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1920S–1950S

Rock emerged out of the confluence of many streams that have nourished it, each with their own histories of assimilating streams that have in turn fed them. Tin Pan Alley, blues, early rhythm and blues, gospel, and country flourished in various regional and national forms before rock took over as the primary musical language. The major events that provide the backdrop for this era are the birth of the recording industry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, World War I, the boom in commercial radio broadcasting and growth of markets aimed at blacks and southern whites in the 1920s, the Great Depression, and World War II and the immediately ensuing postwar prosperity.

TIN PAN ALLEY

Tin Pan Alley (West Twenty-Eighth Street in the vicinity of Broadway, between Fifth and Sixth Avenue in Manhattan) was an important distribution center for sheet music in the early twentieth century and has come to stand in as a name of the predominant style of popular songwriting at the time. The string of shops located there would feature pianists (song pluggers) demonstrating the latest compositions for the general public to purchase and play on their own home pianos. The origins of the term Tin Pan Alley are wrapped up in myth, but it is generally believed to be a description reported by a journalist around 1900 of the piano sounds filtering out of the publishing houses along Twenty-Eighth Street (Mathieu 2017).

The exact location of the concentration of sheet-music publishers followed the movement of theaters north along Broadway, initially around Union Square (Fourteenth Street and Broadway) in the 1880s, then beginning in the mid-1890s to Twenty-Eighth Street, and finally north of Forty-Second Street in the 1920s.¹ Many of the songs came from the world of musical theater, generically known as Broadway because of the concentration of theaters initially around Broadway downtown, eventually moving north to Midtown (roughly between Forty-Second Street and Fifty-Second Street). Songs coming of out Broadway shows set the standard for popular music in the first half of the twentieth century.

The model for what would later be called payola, an illegal practice in which record companies would pay disc jockeys to play recordings of their contracted artists, was set by Tin Pan Alley publishers, who would financially reward vaudeville vocalists to popularize their songs in their shows. (Vaudeville is a concert-show form in which a variety of music, comedy, dance, and other acts would perform.)

Composers and lyricists in the golden age of Broadway musicals in the 1920s–30s were overwhelmingly first-generation American-born Jews from New York City of parents emigrating from Russia, eastern Europe, and Germany. They included composers Irving Berlin (born in Russia), George Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, Harold Arlen (born in Buffalo), and Jerome Kern; and lyricists Ira Gershwin, Oscar Hammerstein II (Jewish father, raised Episcopalian), Yip Harburg, and Lorenz Hart, all four of whom were born within two years of one another (1895–96). Almost all had changed their last names to assimilate and avoid discrimination in the industry. The most notable exception in this crowd was composer and lyricist Cole Porter, born in Indiana in 1891, who experienced a wealthy white Anglo-Protestant upbringing in small town Indiana, earning a Yale college degree. The musical style had roots in European popular song, especially the musical theater (comic operas) of the British team of lyricist W. S. Gilbert and composer Arthur Sullivan, who were active in the 1870s–90s. In general, the lyric content and song style reflected a northern urban white middle-class lifestyle, filled with romance and occasional humor.

One of the most widespread musical forms in this genre can be diagrammed as AABA (as in the Gershwins’ song “I Got Rhythm”), wherein each letter represents eight bars of musical material, for a total of thirty-two bars. In this form the A sections present the same melody and chords, but with different lyrics, and the B section (or bridge) presents a contrasting melody and accompanying chords. In terminology used in the jazz world, each time through the AABA form is called a chorus. A jazz performance might consist of playing the melody once (one AABA chorus), improvising over several choruses of the AABA form, and then playing the melody one more time to end the song. The thirty-two-bar AABA form (or other related thirty-two-bar forms) dominated popular music until twelve-bar blues forms became common currency in the 1950s, although it still retained relevance in the vocal group style called doo wop.²

BLUES

The most important musical stream that has fed rock and R&B in their early years is blues. An expression of southern African American lifestyle changes over the many decades following emancipation, blues existed as a form of musical expression at least a few decades before the first recordings of it were made in the 1920s. In his 1963 classic, Blues People, Amiri Baraka identifies a number of features of postslavery life in the later part of the nineteenth century that led to the development of the blues:

1. increased leisure time and opportunity for solitude;

2. a new personal freedom to travel;

3. work songs no longer responding to the new experiences of black life, which included new opportunities for choosing partners;

4. a lesser hold of the Christian church on black life leading to less communal and more individual social experiences;

5. a new search for employment and struggle for economic security;

6. and the use of new musical instruments. (1963: 61–69)

The new individual forms of musical expression, which grew out of postemancipation experiences and lifestyles, were informed by older communal forms but developed beyond them. Just as communally sung spirituals eventually gave way to composed gospel songs and then recordings featuring star vocal soloists, communal work songs (as well as field hollers) gave way to individual blues musicians singing their own stories. The guitar, which became available through inexpensive mail order by the end of the nineteenth century, replaced the slavery-era banjo and fiddle as the instrument of choice among southern rural blacks.

In the course of making a strong case for the historical conditions that gave rise to the blues, Baraka (1963: 82) also suggested that “musical training was not a part of African tradition—music like any art was the result of natural inclination.” Nowadays, one might note two sides of a claim like this (besides the fact that African musicians can indeed go through rigorous apprenticeship and training). On the one hand, the statement could be taken to reflect racial pride in artistic abilities. On the other hand, suggesting that a people are born with certain inclinations (that they have an inner essence) can also serve to reinforce stereotypes, with the potential implication that they are not born with certain other capabilities.

Blues probably initially developed in the Mississippi Delta region, the two-hundred mile stretch between Memphis in the north and Vicksburg in the south between the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers (in the east and west) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. (The actual river delta is several hundred miles farther south.) It was an especially saturated region of cotton farming, with one of the highest concentrations in the country of black tenant and sharecropping farmers. The towns chronicled by Charley Patton (billed as both “Founder” and “King” of the Delta blues) in “High Water Everywhere, Part 1,” about the devastating river flood of 1927, reads like a guide to the region: Sumner and the county it’s in (Tallahatchie) in the north on the Yazoo side; Rosedale (to the west) and Greenville (farther south) on the Mississippi River and nearby Leland; Sharkey County in between the two rivers in the south; and Vicksburg, where the two rivers meet (see figure 11).

The earliest documentation of the blues appeared in writings in the early part of the first decade of the 1900s. Country blues, performed by men singing and accompanying themselves on the guitar, developed in three southern regions:

• Mississippi Delta (Charley Patton, his protégé Son House, and next generation Robert Johnson);

• East Texas (Blind Lemon Jefferson); and

• Piedmont or southeastern United States (Blind Willie McTell, Blind Boy Fuller).

The Delta branch is especially significant for rock. The impact of those who remained in the region has been deeply felt: the reissue of Robert Johnson’s 1930s recordings by Columbia in the 1960s strongly influenced Bob Dylan and spawned covers by Cream (“Crossroads”), the Rolling Stones (“Love in Vain”), and Led Zeppelin (“Travelling Riverside Blues”). But those who left the region were among the early pioneers of rock: Muddy Waters moved to Chicago, as did harmonica player and vocalist James Cotton and Willie Dixon, one of the great songwriters for Chess Records; B. B. King moved to Memphis; and John Lee Hooker moved to Detroit. Alan Lomax, an important documenter of blues in the 1930s and 1940s (he made the first recordings of Lead Belly and Muddy Waters, for the Library of Congress) reports the lineage.

[Son House, interviewed in the early 1940s]: “Little Robert [Johnson] learnt from me, and I learnt from an old fellow they call Lemon down in Clarksdale, and he was called Lemon because he had learnt all Blind Lemon’s pieces off the phonograph.” Now I [Lomax] felt like shouting. Son House had laid out one of the main lines in the royal lineage of America’s great guitar players—Blind Lemon of Dallas to his double in Clarksdale to Son House to Robert Johnson. “But isn’t there anybody alive who plays this style?” I asked. “An old boy called Muddy Waters round Clarksdale, he learnt from me.” (Lomax 1993: 16–17)

A.L. [in an early 1940s interview with Muddy Waters]: Did you know the tune before you heard it on record [Robert Johnson’s “Walking Blues”]?

M.W.: Yessir, I learned it from Son House; that’s a boy that picks a guitar. I been knowing Son since ’twenty-nine. He was the best…. I followed after him and stayed watching him.³ (411)

Waters had a special reputation among British rock and rollers: “At the Beatles’ first press conference in New York, a reporter asked them what they most wanted to see. They immediately replied, ‘Muddy Waters and Bo Diddley.’ … Mick Jagger named his Rolling Stones after a line from one of the blues Muddy recorded at Sherrod’s [plantation] on that long-ago day [1941–42; rerecorded for Chess in 1950]” (406). Son House also reinforced stereotypes about bluesmen: “‘Bob [Robert Johnson] was a terrible man with the women, like all us guitar players.’ Son looked at his sweet-faced wife and they both laughed. ‘And I reckon he got one too many down there in Lou’sana. So this last one, she gi’n him poison in his coffee. And he died’” (16).

The recording industry did not see any commercial value in recording blues artists until 1920, when it began recording women blues singers, who had developed another, more urbane style variously called city, vaudeville, or classic blues, typically accompanied by pianists or small jazz bands. A wave of women classic blues singers was recorded starting in 1923. The most renowned were Ma Rainey, known as “The Mother of the Blues,” as she came from an early generation, and the next generation Bessie Smith (“The Empress of the Blues”). Recordings of men country blues singers followed in 1926. The 1920s became a golden era of early blues recordings (see figure 12). The following decade the music eventually fell out of fashion, to be replaced by big band jazz (also called swing) and, by the mid 1940s, small group rhythm and blues.

When the women blues singers were first recorded in the 1920s, the genre had gelled into a standard twelve-bar form: one line of lyrics was sung over four measures (of four beats each measure), the same line was repeated over another four measures, and a responding line was sung over the final four measures. This lyric pattern can be diagrammed as aab. Each of these four-measure sections had a distinguishing chord pattern, played on the piano or guitar (see figure 13). “Down Hearted Blues,” recorded by Bessie Smith in New York for Columbia in early 1923, follows this pattern strictly, although it is preceded by a four-line verse (wherein each line is four measures, totaling sixteen measures), which sets up the story. This practice of an introductory verse is borrowed from the Tin Pan Alley songs of the day. The presence of a separate vocalist and accompanist (or ensemble) dictated that a standardized format be followed.

The earliest country blues singers, however, had no need to standardize the musical form. As solo singer-guitarists, they could expand or contract their guitar accompaniment at will, according to how they felt at the moment. When Charley Patton was finally recorded in 1929, he was still playing blues forms that were open ended. In “High Water Everywhere, Part 1,” for example, he used the aab lyric scheme, with the usual chord pattern associated with each line, but he would expand or contract each line at will to more or fewer than four measures. In this piece he systematically turns the beat around (moving the accented strong beat from the downbeat to the offbeat) at the end of the first line and then turns it back around at the end of the response line as he moves into the next verse (see figure 11, which shows the number of beats in each measure for each verse).

Blues forms and vocal and guitar styles laid the foundation for rock through the 1960s. The three-line aab lyric structure can be called a verse or a chorus depending on its function within a song. In American popular song, the term verse, which refers to lyrics that typically move the story line ahead, is contrasted with chorus (sometimes called a hook or refrain), which alternates with verses and repeats the same lines throughout the piece. (The term chorus can refer to a full AABA form or, as here, a repeated line or section that contrasts with the verse—see the glossary for clarification.) Blues developed independently of this verse-chorus tradition and did not initially follow it, but in the 1940s it assimilated mainstream popular song forms to do just that. For example, Chuck Berry’s “Maybelline” opens with a twelve-bar blues chorus (“Oh Maybelline”) that alternates with a twelve-bar blues verse, which pushes the story along. Berry’s “Roll over Beethoven” uses the first two lines of the aab form as a verse (with two separate lines rather than repeating the first line) and the response line (“Roll over Beethoven”) as a chorus.

Blues lyrics are often marked by strong sexual references, almost always couched in metaphor using double entendre, wherein a phrase or line could be interpreted two ways. This led to consumption of certain forms of blues recordings by whites in the 1920s that would be similar to the pattern for certain forms of rap music in the 1990s. The first widely recognized professional blues composer W. C. Handy (“Memphis Blues,” 1912; “St. Louis Blues,” 1914) wrote in his autobiography, “A flock of low-down dirty blues appeared on records, not witty double entendre but just plain smut. These got a play in college fraternities, speakeasies and rowdy spots. Their appeal was largely to whites, though they were labeled ‘race records’” (1941: 209).

Not only did blues styles, forms, and lyrics cast a long shadow over rock, but so also did the actual compositions, which were covered by young white British and American groups in the 1960s. This brought them into their most direct contact with the musical materials and also opened up the ears of their fans, stimulating some of them to seek out the original sources. Two of the more well-known examples from virtuoso electric guitarists (Duane Allman and Eric Clapton) are the Allman Brothers Band’s 1971 cover of Blind Willie McTell’s “Statesboro Blues” (1928) and Cream’s 1968 cover of Robert Johnson’s “Cross Road Blues” (1937).

Blues forms are malleable and can be open-ended. John Lee Hooker’s “Boogie Chillen’” (1948), for example, does not strictly follow the chord pattern or form of blues but rather pares down the form to just two (rather than three) chords and is a vehicle for spoken storytelling. Here boogie can refer to dancing, partying, having a good time, or, perhaps more abstractly, following your passion in life (“cause it’s in him and it got to come out”).

In addition to referring to a musical form, blues refers to a more general aesthetic about music making, a feeling, and an attitude toward life. Baraka’s book Blues People was one of the first to explore this aesthetic and attitude in depth. Angela Y. Davis’s Blues Legacies and Black Feminism has further explored the significance and cathartic and empowering role of the blues in African American life. Referring to blues women in particular, Davis notes, “Naming issues that pose a threat to the physical or psychological well-being of the individual is a central function of the blues…. Through the blues, menacing problems are ferreted out from the isolated individual experience and restructured as problems shared by the community. As shared problems, threats can be met and addressed within a public and collective context” (1998: 33).⁴

RHYTHM AND BLUES

The designation rhythm and blues (R&B) replaced Harlem Hit Parade (1942–45) and race records (1945–49) in the Billboard charts beginning June 25, 1949, continuing the tradition of categorizing music made by African Americans aimed at an African American audience.⁵ But now it no longer covered gospel and other religious music and sermons. Independent record labels flourished in the decade after World War II to cater to local tastes, with many of them specializing in R&B (see figure 14). They had a close relationship with the new independent radio stations exploding in local markets. Several tributaries were covered under the umbrella category R&B.

As the large swing bands, which provided the dance music of the 1930s, became impractical to support in the 1940s because of war rationing, a new style of dance music developed called jump blues, played by a smaller jazz ensemble, with a piano (and sometimes guitar), bass, and drums rhythm section, and a few horns (trumpet and saxophone). The most successful artist in this genre was Louis Jordan and his Tympany Five, who crossed over to the pop charts frequently between 1944 and 1949, hitting #1 there with “G. I. Jive” in 1944.⁶ Figure 15 shows how Jordan’s 1946 recording of “Choo Choo Ch-Boogie” integrates a twelve-bar blues form into a verse-chorus structure. Vocalists in this style who were particularly forceful, often with more sexually oriented lyrics, were called shouters, exemplified by Big Joe Turner (“Roll ’em Pete,” 1938; “Shake, Rattle and Roll,” 1954) and Wynonie Harris (“Good Rockin’ Tonight,” 1948), both of whom were covered in the early rock and roll era by white artists Bill Haley and Elvis Presley.

Many songs in the jump blues style were based on a boogie woogie rhythm, typically played by the bass player or left hand of a pianist (at the bass end). Boogie woogie was first popularized by virtuoso solo pianists in the late 1920s and 1930s, including Meade Lux Lewis (“Honky Tonk Train Blues,” 1927), Pinetop Smith (“Pinetop’s Boogie Woogie,” 1928), and Albert Ammons (“Boogie Woogie Stomp,” 1936).⁷

A major blues scene developed in Chicago, where first-generation migrants from the South modernized their southern roots with the electric guitar, bass, and drum set. Chess Records, located in the black South Side of Chicago, was the primary label, featuring songwriter and bassist Willie Dixon and guitarist and vocalist Muddy Waters, who often teamed up (e.g., “Hoochie Coochie Man,” 1954). Other major artists include B. B. King (based in Memphis), John Lee Hooker (based in Detroit), and Howlin’ Wolf and Little Walter (both in Chicago). This strand of R&B, called Chicago blues or urban electric blues, thrived from the late 1940s through the mid-1950s (see figure 16). It was enormously influential on rock in the 1960s in both its vocal styles and electric guitar styles, which established the model for both singing and guitar soloing.

A smoother and more restrained R&B style was pioneered by pianist and vocalist Nat King Cole (1919–65), who was one of the earliest artists to cross over onto the pop charts; vocalist Charles Brown; and electric guitarist and vocalist Aaron “T-Bone” Walker (1910–75), who is credited with reintroducing the guitar into black dance music. Cole’s “Straighten Up and Fly Right” topped Billboard’s Harlem Hit Parade chart (not yet called R&B) for ten weeks starting April 29, 1944; spent six weeks at the top of the Juke Box Folk chart (not yet called country); and reached the Top 10 of Best Selling Retail Records chart (July 1, 1944) and Top 20 of the Juke Box Pop chart, an extraordinary accomplishment. Walker’s 1947 single “Call It Stormy Monday (But Tuesday Is Just as Bad)” had an immediate impact on R&B, helping along the postwar rise of the electric guitar.

African American male vocal groups began recording a style just after World War II, which a decade later would become known (retrospectively) as doo wop. They were preceded in the 1930s by the very popular Mills Brothers and Ink Spots, who both had a broad audience. The first commercially successful groups in the post–World War II style were the Ravens (New York), with their Top 10 Harlem Hit Parade (R&B) hit “Ol’ Man River” in 1947, followed by the Orioles (from Baltimore) with their #1 R&B hit “It’s Too Soon to Know” in 1948. Clyde McPhatter, lead singer with the Dominoes (“Have Mercy Baby,” 1952) before moving on to a solo career, is often credited with introducing gospel-style singing into R&B, preceding Ray Charles by a few years. The name doo wop comes from a phrase that was used by the background singers. Early examples, from the mid-1950s, include the Clovers (“Good Lovin’,” 1953); the Drifters (“Let the Boogie Woogie Roll,” 1953, not released until 1960); the Turbans (“When You Dance,” 1955, R&B #3, pop #33); and a song called “Do Wop” by the De Villes (1958).

Women vocalists, including Dinah Washington (the most commercially successful), Ruth Brown, LaVern Baker, and Etta James, would have a major and defining presence in R&B in the 1950s (see figure 17). They would occasionally cross over to the pop charts (which expanded to a hundred slots beginning 1955), gaining a greater audience, but reaching the pop Top 40 was much more difficult. For example, Dinah Washington placed forty-seven songs in the R&B charts between 1944 and 1961, thirty-five of which rose to the R&B Top 10; after a single pop crossover in 1950, she finally began crossing over to the pop charts in 1959, placing twenty-one songs (in 1959–63), seven of which reached the pop Top 40. Ruth Brown placed twenty-four songs in the R&B charts between 1949 and 1960, twenty-one of which rose to the R&B Top 10; she too, did not cross over until the late 1950s, placing seven songs (1957–62), two of which reached the pop Top 40.

Ruth Brown’s records sold so well that she is credited with keeping her record label, Atlantic, afloat in the early 1950s. But with twenty-one Top 10 R&B hits and only two hitting the pop Top 40, one can get some sense of the frustrations of R&B artists in the 1950s, especially in the face of bland cover versions by white singers reaching larger audiences. Eventually learning that she was not receiving her share of royalties, Brown enlisted an attorney and testified before Congress at a federal racketeering law hearing in 1986, putting some pressure on Atlantic; her activism had a major impact for her peers. Atlantic Records settled with Brown and many other artists from her era, and as a direct result of her actions the Rhythm and Blues Foundation (2019) was established in 1988 to provide financial assistance, educational outreach, and performance opportunities, seeded by a $1.5 million grant from Atlantic cofounder Ahmet Ertegun. Brown’s (1996) autobiography provides a vivid firsthand account of the R&B generation of the 1950s.

R&B Music and Society

In his book on R&B in the 1950s and 1960s, Brian Ward (1998) suggests significant parallels between the concurrent historical developments of the civil rights movement and rhythm and blues. His starting point was 1954: the Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision (separate public school facilities for black and white children were inherently unequal) in May and the Chords’ “Sh-Boom” crossing over to the pop charts a few months later in July. From about 1956 to 1963 there was a mood of optimism for integration reflected in crossover success and black admiration for some of the white pop of the era.

Ward lays out three premises of his book: (1) both production and consumption patterns are important in understanding R&B (the music industry does not just initiate and sustain trends that do not have relevance for its audience); (2) blacks are not just passive consumers—by actively purchasing recordings, going to concerts and clubs, and choosing to listen to various radio stations they can impact musical production; and (3) Americans are acculturated into attributing certain musical techniques and devices to blacks and to whites. These techniques are generally agreed-on codes, clearly recognized by some adult whites, for example, who initially objected to rock and roll, and by some blacks in the later 1960s who wished to assert less assimilated identities.

R&B of the 1950s–60s challenges notions of authenticity or purity of earlier styles, such as blues and gospel, which were also commercial enterprises, perhaps more removed from the pressures of mass media but still commodities packaged as recordings. Commercial success could indicate a special kind of relevancy to African Americans, similar to what less mediated blues and gospel might have offered in earlier decades. Furthermore, African American music has long been in a mutually engaging relationship with other musical influences around it. Reducing it to a “pure” style (or an inborn essence, sometimes critiqued as racial essentialism) can devalue the breadth of vision and syncretic nature of African American culture.

Until the late 1960s many blacks may have believed, as Ward notes, that white interest in R&B would lead to increased racial understanding. But admiration for black music did not necessarily challenge white stereotypes about blacks, and indeed it could also serve to reinforce them. Characterizations such as physical, passionate, ecstatic, emotional, and sexually liberated could serve both to praise and to stereotype black music. While white audiences with little real-world exposure to African American culture might take these as defining characteristics of African American music and culture, blacks would be less susceptible to consider these as the sum total of a much more rich and diverse existence (e.g., jazz may contain all of this and more: restraint, understatement, technical sophistication, intellectual experiment, and exploration). In general, through the early 1960s black entrepreneurs and performers (with the exception of some in the jazz world) were reluctant to get publicly involved in civil rights causes or to address such issues in their music for fear of limiting their commercial acceptance and opportunities. That would soon change.⁸

GOSPEL

African American gospel music has provided a pervasive influence on R&B, and consequently on rock and roll, primarily in the form of vocal and bodily expression. This is in contrast to blues, which has additionally influenced musical forms, guitar-playing styles, and lyric content (as well as vocal styles). As part of a more racially segregated religious experience, and one that became increasingly vital in the 1930s–1950s, gospel had a strong and direct impact on African Americans growing up in those decades, right when country and classic blues were falling out of favor. Compared to the more publicly visible secular blues, gospel remained relatively hidden from the view of whites.

It is the rule rather than exception for black vocalists to credit the formative impact of early church and gospel music experience on their later careers. B. B. King sang with a gospel quartet about 1946, before moving on to become one of the great blues electric guitarists and vocalists. Soul pioneer Ray Charles sang spirituals since he was three, sang with gospel quartets later in school, and eventually took gospel lines and turned them into secular songs: “Nothing was more familiar to me, nothing more natural [than spirituals and gospel]” (Charles and Ritz 1978: 149). Little Richard sang with the Penniman singers and toured churches; his grandfather and uncle were preachers, and he went to Baptist, AME, and Holiness churches. James Brown went to a lot of churches as a child, taking note of charismatic preachers: “I’m sure a lot of my stage show came out of the church” (1986: 18). Ruth Brown’s formative vocal experiences were in the church, and Clyde McPhatter adapted the style of women gospel singers for the Dominoes and his later solo career. Sam Cooke was a gospel star with the Soul Stirrers before leaving them to help establish the genre that came to be called soul in the late 1950s. And perhaps most famously, Aretha Franklin’s father, Rev. C. L. Franklin, was a nationally known Baptist minister, due in part to his sermons released on disc; gospel greats James Cleveland and Clara Ward were important influences on Aretha, and she toured early on with gospel choirs. She boldly went back to her roots in her acclaimed double-LP Amazing Grace, recorded in 1972 with Rev. James Cleveland and his gospel choir at the height of her initial reign as Queen of Soul. Perhaps one key to Elvis Presley’s success in adapting African American musical styles was that he grew up going to a Pentecostal church.

Gospel music in black communities developed in urban areas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries out of slave-era spirituals, which were communal religious songs. In the 1890s alternatives to Baptist and Methodist churches arose, with denominations such as Holiness, Pentecostal, Church of God in Christ, and Sanctified. Pentecostal churches arose in the first decade of the twentieth century from the interracial Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles, led by an African American preacher. The following decade whites had formed their own Pentecostal denomination, the Assemblies of God (the church that Elvis belonged to). They all featured ecstatic singing and dancing, where congregants often became possessed by the Holy Spirit. They were the first black churches to encourage the use of musical instruments in church, following Psalm 150: “Praise him with the sound of the trumpet … psaltery and harp … timbrel [tambourine] and dance … stringed instruments and organs … loud cymbals.”⁹

The gospel music world is marked by composers, vocal soloists (both men and women), and vocal groups. Methodist minister Charles Albert Tindley (1851–1933) was the first major black gospel composer, with classics such as “I’ll Overcome Some Day” (1901) and “Stand by Me” (1905). Thomas A. Dorsey (1899–1993), son of a Baptist minister, initially played blues piano (as “Georgia Tom”) with Ma Rainey in the 1910s and 1920s, and he was a prolific blues composer: “In the early 1920s I coined the words ‘gospel songs’ after listening to a group of five people one Sunday morning on the far south side of Chicago. This was the first I heard of a gospel choir. There were no gospel songs then, we called them evangelistic songs” (qtd. in Heilbut 2002: 27). From 1929 on he committed himself solely to gospel music, and his music began to flourish. In 1932 he and Sallie Martin (1895–1988), the first of the great women gospel singers, founded the Gospel Singers Convention. Throughout the 1930s she and Dorsey set up the first gospel choruses in many of the major black communities of the South and Midwest. In 1932 Dorsey was appointed choral director of Pilgrim Baptist Church (with three thousand seats) in Chicago, where he stayed for forty years. That same year he composed “Precious Lord,” moved by the death of his wife and child. His music was also popular with white southerners, and by 1939 his music was published in anthologies by white publishers of gospel music. His adaptation of the spiritual “We Shall Walk through the Valley in Peace” later became a hit when Elvis Presley recorded it.

Sister Rosetta Tharpe (1915–73) was a pioneering guitarist and singer in the gospel field (G. Wald 2007; Csaky 2011-v). Born in Arkansas, she grew up in the sanctified Church of God in Christ with her mother, who was a singer and mandolin player. Her family moved to Chicago in the mid-1920s, where her career as a gospel performer and guitarist took off. She signed with Decca Records in 1938 and her recording “Rock Me” that year had a major impact on the rise of the gospel-record industry as well as on the first generation of rock and rollers. Little Richard, who performed with her once when he was a boy, has credited her with inspiring him, as have many others. She performed in the groundbreaking 1938 “Spirituals to Swing” concert in Carnegie Hall and became known for bringing gospel music to secular audiences. She reached the Harlem Hit Parade Top 10 chart with “Strange Things Happening Every Day” (#2) in 1945. Filmed performances from folk and blues festivals in the 1960s of her playing electric guitar and fronting choirs (“Down by the Riverside,” “Didn’t It Rain,” “Up above my Head”) give some sense of her power and excitement. A U.S. Postal Service stamp was issued in her honor in 1998.

Mahalia Jackson (1911–72), the most beloved of all gospel singers, was born and raised in New Orleans into a devout Baptist family. Her early influences were the classic hymns composed by Isaac Watts in eighteenth-century England, Bessie Smith, jazz, and the Sanctified Church (but she remained Baptist). She moved to Chicago in 1927, made her first records in 1937 with Decca, and joined Thomas Dorsey in the early 1940s. In 1946 she signed a contract with Apollo Records and her third record with them, “Move on Up a Little Higher” (1948), sold over a million copies. In 1954 she signed with Columbia Records, for whom she recorded another version of the song (her piano accompanist was Mildred Falls). The high profile of black gospel music can be seen in the career of Mahalia Jackson, who sang the national anthem at the 1961 Kennedy inaugural celebration and “Precious Lord” at the funeral of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who loved her music. Aretha Franklin sang “Precious Lord” at Jackson’s funeral in Chicago in 1972.¹⁰

COUNTRY

The prehistory of country music, going back a few centuries to folk traditions of the rural southern United States, provides one of the most vivid examples of the symbiotic cultural relationship between Anglo-Americans (those coming from the British Isles) and African Americans. The banjo was an invention of enslaved Africans in the Caribbean, with early forms used on plantations in North America by the eighteenth century (Conway 1995). In the early nineteenth century, whites began to play it, adding technical innovations to its construction. In the 1830s it was used in small minstrel troupes in a genre in which whites blackened their faces with burned cork and caricatured blacks by singing in exaggerated dialect. African Americans eventually dropped the banjo in favor of the guitar in the latter half of the nineteenth century, although a few have maintained banjo traditions to this day.

The fiddle, the other characteristic instrument in country music, was brought over from Europe, with an especially strong tradition from Scots-Irish immigrants (Ritchie and Orr 2016). While whites had picked up the banjo from blacks, the complementary process occurred with the fiddle, with some African Americans achieving a degree of local fame for their ability on the instrument. The fiddle, banjo, and guitar form the nucleus of string-band traditions (called old-time music) that were central in the rise of country music in the 1920s.

The first commercial recordings featured virtuoso fiddle-contest champions. Eck Robertson (1887–1975), born in Arkansas and raised in Texas, recorded four fiddle duets with Henry C. Gilliland (1845–1924), who was born in Missouri and grew up in Texas, for Victor in New York in June 1922.¹¹ Robertson recorded solo (and with piano) the following day. Victor released two records from those sessions: “Sally Gooden” (Robertson solo) and “Arkansas Traveler” (duet with Gilliland) in 1922, and “Ragtime Annie” (Robertson solo) and “Turkey in the Straw” (duet with Gilliland) in 1923. They were the first country music recordings.

“Sally Gooden” is replete with a short-long rhythmic pair called a Scotch snap (at the end of every two bars), historically associated with Scottish language and fiddle music, which has filtered into a variety of American musics. Fiddlin’ John Carson (1868–1949), from Georgia, recorded “The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane” and “The Old Hen Cackled and the Rooster’s Going to Crow” on portable recording equipment in Atlanta brought by Ralph Peer of Okeh Records, who was scouting talent in 1923. Carson played solo fiddle and sang along. He had played the previous year on Atlanta’s WSB radio, probably the first station to broadcast country music, but his success in this untapped market was extraordinary. The initial run of five hundred copies quickly sold out, and he would record over 120 sides for Okeh between 1923 and 1931 (and 24 more for Victor in 1934), opening up a new market that was initially called hillbilly in 1925. Billboard charts later used the term folk until it was replaced by country and western in 1949.

An important landmark in country music came when Ralph Peer visited Bristol, Tennessee, in 1927 to record local talent for Victor. The discovery there of singer-guitarist Jimmie Rodgers (1897–1933), born in Mississippi, and the Carter Family (husband, A. P.; wife, Sara, and A. P.’s sister-in-law, Maybelle), from Virginia, yielded the first two major stars of country music, representing opposite poles of the spectrum (the road-wise traveler and the domestic family). The Carters recorded over 300 sides for several record labels from 1927 to 1941, and Maybelle’s daughter June would marry Johnny Cash, a major star who started out on Sun Records in 1955. Rodgers’s career was meteoric, recording over a hundred songs for Victor and selling more than most of Victor’s pop artists, but brief due to his early death just six years after his recording debut.

In the 1930s country expanded to include the westernmost southern states (Oklahoma, Louisiana, Texas) and California, which drew in part on cowboy imagery and songs. The most successful artist was Gene Autry (1907–98) from northern Texas, who went to Hollywood in 1934 and made over ninety movies. Autry popularized the image of a cowboy who wielded both a gun and guitar. Honky-tonks, drinking establishments that featured music, dancing, and jukeboxes, became an important part of the landscape in the 1930s, especially in Texas, where oil attracted workers with cash to spend. Southwestern bands electrified in this environment and developed a style that after World War II became known as western swing.

In 1939 Nashville’s radio show Grand Ole Opry on WSM was picked up for national broadcast by NBC, making it the most visible face of country music. When Decca began recording country musicians there starting in 1946, Nashville would soon become the center of the country music world. Just after the war a virtuosic uptempo instrumental ensemble style called bluegrass surfaced in the hands of Kentucky mandolinist Bill Monroe and his band, including future stars Earl Scruggs (1924–2014) from North Carolina on banjo and Lester Flatt 1914–79) from Tennessee on guitar, and a fiddle and bass player. Their recordings from 1946 to 1947 for Columbia defined the style. Monroe’s “Blue Moon of Kentucky” was covered by Elvis Presley on his very first recording for Sun Records in 1954.

In the late 1940s Hank Williams (1923–53), from Alabama, emerged in a style known as honky tonk (named after the bars where the music was played). Williams’s recording career was short (similar to Rodgers), due to his early death at age twenty-nine in January 1953, but he had an enormous impact on the generations after him. Williams began recording professionally (on the Sterling label) in December 1946, and after recording eight songs (including “Honky Tonkin’”), he moved to MGM in April 1947, when he recorded “Move It on Over,” his first recording to register on a Billboard chart (country #4). The same session also yielded “I Saw the Light.” He recorded another version of “Honky Tonkin’” for MGM in November 1947 and remained with the label for the rest of his life, placing a total of thirty-eight records on the country charts through the year he died, all recorded in Nashville. He had seven #1 country hits during his lifetime, including “Hey Good Lookin’” (1951) and “Jambalaya” (1952), and another four the year he died, including “Your Cheatin’ Heart” (1953). He crossed over into the pop charts only twice in his lifetime (“Lovesick Blues” and “Jambalaya”). After joining the Shreveport radio show Louisiana Hayride in 1948 and Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry in 1949, Williams had become, by virtue of his singing and songwriting abilities, the most famous and most emulated country singer, even though he rarely broke into the pop charts. He averaged earnings of $200,000 per year from recordings and appearances the last few years of his life.

Williams’s clever songwriting was similar in some ways to that of Chuck Berry, the master craftsman of early rock and roll a decade later. “Move It on Over” (1947) and Berry’s “Roll over Beethoven” (1955) both insert a verse-chorus structure into a single twelve-bar blues form: “Move it” has a four-bar verse and eight-bar chorus, and “Roll Over” has an eight-bar verse and four-bar chorus. Each time Williams sings the chorus, he slightly alters it: move, get, scoot, ease, drag, pack, tote, scratch, shake, slide, sneak, shove, and sweep, keeping listeners on their toes. The all-string ensemble, including a fiddle, and solos on the electric guitar and steel guitar exude a signature Nashville sound.

Kitty Wells (1919–2012), from Nashville, was country music’s first woman star, initially registering on the charts with the answer song “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels” (country #1) in 1952. Between 1952 and 1965 she placed fifty-nine singles on the country charts, thirty-four of which hit the Top 10. After that she was still placing on the country charts, but only occasionally breaking into the country Top 40. Wells crossed over into the pop charts even less then Hank Williams, just once, in 1958 (“Jealousy”). Wells was succeeded by Patsy Cline and Loretta Lynn. Beginning with “Walkin’ After Midnight,” which hit country #2 in 1957, Cline (1932–63), from Virginia, had eight Top 10 country hits between 1957 and 1963, two of which reached #1. Sixteen of her songs crossed over into the pop charts in this same period, with four breaching the Top 20. Loretta Lynn (1932–), from Kentucky, debuted in 1960 with her single “I’m a Honky Tonk Girl” hitting #14 on the country chart. Lynn had an extraordinary run of more than sixty-five Top 40 country hits through the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, with sixteen at #1. She rarely crossed over into the pop charts (just five times), never breaching the Top 40.

Elvis Presley’s recording career started out on the country charts. His first five releases, on Sun Records in Memphis, moved up the regional country charts, with his fifth record (“I Forgot to Remember to Forget” and “Mystery Train”) hitting #1 and #10 on the national country chart in early 1956. At that point, after he had moved to RCA Victor, he immediately hit the top of the pop (and country) charts. Elvis placed sixty-seven songs on the country charts in his lifetime, ten of which hit #1 (almost all between 1955 and 1957).¹²

See figure 11. “High Water Everywhere, Part 1,” by Charley Patton

See figure 12. Early blues singers

See figure 13. Twelve-bar blues form

See figure 14. Some key independent record labels, 1940s–1950s (date founded and artist’s debut recording)

See figure 15. “Choo Choo Ch-Boogie,” by Louis Jordan

See figure 16. Electric blues guitarists, 1950s–1960s (R&B Top 10 single hits and pop LP debuts)

See figure 17. Women R&B singers, 1940s–1950s (R&B Top 10 single hits and crossovers to pop Top 40)

1 A plaque commemorating the location is embedded in the sidewalk on West Twenty-Eighth Street near the southeast corner with Broadway.

2 For more on Tin Pan Alley and Broadway, see Hamm (1979), Gottlieb (2004), Gilbert (2015), Yagoda (2015), Furia and Patterson (2016), Mathieu (2017), Kantor (2004-v), and savetinpanalley.org.

3 See also Waters interviewed in Murray (1977) and Lomax and Work’s Library of Congress recordings of Muddy Waters (1993-d) and Son House (2013-d).

4 For more on blues, see Titon (1977), Palmer (1981), Barlow (1989), Santelli (1993), the documentary by Dall (1989-v), and a rare film performance of Bessie Smith (Murphy 1929-v).

5 The term rhythm and blues appeared sporadically in Billboard in 1947 (Csida 1947: 22; Ackerman 1947) and was used as a style heading in an RCA Victor ad in early 1949.

6 Jordan’s short film Caldonia (Crouch 1945-v) includes several performances.

7 Seven-year-old child prodigy Frankie “Sugar Chile” Robinson performing Louis Jordan’s “Caldonia” in the 1946 Hollywood film No Leave, No Love provides an extraordinary example of a boogie woogie bass in the left hand, given his age.

8 For more on R&B, see A. Shaw (1978), George (1988), Gillett (1996), and Mahon (2011). See Kohn (1955-v) for performances by Dinah Washington, Ruth Brown, and Nat King Cole and Price (1956-v) for LaVern Baker.

9 King James version.

10 For more on gospel music, see Reagon (1992), Schwerin (1992), and Boyer (1995).

11 This section on country music is based on Malone and Neal (2010).

12 For more on country music, see Crichton (1938), Green (1965), Peterson (1997), Russell (2010), Pecknold (2013), Hubbs (2014), Stimeling (2014), and H. Gleason (2017).