lesson:
The Juke Joint: Where Oral Literature Comes Alive
What role do Blues lyrics and juke joints play in Black American literature and life?
Below you'll see everything we could locate for your search of “"blues"”
What role do Blues lyrics and juke joints play in Black American literature and life?
Reporting for Newsweek took me to Monterey. I'd gone to work for Newsweekright out of college in 1965 – I was a reporter in the London bureau whenRubber Soul came out, Carnaby Street was jumping, and the Who were at the Marquee. In January '67, just as the '60s musical-social ball was bouncing westward, Newsweek moved me to San Francisco. I arrived in time for the Human Be-In and soon was hanging out at the Avalon and Fillmore, interviewing Jerry and Janis, and covering student demonstrations in Berkeley. In May I began to hear rumours of a huge hippie festival: all the best new bands...
BACK IN THE MID-'50s, the Sun Records studio at 706 Union Avenue was the epicenter of a sudden, wrenching shift in world consciousness. Tremors had been felt for several years, and then, one afternoon in early 1954, Sam Phillips was busy with routine work in the tiny studio when Destiny walked in. Actually, Destiny, in the person of a handsome, painfully shy but flashily dressed young man with longish hair and greasy sideburns, paced up and down the sidewalk outside for some time before summoning the courage to actually walk in the door. Phillips, a thirty-one-year-old radio engineer from Florence,...
How did the Great Migration spread Southern culture, helping to give the Blues a central place in American popular music?
JERRY LEIBER AND MIKE STOLLER. They rank alongside Berry as rock ‘n’ roll’s wittiest composers and their influence as record producers has been immeasurable. As writers they were the first to bring satire and a social conscience to rock; as producers they ushered out the simplicity of an era in which groups were pulled off the streets to "doo-wop" and "doo-wah" into a microphone for three minutes. From these primitive beginnings to monaural overdubbing, the very first eight-track studios and on into the realms of the technological future-shock, Leiber and Stoller have directed all the phases of post-war record production....
Dave Schulps, senior editor of Trouser Press, spent more than six hours with Page, one of the longest interviews Page ever did. The interview was scheduled to happen on the East Coast after the band's 1977 MSG gigs, but Page was too tired to talk. So Swan Song put Schulps on their chartered jet with the and flew him to California. Schulps ended up snagging the guitarist on three separate occasions a few days later in Beverly Hills. The interviews took place at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, on June 16 and 17, 1977, while the band had a brief...
WHILE ENGLAND was paving the way for mass acceptance of white interpretations of classic blues material with bands like the Yardbirds and Bluesbreakers and talented individuals of the caliber of Clapton, Beck and Page, America produced two notable bands working in the same genre – the Al Kooper / Danny Kalb-led Blues Project and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. The latter was not as prone as most to the inevitable "can a white man play the blues?" question (the issue being emotional honesty rather than technical ability), having honed their craft in Chicago’s South Side blues clubs and at the...
IN THE short space of seven months in the 1930s, a slender youth from Robinsonville, Mississippi, recorded twenty-nine blues sides in madeshift conditions, and a year later he was dead. But these two sessions, in Dallas and San Antonio, contain the greatest legend the blues has ever known, and precipitated a whole string of tales, theories, fancies and fabrications about the man which present such a incongruous pastiche when woven together that indeed Johnson’s life, his sudden fame and immediate death, is reminiscent of the kind of mysteries usually recounted exclusively in black magic anthologies. But as that great authority...
How did the early Rolling Stones help popularize the Blues?
In what ways did American Blues affect English musicians in the early 1960s?
How does Langston Hughes’ Blues-inspired poetry exemplify the ideals of the Harlem Renaissance?
"WHEN I FIRST started Atlantic Records," reflects the label founder, Ahmet Ertegun, "I intended to make good blues and jazz music, as well as some pop music. My main interest was in jazz and blues." In the nearly 45 years since Ertegun and his original partner Herb Abramson first got together with this idea (and $10,000 from Ertegun's dentist), Atlantic has become one of the most consistently successful companies in music. So much the paradigm of the post WWII growth of the music business, Charlie Gillett used them for his model in his chronicle, Making Tracks. "The late 50s were a time...
He couldn't read. He couldn't write. He couldn't stop screwing up. Yet Hank Williams is a giant of popular music without whom rock'n'roll might never have happened. "I thought about Hank when I walked out on that Opry stage for the first time. all I could think of was, This is the same stage that Hank Williams was on and now I'm here." – Elvis Presley IN JAILHOUSE ROCK, VINCE EVERETT, PLAYED BY Elvis Presley, has a photograph on his cell wall. Unsurprisingly, it's of Hank Williams. Both singers were influenced by black music early in life, both won talent shows and learnt...
THEY COULD hardly have been a bigger contrast in background and appearance: the young, very tall, bright white Englishman Long John Baldry, and the mature, short, dark brown American John Lee Hooker. But they had the blues in common and when I brought Baldry and Hooker together recently they got along like old friends. John Lee was amazed that Long John, who is a mere 23, has been listening to blues records for 11 years "Yes, the first disc I bought was Muddy Water singing 'Honey Bee' on French Vogue. Then I got another French Vogue, Big Bill Broonzy's 'Blues...
How do the Country Blues reflect the challenges of sharecropping, racial injustice, and rural poverty in early 20th-century African-American life?
LET'S PLAY the numbers game. According to Joel Whitburn's Top Pop Singles 1955-1986, Pat Boone is the fifth highest-ranking artist in the history of theBillboard singles charts. Only Elvis Presley, the Beatles, James Brown and Stevie Wonder were more successful (based on the number of singles charting and their positions). In the '50s, only Elvis was more popular, chart-wise, than Boone. Pat Boone reached the singles charts 60 times, putting him at #8 on that list. Six of those chart singles reached #1, spending a total of 21 weeks in that position, putting Boone in two more Top 10 lists. So much for...
TO PARAPHRASE the titles of two of the 20 Bo Diddley nuggets contained on His Best: The Chess 50th Anniversary Collection , you can't judge a book by its cover but you sure can tell something about how important a musician is by the artists who do cover versions of his songs. That's not to imply that Bo Diddley's legacy rests solely on the interpretations of his music by others. The rich body of work contained here offers ample testament to the multiple talents--as singer, songwriter, guitarist and creator of one of the archetypal rock rhythms--the man born Ellas McDaniels displayed on...
"WOW, YOU guys are really getting it on!" exclaimed Chuck Berry, observing the Rolling Stones cut 'Down The Road Apiece', a track he'd recorded himself just a few years earlier. It was June, 1964, and this youthful British beat band were happily messing around at the Chess studio in Chicago as their older black musical idols watched on, intrigued. In the background Little Walter and Sonny Boy Williamson argued loudly about a woman from Kentucky. Muddy Waters, whose song 'Rollin' Stone', had supplied the English band with its moniker, even helped them bring in their equipment. Later on, they chatted...
The King of Jive Who Made The Good Times Roll IF BILL HALEY AND ELVIS PRESLEY have to be dubbed the father and king of rock’n’roll, then Louis Jordan must be considered its godfather. Practically all of the black American rhythm and blues, rock’n’roll and early soul stars who upset the Fifties have cited Jordan as the main man of their youth and several of the white rock’n’rollers have acknowledged his influence or recorded his songs. Certain elements of rock’n’roll were developing even before Jordan appeared on the scene and others cropped up after his heyday. But most were completely...
How did the electric guitar transform Blues music from the 1940s forward?
What did R&B bring to early Rock and Roll, and how was early Rock and Roll different?
IT IS NOW ABOUT A DOZEN YEARS since the pop music revolution – since Alan Freed began to play, instead of soupy white imitations, straight rhythm and blues in New York and called it rock'n'roll; since Wild Bill Haley and his Comets roared to the top of the Top Ten with 'Shake, Rattle and Roll'; since the advent of the 45 rpm record and the post-war prosperity stretched that Top Ten into the Top 40, and even the Top 100. Despite adult accusations of the sameness of all the bleating sounds, pop has changed many times in those years. Those...
"I was just a country boy, glad to get some sounds on wax" IT WASN'T unexpected; not like the sudden shock when a man is wiped out is his prime by ice on the wings, vomit in the throat, or a wayward bullet; but there was still a sense of irretrievable loss that came with the news of Howlin’ Wolf’s death. He'd been ill for a long time now. Overweight and subject to heart attacks, he'd been in and out of hospital since the late sixties and more or less inactive for the last couple of years. Now the news reports...
ALL ENTERTAINMENT HAS AN EXISTENTIAL dimension: all successful performances imply a life-style and a sense of values, a sub-structure of assumptions upon which the performer plays his part. The Beatles' first film, A Hard Day's Night, successfully crystallised the personalities that had made them the biggest successes in the history of show business: their surreal sense of humour, their sophisticated naïveté, and their four way plug-in personality – clever John, cuddly man in the street Ringo, sardonic George, and precocious cherubic Paul. The Beatles' personalities worked well in the movie since their rather repressed alienation from the feverish glamour of the...
WHEN ROCK'N'ROLL first stopped calling itself rhythm and blues in the mid Fifties, it became a young man's game. Teenage performers like Ritchie Valens began to influence the course of popular music; his double-sided smash hit 'Donna'/'La Bamba' dominated the charts in December 1958. But, unlike rock'n'roll, Ritchie Valens did not survive to face the Sixties. Ritchie's is not the most famous name in rock'n'roll but he had as many or even more hits than some celebrated stars. In a remarkably short career – he was not yet 18 years old when he died – Valens made some excellent individually-styled...
(1915 – 1983) A Mississippi native who rose to prominence in Chicago in the early 1950s, Muddy Waters is one the most esteemed figures in Blues, and a seminal figure in the postwar electrification of acoustic Delta Blues. He was a major influence on many Rock musicians of the 1960s, revered in particular among players who made up the British Blues scene. Waters was born McKinley Morganfield in 1915, and raised on the Stovall Plantation in the Delta town of Clarksdale, Mississippi. At age five Waters began to play harmonica and as a teen he taught himself guitar, emulating the style...
THERE HAS BEEN a great increase recently in the number of popular artists whose songs are influenced by or taken from American folk music–both traditional and modern. The paranoiac need of modern man for a label for anything that comes near him resulted, in this case, in the term "folk-rock" to signify pop music with strong folk influences. Originally "folk-rock" meant pop music that used actual folk material; later, anything folk-influenced that retained a heavy beat, and still later, anything having anything to do with folk that happened to sell in the pop market. The term "folk-rock" is a silly...
(1928 – 1984) Alexis Korner was never a household name, but his influence on the British Rock scene of the 1960s continues to be felt today. As one of the first British performers to embrace American Blues, Koerner — often called the “Father of British Blues” — was a mentor to the stars of the next generation, from the Rolling Stones to Led Zeppelin. Born in Paris in 1928 to an Austrian father and a Turkish/Greek mother, Alexis spent his childhood in France, Switzerland and North Africa, arriving in London at age 13, at the height of the Second World War....
How did Dewey Phillips and Hunter Hancock help bring Rhythm and Blues music to mixed race audiences?
How did Muddy Waters’ music change after he moved to Chicago, and what does that say about the relationship between place and self-expression?
FIRST KILL YOUR HOG. SKIN IT, singe off the hairs and leave the hide to soften. Tug it over a round frame, whittle out a neck, "and there's your banjo", says Roni Stoneman. "The five-string banjo is the only American instrument. The black people brought the four-string banjo, but the five-stringer and the clawhammer style came from the mountains." Roni, elderly Southern belle and professional banjo player, is one of the 15 of Ernest 'Pops' Stoneman's 23 children who made it to adulthood. "A lot of people made their own instruments. There wasn't much money around, but there was plenty...
(1910 – 1976) A towering, larger than life performer with a distinctive, raspy growl, Howlin’ Wolf was among the most influential Blues musicians of the postwar years. A Mississippi native who relocated to Chicago and recorded for that city’s Chess Records, Wolf was at the forefront of transforming the acoustic Blues of the rural South to the electric, urban Blues of Chicago, and he was a particular favorite of many early Blues-influenced Rock musicians, including the Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix. Howlin’ Wolf was born Chester Arthur Burnett in the small town of White Station, Mississippi. After his parents spilt up...
(1917 – 2001) One of the most distinctive and enduring of Blues icons, John Lee Hooker created a stark, brooding signature style rooted in his primitive, hypnotic guitar grooves, along with a highly original songwriting sensibility. His trademark sound and imposing presence helped to make "the Hook" one of the most popular Blues performers of the post-World War II era, and an influence on many Rock and Roll musicians. Although a native of Mississippi, Hooker came to prominence after relocating to Detroit in 1943, following unproductive stints in Memphis and Cincinnati. He began recording in 1948 and experienced immediate success with...
(1925 – 2015) The combination of B.B. King’s gut wrenching vocals and his distinctive guitar style — marked by stinging vibrato, deft phrasing and fluid string bending — has made him one on the most recognizable, successful and influential Blues performers of all time. King was born Riley B. King on a cotton plantation in the Mississippi Delta, where his father abandoned the family when King was 4. Raised mostly by his grandmother, he worked the cotton fields and sang gospel by day, and played blues guitar on street corners for dimes by night. In 1947, King hitchhiked north to the thriving music scene of...
(1894 – 1937) Dubbed the “Empress of the Blues,” Bessie Smith was one of the most successful black stars of the 1920s, and one of a handful of women singers of the era who brought the Blues to a wider audience. Born in 1894, Smith had lost her mother, father and a brother by the age of 9, and was raised by her older sister in Chatanooga, Tenn. With limited job prospects, Smith and her brother Andrew began playing for spare change on the street to support the family. In 1912, Smith joined a traveling vaudeville show as a dancer and...
FEW ENTERTAINERS have fallen quite so far from grace as Sam Cooke did when he died, 30 years ago, at the Hacienda Motel in south-central Los Angeles. Whatever the doubts and suspicions surrounding the shooting – and there are still many – it is hard to see it as a martyr's death. Yet think of Sam Cooke and you think: Grecian good looks, irresistible charm and style, and a voice that rings out like a glorious, golden peal, cooing ‘You Send Me’ down the corridors of eternity. For the best part of 15 years, Cooke was an archangel, a black American...
ALAN FREED, the man responsible for giving rock'n'roll its name, was many things to many people. To some, he was the original Mr Clean, an innocent 'good guy', who opened up hitherto-segregated airwaves and made an unparalleled contribution to the advancement of black popular music. This was the sympathetic impression conveyed by the Floyd Mutrux 1978 bio-pic, American Hot Wax. 'He brought us rock'n'roll,' said Mutrux. 'I didn't want to say bad things about a guy who started all that.' To others like Alexander Walker, the London Evening Standard film critic who met the volatile disc jockey during his heyday, Freed was a pathetic...
How did Bob Dylan merge poetry with popular music?
(1932 – 1964) During his short life, singer and harmonica player Cyril Davies played a key role in popularizing American Blues music in the U.K. in the 1960s, both as a performer and bandleader and as the driving force, with partner Alexis Korner, behind a pair of influential venues. Blues Incorporated, the band Davies started with guitarist Korner, is credited as the first British band to play electric Blues and R&B, and an inspiration for many musicians who would go on to fame, including members of the Rolling Stones, Cream, Led Zeppelin and the Yardbirds. Davies began playing music publicly in...
Until recently little was known of Berry Gordy Jnr’s background. Such information as was available made no sense at all except on a romantic level, and Motown’s official version of its own origins is curiously blunt. The aggressive young car-worker is said to have started the company that revolutionized the record industry on nothing more than an 800 dollar loan from his family’s credit union. But this rags-to-riches account overlooks two factors. In the first instance, Gordy was among the hottest songwriters of the late Fifties and had several million-selling compositions to his credit. Moreover, he came – to borrow...
A DEFT, HARD-DRIVING BLEND of country, gospel and blues, rockabilly was performed mainly by white artists who traded legitimate country backgrounds for a short-lived but frenzied involvement in music with a strong beat. Young, naturally exuberant musicians were the prime exponents, but traditional country singers were not without guile and, for a brief period around 1954-57, they too sang with a flash and glamour to match their rhinestoned clothes. The word rockabilly was first coined by American trade papers who required a catchall term to cover a new development which had a variety of names including ‘western and bop’, ‘cat...
(b. 1945) English musician Eric Clapton has had one of the most enduring and successful careers in Rock, spanning early years as a Blues-obsessed guitar “God,” a middle period as a laid-back, FM-radio hitmaker, and his latter years as an elder statesman beloved by Classic Rock fans. When lists of the best Rock guitarists are compiled, Clapton is unfailingly near the top; he’s also the only musician to be inducted three times into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame; as a solo artist and as a member of Cream and of the Yardbirds. Clapton was born just as the Second World War...
How were Bo Diddley’s recordings an anomaly in relation to 1950s Pop music, and how is his rhythm-driven sound and self-presentation a precursor to Hip Hop style?
How have writers, storytellers, and musicians explored the crossroads as a symbol in their work?
(1883 – 1946) Mamie Smith made history when in 1920 she became the first African American singer to make a record of a Blues song, “Crazy Blues.” The record became a massive hit, changing the record industry and launching a new era of “race records” aimed at black listeners. Born in 1883, Smith entered show business at the tender age of ten. She spent the next decade working in vaudeville as dancer and singer. At age 20 she married and settled down in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood, where she became a regular performer in night clubs. On August 10, 1920, Smith...
(1941 – 2005) Although he never achieved the fame of such contemporaries as Rod Stewart and Elton John — both of whom were members of his early bands and championed him after they became successful — 6'7" vocalist Long John Baldry was a key figure in the Blues revival that hit England in the early '60s. Baldry was one of the first on the London scene to perform American Blues material, and was an early member of the Alexis Korner’s seminal group Blues Incorporated. He was featured on Korner's 1962 LP R&B from the Marquee, which is generally regarded as the...
(died 1934) Though some of the details of Charley Patton's life are not definitively known, like his race and the exact year of his birth, what is agreed on is the impact he had on American Blues music. Often called the "Father of the Delta Blues," Patton influenced bluesmen from Robert Johnson to Howlin' Wolf; the Blues writer Robert Palmer went so far as to call him one of the most important American musicians of the 20th century. Born in Mississippi to sharecropper parents, Patton was raised in part at the Will Dockery Plantation in the Mississippi Delta. A huge operation, the plantation employed...
The British band Cream were only active for a short while, but their blend of Blues, Rock and psychedelia became instantly popular and proved an influence on many Hard Rock and Blues Rock bands that followed them. The three members of Cream were all veterans of various London bands when the power trio formed in mid-1966. As a member of the Yardbirds and John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, Eric Clapton had become a highly regarded guitarist; bassist/singer Jack Bruce and drummer Ginger Baker had both been in the Graham Bond Organisation, a band that combined R&B and Jazz. All three were looking...
(Leonard: 1917 – 1969; Philip: b. 1921) Immigrants from Poland, Leonard and Philip Chess got into the record business more or less by happenstance, and ended up creating one of the most revered labels of the 20th century, Chicago-based Chess Records. Founded in 1950, Chess became perhaps the most influential Blues label ever, issuing seminal records by Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, John Lee Hooker, Sonny Boy Williamson and many others, while also becoming a force in early Rock and Roll, recording Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, among others. Born Lejzor and Fiszel Czy?, the brothers were just boys when they emigrated...
"Will he burn it tonight?" asked a neat blonde of her boyfriend, squashed in beside her on the packed floor of the Fillmore auditorium. "He did at Monterey," the boyfriend said, recalling the Pop Festival at which the guitarist, in a moment of elation, actually put a match to his guitar. The blonde and her boyfriend went on watching the stage, crammed with huge silver-fronted Fender amps, a double drum set, and whispering stage hands. Mitch Mitchell, the drummer, came on first, sat down, smiled, and adjusted his cymbals. Then came bassist Noel Redding, gold glasses glinting on his...
(1902 – 1988) A onetime preacher who turned to secular music, Son House ranks among the most influential Country Blues singers of the prewar era. He had two distinct periods as a performer – in the South during the 1930s, and then in the North beginning in 1964, where he was embraced as part of the Folk revival. Eddie James “Son” House Jr. was born in Mississippi, where his parents worked the cotton fields. As a youngster House was drawn to religion and was said to loathe secular music; in his teen years House found regular work preaching sermons. He did...
(1902 – 1969) One of the most influential of the Delta Blues players, Mississippi-bred Skip James' intricate, unconventional guitar technique and high, haunting vocals made him one of the genre's most distinctive and expressive performers. In his 1930s heyday, James – who played piano as well as guitar, a rarity for Country Blues singers — was notably an influence on Robert Johnson, who reworked James’ "Devil Got My Woman" and "22-20 Blues" as "Hellhound on My Trail" and "32-20 Blues, respectively. In his early life, James worked as a manual laborer on road-construction and levee-building crews, as well as a sharecropper...
(b. 1936) From his pioneering 1950s work to his late-blooming mainstream stardom, Buddy Guy has built a track record as one of Blues’ most inventive and influential guitarists. His raw, forceful playing on numerous Chess Records sessions, as well as his flamboyant onstage showmanship, served as a crucial inspiration to such Rock players as Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page and Stevie Ray Vaughan. The Louisiana native got his start playing with bands in Baton Rouge, before moving to Chicago in 1957. There, he joined Muddy Waters' band and began working for Chess as a session guitarist, playing on...
(1893 – 1929) One of the first Blues musicians to sell records in significant numbers, Lemon Henry Jefferson was born blind on a farm in east Texas to sharecropper parents. He took up guitar in his early teens — perhaps inspired by the many traveling guitarists who made their way through the farms and plantations of the South performing Blues and dance tunes for the workers — and was soon performing at picnics and parties. By 1912 he was a regular performer around Dallas, where he sometimes performed with Huddie Ledbetter, a.k.a. Leadbelly. In 1925 Jefferson was discovered by a scout...
How did Country Music influence Rock and Roll and the musicians who made it?
How does the story of “Hound Dog” demonstrate music culture’s racial mixing as it differed from mainstream American life in the 1950s?
(1915 – 2002) Folklorist and ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax was an influential figure in 20th century American music, producing archival and field recordings that significantly boosted public awareness of American Folk, Blues and Jazz traditions, and was instrumental in launching the Folk and Blues revivals that took place among young white musicians and listeners in the 1950s and 60s. Lomax spent much of his life traveling and recording music, first traversing the backroads of the American South and eventually making his way around the world, interviewing musicians playing Folk, Blues, Jazz, Gospel, Calypso, Cajun music, and other genres, and capturing their music for...
Although he's best known for Elvis Presley's covers of his songs "That's All Right" (which was Presley's debut single in 1954), "So Glad You're Mine" and "My Baby Left Me," singer-guitarist Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup is notable for his own contributions to the Blues canon. With a distinctive voice and a guitar style whose primitivism may have been attributable to the fact that he didn't pick up the instrument until he was 30, the Mississippi-bred Crudup had traveled around the South as a migrant worker and toured as a member of the Gospel act the Harmonizing Four before moving to...
How has Memphis music culture provided one example of art’s capacity to challenge the racial boundaries that have so often structured American life?
(1886 – 1939) A hugely popular touring singer during the 1920s Ma Rainey was one of the earliest popular entertainers to perform and record Blues, spreading the popularity of the genre beyond traditional Blues audiences and earning her the nickname “The Mother of the Blues.” Ma Rainey was born Gertrude Pridgett in 1886 in Columbus, Georgia. She showed her abilities as an entertainer at an early age and went from local talent shows to touring with vaudeville and minstrel shows while still in her teens. In 1904 she married William "Pa" Rainey, a minstrel show manager, and took the stage name...
(1912 – 1982) With a career spanning six decades and hundreds of recordings, Lightnin’ Hopkins was among the most prolific and admired Blues players of the 20th century, and one who spanned the rural Country Blues tradition and the electric Blues of the postwar years. He was also an accomplished guitarist whose syncopated, thumping fingerpicking style directly or indirectly influenced many subsequent Blues and Rock players. Sam John Hopkins was born in 1912 in Centerville, Texas, the grandson of slaves and the son of sharecroppers. Immersedi in the Blues from a young age, Hopkins built his first “guitar” from a cigar box...
How did the recordings Sam Phillips produced at Sun Records, including Elvis Presley’s early work, reflect trends of urbanization and integration in the 1950s American South?
(1943 – 1970) With a powerhouse vocal style and a brash, larger-than-life persona, Blues-steeped singer Janis Joplin arrived in San Francisco from Port Arthur, Texas, a few years before the Summer of Love and rose to become one of the biggest stars of the late 1960s. As a charismatic female star at a time when Rock was heavily male-dominated, Joplin was a trailblazer – however, her career was cut short when she died of a drug overdose in 1970, at the age of 27. As a teenager growing up in Texas in the late 1950s, Joplin was smitten by old Folk,...
(1926 – 2017) John Lennon famously said, "if you tried to give Rock and Roll another name, you might call it Chuck Berry." Indeed, Chuck Berry is one of the few to lay claim as a true founding father of Rock music. Born in St. Louis, Mo., Berry started playing guitar in high school, borrowing guitar riffs and stagecraft from Blues legend T-Bone Walker. By early 1953 Berry was performing with local pianist Johnnie Johnson's trio, starting a longtime collaboration with Johnson. Although the band played mostly Blues and ballads — Berry idolized the hard driving Bluesman Muddy Waters and the...
IN AUGUST LAST YEAR Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons celebrated ten years as one of the most successful recording groups America has ever produced. Their total world record sales now stand somewhere between 80 and 90 millions. Well below the Beatles, but higher than many more consistent artists like The Rolling Stones, The Beach Boys and Creedence Clearwater. But in the rush to document everybody who trod a recording studio floor from 1950 onwards the Four Seasons seemed noticeable by their lack of attention. Maybe as Nik Cohn points out in his definitive book Wopbopaloobop alopbamboom (Paladin) they were such a...
What are the musical and cultural roots of Heavy Metal?
THE MOST AMAZING thing about Dick Clark is not that "America's Oldest Living Teenager" still fits that role at age 61. It's not that he's one of the most successful (and wealthiest) people in show business. It's not even the fact that nearly all the great (and plenty of not-so-great) artists in the history of rock 'n' roll have appeared on his American Bandstand. The most amazing thing about Dick Clark is that he can't dance. He's admitted it. Dick Clark has two left feet. Beginning August 5, 1957, the Monday afternoon when he took over as host of the longest-running variety...
How can teachers help students analyze and understand Rock and Roll?
Formed in London in the late 1960s, Led Zeppelin went on to become one of the most popular and influential bands in Rock and Roll history. Like many British bands of the era, Led Zeppelin were steeped in American Blues, but they took that influence in a heavier direction than most of their peers, creating a powerful, stomping sound that also incorporated elements of British Folk, Psychedelia, Soul, Reggae, and Celtic and Arabic music. As such, they wielded a huge influence over subsequent Hard Rock bands, and are often credited as forbears of Heavy Metal. The band was brought together...
(1915 – 1973) Both a Gospel superstar and a popular Rhythm and Blues singer, Sister Rosetta Tharpe achieved widespread popularity in the 30s and 40s, with a high-energy performing style that marks her as a pioneering early influence on Rock and Roll. A powerful singer, a distinctive songwriter and an expansive, effervescent personality, Tharpe made exuberant music that drew heavy inspiration from the Blues, often combining spiritual lyrics with raucous, earthy music, while exhibiting a level of showmanship and charisma that was uncommon in the Gospel field at the time. Tharpe was also an influential early exponent of the electric...
(1911 – 1938) Mythic Mississippi Bluesman Robert Johnson is generally regarded as the most distinctive, inventive and influential of all of the Delta blues artists. His haunted singing, complex guitar playing and formally ambitious songwriting give his music an emotional resonance that's made it a touchstone for multiple generations of Rock musicians. Although the handful of recordings that he left behind are now recognized as musical milestones, the records he released during his short career were never big sellers at the time, and he enjoyed little commercial success or public recognition in his lifetime. Many details of Johnson's life remain shrouded...
What is the relationship between the banjo and slavery, and how did music making by enslaved people influence the abolition debate during the 18th and early 19th century?
What is the significance of Reconstruction and what does it reveal about the freedom that the post-Civil War constitutional amendments secured for African Americans?
I KNOW THIS may sound a little overboard, but there once was a time when the Young Rascals were the greatest rock & roll band in the world. I say this without flinching, and in full realization that such combinations as the Rolling Stones and the Beatles were in the process of turning out their finest work. I say it in spite of the fact that there are those who would much rather see the Remains,Question Mark and the Mysterians, the Daily Flash, or some other heart-felt favorite stand in the top spot. And I say it knowing far...
(1889 – 1949) A singular figure in American music, Lead Belly is often called a Blues singer, but his repertoire ran well beyond Blues, and into a breadth of American Folk styles, from prison work songs and field songs to spirituals and square-dance calls. An itinerant singer who was both a songwriter and a repository for tradional songs, Lead Belly built an extensive repertoire that significantly influenced the Folk revival of the 1960s. Huddie Ledbetter was born in 1889 (by most estimates) near Shreveport, Louisiana. He was the son of sharecroppers and took an interest in music as a young boy,...
Fusing Gospel, Blues, and Folk influences with positive messages, the two-generation family act the Staple Singers produced some of the most unique and critically acclaimed R&B hits of the 1970s. The Staple Singers’ roots go back to the childhood of family patriarch Roebuck "Pops" Staples, who learned Blues guitar growing up in 1920s Mississippi. He entertained locally and as a young man began singing and playing with various Gospel outfits, eventually moving to Chicago in the early 1940s. By 1948 he was performing with children Cleotha, Mavis, and Pervis at local churches under the Staple Singers name (spelled Staple, though the...
Essential Question: How did Aretha Franklin’s foundation in Gospel music influence her recording of “Chain of Fools,” helping to establish a Soul sound and bringing black culture into mainstream America?
(b. 1939) Although he originally emerged as a swaggering, Doo Wop-singing teen idol in the late 1950s, streetwise New Yorker Dion DiMucci (better known simply as Dion) quickly showed himself to be a sublimely soulful vocalist as well as an artist of depth and versatility. In the half-century since his original run of hits ended, he's continued to make personally charged, if not always commercially successful, music in a variety of styles. Dion's musical sensibility was shaped by the Blues, R&B and Country records he heard while growing up in the Bronx in the pre-Rock and Roll 50s. After an unsuccessful...
In what ways did Jimi Hendrix help create a new "Hard Rock" sound while retaining a connection to the Blues and R&B of his past?
(1897 – 1933) A onetime railroad man dubbed “The Singing Brakeman,” Jimmie Rodgers is widely credited as the Father of Country music. By combining Folk, Hillbilly and Blues with a little bit of Jazz and his trademark yodeling, Rodgers helped create the classic American genre, and influenced countless performers who followed him. Rodgers was born in Meridian, Mississippi; his mother died when he was a young boy. After wining a talent show at age 12, young Jimmie, itching to try his hand at entertaining, ran away from home to start his own tent show. His father brought him home and offered...
What is the American Dream and how did Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash personify its ideals?
What factors led to the rise of the electric guitar as the dominant symbol of Rock and Roll?
(1949 – 2011) Acclaimed as a godfather of Rap and Soul Jazz, musician/poet Gil Scott-Heron forged a radicalized vision of the world with deep roots in the Black Power movements of the late 1960s. He came to prominence in the early 1970s, most notably with “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” a provocative 1970 poem from his debut album Small Talk at 125th and Lenox that gave a militant voice to America’s ghetto street culture. Scott-Heron also made a string of albums with keyboardist Brian Jackson that influenced the “neo Soul” movement of the 1990s, as represented by Erykah Badu,...
How can Gospel music help students identify the musical concepts of beat, meter, backbeat, subdivision, and syncopation?
How did the electrification, amplification and design of the guitar facilitate its emergence as a dominant instrument of popular music?
(1923 – 2003) If he'd done nothing other than discover Elvis Presley and release his early singles, Sun Records founder Sam Phillips would be a crucial figure in the birth of Rock and Roll. But the Memphis-based impresario's music-related achievements were far broader than his pivotal association with Elvis. The Alabama native opened the Memphis Record Service in 1950, hiring out his services to record weddings, funerals, and civic events, while cutting sessions with such local (and soon to be legendary) Blues musicians as Howlin' Wolf, B.B. King, Junior Parker, James Cotton, Rufus Thomas, Rosco Gordon, Little Milton, and Bobby Blue...
How has the relation between sound and image shifted through the history of recorded music, and how did the rise of MTV bring that relationship to a culmination of sorts?
From their early days as Blues-obsessed Londoners at the forefront of the British Invasion to their current status as living legends and a top draw on the arena circuit, the Rolling Stones – a.k.a. “The World’s Greatest Rock and Roll Band – have proved one of the most influential and enduring bands in Rock. The Stones began their recording career in 1963 as just one of a legion of young British bands enamored with American Blues and R&B. Although they possessed a charismatic frontman in Mick Jagger, a punchy guitar tandem in Keith Richards and Brian Jones, and a solid,...
(1916 – 2004) Generally recognized as the first West Coast disc jockey to play Rhythm and Blues on the radio, as well as one of the first to spin Rock and Roll, Hunter Hancock was an early white hipster whose affinity for the music and impish sense of humor captured Los Angeles-area listeners from 1947 until 1966. Hancock got his first radio experience in his home state of Texas, but held numerous other jobs early in life, including a stint touring as a singer in a vaudeville troupe. He settled in Los Angeles in the early 40s, landing a part-time job...
(1923 – 2006) A larger-than-life figure, Ahmet Ertegun’s long career with Atlantic Records paralleled the music business' evolution from quirky cottage industry to corporate enterprise. Ertegun and original partner Herb Abramson co-founded Atlantic in 1947 as a small independent label, and would eventually turn the company into one of the music industry's most powerful forces, releasing a great many commercial and critical successes and fostering artists ranging from John Coltrane and Ray Charles to Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones to ABBA and Kid Rock. The Istanbul-born son of the Republic of Turkey's ambassador to the United States, Ertegun grew up...
(1899 – 1993) Hailed as the "father of Gospel music," composer and pianist Thomas Dorsey was responsible for writing many of the genre's best-known standards, including songs widely recorded by secular artists. He is credited with creating much of the template for 20th century African-American gospel music, incorporating Jazz and Blues rhythms that had previously not been a part of the genre. Dorsey also played a key role in the early career of Mahalia Jackson, working with her as songwriter and accompanist for 14 years. His composition "Take My Hand, Precious Lord" (which he wrote after his wife and newborn...
(1923 – 1953) In many ways, Hank Williams was Country music's first Rock star — not just for the fast lifestyle that killed him at the age of 29, but also for the uncompromising, personally charged edge he brought to his music. In addition to being a charismatic performer and a compelling, inventive songwriter, Williams was one of Country's most beloved superstars, scoring 35 Top 10 Country singles, eleven of which reached No. 1, and he was instrumental in expanding Country and Western's popularity beyond its traditional regional audience. Williams' performing style and musical sensibility inspired not only countless Country...
(1928-2008) In the early 1950s, Bo Diddley created a trademark sound that brought together aspects of Blues, Gospel and R&B with Latin and African rhythms. In the process, Diddley (a.k.a. “The Originator”) became one of the early giants of Rock and Roll, widely credited as one of the genre’s pioneers. Diddley was born Otha Ellas Bates in southern Mississippi in 1928. Raised by his mother’s cousin, he moved north with her family to Chicago at the age of 6, and took her last name, becoming Ellas McDaniel. Growing up on the city’s South Side, he was an active member of his local Baptist church,...
(1908 – 1975) Saxophonist/vocalist/songwriter/bandleader Louis Jordan was an early R&B pioneer whose exuberant spirit and musical approach were key influences on early Rock and Rollers, perhaps most notably Chuck Berry, who cited Jordan as an inspiration. His swinging small-combo style was a bridge between the Big Band era and the birth of Rock and Roll. Although he began his career in Big Band swing in the 1930s, Jordan became a star in the following decade as one of the leading popularizers of the uptempo Jazz/Blues/Boogie Woogie hybrid known as Jump Blues. Funny and charismatic, he created a series of joyous, raucous,...
What is the Surf sound and where did it come from?
How does the “Surf Sound” in Rock and Roll reflect early surf culture, and what are the roots of this genre of music?
Perhaps more then any other band, the Grateful Dead helped develop and propagate the 1960s San Francisco hippie image, and it’s an image they unwaveringly maintained throughout their 30-year career. Hugely popular as a touring act, the band was singular in a number of aspects, including the way it combined Blues, Country, and Folk influences with a devotion to psychedelia-drenched improvisation, the way it achieved large-scale popularity without radio hits, and the rabid intensity of its itinerant army of fans, called Deadheads. The roots of the Grateful Dead go back to 1964, when lead guitarist/vocalist Jerry Garcia, keyboard player Ron...
(1931 – 2002) Singer-guitarist-banjoist Lonnie Donegan is a key figure in the foundation of British Rock and Roll. In 1954, long before Rock reached the British Isles, the Scottish-born Londoner created Skiffle, an upbeat acoustic variation on American blues and folk that made Donegan a major star. Donegan’s infectious music and exuberant performing style captured the imaginations of a generation of young English boys. That generation included John Lennon and Paul McCartney — whose skiffle group the Quarrymen evolved into the Beatles — along with many of the performers who would populate the British Invasion. As a teenager in the post-World...
(1925 – 1981) A disc jockey and Western Swing bandleader in Chester, Pa., Bill Haley was perhaps an unlikely purveyor of the first smash hit of the Rock and Roll era. But that's exactly what he became, when his song "Rock Around the Clock" was featured over the opening scene of the juvenile-delinquent drama "Blackboard Jungle," and became a worldwide hit, by some estimates making Haley the first Rock and Roll star. A working guitarist by the age of 15, Haley was rooted in Country and Western Swing (the Saddlemen was his group's initial name), but added elements of Rhythm and Blues...
What are the arguments for and against Bob Dylan receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature?
THE WHO PLAY rock "n’ roll music ("it’s got a back beat, you can’t lose it," says Chuck Berry). Not art-rock, acid-rock, or any type of rock, but an unornamented wall of noise that, while modern and electronic, has that "golden oldies" feeling. Four Mod kids who started in 1963 as the High Numbers in London’s scruffy Shepherd’s Bush, the Who play a tight driving music which is a descendant of the rock of Elvis, Bill Haley, Gene Vincent, and even the early Beatles. In San Francisco near the end of a ten-week, fifty-city tour, the Who were at their...
(1935 – 1977) Hailed as the “King of Rock and Roll," Elvis Presley is one of the most important cultural icons of the 20th century and is universally credited with breaking Roll and Roll music into the mainstream. Born in Tupelo, Miss., in 1935 and raised in Memphis, Tennessee, Elvis was a product of the musical culture of the American South — from the Gospel he heard in church, the Country music he heard on the radio to the black Blues and R&B he heard on Beale Street as a Memphis teenager, Elvis absorbed it all. He began his singing career with...
(1933 – 2003) Beyond her status as one of Jazz's most distinctive and dynamic vocal stylists, singer-pianist Nina Simone won attention and respect for her feisty, commanding personality. Performing her own personally charged compositions as well as a broad array of outside material drawn from the worlds of Jazz, Pop, Soul, Blues, Folk, Gospel, and Broadway, Simone resisted easy categorization but put a fiercely personal stamp on every song she sang. Over a performing and recording career that covered four decades, Simone’s uncompromising approach to her work helped establish her as a role model for subsequent generations of performers. Born Eunice...
(1926 – 1984) Willie Mae "Big Mama" Thornton was described by songwriter Jerry Stoller as “a bit frightening,” “a force of nature” and “absolutely magnificent.” With her larger-than-life personality and spicy take on the Blues she was one of the R&B performers that helped usher in the coming of Rock and Roll. Like many R&B performers of her generation, Thornton started singing in church as a youngster. By her teens she was playing drums, guitar and harmonica and developing her earthy singing voice playing shows around her home base of Montgomery, Ala. She spent much of the 1940s touring the South...
What role did cover songs like “Twist and Shout” play early in the Beatles's career, and how did their experiences growing up in post-WWII Liverpool and performing in Hamburg nightclubs help them to develop as a professional musical ensemble?
How is the re-use and re-purposing of existing music at the heart of the Hip Hop recording experience?
(1917 – 2008) A key figure in exposing Rhythm and Blues music to a wider audience, Jerry Wexler was highly influential during his days as executive and producer for Atlantic Records, helping to shepherd the label's growth from small R&B imprint to massive industry force. The Bronx native began his career as an editor and reporter for the music-industry trade journal Billboard, and it was he who coined the term "Rhythm and Blues" as a classification for what had previously been known in the industry as "race music" – a term Wexler found demeaning. He became a partner in Atlantic in...
(1942 – 1970) Jimi Hendrix’s recording career lasted only a few years, but he blew a swath threw the late 1960s, doing things with a Fender Stratocaster guitar that nobody had done before. He’s widely acknowledged as one of the most influential and innovative musicians Rock has produced, and is often cited as the greatest electric guitarist in history. Hendrix was born in 1942 in Seattle, Washington, and raised mostly by his single father. As a boy Hendrix spent hours “playing” a broom as if it were a guitar, eventually graduating to a one-stringed ukulele he found in the trash. When...
ON 3 February 1959 Richard Valenzuela died in a plane crash along with Buddy Holly whose final recordings foretold the Beatless sixties; a more pop than rock era for which Valens would have prescribed the remedy. He was a sixteen year old who passed for twenty-eight. A thick set, brutish greaser who carried on rockin' whilst, all around him, pretty boys like Fabian and Avalon ponced up the music. A look at the situation of the Mexican American – scarcely white by U.S. standards – belies America's devotion to freedom and democracy. From San Fernando, Valen's background typified the Mexican-American struggle...
With A Mixture Of Folk, Rock And Comedy, Dylan Shows He Can Take Every Insult But Not A Compliment "EQUALITY, I spoke the word, as if a wedding vow, ah but I was so much older than, I'm younger than that now..." Bob Dylan thus changed. It all began with a song called 'My Back Pages' recorded some three years ago on an LP and reached its probable culmination at the Royal Albert Hall the other week when he performed his last British concert. As always, Dylan is logical and compromising. A full half of his concert is given purely to his...
(1935 – 1980) Larry Williams was an R&B singer and an outsized character whose raucous late 50s recordings would become favorites of many of the young rockers of the 1960s British Invasion. Growing up in New Orleans, Williams learned to play piano as a boy. As a teen he joined a local R&B band in Oakland, Calif., when his parents relocated there. In 1954 he returned to New Orleans and began to work as a chauffer/valet for singer Lloyd Price, eventually becoming pianist for Price as well as R&B singers Roy Brown and Percy Mayfield, who were all recording for Specialty...
Black vocal groups once sang for enjoyment on street-corners throughout ghettos in each of the big American cities. Late into the night they harmonised together, sublimating a frustration which exploded by day. Zip-gun safely stored in the cistern, a Harlem teenager could leave his decaying tenement and join others for an acapella session in a dingy pool-hall or on a deserted subway platform. Street-corner talent-spotting became the normal way for a group to obtain a record contract. An audition from the guy who crossed the road to listen might mean gifts for all the folks and a shiny Cadillac. As groups proliferated...
If anybody is... WHFS IS A 5000-watt FM station with call letters that were meant to stand for High Fidelty Stereo. It was the first station to broadcast mutiplex in the D.C. area, transmitting from a 150-foot antenna atop the Triangle Towers, a fifteen-story apartment house at 4853 Cordell Avenue, right across the street from the Psyche Delli and the Bank of Bethesda in Bethesda, Maryland. You can always tell you're in Bethesda by the way they always keep the white lines white. Bethesda has one of the highest per capita incomes of all the municipalities in America. The WHFS studios...
HIS first million-seller was named after himself. Until last year he had more million-sellers than Elvis, who finally caught up with him after a hard struggle. He had more Gold discs before his biggest hit – in 1956 – than after. That hit was 'Blueberry Hill', the first disc was 'The Fat Man' and the man himself is Antoine "Fats" Domino. When Fats first came on the scene back in 1948 the big trend in pop music was jazz, and watery pops. There was no "vital" music for the kids except some obscure Blues that wasn't commercial enough anyway. Fats made 'The...
WHEN DION DiMucci made his major comeback at New York's Radio City Music Hall two years ago, he was joined onstage by an all-star quartet of backing singers: Bruce Springsteen, Lou Reed, Paul Simon, and Billy Joel. It said a lot for the 48-year-old singer that he could bring together four such different examples of the New York street troubadour, each of them in their own way having come under the spell of the man who sang those swaggering classics of the early '60s 'The Wanderer' and 'Runaround Sue'. "When we were rehearsing that show," says Dion two years later, "I...
THERE WAS AN outpouring of grief this week when the White Stripes announced they were to split. Stevie Chick explains their magic while photographer Ewen Spencer talks about working with them Whether you're a fan or not, the massive outpouring of grief this week in response to the news that minimalist rock band the White Stripes were to split up might seem puzzling. In their exit statement on Thursday, the Detroit duo said they hoped the news would not be "met with sorrow by [our] fans", emphasising that the split was not due to health issues or artistic differences. Prolific singer/guitarist/songwriter Jack White...
METALLICA. YOU KNOW the story. Those that don't are doomed to have me repeat it. Early '80s, a metal brat and a friend not ashamed to look like Frank Marina come crashing out of the Ulrich family garage in tree-lined Norwalk, California, and into the L.A. metal scene proper, only to be kicked in the corner by a batallion of stilettos. Not that there's anything wrong with stilettos, nor make-up nor spandex nor hairspray for that matter; all have been a better friend to me than any dog I've known. What was wrong, in the metal sense, was the behavior of...
ONE OF THE MOST CELEBRATED MOMENTS IN late-Sixties rock comes at the beginning of 'To Be Alone With You' on Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline album. As the guitars begin to strum, Dylan drawls, "Is it rolling, Bob?" "Bob" is Bob Johnston, Dylan’s producer. With that single question Dylan brings to our attention Johnston’s role in the singer’s recording career. The producer is here acknowledged as a crucial part of the whole undertaking — as necessary as the tape machines, microphones, and instruments...almost as important as the singer himself. By the end of the Sixties, most rock fans could give you the names of...
ON STAGE at the Apollo, Harlem: standing at one microphone, an immaculately dressed man dramatically insists his love. At the second mike, four men bend towards each other, sing a phrase in harmony, step back and spin into an intricate flowing movement as the lead singer takes a line by himself, but comes swooping back in time to echo his last phrase. Behind them, poised, seemingly somehow to control what they do without any obvious signs or instructions, stands the guitarist; near him, the organist and drummer. The scene doesn't change much from week to week. The names and faces are...
KREATURE COMFORTS – "the Lowlife Guide to Memphis" – claims that Memphis can offer visitors "the best or worst of vacations: you could hit a jamming Keith Richards show on Beale Street or end up in line with 8,000 Elvis Zombies waiting to smell Elvis's bicycle seat at Graceland. The choice is yours." I'll take Graceland, thanks. Only inverted snobs contest the notion that the biggest musical phenomenon in Memphis – "Home of the Blues, Birthplace of Rock 'n' Roll" – was Elvis Presley. For the last 20 years of his life, he lived at Graceland. When he died, in 1977,...
Judas Priest are an iconic Heavy Metal band who helped to transform the genre from its 60s Blues-Rock roots to the mainstream phenomenon we know today. Alongside Iron Maiden and Black Sabbath, the band are widely ranked among the most influential Heavy Metal bands of all time, and with a career that’s spanned over 40 years, they’re one of the most enduring. Judas Priest formed in the gritty industrial city of Birmingham, England, in 1971. They spent the next few years playing local shows and developing their heavy, Blues-based sound. Their debut album, Rocka Rolla, was released in 1974 and...
IF YOU thought Jefferson Airplane was a weird name, let some of these drop off your tongue. Talking Heads. Tuff Darts. Ramones. Planets. Heartbreakers. Shirts. Television. Day Old Bread. Manster. They are names of some of the better known of hundreds of New York area bands, often categorized under the catch-all "punk rock" or "punk bands," that are attracting rock fans to lower Manhattan clubs like CBGB, Mothers and Max's Kansas City. That definition is misleading, because the punkiest thing about most of the bands is their names. They represent a variety of musical styles and competence levels. Some, like Television...
How do Langston Hughes, Gladys Bentley, and Louis Armstrong effectively write personal narratives about living during the Harlem Renaissance?
NOW hear this — and kindly hear it good! Are you one of the fans who think there's nothing much new happening on the pop scene? Right… then we want to bring your attention to a new artist, a new star-in-the-making, who we predict is going to whirl round the business like a tornado. Name: Jimi Hendrix. Occupation: Guitarist-singer-composer-showman-dervish-original. His group, just three-strong: The Jimi Hendrix Experience. Bill Harry and I dropped in at the Bag O'Nails' club in Kingley Street to hear the trio working out for the benefit of Press and bookers. An astonished Harry muttered: "Is that full, big,...
In downtown Manhattan the rock 'n' roll war rages on as potential crown princes of Punkdom battle for recognition.. NICK KENT interprets the action IN MANHATTAN you're either uptown or down town and there's really no halfway house to dissolve into while in transit. You case your bearings purely on instinct as the yellow cab careers awkwardly down, down, down from the uptown three-star 51st and 3rd Mafioso hotel (ageing Hawaiian bellboys/the overbearing aroma of styrofoam in the Coffee Shop/the tight-lipped Italianate retired hit-man of a receptionist who always makes you wait for the key, nodding suspiciously to the grease-ball house...
The White Stripes made for an unlikely international success story: a husband-and-wife duo who posed as brother and sister, playing raw, Blues-influenced Garage Rock with a bare-bones lineup of guitar and drums. The Stripes nonetheless became one of the most successful bands of the 2000s, selling 4 million copies of their 2003 album Elephant. The duo was formed in Detroit in 1997 by singer-guitarist Jack White, at the time working as an upholsterer, and drummer Meg White. Their early releases came out on the small garage-punk label Sympathy for the Record Industry; released in 1999, their self-titled 1999 debut album won a...
What does Link Wray’s biography say about how Native Americans lived in the first half of the 20th century, and what role did Wray’s upbringing have on his music?
(1942 – 1969) Brian Jones was a founding member of the Rolling Stones, forming the group in 1962. He was responsible for recruiting Mick Jagger to the band; Mick in turn brought Keith Richards into the fold as a second guitarist. A blues fanatic, Jones initially functioned as the band's leader and manager. When the Stones acquired an official manager in Andrew Loog Oldham, Jones' role in the band began to diminish. Oldham encouraged Jagger and Richards to develop a catalog of original material, and Jones, who showed little inclination toward songwriting, saw his influence within the band dwindle. He would gradually isolate himself from...
What is Fania Records, and how does it reflect the history of Spanish-speaking Caribbean communities in New York City?
(b. 1944) After spending most of the 60s reaping massive success as lead singer of the Supremes, Diana Ross transitioned smoothly into her next incarnation as a glitzy solo diva — and the personification of Motown boss Berry Gordy's grand crossover ambitions. Ross and Gordy were laying the groundwork for Ross' solo career long before her departure from the Supremes was announced in November 1969. After giving her final performance with the group in January 1970 at Las Vegas' Frontier Hotel, Ross immediately scored a pair of major solo hits with "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" and "Reach Out and Touch...
What makes a work of art “original,” and how does the use of “sampling” technology in Hip Hop challenge perceptions of “originality”?
(1911 – 1996) Bill Monroe was a pioneering Country music performer and bandleader, credited as the Father of Bluegrass, a genre that drew from the Appalachian folk, Gospel and Blues music with which Monroe had grown up. Monroe was born the youngest of eight children in Rosine, Ky., to a musical family. Orphaned at the age of 16, Monroe moved to Indiana, working through the Great Depression in an oil refinery. He subsequently formed a duo with his brother Charlie and as half of the Monroe Brothers scored an immediate hit single with the Gospel song "What Would You Give In Exchange For Your...
How have works of literature and music by Black Americans shared an empowering theme of identifying and resisting Jim Crow?
What is distortion, and how did it become a desired guitar effect in Rock and Roll?
(1926 – 1968) As the most popular radio disc jockey in Memphis in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Dewey Phillips was a trailblazer in several ways. He had a larger-than-life on-air persona that presaged later Rock and Roll DJs. In a segregated southern city he was a white DJ who played both black and white artists for an integrated audience. And he played a mix of styles – Blues, R&B, Country, Rockabilly, Gospel — that were the building blocks of what soon would be called Rock and Roll. Philips served in the Second World War, and when he returned to Memphis his desire...
The pioneering Heavy Metal band Black Sabbath was formed in the industrial city of Birmingham, England, in 1968, by four teenage friends: bassist Geezer Butler, guitarist Tony Iommi, singer Ozzy Osbourne, and drummer Bill Ward. At first the quartet, called Earth at the time, played straightforward Blues Rock in the vein of popular bands like Cream. But the band quickly found their own sound: their lyrics took on darker themes, often focusing on occultism and drugs, and the music became thicker, louder and more riff-based. It also became more dissonant, making use of the tritone, or so-called “devil’s chord,”...
How can math be used to better understand the Grateful Dead’s success?
How can data be analyzed and interpreted to better understand a band's success?
(b. 1929) Although he began his musical career as a songwriter and producer, Motown Records founder Berry Gordy Jr. made his fortune, and his mark on popular culture, through his ability to recognize and nurture the musical talents of others. At a time when black-owned record labels were largely restricted to a relatively small piece of the Pop marketplace, Gordy created a radio-friendly Pop-R&B hybrid that appealed equally to black and white listeners, and built a musical empire that rivaled the bands of the British Invasion for chart dominance through the 1960s. The Detroit native was a former boxer and all-around hustler...
How did The Beatles' rigorous work schedule during the years 1960-63 build their strengths as performers, as musicians, and as a band?
(1939 – 1984) Of all of the performers who passed through Motown Records' Detroit hit factory in the 1960s, Marvin Gaye was perhaps the most iconoclastic. Beyond the smooth voice, good looks, and snappy Pop Soul tunes that fueled his initial success, Gaye subsequently revealed an ambitious sonic vision and deeply personal songwriting talent that would help to rewrite the rules of Soul music and establish him as one of R&B's most influential creative forces — as well as the first artist to successfully break away from Motown's rigid musical formula to pursue his own creative vision. Growing up in Washington,...
Slade were at the forefront of the 70s Glam Rock scene in Britain, racking up a long string of loud, catchy hits that made them one of the U.K.’s most successful bands of the decade, and one cited as an influence by bands across a range of heavy-hitting genres, from Punk to Pop Metal to Grunge. Slade’s formation goes back to the early 60s, when the members, led by singer and guitarist Noddy Holder, formed The 'N Betweens, a band influenced by Blues, R&B and Motown. Coming under the wing of manager Chas Chandler, the former Animals bassist who’d helped...
(1905 – 1975) As a fiddler, singer, songwriter and bandleader, Bob Wills was the foremost practitioner of Western Swing, a genre-bending style incorporating elements of Country, Jazz, Blues, Big Band Swing and Pop. Through the late 30s and most of the 1940s, Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys were one of America's most popular and musically accomplished bands, packing dance halls across the Southwest and beyond. Born in Texas in 1905, the son of a cotton farmer and amateur fiddler, Wills entered show business as a teen, playing local dances. He formed a band that earned some regional popularity, and in the...
Poison was one of the most successful of the Pop Metal acts that dominated the landscape in the second half of the 1980s, combining a swaggering Hard Rock stance, a flamboyant Glam look and catchy Pop tunes that made female MTV viewers swoon. The Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania-via Hollywood quartet achieved massive success during its original run, selling over 45 million records worldwide and over 15 million in the United States alone, while scoring half a dozen U.S. Top 10 singles. With an androgynous, long-haired image that seemed to establish the band members as vaguely dangerous yet non-threatening, frontman Bret Michaels, guitarist...
(1912 – 1967) Before Bruce Springsteen, before Bob Dylan, there was Woody Guthrie, the original Folk hero. During the 30s and 40s, Guthrie was instrumental in elevating Folk music to a form of social protest and observation, and in doing so, inspired a generation of songwriters. Guthrie was born into relatively fortunate circumstances; his father had established a successful real estate career in their native Oklahoma. However, by Woody's eighth birthday, the elder Guthrie's business collapsed, and a hardscrabble existence befell the Guthrie family for the remainder of Woody's formative years. He was a voracious reader and had a natural affinity for music, and in...
Sam Moore and Dave Prater made for one of the most successful Soul acts of the 1960s, racking up a string of hard-grooving hits with a tag-team vocal style that owed a debt to the church music both men had grown up singing. Solo performers at the outset, the two southerners – Moore from Florida, Prater from Georgia – formed a duo in 1961, after meeting at a club in Miami. After bouncing between various labels and issuing a series of singles that received regional airplay but failed to ignite, the pair’s moment came when they were signed by Jerry Wexler...
(1941 – 1967) Although his recording career lasted just over five years and was cut short by his premature death, Otis Redding left a legacy as one of the most important figures in Soul music. An electrifying performer with an impassioned voice and a volcanic performing style, as well as a distinctive songwriter whose compositions became classic hits for other artists, Redding's influence continues to loom large over American Rhythm and Blues. Although he was the seminal Memphis label Stax's biggest star, the Georgia native first arrived at the company not as an artist, but as driver for guitarist Johnny Jenkins. ...
Formed in Seattle in 1988, Mudhoney have never seen major commercial success, but the band is often cited as a key influence on the breakout acts of the Seattle Grunge scene, Nirvana in particular. Mudhoney formed out of the remnants of Green River, the Seattle band that many credit for originating Grunge, with its blend of Garage Rock, Heavy Metal, Punk, and Blues. Assembled by onetime high-school classmates Mark Arm and Steve Turner, Mudhoney was the first band signed to the indie label Sub Pop, which released its first single,"Touch Me I'm Sick,” in 1988, followed by "Sweet Young Thing...
In the '80s and '90s, Metallica almost singlehandedly brought the attitude and sensibility of the Heavy Metal underground into the mainstream, bringing Metal back to its earthy roots at a time when commercial Hard Rock had become dominated by the more commercial sounds of Pop Metal (derided by its detractors as “Hair Metal” for its photogenic, elaborately coiffed bands). Maintaining an unpretentious regular-guy image, Metallica combined the Thrash Metal subgenre's emphasis on speed and volume with intricate songwriting and aggressive yet complex instrumental interplay. Founded in Los Angeles, Calif., by Danish-born drummer Lars Ulrich and fronted by singer/guitarist James Hetfield,...
(1932 – 2003) With his rumbling baritone voice, spare, percussive guitar and imposing, black-clad presence, Johnny Cash was an iconic figure whose influence spans the 50s Rockabilly explosion, multimedia stardom in the 60s and a late-life comeback in the '90s. Cash remained a beloved star in the Country field for decades, despite his refusal to play by the genre's established rules. Meanwhile, the empathy for the underdog and passion for social justice that fueled much of his music aligned him with the Rock counterculture from the '60s onward. The Arkansas-bred Cash first recorded in the 50s for the Sun label, where...
How did the Beatles take a stand against segregation while touring America? And what did it mean for popular music culture?
What role did the so-called "teen idols" of the late 1950s play in bringing Rock and Roll into mainstream American culture?
How did growing up in post-WWII Liverpool influence the Beatles?
How did car culture intersect with and inspire Rock and Roll?
How did Gospel influence American popular music?
(b. 1935) Perhaps the wildest of Rock and Roll's early pioneers, Jerry Lee Lewis embodied an unruly mass of contradictions that manifested themselves on such hits as "Whole Lotta Shakin' Going On," "Great Balls of Fire" "Breathless," and "High School Confidential." Shouting his lusty lyrics and pounding his piano like a man possessed, Lewis — affectionately known, then and now, as the Killer — balanced the sacred and the profane like nothing that had ever been in heard in American popular music, establishing himself as a walking embodiment of American parents' darkest fears about this strange new music. When he showed...
(1933 – 2006) A monumental figure in the development of Rhythm and Blues, James Brown was a one-of-a-kind musical visionary whose influence is as massive as the larger-than-life stage persona that spawned such superlative nicknames as the Godfather of Soul, Mr. Dynamite, and the Hardest-Working Man In Show Business. In a recording career that spanned six decades, Brown’s innovations helped to build the foundation of Soul, Dance music, and especially Funk, while his electrifying performances established him as one of contemporary music's best-known and best-loved icons. Growing up poor and largely on his own, in and around Augusta, Georgia, Brown was...
Why is Chuck Berry often considered the most important of the early Rock and Rollers?
Iron Maiden With a career spanning three decades and tens of millions of records sold, the U.K.’s Iron Maiden are one of the most successful and influential Heavy Metal bands in history. Emerging in the early 1980s, the band spearheaded the so-called “New Wave of British Heavy Metal,” built around a sound that eschewed the Blues influence of progenitors like Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath in favor of faster tempos and a harder sound Iron Maiden was formed in east London in 1975 by bassist and primary songwriter Steve Harris. The band spent the next few years swapping players and developing...
What is Folk music? To what extent did Folk Rock sustain the spirit of Folk music?
Why is the Pop song such a common medium for expressing feelings about love, and how do individual songs relate to their historical moments?
How did radio influence American life in the years before the birth of Rock and Roll?
How has “the beat” been an object of both celebration and concern in the history of popular music?
(b. 1932) One of Rock and Roll's flashiest performers, Little Richard has often proclaimed, "I am the innovator! I am the originator! I am the architect of Rock and Roll!" Such grandiose statements aren't too far off the mark. The flamboyant piano-pounder's wild, uninhibited mid-to-late-'50s singles are landmarks of the early Rock and Roll era, spotlighting his exuberant vocals and crystallizing his fusion of swinging New Orleans R&B and ecstatic Gospel fervor. Richard Penniman grew up in a poor, religious family in Macon, Ga. He sang Gospel as a child, and began performing secular R&B with various groups in the late...