trumpet and cornet leaders like Louis Armstrong and Joe "King" Oliver, playing with the trumpet proclaiming the melody and harmonies and countermelodies coming from the clarinet or trombone. The rhythm section typically included a tuba or bass, piano, banjo or drums. During this period, ensembles were standard, in contrast to many of the later developments in jazz. By the 1930s, however, newer forms of pop-jazz like swing music and Dixieland had overtaken authentic New Orleans-style jazz among mainstream audiences.
Dixieland jazz is a form of jazz which arose in the 1920s in Chicago. Musicians there were trying to revive authentic, classic New Orleans jazz. By the 1940s, Dixieland revival musicians like Jimmy McPartland, Eddie Condon and Bud Freeman had become well-known and established their own unique style. Most characteristically, players entered solos against riffing by other horns, and were followed by a closing with the drummer playing a four-bar tag that was then answered by the rest of the band.
In 1917, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band released "Livery Stable Blues", which is often said to be the first jazz recording. The genre had certainly existed before 1917, however, but recording opportunities were bleak. Buddy Bolden, a cornetist from New Orleans, never recorded his influential take on jazz. The early 1920s saw recordings from Kid Ory, King Oliver, Sidney Bechet, Jelly Roll Morton and Bessie Smith. King Oliver included a young cornetist named Louis Armstrong on his records as the second cornet. Armstrong soon moved to Chicago, worked with Fletcher Henderson, Bessie Smith and Clarence Williams and eventually began working as a band leader in 1925, his work setting the stage for the development of swing and the jazz variations to come after. Jazz had just reached its first peak of mainstream popularity in 1924, with the recordings of Paul Whiteman.
Alongside the Great Depression, many musicians from poor, rural Southern states like Louisiana moved to the north, especially New York City and Chicago, Louis Armstrong was among them, and he helped make Chicago the center for musical innovation in the country before moving on to New York, where clubs like Cotton Club, Village Vanguard and Minton's were flourishing.
The mid-1930s were the peak of big band swing, with artists like Charlie Barnet, Chick Webb and Benny Goodman rising to the ranks of esteemed-band leaders. Soloists appeared during this period, inspiring hysterical reactions among fans.
Swing
Swing was a pop-oriented form of jazz, the origins of which can be found as far back as 1923, when Fletcher Henderson began enlarging jazz bands. Whole new sections were added, and Henderson created music of greater range and texture. The same period saw Duke Ellington similarly expanding his relatively small jazz bands, and both groups had laid down recordings as early as 1931. Jead Goldkette and Ben Pollack were also early influential African American swing musicians, and were followed by yet more dance-oriented swing bands led by Jimmie Lunceford, Earl Hines, Don Redman, Count Basie, Glen Gray, Dorsey Brothers, Bob Crosby, Luis Russell, Andy Kirk, Glenn Miller, and Benny Carter.
Cajun and Creole music
Modern Cajun music began developing in the 1920s, drawing on traditional fiddlers and more modern accordionists. Joe and Cléoma Falcon made the first recording, "Allons à Lafayette", in 1928. The song was a regional hit that paved the way for Cleoma's brother, Amédée Breaux's "Jolie Blonde", now often considered the Cajun national anthem. Amédé Ardoin, a black man, soon became the most popular Cajun star, however. Louisiana's Creole population, made up of mixed African, French and Anglo heritage, had developed a form of dance music known as la la. Canray Fontenot was perhaps the most influential la la performer.
In the 1930s, oil was discovered in Louisiana and Anglos came to the state en masse. Cajun culture was denigrated and restricted, and old-time music and western swing became major influences on Cajun music. Luderin Darbone's The Hackleberry Ramblers and Harry Choates were the vanguard of this new wave of Cajun music, which incorporated English lyrics and a smooth style. By the 1940s, though a revival of traditional Cajun music had begun, led by Iry LeJeune, whose 1948 "La valse du pont d'amour" is considered a watershed in the field.
Country music
Country music evolved along somewhat the same lines as folk, but achieved much more mainstream success. Jug bands and other influences (including Hawaiiansteel guitar, folk and the country blues) coalesced in the 1930s development of honky tonk, a rough form of country music.
Hillbilly music was not widely recorded until the 1920s. Bristol, a city on the Virginia and Tennessee border, was the site of a two-week recording session in 1927 that led to the discovery of the two biggest names in hillbilly music: The Carters and Jimmie Rodgers. The Carters were a trio playing Auto-harp and Guitar, with clear, strong vocals and harmonies, while Rodgers sang a more worldly, blues-influenced music that has been called country blues. Rodgers sold millions of records in the 1930s During this period, hillbilly music became big business, and musicians began endorsing products as well as adding new instruments, like fiddles, banjos, mandolins and Hawaiiansteel guitar. Some other important musicians of this era include Gid Tanner & the Skillet Lickers and Charlie Poole & the North Carolina Ramblers.
Blues is a music genre and musical form which originated in the Deep South of the United States around the 1860s. Blues incorporated spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts, chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads from the African-American culture. The blues form is ubiquitous in jazz, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll, and is characterized by the call-and-response pattern, the blues scale, and specific chord progressions, of which the twelve-bar blues is the most common. Blue notes, usually thirds, fifths or sevenths flattened in pitch, are also an essential part of the sound. Blues shuffles or walking bass reinforce the trance-like rhythm and form a repetitive effect known as the groove.
Jazz is a music genre that originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans, Louisiana, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with its roots in blues and ragtime. Since the 1920s Jazz Age, it has been recognized as a major form of musical expression in traditional and popular music. Jazz is characterized by swing and blue notes, complex chords, call and response vocals, polyrhythms and improvisation. Jazz has roots in European harmony and African rhythmic rituals.
The Original Dixieland Jass Band (ODJB) was a Dixieland jazz band that made the first jazz recordings in early 1917. Their "Livery Stable Blues" became the first jazz record ever issued. The group composed and recorded many jazz standards, the most famous being "Tiger Rag". In late 1917, the spelling of the band's name was changed to Original Dixieland Jazz Band.
Swing music is a style of jazz that developed in the United States during the late 1920s and early 1930s. It became nationally popular from the mid-1930s. The name derived from its emphasis on the off-beat, or nominally weaker beat. Swing bands usually featured soloists who would improvise on the melody over the arrangement. The danceable swing style of big bands and bandleaders such as Benny Goodman was the dominant form of American popular music from 1935 to 1946, known as the swing era. The verb "to swing" is also used as a term of praise for playing that has a strong groove or drive. Musicians of the swing era include Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Count Basie, Cab Calloway, Jimmy Dorsey, Tommy Dorsey, Woody Herman, Harry James, Lionel Hampton, Glenn Miller, Artie Shaw and Django Reinhardt.
The music of the United States reflects the country's multi-ethnic population through a diverse array of styles. It is a mixture of music influenced by the music of Europe, Indigenous peoples, West Africa, Latin America, Middle East, North Africa, amongst many other places. The country's most internationally renowned genres are traditional pop, jazz, blues, country, bluegrass, rock, rock and roll, R&B, pop, hip-hop/rap, soul, funk, disco, house, techno, ragtime, folk, americana, tejano, reggaeton, and salsa. American music is heard around the world. Since the beginning of the 20th century, some forms of American popular music have gained a near global audience.
Zydeco is a music genre that evolved in southwest Louisiana by French Creole speakers which blends blues, rhythm and blues, and music indigenous to the Louisiana Creoles and the Native American people of Louisiana. Although it is distinct in origin from the Cajun music of Louisiana, the two forms influenced each other, forming a complex of genres native to the region.
The New Orleans Rhythm Kings (NORK) were one of the most influential jazz bands of the early to mid-1920s. The band included New Orleans and Chicago musicians who helped shape Chicago jazz and influenced many younger jazz musicians.
The Jazz Age was a period in the 1920s and 1930s in which jazz music and dance styles gained worldwide popularity. The Jazz Age's cultural repercussions were primarily felt in the United States, the birthplace of jazz. Originating in New Orleans as mainly sourced from the culture of African Americans, jazz played a significant part in wider cultural changes in this period, and its influence on popular culture continued long afterwards. The Jazz Age is often referred to in conjunction with the Roaring Twenties, and in the United States, it overlapped in significant cross-cultural ways with the Prohibition Era. The movement was largely affected by the introduction of radios nationwide. During this time, the Jazz Age was intertwined with the developing youth culture. The movement also helped start the beginning of the European Jazz movement.
The music of Louisiana can be divided into three general regions: rural south Louisiana, home to Creole Zydeco and Old French, New Orleans, and north Louisiana. The region in and around Greater New Orleans has a unique musical heritage tied to Dixieland jazz, blues, and Afro-Caribbean rhythms. The music of the northern portion of the state starting at Baton Rouge and reaching Shreveport has similarities to that of the rest of the US South.
Jazz standards are musical compositions that are an important part of the musical repertoire of jazz musicians, in that they are widely known, performed, and recorded by jazz musicians, and widely known by listeners. There is no definitive list of jazz standards, and the list of songs deemed to be standards changes over time. Songs included in major fake book publications and jazz reference works offer a rough guide to which songs are considered standards.
Trad jazz, short for "traditional jazz", is a form of jazz in the United States and Britain in the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, played by musicians such as Chris Barber, Acker Bilk, Kenny Ball, Ken Colyer and Monty Sunshine, based on a revival of New Orleans Dixieland jazz, on trumpets, trombones, clarinets, tambourines, banjos, double basses, saxophones, Hammond organs, pipe organs, pianos, electric basses, guitars and drums and cymbals, with a populist repertoire which also included jazz versions of pop songs and nursery rhymes.
Music history of the United States includes many styles of folk, popular and classical music. Some of the best-known genres of American music are rhythm and blues, jazz, rock and roll, rock, soul, hip hop, pop, and country. The history began with the Native Americans, the first people to populate North America. The music of these people was highly varied in form, and was mostly religious in purpose.
American popular music has had a profound effect on music across the world. The country has seen the rise of popular styles that have had a significant influence on global culture, including ragtime, blues, jazz, swing, rock, bluegrass, country, R&B, doo wop, gospel, soul, funk, punk, disco, house, techno, salsa, grunge and hip hop. In addition, the American music industry is quite diverse, supporting a number of regional styles such as zydeco, klezmer and slack-key.
New Orleans blues is a subgenre of blues that developed in and around the city of New Orleans, influenced by jazz and Caribbean music. It is dominated by piano and saxophone, but also produced guitar bluesmen.
The music of New Orleans assumes various styles of music which have often borrowed from earlier traditions. New Orleans, Louisiana, is especially known for its strong association with jazz music, universally considered to be the birthplace of the genre. The earliest form was dixieland, which has sometimes been called traditional jazz, 'New Orleans', and 'New Orleans jazz'. However, the tradition of jazz in New Orleans has taken on various forms that have either branched out from original dixieland or taken entirely different paths altogether. New Orleans has also been a prominent center of funk, home to some of the earliest funk bands such as The Meters.
Chicago, Illinois is a major center for music in the midwestern United States where distinctive forms of blues, and house music, a genre of electronic dance music, were developed.
Dixieland jazz, also referred to as traditional jazz, hot jazz, or simply Dixieland, is a style of jazz based on the music that developed in New Orleans at the start of the 20th century. The 1917 recordings by the Original Dixieland Jass Band, fostered awareness of this new style of music.
In the early 1940s in jazz, bebop emerged, led by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk and others. It helped to shift jazz from danceable popular music towards a more challenging "musician's music." Differing greatly from swing, early bebop divorced itself from dance music, establishing itself more as an art form but lessening its potential popular and commercial value. Since bebop was meant to be listened to, not danced to, it used faster tempos. Beboppers introduced new forms of chromaticism and dissonance into jazz; the dissonant tritone interval became the "most important interval of bebop" and players engaged in a more abstracted form of chord-based improvisation which used "passing" chords, substitute chords, and altered chords. The style of drumming shifted as well to a more elusive and explosive style, in which the ride cymbal was used to keep time, while the snare and bass drum were used for accents. This appealed to a more specialized audiences than earlier forms of jazz, with sophisticated harmonies, fast tempos and often virtuoso musicianship. Bebop musicians often used 1930s standards, especially those from Broadway musicals, as part of their repertoire. Among standards written by bebop musicians are Gillespie's "Salt Peanuts" (1941) and "A Night in Tunisia" (1942), Parker's "Anthropology" (1946), "Yardbird Suite" (1946) and "Scrapple from the Apple" (1947), and Monk's "'Round Midnight" (1944), which is currently the most recorded jazz standard composed by a jazz musician. An early 1940s style known as "jumping the blues" or jump blues used small combos, uptempo music, and blues chord progressions. Jump blues drew on boogie-woogie from the 1930s. Kansas City Jazz in the 1930s as exemplified by tenor saxophonist Lester Young marked the transition from big bands to the bebop influence of the 1940s. These divergences from the jazz mainstream of the time initially met with a divided, sometimes hostile response among fans and fellow musicians, especially established swing players, who bristled at the new harmonic sounds. To hostile critics, bebop seemed to be filled with "racing, nervous phrases". Despite the initial friction, by the 1950s bebop had become an accepted part of the jazz vocabulary. The most influential bebop musicians included saxophonist Charlie Parker, pianists Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk, trumpeters Dizzy Gillespie and Clifford Brown, and drummer Max Roach.
Jazz – musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States, mixing African music and European classical music traditions.
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