The roots of this haphazard history of American popular music originally started about a year earlier and at least one music blog before this one. The former timeline started with the 1820s - when the United States as we (sort of) know it was just over 30 years old - and continued up to the 1920s. It introduced a multiplicity of themes and pathways, among them: the homesickness genre, a product of the Industrial Age and families scattered as wide as they’ve been in human history; the interaction between popular music and waves of immigration; the bloodthirsty/God-is-on-our-side anthems of America’s wars, both civil and others; the massive, popular, semi-utopian “Jubilee” concerts that followed; the noteworthy spasm of Christmas carols that bloomed alongside the commercialization of that holiday; the odd devotional number; marching bands and the arrival of modern brass instruments; the maudlin borderline hackery of the late Victorian era; the establishment and growth of Tin Pan Alley and its remarkable marketing machinery; and, perhaps more important than any of them in terms of what came later, minstrelsy. No less significant: literally all of that moved about the country by way of sheet music, the first conduit for the mass marketing of popular music.
All of that both informed and laid the foundation for much of what followed, but it also existed and operated in a vastly different and slower world. I think citizens of the 21st century can conceptualize, even appreciate those times, but actually wrapping one’s head around all that silence requires more imagination that most of us have. So, I took down those posts (twice, in fact) and restarted this follow-up project from a different foundation: the dawn of recorded sound, aka, the beginnings of a time when people could hear music without having friends who knew how to play it and, by the same devices, listen to a song until it either inspired them or made them puke.
Recordings existed well before the 1920s - singers ranging from John McCormack and Eddie Murray to the famous tenor Enrico Caruso (who recorded for one label's “high-class series”) - but I decided to start with the 1920s for several reasons. The ability to record sound came several decades before (by memory, the mid-1870s), but even 40 years later the sound remained limited - e.g., the recordings literally could not pick up pitches on the high end and some instruments all together - and, therefore, terrible. It took a decade or five for all the tinniness/recording-in-a-bucket-inside-a-box to the leech out, but recording and records (it’s all still 78 rpm at this point) reached the lofty heights of reasonable listening experience as early as the mid-1920s and continued to improve into the 1930s. Once film and radio arrived, they opened avenues for musical artists to spread their presence and influence across multiple mediums - i.e., the essence of modern stardom. That brings the story to the beginning of the modern era, at least in my mind. That said, keep in mind that the entire concept and culture of radio belongs to the 1930s - i.e., a time when the collapse of the consumer market made something one owns and turns on for entertainment the thriftier choice over something one buys and collects. As you’ll see if you read the posts below, a lot of them end with the Great Depression.
That gets ahead of the story, so, pulling back ten years, people call the 1920s the Jazz Age, but that does a real disservice to proliferation of genres that started and blossomed in jazz’s shadow. While none of them actually started in the 1920s, the way communications shrunk the world made once regional sounds available to a national audience - and one with resources to burn. That included the beginnings of country music - which, incidentally, came from the folk traditions of the 19th century - and at least three kinds of blues - e.g., 1) the female royalty of the early 20s, 2) the lone, often haunted blues men of the late 20s, and 3), at the tail-end, boogie-woogie. To back up even further, all of those borrowed something from ragtime - aka, the first “scary” (read: black) music to spook establishment white audiences - and Tin Pan Alley blended all that with popular sounds and themes from earlier eras, and that’s what the 1920s sounded like. Innovation meets mass-marketing, basically; strip away technologies that forever expand availability and accessibility and it’s not so different today.
All of that both informed and laid the foundation for much of what followed, but it also existed and operated in a vastly different and slower world. I think citizens of the 21st century can conceptualize, even appreciate those times, but actually wrapping one’s head around all that silence requires more imagination that most of us have. So, I took down those posts (twice, in fact) and restarted this follow-up project from a different foundation: the dawn of recorded sound, aka, the beginnings of a time when people could hear music without having friends who knew how to play it and, by the same devices, listen to a song until it either inspired them or made them puke.
Recordings existed well before the 1920s - singers ranging from John McCormack and Eddie Murray to the famous tenor Enrico Caruso (who recorded for one label's “high-class series”) - but I decided to start with the 1920s for several reasons. The ability to record sound came several decades before (by memory, the mid-1870s), but even 40 years later the sound remained limited - e.g., the recordings literally could not pick up pitches on the high end and some instruments all together - and, therefore, terrible. It took a decade or five for all the tinniness/recording-in-a-bucket-inside-a-box to the leech out, but recording and records (it’s all still 78 rpm at this point) reached the lofty heights of reasonable listening experience as early as the mid-1920s and continued to improve into the 1930s. Once film and radio arrived, they opened avenues for musical artists to spread their presence and influence across multiple mediums - i.e., the essence of modern stardom. That brings the story to the beginning of the modern era, at least in my mind. That said, keep in mind that the entire concept and culture of radio belongs to the 1930s - i.e., a time when the collapse of the consumer market made something one owns and turns on for entertainment the thriftier choice over something one buys and collects. As you’ll see if you read the posts below, a lot of them end with the Great Depression.
That gets ahead of the story, so, pulling back ten years, people call the 1920s the Jazz Age, but that does a real disservice to proliferation of genres that started and blossomed in jazz’s shadow. While none of them actually started in the 1920s, the way communications shrunk the world made once regional sounds available to a national audience - and one with resources to burn. That included the beginnings of country music - which, incidentally, came from the folk traditions of the 19th century - and at least three kinds of blues - e.g., 1) the female royalty of the early 20s, 2) the lone, often haunted blues men of the late 20s, and 3), at the tail-end, boogie-woogie. To back up even further, all of those borrowed something from ragtime - aka, the first “scary” (read: black) music to spook establishment white audiences - and Tin Pan Alley blended all that with popular sounds and themes from earlier eras, and that’s what the 1920s sounded like. Innovation meets mass-marketing, basically; strip away technologies that forever expand availability and accessibility and it’s not so different today.
