| Traditional pop | |
|---|---|
| Other names | Classic pop, pre-rock and roll pop |
| Stylistic origins | |
| Cultural origins | 1920s–1930s, United States |
| Typical instruments | |
| Derivative forms | Pop |
| Regional scenes | |
| Japan | |
Traditional pop (also known as classic pop and pre-rock and roll pop) is Western pop music that generally pre-dates the advent of rock and roll in the mid-1950s. The most popular and enduring songs from this era of music are known as pop standards or American standards. The works of these songwriters and composers are usually considered part of the canon known as the "Great American Songbook". More generally, the term "standard" can be applied to any popular song that has become very widely known within mainstream culture.
AllMusic defines traditional pop as "post-big band and pre-rock & roll pop music". [1]
Classic pop includes the song output of the Broadway, Tin Pan Alley, and Hollywood show tune writers from approximately World War I to the 1950s, such as Irving Berlin, Frederick Loewe, Victor Herbert, Harry Warren, Harold Arlen, Jerome Kern, George Gershwin and Ira Gershwin, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, Oscar Hammerstein, Johnny Mercer, Dorothy Fields, Hoagy Carmichael, and Cole Porter.
The swing era made stars of many popular singers including the young Frank Sinatra, Dinah Shore, Jo Stafford, Perry Como, Peggy Lee, Patti Page, David Whitfield, and Bing Crosby. Two notable innovations were the addition of string sections and orchestral arrangements and more emphasis on the vocal performance. [2] The addition of lush strings can be heard in much of the popular music throughout the 1940s and 1950s.
In the late 1950s, rock became a popular and prominent musical style. However, some pop singers who had been popular during the swing era or traditional pop music period were still big stars such as Frank Sinatra, Doris Day, Ella Fitzgerald, Dinah Shore, Dean Martin, and Bing Crosby.
Some of these vocalists faded with traditional pop music, while many vocalists became involved in 1960s vocal jazz and the rebirth of "swing music"; the swing music of the 1960s is sometimes referred to as easy listening and was, in essence, a revival of popularity of the "sweet" bands that had been popular during the swing era, but with more emphasis on the vocalist. Like the swing era, it too featured many songs of the Great American Songbook. Much of this music was made popular by Nelson Riddle and television-friendly singers like Rosemary Clooney, Dean Martin, and the cast of Your Hit Parade .
Many artists made their mark with pop standards, particularly entertainer, vocal jazz and pop singers such as Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, [3] Tony Bennett, Doris Day, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Louis Armstrong, Nat King Cole (originally known as a jazz pianist), [3] Lena Horne, Vic Damone, Johnny Mathis, [4] Bobby Darin, [5] Ella Fitzgerald, Carmen McRae, Barbra Streisand, Peggy Lee, Sarah Vaughan, Dinah Washington, Andy Williams, Frankie Laine, Nancy Wilson, Rita Reys, Liza Minnelli and Cleo Laine. [6]
The diverging tastes between the baby boomers and older Americans of the 1960s led to one of the earliest schisms in music radio. Whereas rock dominated contemporary hit radio (top 40), traditional pop formed the basis of middle of the road (MOR). In terms of 21st century radio formats, the top-40 hits of the 1950s and 1960s are played on oldies stations while the traditional pop hits are the province of adult standards (with some exceptions); [7] due to aging demographics, both formats are fading in popularity in favor of classic hits and gold-based adult contemporary, respectively.
With the growing popularity of rock and roll in the 1950s, much of what baby boomers considered to be their parents' music, traditional pop, was pushed aside. [8] Popular music sung by such performers as Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee and their contemporaries was relegated in the 1960s and 1970s to television, where they remained very popular, and to Las Vegas club acts and elevator music. Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra continued to have many hit singles and albums until the late 1960s, however. Nashville country music borrowed heavily from traditional pop sounds in the late 1950s as Music Row sought to limit the growing influence of rock and roll on the genre; [9] it remained popular until both the British Invasion, the deaths of two of Nashville's biggest country stars (Patsy Cline and Jim Reeves) in separate airplane crashes, and the growing influence of West Coast country music pushed it aside beginning in 1964.
In 1983, Linda Ronstadt, a popular female vocalist of the rock era, [10] [11] elected to change direction. [12] She collaborated with legendary arranger-conductor Nelson Riddle and released a successful album of standards from the 1940s and 1950s, What's New . It reached No. 3 on the Billboard pop chart, won a Grammy, and inspired Ronstadt to team up with Riddle for two more albums: 1984's Lush Life and 1986's For Sentimental Reasons. [13] The gamble paid off, as all three albums became hits, the international concert tours were a success and Riddle picked up a few more Grammys in the process. Ronstadt's determination to produce these albums exposed a new generation to the sounds of the pre-swing and swing eras. [14]
Since then, other rock/pop stars have occasionally found success recording traditional pop music. Notable albums include Rod Stewart's It Had to Be You: The Great American Songbook , Willie Nelson's Stardust , Chaka Khan's Echoes of an Era and Carly Simon's Torch . [15]
The appearance of the lounge subculture in the mid-1990s in the United States helped to enhance the revival and interest in the music, style, and performers of popular music before rock and roll. Many contemporary performers have worked in the style of classic pop and/or easy listening swing. Some jazz and popular music singers, such as Diana Krall are sustaining the tradition.
Linda Maria Ronstadt is an American singer who has performed and recorded in diverse genres including rock, country, light opera, the Great American Songbook, and Latin music.
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. 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, when people were dancing the Lindy Hop. 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, Benny Carter, Jimmy Dorsey, Tommy Dorsey, Woody Herman, Earl Hines, Bunny Berigan, Harry James, Lionel Hampton, Glenn Miller, Artie Shaw, Jimmie Lunceford, and Django Reinhardt.
Easy listening is a popular music genre and radio format that was most popular during the 1950s to the 1970s. It is related to middle of the road (MOR) music and encompasses instrumental recordings of standards, hit songs, non-rock vocals and instrumental covers of selected popular rock songs. It mostly concentrates on music that pre-dates the rock and roll era, characteristically on music from the 1940s and 1950s. It was differentiated from the mostly instrumental beautiful music format by its variety of styles, including a percentage of vocals, arrangements and tempos to fit various parts of the broadcast day.
Dinah Washington was an American singer and pianist, one of the most popular black female recording artists of the 1950s. Primarily a jazz vocalist, she performed and recorded in a wide variety of styles including blues, R&B, and traditional pop music, and gave herself the title of "Queen of the Blues". She was also known as "Queen of the Jukeboxes". She was a 1986 inductee of the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame, and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993.
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.
Many musical styles flourished and combined in the 1940s and 1950s, most likely because of the influence the radio had in creating a mass market for music. World War II caused great social upheaval, and the music of this period shows the effects of that upheaval.
Nelson Smock Riddle Jr. was an American arranger, composer, bandleader and orchestrator whose career stretched from the late 1940s to the mid-1980s. He worked with many vocalists at Capitol Records, including Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole, Judy Garland, Dean Martin, Peggy Lee, Johnny Mathis, Rosemary Clooney and Keely Smith. He scored and arranged music for many films and television shows, earning an Academy Award and three Grammy Awards. He found commercial and critical success with a new generation in the 1980s, in a trio of Platinum albums with Linda Ronstadt.
Frankie Laine was an American singer and songwriter whose career spanned nearly 75 years, from his first concerts in 1930 with a marathon dance company to his final performance of "That's My Desire" in 2005. Often billed as "America's Number One Song Stylist", his other nicknames include "Mr. Rhythm", "Old Leather Lungs", and "Mr. Steel Tonsils". His hits included "That's My Desire", "That Lucky Old Sun", "Mule Train", "Jezebel", "High Noon", "I Believe", "Hey Joe!", "The Kid's Last Fight", "Cool Water", "Rawhide", and "You Gave Me a Mountain".
Lounge music is a type of easy listening music popular in the 1950s and 1960s. It may be meant to evoke in the listeners the feeling of being in a place, usually with a tranquil theme, such as a jungle, an island paradise or outer space. The range of lounge music encompasses beautiful music–influenced instrumentals, modern electronica, while remaining thematically focused on its retro–space age cultural elements. The earliest type of lounge music appeared during the 1920s and 1930s, and was known as light music.
A crooner is a singer who performs with a smooth, intimate style that originated in the 1920s. The crooning style was made possible by better microphones that picked up quieter sounds and a wider range of frequencies, allowing the singer to access a greater dynamic range and exploit the proximity effect. This suggestion of intimacy was supposedly wildly attractive to women, especially a youth subculture known at the time as "bobby soxers". The crooning style developed among singers who performed with big bands, and reached its height in the 1940s to late 1960s.
The Great American Songbook is the loosely defined canon of significant 20th-century American jazz standards, popular songs, and show tunes.
American popular music is popular music produced in the United States and is a part of American pop culture. Distinctive styles of American popular music emerged early in the 19th century, and in the 20th century the American music industry developed a series of new forms of music, using elements of blues and other genres. These popular styles included country, R&B, jazz and rock. The 1960s and 1970s saw a number of important changes in American popular music, including the development of a number of new styles, such as heavy metal, punk, soul, and hip hop.
Frank Sinatra's musical career began in the swing era in 1935, and ended in 1995, although he did briefly retire in 1971, before returning to music in 1973. Sinatra is one of the most influential music artists of the 20th century, and has sold 150 million records worldwide, making him one of the best-selling music artists of all-time. Rock critic Robert Christgau called Sinatra "the greatest singer of the 20th century". In addition to his music career, Sinatra was also a successful film actor, having won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role as Private Angelo Maggio in From Here to Eternity (1953).
What's New is an album of traditional pop standards released by American singer Linda Ronstadt in 1983. It represents the first in a trilogy of 1980s albums Ronstadt recorded with arranger Nelson Riddle. John Kosh designed the album covers for all three albums.
The following is the discography for big band and traditional pop arranger Nelson Riddle (1921–1985).
This article includes an overview of the events and trends in popular music in the 1960s.
This article includes an overview of the major events and trends in popular music in the 1950s.
Music of the United Kingdom began to develop in the 1950s; from largely insular and derivative forms to become one of the leading centres of popular music in the modern world. By 1950 indigenous forms of British popular music, including folk music, brass and silver bands, music hall and dance bands, were already giving way to the influence of American forms of music including jazz, swing and traditional pop, mediated through film and records.
For music from an individual year in the 1940s, go to 40 | 41 | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45 | 46 | 47 | 48 | 49
"Oh! What it Seemed to Be" is a song composed by Bennie Benjamin, George Weiss and Frankie Carle. The song was most popular in 1946, and was taken to number 1 that year by both Frank Sinatra and the Frankie Carle orchestra, the latter with Marjorie Hughes on vocals.