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1910s
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- The roots of American popular music are deeply intertwined with African-American contributions and innovation. The earliest jazz and blues recordings emerged in the 1910s, marking the beginning of a transformative era in music.
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The roots of American popular music are deeply intertwined with African-American contributions and innovation. The earliest jazz and blues recordings emerged in the 1910s, marking the beginning of a transformative era in music.
The Timeline of African American Music by Portia K. Maultsby, Ph.D. presents the remarkable diversity of African American music, revealing the unique characteristics of each genre and style, from the earliest folk traditions to present-day popular music.
- 1912. Trumpeter W.C. Handy — who earned the sobriquet "Father of the Blues" — publishes the sheet music for "Memphis Blues, " which he called a "southern rag"; two years later he penned the classic "Saint Louis Blues."
- 1925. Louis Armstrong records the first of a series of singles for Okeh Records with his Hot Five and Hot Seven combos. The trumpeter's take on the songs, including "Saint James Infirmary," "Basin Street Blues," and "Muskrat Ramble," "helped to change the course of American music," as writer Charles Hiroshi Garrett noted in a review of a 2000 collection of the complete recordings.
- 1934. The Apollo Theater opens and becomes a cultural and musical mecca in the heart of the Harlem neighborhood in NYC.
- 1935. Pianist Teddy Wilson is part of the "first known interracial jazz group" — the Benny Goodman Trio, with the namesake clarinetist and drummer Gene Krupa.
- A Music Rooted in Africa
- The Negro Spiritual
- The Rise of Ragtime
- The Blues
- "Chicago Blues"
- Jazz
- The Blues and Jazz
- Classical Performers and Composers
- Gospel Music
- Rap
The first Africans transported to this country came from a variety of ethnic groups with a long history of distinct and cultivated musical traditions. Some were able to bring musical instrumentswith them or build new ones in this country. The "banja" or "banshaw," now known asthe banjo, was one of the African instruments that continued to be built ...
One of the most widespread of early musical forms among southern blacks was the spiritual. Neither black versions of white hymns nor transformations of songs from Africa, spirituals were a distinctly African American response to American conditions. They expressed the longing of slaves for spiritual and bodily freedom, for safety from harm and evil...
Ragtime became the first nationally popular form of American music in 1899, when Scott Joplin's (1868-1917) "Maple Leaf Rag" enjoyed unprecedented success, selling over a million sheet-music copies. But ragtime was not new in 1899. Documents reveal that it was being played as early as the 1870s. Black musicians spoke of "ragging a tune" when descri...
The blues is perhaps the simplest American musical form and yet also the most versatile. Along with jazz, blues takes its shape and style in the process of performance, and for this reason it possesses a high degree of flexibility. Although certain musical and lyrical elements of the blues can be traced back to West Africa, the blues, like the spir...
Migration not only changes social order, it also breeds new forms of culture. The history of the blues in the twentieth century provides one example of the link between black migration and cultural change. Industrialization brought about technological advances in recording, the growth of radio, a black "race record" industry, and the development of...
Jazz, which has been called "America's classical music," is perhaps the most creative and complex music the nation has produced. Although no one can say for sure where the origins of jazz lie, it combines the musical traditionsof black New Orleans with the creative flexibility of the blues. By 1918, the term "jazz" was already in wide use. Early ja...
The blues and jazz are unique forms of African American traditional expression that defy the popular belief that in the field of music there are no truly original ideas, only the rehashing of existing traditions. Both musical genres reveal that, within the African American artistic community, there is a drive to create a wonderful "new story." The ...
While a number of black female concert singers have achieved great popularity during the last fifty years, their success is not altogether new. Their way was paved by earlier classical singers like Elizabeth TaylorGreenfield (1809-1876). The first of the widely known black vocalists, Greenfield made her debut in 1853 in Philadelphia in a recital th...
The sound of today's gospel music also has a long history in African American music, having been influenced by everything from the ensemble performances of the jubilee singers during the late 1800s and early 1900s to the predominantly male gospel quartets and choirs of the 1930s and 1940s. By the 1930s, Roberta Martin (1912-1969), Sallie Martin, an...
Rap is the most complex and influential form of hip-hop culture, combining elements of the African American musical tradition (blues, jazz, and soul) with Caribbean calypso, dub, and dance-hall reggae. Two of its earliest innovators were West Indians, DJ Kool Herc and Grand-master Flash (b. 1958). The Jamaican DJ Kool Herc was known for using massi...
1600s. Sacred. The Timeline of African American Music by Portia K. Maultsby, Ph.D. presents the remarkable diversity of African American music, revealing the unique characteristics of each genre and style, from the earliest folk traditions to present-day popular music. Learn More.
Jan 11, 2022 · Encompassing the earliest folk traditions to present-day popular music, the new Timeline of African American Music is a detailed view of the evolution of African American musical genres that span the past 400 years.
Their work songs, dance tunes, and religious music—and the syncopated, swung, remixed, rocked, and rapped music of their descendants—would become the lingua franca of American music, eventually influencing Americans of all racial and ethnic backgrounds.
