This article is the first in the Music of the United States series.

'''American roots music: Native American, European and African melting pot'''

1940s and 50s

1960s and 70s

1980s to the present

African-American music

Native American music

Latin, Tejano, Hawaiian, Cajun, Puerto Rican and other immigrants

Roots musical forms reached their most expressive and varied forms in the first two to three decades of the 20th century. The Great Depression and the Dust Bowl were extremely important in disseminating these musical styles to the rest of the country, as Delta blues masters, itinerant honky tonk singers and Latino and Cajun musicians spread to cities like Chicago, Los Angeles and New York. The growth of the recording industry in the same approximate period was also important; increased possible profits from music placed pressure on artists, songwriters and label executives to replicate previous hit songs. This meant that fads like Hawaiian slack-key guitar never died out completely as rhythms or instruments or vocal stylings were incorporated into disparate genres. By the 1950s, all the forms of roots music had led to pop-oriented forms. Folk musicians like the Kingston Trio, Latin chachacha and salsa artists, blues-derived rock and roll and rockabilly, pop-gospel, doo wop and R&B (later secularized further as soul music) and the Nashville sound in country music all modernized and expanded the musical palette of the country.

Notable roots musicians include Woody Guthrie, Son House, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Leadbelly, Mahalia Jackson, and Washington Phillips. More recent musicians who occasionally or consistently play roots music include Keb' Mo', Bela Fleck, Iron & Wine, and Ricky Skaggs. Additionally, the soundtrack to the 2000 comedy film O Brother, Where Art Thou is exclusively roots music, performed by Alison Kraus, The Fairfield Four, Emmylou Harris, Norman Blake and others.

American roots music was the subject of a documentary series on PBS in 2001.

Table of contents

1 Pre-20th century 1.1 Appalachian folk music 1.2 Shape-note and Sacred Harp 1.3 African Americans 1.4 Brass bands 1.5 Jazz 1.6 Eastern European immigrants 1.7 Mexican-Texans 1.8 Native Americans 2 Tin Pan Alley and the development of popular music 2.9 Military marches 2.10 Ragtime 3 Early 20th century 3.11 Early popular music 3.12 Early foreign influences 3.13 Blues and gospel 3.14 Jazz 3.14.1 Swing 3.15 Cajun and Creole music 3.16 Country music 4 Sound samples 5 References 5.17 Additional sources

Pre-20th century

In the 19th century through the 20th century, it was the influence of the music of African-Americans which most set the United States apart from that of Western Europe. While African-Americans were looked down on by the majority of European-Americans and their culture was denigrated as low class, if not semi-barbaric as late as the 1930s, the music was wildly popular with the general public. The African banjo (a stringed instrument) became common in many styles of US music in the 19th century. Stephen Foster, by far the most popular American composer of that century, incorporated many African American rhythmic notions into his songs. The minstrel show was very popular, and was the first example of American music widely exported abroad. Perhaps the most important characteristic of African music, which survives to the present, is call-and-response, in which the singer(s) present a lyrical phrase and the audience issues some sort of reply. This characteristic has been present in African American music from spirituals to hip hop, and can be found in white-dominated country, rock and other genres.

Interestingly, some West-African melodies, such as "Lucy Long" and "Old Dan Tucker", were retained by white country musicians decades after they fell out of the repertory of the descendants of the Africans who brought the tunes over.

Early American composers included William Billings and Daniel Read, who worked as itinerant singing masters.

Prior to the late 19th century, U.S. music was dominated by occasional songs of great popularity. Exampes include "The Star Spangled Banner", "Dixie" "Jump Jim Crow", "Oh Susana", "Oh My Darling, Clementine", "The Old Folks at Home", "My Old Kentucky Home", "Battle Hymn of the Republic", "Just Before the Battle, Mother", and "When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again". African-American spirituals were also popular, and were even played for Queen Victoria in 1871; she is said to have been moved to tears by the performance.

The upper-class during the colonial era promoted ensembles who played serenades, feldparthien and divertimenti, such as those composed by Mozart and Haydn. Natural horns and bassoons provided harmonic support for the melodic line, played by clarinets and oboes. Thomas Jefferson suggested this instrumentation for the U.S. Marine Band, and asked fourteen Italian-American musicians to form the nucleus of that influential group, and thus these ensembles were the origin of the American brass band tradition, which flourished in the 19th century, having moved from upper-class entertainment to that of the common folk.

Opera was also popular; the first opera to be performed in the US was Giovanni Pergolesi's La Serva Padrona in 1790. In 1883, sixty-five Italian-American musicians formed the orchestra at the newly-opened Metropolitan Opera House in New York City, which would become an important venue for opera in the country.

Western European opera and classical music provided the underpinnings for modern American music. Many claim that the first form of distinctly American music was jazz, which arose as a fusion of African and European forms. African music provided the incessant rhythms and emotional qualities, while Europe contributed a focus on melody and harmony. The result was well-suited for both popular consumption (through simplified genres like ragtime and swing) as well as artistic works of great passion (eventually including avant-garde styles like bebop).

Appalachian folk music

The Appalachian Mountains have long been a center for cultural innovation, in spite of only sparse settlement by Native Americans and Europeans alike. Due to complex geologic reasons, the mountains and subranges were difficult to cross and included ridges of uninhabitable quartz mixed with valleys of soil unsuitable for agriculture. As a result, immigration of Europeans and their African slaves tended to be southern in direction, along the Piedmont area, and the Appalachian region was populated by poor Europeans, many of Irish or Scottish descent. This settlement occurred primarily from 1775 to 1850.

Celtic folk tunes and ballads continued evolving from their distant roots along the Appalachians, eventually forming the major basis for jug bands, country blues, hillbilly music and a hodge-podge of other genres which eventually became country music. These folk tunes adopted characteristics from multiple sources, including British broadside ballads (which switched their themes from love to a distinctly American preoccupation with masculine work like mining or sensationalistic disasters and murder), African folk tunes (and their lyrical focus on semi-historical events) and minstrel shows and music halls. The banjo was also introduced, having gone through numerous geographic movements since its invention by the Arabians and subsequent travel across Africa, the Atlantic and throughout the Americas.

A Scottish fiddler named Neil Gow is usually credited with developing (during the 1740s) the short bow sawstroke technique that defined Appalachian fiddling. This technique was altered during the next century, with European waltzes and polkas being most influential. Square dances, based on the cotillion, and cakewalks, an African American imitation of white dances and the Virginia Reel arose during the 19th century

Shape-note and Sacred Harp

In 1801, William Smith and William Little published The Easy Instructor, a textbook for choral teachers, using a unique system of notation that was used only briefly in New England, where it was published, but became popular in Appalachia and the American South in the 1830s. The end of popularity in New England can be credited to Lowell Mason and Thomas Hastings. Shape-note came to be called shape note singing, and proved a major influence on Appalachian folk music and its descendents, including country music. Benjamin Franklin White and Elisha J. King published The Sacred Harp in 1844, using the shape note tradition as a basis for Sacred Harp music.

African Americans

In the 1830s, a Great Awakening of fervent Christianity began, leading to popular spiritual song traditions. During this period, the country was undergoing a religious revival that centered around outdoor worship gatherings (camp meetings), where hymns (camp songs) were sung. Though the African-Americans, still mostly enslaved, were not generally allowed to participate, they watched, and were inspired to use African vocal styles and rhythms with the English hymns. These songs were called Negro spirituals. While many were songs praising God or Jesus Christ, others contained coded messages to fellow slaves and rhetoric or symbolically demanding freedom. Songs like "Steal Away to Jesus" communicated an impending escape, while "Let My People Go" and "Go Down Moses" overtly concerned Biblical Hebrew slaves as a symbol for African slaves. The 1840s saw the banjo, long-denigrated as a "slave instrument" unsuitable for white folks, popularized by the minstrel show. In 1867, Slave Songs from the Southern United States was published, and the songs are popularized by students from Fisk University in Nashville.

Brass bands

The early

John C. Linehan described the spirit of American brass bands, and specifically the Fisherville Cornet Band, formed immediately before the Civil War:

(The band's) engagement by the Horse Guards, although a matter of pride, was nevertheless an occasion of dismay, for the boys for the first time in their lives had to play on horseback. As nearly all of them were novices in this direction the outlook was serious, for it is a question if there were half a dozen of the number that had ever straddled a horse. When the proposition was first broached in the band room, one of the saddest looking men was the leader, Loren Currier. He said he would vote to accept on one condition, and that was if a horse could be secured large enough to have them all ride together and give him a place in the middle. The proposition was, however, accepted. . . . It was a moving sight (the moving was all towards the ground, however), and the bucking broncos of the Wild West Show furnished no more sport, while it lasted, than did the gallant equestrians of the Fisherville Band while trying to train their horses to march and wheel by fours.

With the coming of the Civil War, the popularity of brass bands continued to grow. Promises of a famous band being attached to a regiment were used to induce recruitment, and the brass band tradition flourished. Following the war, huge peace jubilee concerts were held, where thousands of performers sometimes played.

Jazz

Jazz was a fusion of African rhythms with European melodies and harmonies, resulting in a highly-variable, diverse genre that came to include both popular styles like swing, popularized in the 1920s to the 1940s, as well as avant-garde art music like bebop and cool jazz, which catered to intellectuals, especially blacks associated with the Black Power and Civil Rights Movements. Early jazz was associated primarily with New Orleans, and a local, Cajun influence can be seen in the genre's instrumentation and form.

Eastern European immigrants

Starting in the 1880s, Eastern European Jews immigrated to the US in large numbers. They brought with them klezmorim, or musicians who played at weddings and other community events. Soon, the United States became the international center for klezmer music, and it became a major influence on jazz and other genres. Into the 20th century, immigration from Italy, Ireland, Armenia, China, Germany, Finland and elsewhere was widespread. Most of these immigrant communities kept their folk traditions alive. Some produced musicians of great stature, such as Ukrainian fiddler Pawlo Humeniuk in the 1920s and 30s. Much later, Armenian oud player Richard Hagopian also became popular at home and abroad. The Slovenian polka master, Frankie Yankovich, has had perhaps more crossover success than these other stars; his period of greatest popularity was in the 1940s.

Mexican-Texans

Southern Texas was part of Mexico until the mid-1800s, after the Mexican War, and its Mexican-American inhabitants played a mixture of ranchera, bolero and polka music called conjunto. To some extent an American version of accordion-led Mexican música norteña, conjunto was popular throughout Mexican communities in Texas.

Native Americans

Modern Native American pow-wows arose around the turn of the 20th century. While some claim that powwow had been an integral part of indigenous cultures for centuries, some modern analysts believe that powwows 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, Zuni Shalako, 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 Songs, a fusion of gospel and traditional music revolving around ceremonies in which hallucinogenic peyote 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 German polka and Mexican-American norteño.

Tin Pan Alley and the development of popular music

In the later decades of the 19th century, the music industry became dominated by a group of publishers and song-writers in New York City that came to be known as Tin Pan Alley. Tin Pan Alley's representatives spread throughout the country, buying local hits for their publishers and pushing their publisher's latest songs. Song demonstrators were fixtures at department stores and music stores across the country, and traveling song demonstrators made circuits of rural areas. The industry was driven by the profits from the sales of sheet music. A piano was considered a must in any middle-class or higher home. Major 19th century Tin Pan Alley hits included "Only a Bird in a Guilded Cage" and "After the Ball Is Over".

Military marches

Military style march music enjoyed great popularity, and most towns had brass bands that performed them. The most popular of the US march composers were John Philip Sousa, Henry Fillmore, and Karl King.

Ragtime

In the 1890s, more sophisticated African-American styles of the cakewalk and then ragtime music started to become popular. Originally associated primarily with poor African Americans, ragtime was quickly denounced as degenerate by conservatives and the classically trained establishment. In spite of the denigration, however, the style continued to gain widespread popularity and became mainstream; it was adopted by Tin Pan Alley at the start of the 20th century.

Ragtime shared similarities with both blues and jazz, the two rival forms of African American music at the time. It was primarily piano-based, and could be performed by a single person (more like the blues) or by an entire orchestra (more like jazz). Scott Joplin was the most famous ragtime musician.

Early 20th century

Early popular music

In the beginning of the 20th century, the Tin Pan Alley popular song dominated the nation's music. Songwriters like Harry Von Tilzer, George M. Cohan, and Irving Berlin produced many catchy melodies early in the new century. Trailing behind were four other significant genres. African American jazz and blues performers diversified their sound and managed to achieve some success among white Americans. Folk and country music dominated the sound of rural white performers, and both managed to achieve some mainstream success.

With the 20th century, the rise of the popular home phonograph began to give competition to the long dominant Tin Pan Alley sheet music publishers, and slowly became a significant force in American music by the 1910s. In the 1920s radio broadcasts of music came on the scene, and together with the recording industry surplanted the sheet music publishers as American music's driving force in the 1930s. In a parallel development, individual performers became more associated with hit songs in the public's mind than the songwriters.

Early foreign influences

In addition to jazz, blues, folk and country, music from the Caribbean region also briefly became popular during the first half of the twentieth century. Trinidadian calypso, Argentinian tango and Dominican merengue 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).

Eastern European Jews contributed klezmer music to American culture, with the earliest stars including Harry Kandel, Naftule Brandwein, Dave Tarras and Abe Schwartz. Kandel, a prominent clarinetist, set the stage for American klezmer.

Since the late 1800s, conjunto music had reigned in south Texas' Mexican-American communities. It was first recorded in the late 1920s, with artists like Narciso Martínez, Don Santiago Jiménez and Bruno Villareal leading the way.

Blues and gospel

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 jackleg 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. Like 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 1895, when Storyville (a neighborhood in New Orleans) produced legendary musicians like Buddy Bolden, Jelly Roll Morton and Kid Ory. The most unique 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 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 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 solors 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 Jass 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 legendary 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 bandleader 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-bandleaders. 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 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, Benny Carter and Earl Hines.

Cajun and Creole music

In the 1930s, oil was discovered in Louisiana and Anglos came to the state en masse. Cajun culture was denigrated and restricted, and hillbilly 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

At the beginning of the century, rural whites from Appalachia were known as hillbillies, and their music soon came to be called hillybilly music. Protestant churches like the Old Regular Baptists and Holiness Pentecostal used music in their services, and this was one of the biggest influences on hillbilly 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 hilbilly music: The Carters and Jimmie Rodgers. The Carters were a trio playing autoharp 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 dding new instruments, like fiddles, banjos, mandolins and Hawaiian steel guitar. Some other important musicians of this era include Gid Tanner & the Skillet Lickers and Charlie Poole & the North Carolina Ramblers.

By the 1940s, brother duets, in which two brothers sang harmony with precision and clarity, had become popular and were known as close harmony. The Blue Sky Boys, Delmore Brothers, Monroe Brothers and, especially, the Louvin Brothers, were the most popular brother duet pairs.

Sound samples

• is a recording from the Library of Congress, collected by Alice Cunningham Fletcher and Francis La Flesche and published in 1897. The singer is George Miller, who was probably born in about 1852. It was described as: "The true love-song, called by the Omaha Bethae waan, an old designation and not a descriptive name, is sung generally in the early morning, when the lover is keeping his tryst and watching for the maiden to emerge from the tent and go to the spring. They belong to the secret courtship and are sometimes called Me-the-g'thun wa-an - courting songs. . . . They were sung without drum, bell or rattle, to accent the rhythm, in which these songs is subordinated to tonality and is felt only in the musical phrases. . . . Vibrations for the purpose of giving greater expression were not only affected by the tremolo of the voice, but they were enhanced by waving the hand, or a spray of artemesia before the lips, while the body often swayed gently to the rhythm of the song (Fletcher, 1894, p. 156)."