Music, Raman

Rock ‘n’ Roll

(Quick note: The name of the style is usually stylized as either “rock ‘n’ roll” or “rock and roll”. I will be using the first, but some of the sources use the second. I have left the original styling intact in any direct quotes.)

 

Break out your leather jackets, jeans, and assorted hair products because we’re going to be talking about rock ‘n’ roll. Rock ‘n’ roll is a fusion of blues, rhythm & blues, jazz, country, and a variety of less well known styles. It originally featured either saxophone or piano, but evolved to generally feature the electric guitar (an instrument that it helped to popularize). It generally consists of a 12-bar major chord progression, swing or shuffle rhythm, heavily emphasized backbeat, and a blend of blues and country melodies. (Remember, rock ‘n’ roll is not the same as rock. We will discuss that distinction a little later.)

Like jazz before it, the rise of rock ‘n’ roll was met with outrage and disgust. Frank Sinatra said that “rock and roll is the most brutal, ugly, degenerate, vicious form of expression — lewd, sly, in plain fact, dirty — a rancid-smelling aphrodisiac and the martial music of every side-burned delinquent on the face of the earth” (America Rocks and Rolls). It was banned from certain schools and radio stations and was decried by churches as “Satan’s music.” As one author put it, “Because rock and roll originated among the lower classes and a segregated ethnic group, many middle-class whites thought it was tasteless” (America Rocks and Rolls). Also like jazz before it, the resistance was swiftly brushed aside.

Rock ‘n’ roll was incredibly popular. The music of artists like Elvis, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran, Richie Valens, and Jerry Lee Lewis resonated with a generation of teenagers seeking to rebel against their jazz-loving, conformist parents (read my post on jazz to understand the irony of this). The “side-burned delinquents” Sinatra spoke of became known as greasers (yes, the ones from Grease), but they were not the only rock ‘n’ roll fans. One of the reasons the style was so controversial was that it appealed to both black and white audiences, who would often listen and dance to it together. Some historians credit this with helping to break down racial barriers and playing a role in the success of the civil rights movement (Rock).

It also became very popular overseas, which is where the line between rock ‘n’ roll and rock began to form. In the early 1960s, foreign artists began to release their own takes on American rock ‘n’ roll. Much of this was very similar to the American style, but some of it was different. The face of this newer style was the Beatles, who were a British band that traded in the swing rhythm, piano, and saxophone (remnants of American jazz) for straight eights and vocal harmonies. Some of their early music still had the 12 bar call-and-response verses and swing rhythms that characterized rock ‘n’ roll, but they were moving away from that and towards something new: rock.

After a decade of rock ‘n’ roll, people were ready for a fresh sound. British rock and bands inspired by it spread like wildfire in mid-sixties America. Rock had many of the same elements as its immediate predecessor, and it offered the same rebelliousness as rock ‘n’ roll once had, but it was really something new. As one historian explains it:

The differences between rock ‘n’ roll and rock are aesthetic and generational; there is a strict correspondence between the age cohorts performing the music and their aesthetic tendencies. Rock ‘n’ roll performers, born generally in the mid-1930s, represent the fusion of existing trends in popular music at very particular points of time. Rock performers, born generally from the early 1940s through the 1950s, represent later fusions, of which rock ‘n’ roll is itself a major element. The differences are far more than aesthetic; they represent sensibilities related to cultural evolution, social perceptions and historical events. Within each aesthetic-generational location there are stylistic genres, such as rockabilly, doo-wop during the period of rock ‘n’ roll; country rock, blues rock, acid rock, glam rock, heavy metal, punk, new wave and many others during the period rock era. (The Eclipse of Rock ‘n’ Roll)

Rock is deserving of its own post, and I will get to that at some point, but for now it is enough to know that it is different from rock ‘n’ roll and that it has a more global heritage than its strictly American predecessor.

Works Cited

“America Rocks and Rolls.” Ushistory.org. Independence Hall Association, Web. 17 Nov. 2015. <http://www.ushistory.org/us/53d.asp>.

“The Eclipse of Rock ‘n’ Roll: The Last Music of the ‘Mechanical Age’” Divergences. Web. 17 Nov. 2015. <http://divergences.be/spip.php?article1187&lang=fr>.

“Rock.” America’s Music. Tribeca Film Institute, Web. 17 Nov. 2015. <http://americasmusic.tribecafilminstitute.org/session/view/rock>.

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Music, Raman, Uncategorized

The Blues

As a guitar player, this is one of the blog posts I have been most looking forward to. Many of the world’s greatest guitar players began with or were inspired by the blues, and when I teach kids how to play the guitar I always start by teaching them the blues. In addition to their significance to guitar players, the blues are also considered to have been an essential part of black identity in the early part of the 20th century: they can be found in the works of literary icons such as Langston Hughes and August Wilson as well as in the works of scholars like W.E.B. Du Bois.

The history of the blues is long and largely unclear, but there is agreement on the basic evolution. As PBS puts it in “What is the Blues?”:

At the turn of the century, the blues was still slowly emerging from Texas, Louisiana, the Piedmont region, and the Mississippi Delta; its roots were in various forms of African American slave songs such as field hollers, work songs, spirituals, and country string ballads. Rural music that captured the suffering, anguish-and hopes-of 300 years of slavery and tenant farming, the blues was typically played by roaming solo musicians on acoustic guitar, piano, or harmonica at weekend parties, picnics, and juke joints. Their audience was primarily made up of agricultural laborers, who danced to the propulsive rhythms, moans, and slide guitar. (1)

In 1912, dance orchestra leader W.C. Handy, who had become infatuated with the blues after an encounter with a traveling blues musician at a train station some years earlier, became one of the first to transcribe and publish sheet music for blues songs. It began to catch on over the following years and singers such as Mamie Smith, Ma Rainey, and Bessie Smith helped to establish its place in American culture with the commercial success of their recordings (1).

As the music became increasingly popular it became a mainstay of the renaissance in black American culture. Langston Hughes began to experiment with what he called “blues poetry”, a type of poetry that “regardless of form, utilizes the themes, motifs, language, and imagery common to popular blues literature,”(2) and he “sought to catch this ‘blues spirit’–this compensatory expression of conflicting emotions–in his poetry, in part by imitating the blues themselves”(2). He was drawn to this style because “sad as Blues may be, there’s almost always something humorous about them–even if it’s the kind of humor that laughs to keep from crying”(2).

Playwright August Wilson had a similar experience in that the blues profoundly influenced him as well. He claimed that, when he first heard the blues, “the universe stuttered, and everything fell into place”(3). Like Hughes, he recognized the veiled hopefulness of the blues, noting that, “contrary to what most people think, it’s not defeatist, ‘Oh, woe is me.’ It’s very life-affirming, uplifting music. Because you can sing that song, that’s what enables you to survive”(3).

As the music became more popular, white blues musicians began to pop up and more white listeners began to enjoy blues music. Some people felt that white people playing and enjoying the blues detracted from its authenticity and emotional relevance to black identity. This argument was very similar to one that would be made about similar phenomena that occurred with rock and roll, r&b, hip-hop, and rap in later generations. This will likely be another blog post, but the blues was one of the earliest sources of the controversy over musical appropriation.

If you have never listened to the blues, go on YouTube and listen to BB King’s “The Thrill is Gone” and “Everyday I have the Blues”, the classic “Sweet Home Chicago” at the Crossroads festival, and Albert King and Stevie Ray Vaughan playing “Stormy Monday”. If you like what you hear, I will gladly provide you with dozens more recommendations. If you play guitar (or any instrument really) and you like what you hear, I am always up to jam!

 

Resources:

  1. http://www.pbs.org/theblues/classroom/essaysblues.html
  2. https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/callaloo/v019/19.1chinitz.html
  3. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1700922

 

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