Music of the United States

• 1. Introduction

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  Music of the United States has never belonged to a single people or a single sound. Its roots reach into West Africa, into the British Isles, into Latin America and the Middle East, and into the lands of Indigenous peoples who were playing music here long before any settler arrived. What makes American music unusual is not simply its variety. It is the way so many distinct traditions collided, borrowed from each other, and fused into something that no single culture could have produced alone. How did enslaved people shape the sound of a country that enslaved them? Why did a war between Americans become the moment the country first developed a recognizable musical voice? And how did a handful of African American musicians from New Orleans change what the entire world listens to? Those are the questions this documentary will follow.

• 2. Before the Colonies

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  Native Americans played the first music in what is now the United States, and their traditions share certain qualities across hundreds of distinct tribal cultures. Near-universal traits include the absence of harmony and polyphony, the use of vocables rather than words, and descending melodic figures. Instruments centered on the flute and a wide range of percussion: drums, rattles, and shakers. These were not decorative elements. Most Native American traditional music was spiritual in nature, bound to ceremony and community.

  After European and African contact, Native American music began absorbing new influences, developing fusions that combined Indigenous forms with European folk dances and Tejano music. The most publicly visible expression of this living tradition today is the pow wow, a pan-tribal gathering at which traditionally styled dances and music are performed. These gatherings draw from many nations, presenting a shared ceremonial space that itself reflects the long history of contact and exchange between tribal cultures.

• 3. The African Foundation

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  Beginning in the 17th century, enslaved people from West Africa arrived in the Americas carrying musical traditions that would permanently reshape every corner of American sound. They came from hundreds of distinct tribes, yet their shared musical practices included call-and-response vocals, syncopated beats, shifting accents, and complexly rhythmic music. Music scholar John Warthen Struble has argued that these traditions, brought together under the brutal conditions of slavery, developed into something new precisely because people from such varied backgrounds were forced into close proximity.

  The first slaves in the United States sang work songs, field hollers, and, following Christianization, hymns. In the 19th century, when a Great Awakening of religious fervor spread through the South, Protestant hymns written by New England preachers became the soundtrack of camp meetings. When Black Americans began adapting those hymns, the result was the Negro spiritual. The Fisk Jubilee Singers, formed at Fisk University in 1871, became a pioneering group that carried spirituals out of the South and across the country. From this soil of spiritual songs, work songs, and field hollers, three of America's most consequential genres took root: blues, jazz, and gospel.

  Blues emerged in the rural South in the first decade of the 20th century. Its defining feature is the blue scale, with a flatted or indeterminate third, along with typically lamenting lyrics. Although both of these elements had existed in African American folk music before the 20th century, the codified form of modern blues did not crystallize until that early period. Classic female blues singers like Bessie Smith brought the genre to wider audiences in the 1920s. Record companies, responding to that interest, launched what they called race music, targeted at African American audiences. From that moment, the delta blues musician Robert Johnson and Piedmont blues musician Blind Willie McTell became among the most legendary figures the genre produced.

• 4. War as Crucible

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  Struble identified the ballads of the Civil War as the first American folk music with features that could be considered unique to America: the first genuinely American-sounding music, distinct from any regional style derived from another country. That claim deserves attention. Before the Civil War, American music developed largely in regional isolation. The conflict forced soldiers from across the country into the same army units, and they traded tunes, instruments, and techniques at a rapid pace. The burgeoning railroad industry and other new technologies accelerated this exchange.

  Out of that collision came some of the era's most durable songs. "Dixie," written by Daniel Decatur Emmett and originally titled "Dixie's Land," was made for the closing of a minstrel show. It spread first to New Orleans, where it was published and became, as contemporaries described it, one of the great song successes of the pre-Civil War period. Music author David Ewen described the amateur ensembles of the Civil War era as combining the depth and drama of the classics with undemanding technique, using English lyrics despite critics who called English an unsingable language. In a way, Ewen wrote, these musicians were part of an entire awakening of America, a period when painters, writers, and serious composers addressed specifically American themes. The period that followed saw what observers called a general flowering of American art, literature, and music. The era's amateur musical culture can be seen as the birth of American popular music.

• 5. Jazz and Swing

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  Jazz arose from the city of New Orleans, populated by Cajuns and Black Creoles who combined French-Canadian culture with their own musical styles in the 19th century. Large Creole bands that played for funerals and parades became a foundational source for early jazz, which then spread from New Orleans to Chicago and other northern urban centers. Early jazz is closely related to ragtime, from which it can be distinguished by the use of more intricate rhythmic improvisation. The earliest jazz bands adopted bent and blue notes and instrumental growls and smears not common in European music.

  Louis Armstrong became one of the first popular stars of jazz and a major force in its development, alongside his friend and collaborator, pianist Earl Hines. Armstrong popularized scat singing, an improvisational vocal technique using nonsensical syllables called vocables. Armstrong and Hines were also influential in the rise of swing, a kind of pop big band jazz. Swing is characterized by a strong rhythm section, typically double bass and drums, medium to fast tempos, and the swung note. It is primarily a fusion of 1930s jazz with elements of blues and Tin Pan Alley, and it became a major part of African American dance culture, accompanied by a popular dance of the same name.

  Swing used larger bands than earlier jazz, which led bandleaders to arrange material more tightly, discouraging the improvisation that had previously defined the form. Jazz continued evolving through the middle of the 20th century into bebop, a style developed in the early and mid-1940s, characterized by fast tempos, improvisation based on harmonic structure rather than melody, and use of the flatted fifth. Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, who came up in small jazz clubs in New York City, were among its key innovators. Later crossover stars like Miles Davis kept jazz visible in the broader popular music landscape.

• 6. Country and Its Discontents

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  Country music is primarily a fusion of African American blues and spirituals with Appalachian folk music, adapted for popular audiences and first commercially recorded in 1927, when music talent scout Ralph Peer recorded Jimmie Rodgers and The Carter Family. The genre's roots lie in rural Southern folk music that was primarily Irish and British in origin, with African and continental European elements absorbed over time. The earliest country instrumentation revolved around the European-derived fiddle and the African-derived banjo, with the guitar added later. String instruments like the ukulele and steel guitar entered the mix through the popularity of Hawaiian musical groups in the early 20th century.

  After World War II, the most influential country musician of the era was Hank Williams, a bluesy country singer from Alabama, regarded by many as one of country music's greatest songwriters, viewed as a folk poet with a honky-tonk swagger and working-class sympathies. As the decade progressed, producer Chet Atkins developed what became known as the Nashville sound by stripping out hillbilly elements and introducing smooth instrumentation and advanced production techniques, including strings and vocal choirs. This polish alienated traditionalist fans and performers, giving rise to regional responses like the Bakersfield sound, developed in the mid to late 1950s by performers like Wynn Stewart and Buck Owens, who incorporated Western swing and rock elements. In the early 1970s, Merle Haggard joined singer-songwriters Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings in outlaw country, a rock-oriented movement whose lyrics focused on the criminal antics of its performers. By the 1980s, the country charts were dominated by pop singers, though performers like Dwight Yoakam led a honky-tonk revival, and alternative country acts like Uncle Tupelo pushed back against mainstream polish.

• 7. Rhythm, Soul, and Pop

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  R&B arose in the 1930s and 1940s out of large rhythm units backing screaming blues singers. Record companies initially resisted it, believing its suggestive lyrics and driving rhythms would not appeal to most audiences, especially middle-class white listeners. Bandleader Louis Jordan innovated the early R&B sound with a small horn section and prominent rhythm instrumentation, and by the end of the 1940s had achieved several hits. Berry Gordy founded Motown Records in 1959 in Detroit, Michigan, and built a company whose explicit goal was to transcend the R&B market. Music journalist Jerry Wexler once described what Motown achieved as taking black music and beaming it directly to the white American teenager.

  Soul music combined rhythm and blues with gospel, beginning in the late 1950s. The 1950s recordings of Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, and James Brown are commonly considered its origins. Sam Cooke's "A Change Is Gonna Come," released in 1964, became an anthem of the American Civil Rights Movement. According to AllMusic, James Brown was critical to two revolutions in black American music: turning R&B into soul and then turning soul into funk. By the late 1960s, Atlantic recording artist Aretha Franklin had emerged as the most popular female soul star in the country.

  Michael Jackson's Thriller saw unprecedented success, selling over 10 million copies in the United States alone. By 1984, the album had captured over 140 gold and platinum awards and was recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records as the best-selling record of all time. MTV's broadcast of "Billie Jean" was the first for any Black artist on the channel, breaking what observers called the color barrier of pop music on the small screen. Whitney Houston's 1992 hit soundtrack The Bodyguard spent 20 weeks at the top of the Billboard Hot 200, sold over 45 million copies worldwide, and remains the best-selling soundtrack album of all time. "I Will Always Love You," from that soundtrack, became the best-selling physical single by a female act of all time, with sales of over 20 million copies worldwide.

• 8. Hip-Hop's Rise

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  Hip-hop arose in the early 1970s in the Bronx, New York City. Jamaican immigrant DJ Kool Herc is widely regarded as its progenitor; he brought from Jamaica the practice of toasting over the rhythms of popular songs. Over time, DJs began isolating the percussion break in songs, producing a repeated beat that emcees rapped over. MC Sha-Rock is considered the pioneer of female hip-hop culture. She started her career as a break-dancer in the Bronx and became, as she has been called, hip-hop culture's first female emcee. She was a former member of the Funky 4+1 More and engaged in MC rhyming battles with groups including Grandmaster Flash and the Furious 5.

  Gangsta rap emerged in the mid-1980s, with origins traceable to Philadelphia's Schoolly D and the West Coast's Ice-T. A distinctive West Coast scene produced the early 1990s G-funk sound, pairing gangsta rap lyrics with a thick sound built from 1970s funk samples. Its best-known proponents included Tupac Shakur, Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, and Snoop Dogg. The dominance of gangsta rap in mainstream hip-hop was supplanted in the late 2000s largely because of a sales competition between the simultaneous releases of Kanye West's Graduation and 50 Cent's Curtis. West outsold 50 Cent, selling nearly a million copies of Graduation in the first week alone. Industry observers remarked that West's victory proved that hip-hop did not have to conform to gangsta rap conventions to achieve commercial success. That opening paved the way for artists including Drake, Kendrick Lamar, and J. Cole. Lamar became the first musician outside the classical and jazz genres to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music, which he received in 2018. Cardi B's first studio album, Invasion of Privacy, debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 in 2018 and made her the only woman to win the Grammy Award for Best Rap Album as a solo artist.