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All musical genres are represented on the American music scene, but the resource collection here will focus on jazz and rock/country and classical music.

Jazz

Pulitzer Prize winner WyntonMarsalis, a contemporary champion of “traditional” jazz.

Jazz originated in New Orleans early in the 20th century, bringing together elements from ragtime, slave songs, and brass bands. One of the distinguishing elements of jazz was its fluidity: in live performances, the musicians would almost never play a song the same way twice but would improvise variations on its notes and words. Jazz was the reigning popular American music from the 1920s through the 1940s. In the 1930s and 1940s, the most popular form of jazz was "big band swing," so called after large ensembles conducted by the likes of Glenn Miller and William "Count" Basie. In the late 1940s, a new, more cerebral form of mostly instrumental jazz, called be-bop, began to attract audiences. In the 1960s, jazz musicians such as Miles Davis and John Coltrane experimented with a wide range of musical influences. Younger jazz musicians began to include the rhythms of rock and roll. Later, in the 1970s, many jazz musicians experimented with electronic instruments and created a blend of rock and jazz called fusion.

Rock and Country

Elvis Presley (© AP Images)

By the early 1950s, however, jazz had lost some of its appeal to a mass audience. A new form of pop music, rock and roll, evolved from a black style known as rhythm and blues: songs with strong beats and provocative lyrics. To make the new music more acceptable to a mainstream audience, white performers and arrangers began to "cover" rhythm and blues songs - singing them with toned down beat and revised lyrics. At the beginning of his career, Elvis Presley covered black singers. One of his first big hits was Hound Dog, which had been sung by blues artist Big Mama Thornton. Soon, however, Presley was singing original material, supplied by a new breed of rock and roll songwriters.

A challenge to rock appeared in the form of folk music. Folk music was based largely on ballads brought over from Scotland, England, and Ireland; it had been preserved in such enclaves as the mountains of North Carolina and West Virginia.

Bob Dylan extended the reach of folk music by writing striking new songs that addressed contemporary social problems, especially the denial of civil rights to black Americans. The division between the two camps - rock enthusiasts and folk purists - came to a head when Dylan was booed for "going electric" (accompanying himself on electric guitar) at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Far from being deterred, Dylan led virtually the entire folk movement into a blend of rock and folk. This merger was a watershed event, setting a pattern that holds true to this day. Rock remains the prevalent pop music of America - and much of the rest of the world - largely because it can assimilate almost any other kind of music, along with new varieties of showmanship, into its strong rhythmical framework.

Like folk, country music descends from the songs brought to the United States from England, Scotland, and Ireland. The original form of country music, called "old-time" and played by string bands, can still be heard at festivals held each year in many southern states. Modern country music developed in the 1920s, roughly coinciding with a mass migration of rural people to big cities in search of work. Like many other forms of American pop music, country lends itself easily to a rock-and-roll beat, and country rock has been yet another successful music merger.

Classical Music

The development of the arts in America has been marked by a tension between two strong sources of inspiration - European sophistication and domestic originality. A distinctively American classical music came to fruition when such composers as George Gershwin and Aaron Copland incorporated homegrown melodies and rhythms into forms borrowed from Europe.

The arts in America get relatively little government support. To survive, symphony orchestras depend largely on philanthropy and paid admissions. Some orchestra directors have found a way to keep mainstream audiences happy while introducing new music to the public. Rather than segregate the new pieces, these directors program them side-by-side with traditional fare. Meanwhile, opera - old and new - has been flourishing; because it is so expensive to stage, however, opera depends heavily on the generosity of corporate and private donors.

Online Reading

American Popular Music (PDF file, 7.70MB)

Music: The Quintessential American Sound (The Arts in America, Electronic Journal, Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State, April 2003) (PDF file, 98KB)

U.S. Pop Music:  A Conversation with Gary Burton (PDF file, 24KB)