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Second Wave: Women’s Rights and Music in the 1960s
What was second-wave feminism, and how did music contribute to the movement?
Below you'll see everything we could locate for your search of “women's history”
What was second-wave feminism, and how did music contribute to the movement?
What did the success of the female Singer-Songwriters of the early 1970s reveal about the changing roles of women in the United States?
How did female Country and Tejano artists approach the issues of feminism and Women’s Rights in the 20th and 21st century?
How did Aretha Franklin represent a new female voice in 1960s popular music?
What was Third Wave Feminism, why did it occur, and how did musicians address some of the movement’s demands?
Were the Girl Groups of the early 1960s voices of female empowerment or reflections of traditional female roles?
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...
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...
How is Rock and Roll's power, at least in part, a result of its being born on the margins of society?
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?
How do Nimrod Workman’s songs and stories about his life as a coal miner illustrate the struggles of working class people during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era?
What were the Stonewall Riots, and what role did they play in ongoing struggles for LGBTQ+ equality in the United States?
How did Black and Latinx people in the LGBTQ+ community take initiative in the Stonewall Inn rebellions, Gay Liberation Movement, and in the preservation of LGBTQ+ history?
How does Lydia Mendoza’s Tejano music connect to the history of Texas and the influence Mexico has had on that state?
How has Memphis music culture provided one example of art’s capacity to challenge the racial boundaries that have so often structured American life?
How can teachers help students analyze and understand Rock and Roll?
How did the singer-songwriters of the 1960s and 70s address the concerns of the environmental movement?
How did the electric guitar transform Blues music from the 1940s forward?
How do the Country Blues reflect the challenges of sharecropping, racial injustice, and rural poverty in early 20th-century African-American life?
How is the re-use and re-purposing of existing music at the heart of the Hip Hop recording experience?
How does “the beat” of popular music reflect the histories of multiethnic populations and places?
How did black artists and white songwriters and musicians interact in the Soul era, and what contributed to that interaction?
How has “the beat” been an object of both celebration and concern in the history of popular music?
What is Chicana Punk, how does it relate to the Chicano Movement, and how did it transform the Punk music scene?
How did the development of microphones in the 20th century change the way people make and listen to music?
How did Disco relate to the sentiments and social movements of the 1970s?
How did Motown Records in Detroit operate during the 1960s?
How did Bob Dylan merge poetry with popular music?
How did growing up in post-WWII Liverpool influence the Beatles?
How did car culture intersect with and inspire Rock and Roll?
"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...
How did 1970s Funk respond to African-American life in the decade following the Civil Rights movement?
What Latin American genres inspired Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee’s hit song “Despacito”?
How can music help tell the story of your hometown?
How did antiwar protest music provide a voice for those opposed to the Vietnam War?
Does Lana Del Rey’s “Young and Beautiful” help humanize Daisy Buchanan of The Great Gatsby?
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...
How have works of literature and music by Black Americans shared an empowering theme of identifying and resisting Jim Crow?
How did wartime restrictions and other factors cause popular music ensembles to shrink in size during the 1940s, helping to set the stage for the small “combos” of Rock and Roll?
What does a music producer do and in what ways does one hear the sound of a producer’s work in recordings?
What role did the so-called "teen idols" of the late 1950s play in bringing Rock and Roll into mainstream American culture?
What makes a work of art “original,” and how does the use of “sampling” technology in Hip Hop challenge perceptions of “originality”?
How did music advance the goals and inform the tactics of the Civil Rights Movement?
How did multitrack recording technologies enable musicians to create a form of music that could only be realized in the studio?
How did the Great Migration spread Southern culture, helping to give the Blues a central place in American popular music?
How did radio influence American life in the years before the birth of Rock and Roll?
What social issues continue to confront Asbury Park today, and how are activists tackling them?
How did Doo Wop develop as a musical genre?
Why is Chuck Berry often considered the most important of the early Rock and Rollers?
How did the careers of Italian American vocalists in the first half of the 20th century reflect the experiences of Italian American immigrants and attitudes toward them in the wider American culture?
How did Social Soul reflect a new vision of African-American identity in the late 1960s and early 1970s?
What is the Surf sound and where did it come from?
How was Punk Rock a reaction both to the commercialization of Rock and Roll and to the social climate in late 1970s Britain?
How did Bob Dylan’s early experiences with Folk and Rock and Roll music influence his songwriting?
Since the 1960s, how have artists used musical events to promote change?
How did Gangsta Rap and Conscious Hip Hop respond to the social and political conditions of the 1990s?
What are the roots of Hip Hop?
What were the factors that contributed to the rise of Beatlemania?
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,...
What was Westward Expansion, and what effect did it have on American Popular music?
How did the Who represent “My Generation” in mid-1960s England?
How did synthesizers allow musicians to create new sounds and how did those sounds reflect American culture throughout the 20th century?
How did New York bands interact with the city's art scene to create something new?
How does the “Surf Sound” in Rock and Roll reflect early surf culture, and what are the roots of this genre of music?
How did Country Music influence Rock and Roll and the musicians who made it?
How have singers responded as advances in studio recording techniques have enabled increased technological “perfection”?
How did Progressive Rock’s incorporation of classical traditions and countercultural values help to forge a unique Rock genre in the late 1960s?
How did changes in the technology of record manufacturing effect popular music, radio, and the people who consumed both?
How did Rock and Roll serve as an expressive tool for the working-class youth of Detroit?
How did teenagers become a distinct demographic group in the 1950s?
What did Punk Rock provide that opened the door for New Wave acts? And what are some among the defining attributes of New Wave?
How were musicians and artists affected by McCarthyism in 1950s America?
How did The Beatles’ use of cutting edge recording technology and studio techniques both reflect and shape the counterculture of the 1960s?
How did Sixties Soul help give voice to the Civil Rights movement?
How did teen dance shows and the Twist influence American culture?
Why did nearly 100,000 young people descend upon San Francisco in 1967 for a “Summer of Love"?
How was Heavy Metal involved in the 1980s controversy surrounding the creation of parental advisories for “offensive” music?
What was Grunge and where did it come from?
How did the early Rolling Stones help popularize the Blues?
How did changes in the Soul music of the early 1970s reflect broader shifts in American society during that time?
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?
How did the electrification, amplification and design of the guitar facilitate its emergence as a dominant instrument of popular music?
How have Black artists throughout the 20th century used music to speak about racial injustice in America?
In what ways did American Blues affect English musicians in the early 1960s?
What is Folk music? To what extent did Folk Rock sustain the spirit of Folk music?
Who is Dolores Huerta, what role did she play in the United Farm Workers movement, and how is she recognized today?
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...
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...
How did same-sex marriage become legal in the United States?
What is Cumbia, and how do you play its traditional rhythms?
What is the American Dream and how did Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash personify its ideals?
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?
What are the musical and cultural roots of Heavy Metal?
What factors led to the rise of the electric guitar as the dominant symbol of Rock and Roll?
What does the founding and early history of Asbury Park reveal about practices of segregation in the Northern United States?
How was Glam Rock part of a new teenage culture in the 1970s?
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...
What caused The Beatles to cease touring in 1966 and how did the innovative music they then created during their subsequent immersion in the recording studio both reflect and influence the world at that time?
What did R&B bring to early Rock and Roll, and how was early Rock and Roll different?
How did Dewey Phillips and Hunter Hancock help bring Rhythm and Blues music to mixed race audiences?
How did The Beatles establish a new paradigm for the image of "the star," and how did that image support their global success?
How did Ritchie Valens meld traditional Mexican music and Rock and Roll?
How did Black radio empower Black Americans, aid the Civil Rights Movement, and influence U.S. society?
How was Glam Rock a reaction to the "seriousness" of popular music at the time?
Who is Dolores Huerta, what role did she play in the United Farm Workers movement, and how is she recognized today?
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?
How did popular music amplify the voices and experiences of Americans serving in the United States Armed Forces during the Vietnam War?
Who is the ‘us’ in P!nk’s song “What About Us?”
In what ways did the music of Native Americans mark them as outsiders from the developing narratives of “American-ness” in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and how did the federal government attempt to use music as a tool to force assimilation?
How did movies help to introduce Rock and Roll culture to mainstream audiences in the 1950s?
How did the cassette tape change the audience’s experience by allowing the listener to record, compile and disseminate music?
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?
What was South African apartheid, and how did musicians unite to challenge it?
How do Langston Hughes, Gladys Bentley, and Louis Armstrong effectively write personal narratives about living during the Harlem Renaissance?
How did the input of manager Brian Epstein and record producer George Martin help The Beatles develop and refine skills that aided the band in presenting their music and personalities to a mass audience?
How did the Beatles’ image as a “rock band” affect young people in America?
How did The Beatles' rigorous work schedule during the years 1960-63 build their strengths as performers, as musicians, and as a band?
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?
What is intersectionality, and how do musicians in the Punk music scene navigate life at different intersections?
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 have musicians responded to the Black Lives Matter movement?
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...
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...
GIRL GROUP ROCK flourished between 1958 and 1965, and though, with the passing of the Brill Building and the coming of the sophistication of the soul beat, the tradition thinned out, it’s still around. I don’t mean Shirley Alston puffing her way through greatest hits medleys on late-nite TV, the Three Degrees flashing pubic hair inside their latest offering, or even an authentic throwback like Spring – I mean the songs are still in the air, and sometimes even on the air: they’re at the heart of the Dolls, all over any John Lennon vocal, and of course there’s Bette...
LET'S FACE IT – much of what passes for music in our country is, in fact, nothing more than product, the worthless, soulless result of greed and stupidity. The sights are set low, and the history of rock and roll is awash with things that just don't matter. They don't come from the heart and they don't touch any hearts. They glitter for a minute and are gone. Black Flag is another story. Perhaps the most vilified, hated and harassed band in recent memory, Black Flag's entire career, virtually, has been circumscribed by how the police and media portray them. Not even...
JAMES BROWN will die on the stage one night, on the moving staircase of his own feet in front of a thirty-piece band; and then who knows what may be unloosed between black Americans and white? In Baltimore or Washington or Detroit, cities where the very peace between them has a quality of angry breathing, merely the presence of Brown has been reckoned to equal 100 policemen. Harlem, on the sweltering night after an atrocity, he can cool by one word. At the end of each performance he sings the chorus "Soul Power" over and over again with bass guitar...
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...
How did the bands X-Ray Spex, Bad Brains, and Death define Punk on their own terms?
How did Gospel influence American popular 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 the Beatles take a stand against segregation while touring America? And what did it mean for popular music culture?
How has the image and history of the American cowboy been reclaimed in the 21st Century?
How does the Union occupation of Port Royal highlight the complex issues behind the Civil War?
How did Dr. King’s Birthday become a national holiday?
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 was Hurricane Katrina, and how did Black Americans articulate the frustrations they felt in its aftermath?
How does a bill become a law in the United States of America?
How might Tori Kelly’s song “Funny” speak to the potential pitfalls of “superstardom,” and how does it relate to past songs written about the subject?
How have visual artists worked with musicians without compromising their style?
What is the influence of Brazilian music and culture in the United States?
What was the Second Great Awakening, how did it change American society, and how does Sacred Harp singing exemplify its ideals?
What factors led up to the Asbury Park "Riots" in New Jersey in the summer of 1970?
In what ways did the Civil Rights Movement mark a turning point in United States history?
What was the Red Power movement, and what role did Folk and Country music play within it?
What are the arguments for and against Bob Dylan receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature?
In what ways and to what extent did the Vietnam War change American culture, society, and values?
Did President Ronald Reagan’s Cold War policies serve to heighten or to reduce tensions with the Soviet Union?
What is Joropo, and how is it inspired by nature?
How did the LGTBQ+ community creatively respond to the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and 1990s, and protest government inaction in addressing the epidemic?
What were the different reactions to songs and comments by Country musicians about the September 11th terrorist attacks versus the Iraq War?
How did the singer-songwriters of the 1960s and 70s address the concerns of the environmental movement?
Why might people dance, and how have dance trends changed in America since the 1920s?
What is the history behind Puerto Rican migration to New York City in the 1940s and 1950s, and how did Puerto Rican migration affect American Popular Music?
What is distortion, and how did it become a desired guitar effect in Rock and Roll?
What was NASA’s Apollo program and why was it controversial?
When The Police played New York's Shea Stadium it looked like something from outer space. 67,000 people were in the audience. One of them was Neil Tennant. APPROACHING it from New York in a big black car, Shea Stadium looks like the spaceship that lands at the end of Close Encounters Of The Third Kind. It's almost round and completely bathed in light: a warm halo glowing against the night sky. Driving closer, an atmosphere of intense excitement and activity is evident. 67,000 people have bought tickets to see The Police play here tonight. Thousands more have been disappointed. "Don't show up...
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....
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...
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...
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,...
SINCE ENTERING POP MUSIC in the Fifties, the Bees Gees have had three careers on three continents, each more successful than its predecessor. The first was in Australia as child prodigies. In 1967, they came to Britain as suitable opposition to the Beatles. Finally in the mid-Seventies they found themselves setting the pace for the disco boom and emerging as songwriters of note on the adult-oriented rock scene. The career of the three Gibb brothers began inauspiciously enough in December 1956 at the Gaumont cinema in Chorlton-cum-Hardy, Manchester, where they volunteered for the regular mime spot preceding the Saturday morning...
(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...
(b. 1946) Pioneering Punk poet Patti Smith is one the most influential female artists in Rock history, known not only for being an uncompromising iconoclast at a time when few women in Rock fit that description, but also for maintaining a literate, intellectually curious sensibility that was relatively unusual in the Punk milieu in which she first gained public attention. While growing up in New Jersey, the teenaged Smith found inspiration and solace in the writing of Arthur Rimbaud and the Beats, and in the music of Bob Dylan, James Brown and the Rolling Stones. After moving to New York City...
How did the Grateful Dead reflect new ideas about life and society in the 1960’s?
How did the counterculture movement of the late 1960s challenge traditional American behaviors and values, and how did the Grateful Dead reflect these changing views of life and society?
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?
How did the music of the Beach Boys reflect the suburbanization of postwar America?
What was South African apartheid, and how did musicians unite to challenge it?
How were American’s divisive opinions over the Vietnam War articulated by musicians in the 1960s and early 1970s?
How might Beyoncé's song “I Was Here” inspire people to serve their community and make a positive impact on the world?
What was the Berlin Wall and how did music respond to what it symbolized?
How did Country musicians’ responses to the September 11th terrorist attacks speak to the feelings of some Americans after the tragedy?
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...
What is Ciranda, and how can group singing and dancing help us feel like a part of a community?
How can data be analyzed and interpreted to better understand a band's success?
How have Native American musicians, poets, and visual artists negotiated their identity, and what role does physical space play in these negotiations?
What is Fania Records, and how does it reflect the history of Spanish-speaking Caribbean communities in New York City?
How can graphing be used to analyze music industry data?
(1901 – 1974) Ed Sullivan was a television host whose hugely popular variety show — The Ed Sullivan Show, which broadcast from 1948 to 1971 — was an important outlet for many early Rock and Roll acts. Artists who appeared on the show during its long tenure ran from Buddy Holly and Bo Diddley to the Doors and Janis Joplin to Marvin Gaye and Jackie Wilson. The most notable musical moment in the show's history was the Beatles' appearance on February 9, 1964, which a full-on cultural event credited with sending Beatlemania into high gear in the U.S. The program — a...
(1945 – 1981) Jamaican singer, songwriter and bandleader Bob Marley is the biggest star Reggae has produced, credited with bringing the music to international prominence. A charistmatic performer, he was also a gifted songwriter, whose best-known hits include "I Shot the Sheriff" "No Woman, No Cry," "Could You Be Loved," "Stir It Up," "Get Up Stand Up," "Redemption Song," "One Love," "Buffalo Soldier" and "I Shot the Sheriff" (prominently covered by Eric Clapton, who had a hit with the song in 1974). Much of Marley's music was heavily influenced by the social issues of his native Jamaica, and his popularity and stature were such that his pronouncements on public issues were accorded the attention usually reserved...
The Beatles are universally regarded as one of the most important bands in the history of Rock and Roll. Over the course of an active career that spanned just 10 years, the band released some of the most enduring popular music of the 20th century – a catalog whose influence would be hard to overstate. To give but one measure of the band’s stature, when Rolling Stone ranked the “500 Greatest Albums Of All Time,” four Beatles records made the top ten: Revolver, Rubber Soul, The Beatles (a.k.a. the “White Album”) and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which...
How have writers, storytellers, and musicians explored the crossroads as a symbol in their work?
How did activism by Black students challenge Jim Crow segregation during the Civil Rights Movement, and what unique role did music play as an organizing tool?
What shapes did Pablo Picasso use to create his piece Guitar, Sheet Music, and Glass and how can similar shapes be used to create other instruments?
How can the guitar help us understand the scientific principle of transduction?
How is plastic made, how does it affect our marine environments, and how can plastic waste be eliminated?
How do successful music producers practice positive leadership skills?
How did the Grateful Dead’s business practices create a dedicated fan culture and ensure the financial success of the group?
Who are the Wharf Rats, and how do they exemplify the practices of sobriety, peer support, and community building within a musical fan culture?
How can math be used to better understand the Grateful Dead’s success?
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...
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...
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?
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...
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?
Or how the '70s has seen a limp-wristed sell-out of the ideals of the 60s. MICK FARREN discusses the way the Uncle Toms of Teendom have taken Rock off the streets and into the penthouse. WHEN YOU spend a great deal of your waking time hard up against the outpourings of the rock and roll industry, it gets difficult to believe that the music we've all grown up with is actually drifting away from the mainstream of everyday life. Unfortunately, if you do step far enough back to get modern rock trends into perspective with the general movements in society at...
STEVE VAN ZANDT, May 2011, Lillehammer, Norway: "The anti-apartheid Sun City project (single, album, video, documentary, book, teaching guide) was a high point and a rare clear cut victory from the ten years I spent immersed in the dark, murky, frustrating labyrinth of international liberation politics. It came in the middle of my five politically themed solo albums and had its roots – like all the charity and consciousness raising multi-artist events that would follow – in the Concert for Bangladesh." August 1st marks the 40th anniversary of two landmark benefit concerts that nearly 40,000 attended at Madison Square Garden...
GIL SCOTT-HERON aims to be a catalyst. Not a leader of revolutions, but an insistent elbow in the ribs, nudging people off their fence to bring them a little bit closer to the essence of their problems. He likes that word essence; uses it a lot. He uses all words a lot. They are his stock in trade. He's not loud or dramatic, but he's sure of himself and sure of what needs saying and sure as hell not afraid to say it. A conversation with Gil is a fascinating if demanding dialogue. Nothing's thrown away. He's attentive and analytical of...
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...
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...
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...
How have musicians helped spread climate activist Greta Thunberg’s message?
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...
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...
Poisoned by the chalice of instant success, bedridden with road-rash after a ton of amp-smashingly intense gigs – what's happened to Nirvana's tortured singer and distillery of teen spirit, Kurt Cobain? "All I need is a break," he says... FOR NOW, Kurt Cobain and his new wife, Courtney Love, live in an apartment in Los Angeles' modest Fairfax district. The living room holds little besides a Fender Twin Reverb amplifier, a stringless guitar, a makeshift Buddhist shrine and, on the mantel, the couple's collection of naked plastic dolls. Scores of CDs and tapes are strewn around the stereo – obscurities such...
"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...
"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...
Could a musical group “go viral” before the internet?
What was the cultural, social, and historical significance of the zoot suit during the period of World War II?
How did the Grateful Dead make their concerts more accessible to the Deaf and Hard of Hearing (DHH) community?
How do Kendrick Lamar’s album DAMN. and the work of photojournalist Gordon Parks tell stories that bring attention to social issues?
How does Common and John Legend's “Glory” signal Civil Rights movements of the past and the present?
(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...
What is Bystander Intervention and how does it make music spaces and other public gathering places more safe, accessible, and fun for everyone?
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,...
Made up of three young women from Detroit's Brewster-Douglass housing project, the Supremes went on to become the most commercially successful act of Motown Records' 1960s heyday — and by many measures the most successful American recording act of that decade. As such, they exemplified Motown founder Berry Gordy’s crossover-minded melding of R&B and Pop. The three Supremes — Diana Ross, Florence Ballard, and Mary Wilson — were still teenagers when they won a deal with Motown, but they released half a dozen unsuccessful singles with the label before 1963's "When the Lovelight Starts Shining Through His Eyes" finally put...
A trio of sassy, glamorous young women from Spanish Harlem, the Ronettes exemplified the Girl Group ideal, exuding both youthful innocence and worldly sensuality. They were the ideal vehicle for the eccentric, visionary producer Phil Spector, who combined his innovative “Wall of Sound” production techniques with the Ronettes' sweet-but-sexy voices to create such teen classics as "Be My Baby," "Baby I Love You," "Do I Love You?," and "Walking in the Rain." (Spector also married lead singer Ronnie Bennett.) Although they're now known almost exclusively for their work with Spector, the Ronettes actually got their start a few years earlier....
(b. 1969) Born O’Shea Jackson in South Central Los Angeles, Ice Cube is a founding member of N.W.A., and is considered one of the most vivid and inventive lyricists in the Gangsta Rap genre. He’s known for his angrily furrowed brow, his strong, stentorian voice, and for courting controversy in N.W.A. and on his early solo albums, with what critics called violent and misogynist imagery. Cube was a key presence on N.W.A.’s explosive debut, Straight Outta Compton, but after a bitter dispute with the group’s manager, he left to launch a solo career. His 1990 debut, AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted, was co-produced by the...
(b. 1948) As the first performer to introduce horror-movie imagery to Hard Rock, pioneering Shock Rocker Alice Cooper mined social outrage and parental disapproval into transgressive stardom in his 1970s heyday. If his flamboyantly theatrical approach lacked the dangerous edge of his Michigan contemporaries the MC5 and the Stooges, Cooper's macabre imagery and catchy teen-rebellion anthems — not to mention elaborate concerts incorporating guillotines, boa constrictors, decapitated baby dolls, and gallons of stage blood — held considerably more appeal to middle American teens. A minister’s son born Vincent Damon Furnier, Cooper was a Detroit native who moved with his family to...
What is the Flint water crisis, and why did it occur?
How can a logo help communicate a person or group’s unique personality?
One of the most influential and controversial groups in the history of Hip Hop, N.W.A. were almost solely responsible for elevating Gangsta rap from a street phenomenon in South Central Los Angeles to national prominence, through their raw, provocative debut Straight Outta Compton, which sold 3 million copies in the year after its 1988 release. N.W.A. (short for “Niggaz Wit Attitude”) began taking shape in early 1986, when Eric “Eazy-E” Wright sought out Dr. Dre and DJ Yella, who had performed together in an electro-rap band and produced beats and mixtapes for the KDAY radio station. The trio then recruited...
(b. 1965) Back in the early 1980s, when a teenaged Lawrence Krisna Parker began tagging the Bronx River Projects in New York City with the graffiti name KRS-ONE, he didn’t yet know he had a talent for writing and rhyming that would help change how Hip Hop is perceived as an art form. Throughout a long career that includes six years as frontman for the Rap group Boogie Down Productions, KRS-One (also known to fans as “The Blastmaster”) has established a politically charged and message-conscious style that’s rich in historical, philosophical, religious and literary references. In 1985, Parker was a 20-year-old...
How did Westward Expansion and the idea of Manifest Destiny inform the image of the cowboy in American culture?
(1911 – 1972) Widely acknowledged as the "Queen of Gospel," Mahalia Jackson was a major musical and cultural force whose popularity and influence made her an icon in African-American culture for decades; Harry Belafonte once described her as "the single most powerful black woman in the United States." Possessing both a powerful presence and an authoritative contralto voice, Jackson remained one of America's top-selling Gospel artists for most of her career. Growing up in New Orleans, Jackson began singing in church as a child in the 1920s, and performed around the city with the Johnson Gospel Singers, one of the first...
How can Gospel music help students identify the musical concepts of beat, meter, backbeat, subdivision, and syncopation?
(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. ...
Known to fans as P-Funk, Parliament-Funkadelic is an ever-morphing collective of musicians founded by singer and songwriter George Clinton. Originally it was comprised of two groups, the first being the Parliaments — a Doo Wop group that came together in the late 1950s in the back of a New Jersey barbershop where Clinton straightened hair. The second was an ad-hoc backing band for the Parliaments, assembled by Clinton in the early 1960s, that by 1967 had solidified under the name Funkadelic. As the mad genius behind P-Funk, Clinton – a former staff writer for Motown — drew inspiration from the...
(b. 1934) Clean-cut singer/actor Pat Boone had a lengthy run as a major recording star in the years prior to the British Invasion, scoring 38 Top 40 hits and becoming a familiar, wholesome presence in films and TV shows. Boone is notable figure in Rock and Roll’s early history for his smooth covers of then-current hits by such black artists as Little Richard and Fats Domino, which critics blasted as “watered down” versions aimed at listeners and radio stations for whom the originals were too musically — or racially — incendiary. While rocking out may not have been Boone’s forte,...
(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...
(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 can the music of ChocQuibTown, from the Pacific Coast of Colombia, help students express and celebrate their cultural identity through Rap?
What role do ratios play in the Western musical concepts of rhythm and harmony?
(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...
(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...
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...
(b. 1967) Although he was massively popular for a brief period in the early '90s, rapper Vanilla Ice occupies roughly the same niche in Hip Hop history that Pat Boone filled in the early days of Rock and Roll: he’s often regarded as a white performer who achieved commercial success by sanitizing a "dangerous" musical style for mainstream consumption. Born Robert Van Vinkle, Ice – who was born in Texas and raised there and in South Florida — released his first album, Hooked, in 1989 on the independent Ichiban label. He then signed with the corporate SBK Records, which released a...
(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...
How can writing and evaluating expressions be used to explain the scope of an artist’s concert schedule?
(b. 1947) In a career spanning five decades, Sir Elton John has notched more than 50 Top 40 hits and sold more than 250 million records, making him one of the most popular and successful singer-songwriter-performers of all time. He remains best known for his output during the 1970s, a decade he started as a sincere, somewhat somber piano-playing singer-songwriter and ended as an arena-packing Pop star, and during which he had a phenomenally prolific streak of No. 1 albums and hit songs. Elton was born Reginald Dwight in Middlesex, England. He was picking out songs on the piano at age three;...
(b. 1942) Perhaps the most successful female songwriter of the Rock era, Carole King did much to shape the sound of 60s and 70s Pop music, first as a prolific writer of hits for others and then as a hugely successful solo artist. The writer or co-writer of well over 100 songs that have made the Billboard singles chart, she also recorded one of the best-selling records in history, 1971’s Tapestry, considered one of the most important and influential albums connected to the Singer-Songwriter movement of the early 1970s. Growing up in Brooklyn, New York, King demonstrated her musical ability at...
What is mountaintop removal, how does it affect the environment and people’s health?
(b. 1950) Although he's best known as a founding member of Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band and as mob consigliere Silvio Dante on TV's The Sopranos, Steven Van Zandt (aka Little Steven) has a far-ranging resume that speaks to a lifelong devotion to music, and spans the roles of guitarist, songwriter, producer, arranger, radio host, label owner, human-rights activist and educator. Van Zandt's association with Springsteen stretches back to both men's early days of playing in little-known combos on the Jersey Shore bar scene. But he didn't officially join the E Street Band until Springsteen's third album, 1975's Born to Run,...
Although Genesis is among the most commercially recording acts of all time, with approximately 150 million albums sold worldwide, the group's colorful four-decade history is actually the story of two very different bands with two very different bodies of work. After being formed by a group of classmates at England's posh Charterhouse school in the late '60s, Genesis emerged in the early 70s as a Progressive Rock powerhouse, distinguished by complex compositions, elaborate instrumental arrangements and frontman Peter Gabriel's imaginative lyrical flights and flamboyant onstage theatricality. Such albums as Nursery Cryme, Foxtrot, Selling England by the Pound and the elaborate...
How can one reproduce the effects seen in the music video for Zedd, Maren Morris, and Grey’s song “The Middle” using a homemade projector?
How does the song “Blowin’ in the Wind” use poetic devices to communicate an open-ended yet powerful message about the human condition, without ever losing its historical specificity?
What different types of communities exist, and how do the people in our communities impact us?
What different types of communities exist, and how do the people in our communities impact us?
How did Muddy Waters’ music change after he moved to Chicago, and what does that say about the relationship between place and self-expression?
What is plastic, how is it harmful for the environment, and how can it be used more responsibly?
How can shapes be used to design an electric guitar?
What is the science behind color theory, and how is it used in fashion and album cover design?
How might visual artists use music as a tool for inspiration, and how might sound be reflected through art?
What is cultural appropriation, how does it affect Native American communities, and should it be regulated by law?
What is a logo, what are the elements of effective logo design, and how have musicians and bands used logos to brand themselves?
How does music help us remember people we are close to, or those we have lost?
Who are the gods and superheroes referenced in “Something Just Like This,” and what are the connections between them?
In what ways does Alessia Cara’s “Here” defy popular music conventions, and what does the song say about peer pressure in youth culture?
How does the story of “Hound Dog” demonstrate music culture’s racial mixing as it differed from mainstream American life in the 1950s?
How did the input of manager Brian Epstein and record producer George Martin help The Beatles develop and refine skills that aided the band in presenting their music and personalities to a mass audience?
How does Langston Hughes’ Blues-inspired poetry exemplify the ideals of the Harlem Renaissance?
What is the Flint water crisis, and why did it occur?
How did beat writers like Jack Kerouac influence the Grateful Dead’s music?
(b. 1942) Known as "the Queen of Soul," Aretha Franklin is one of many soul singers who started singing as a youngster in church. She was born in Memphis, Tenn., but her family eventually settled in Detroit, Michigan where her father, C.L. Franklin, was a popular Baptist minister. Her father often entertained popular gospel stars, who encouraged and coached the young singer. At the age of 19, Aretha made her first album for the Columbia label, after being signed by legendary talent scout John Hammond. Her recordings for the label, aimed at the Pop and Jazz market, met with some success, but failed to connect with...
How can you help someone struggling with addiction?
What is a PA system, how does it work, and how were the Grateful Dead pioneers in live sound technology?
Who are the Deadheads and how did their lifestyle contrast with the conservative values promoted by President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s?
How can society lower the amount of greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere?
(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...
In what ways do indigenous views of water align with scientific views, and how do indigenous activists use artistic expression to advocate for water protection?