Last week we looked at the cauldron that American Pop Music springs from: the sounds and songs, the folk tales and melodies, the emotions and the longings brought to the North American shores by wave after wave of immigrants. Many of these people came searching for a new life, broader horizons and vistas, more promising futures. Others, of course, had no choice in the matter. Over two millions Africans were brought across the ocean to work the fields and farms as slaves, bought and paid for. This friction and resentment will run as a steady chasm through American life culturally, politically, socially, spiritually from its earliest days to the present. Race is the elephant in the living room in America and has been both a source of shame and a source of pride. What is heartening for us, however, is the music that grows out of this experience.
This week, we look at the "baby steps" of the music we hear today. We get introduced to Stephan Foster, America's first real songwriter. His songs are still performed today and some, for example "Hard Times Come Around No More", have as much power as they did when they were first performed. His work is a part of our collective memory and I will venture a guess that each and everyone of us has heard a Stephan Foster song somewhere in our past. Unfortunately, most of his songs were written for minstrel shows, a misunderstood, though rightfully shameful, form of entertainment that sprung up mostly after the Civil War. Minstrel shows were a great deal more complicated than they would appear on the surface and you owe it to yourself to do a little research on them. The Internet is full of resources you can garner information from.
The following is a short clip from a series entitled "The Great American Song Book," which tells the history of American pop music through the use of movies clips from the 30s and 40s. It is enlightening, to a degree, but it is hard to look at the footage showing minstrel shows without thinking "What the hell were they thinking???"
Shortly after this period, in the American South, Ragtime gets invented and Ragtime will dominate popular music for decades. It was developed as a dance rhythm and spread across the country like a virus. Ironically, one of the most popular dances that emerged from this rhythm was "the Cakewalk," a dance that white Americans saw black people doing and quickly expropriated it. The irony is that blacks developed the dance as a way of making fun of how white people danced and the millions of whites dancing "The Cakewalk" had little idea of its origins. Sweet revenge in a way, eh? Here is another short clip from "The Great American Songbook".
Ragtime, with its infectious rhythms and jaunty syncopation caught on and became, for a short period, the most listened and danced to form of music in America. everyone wanted to learn how to play the complicated style and many families bought pianos, both regular and player pianos, just so they could enjoy the music at home. Here is a YouTube cartoon that illustrates the left and right hand syncopation.
Here is a YouTube clip i found that someone put together during the Obama race for President in 2008. At the time, America was struggling with whether it was ready or not for a black President. ironically, in some of the black communities, the question started to arise as to whether Obama was indeed "black enough." In the author of this clip's investigation what it means to be black in America, he came across the idea of minstrel shows and he has provided a wonderful little history of this fascinating but confusing part of American musical history.
Finally (because this must be as exhausting to read as it is to write . . .lol), here is another clip from "The Great American Song Book" that deals with Tin Pan Alley - a form of music that without which, Michael Buble would be just another hapless Canadian singer performing as the opening act at Casino Rama.
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