Four Hundred Years of American Music

The Musicians (Nicolas De Staël, 1952)

Part One

I just came back from a week in New York City. It was once my home for three full years. I lived and worked there and, having partaken of part of its magic, I would like to think that my work at the Alan Lomax Archive, in some small way, may have contributed to it.

The greater New York area has a population of more than eighteen million people. People from every state in the union live there, as do communities from every nation on the face of the earth. Each one of these communities brought their music with them.

At the same time, the greater New York area also comprises Americans of every race, creed and color who are experts in the performance of American musical repertoires, from the time of Henry Hudson’s visit to Manhattan Island in 1609, until the present day.

Let’s go for a walk in Central Park where I will take you on an imaginative tour of American music that can still be heard on the streets of this fine city and in its abundant musical archives.

This musical safari will be divided into two sections: foundational repertoires and their hybrid musical offshoots. This is based on the assumption, supported by scholars such as Bruno Nettl and the late Alan Lomax, that the distinctive nature of American music has been and continues to be based on a creative clash of cultures; Native American, European, African, Spanish and now Asian and international.

Music of Many Spirits: The Thunderbird Dancers

In 1609 Henry Hudson met the indigenous American inhabitants of Manhattan, the Manhattoe Indians. Later this group of Amerindians sold Manhattan Island to the Dutch for 24 dollars in beads. And so, within a short period of time, the Manhattoes disappeared from history as immigrants from Europe and Africa made Manhattan island their home.

However, Indians have never really left Manhattan. In fact, in 1933, during the height of the Depression, an American Indian chief ironically requested from the city administration an Indian reservation at Inwood Park to show Euro Americans how they could live in closer harmony with nature. Native Americans have been making New York their home for centuries. It is just that at times, they have been invisible to the wider population.

This is not the case at the American Indian House Serving the Northeast and New York Metro Area which hosts an annual Pow Wow at a park near Harlem and which highlights the talents of Amerindian singers, dancers and composers, including ensembles like the Thunderbird American Indian Dancers, created by Louis Mohfsie, or other groups like the Little Eagles.

Closer to God: The Sacred Hymns of the English

The hymns that were brought to America’s Atlantic shores by the early English settlers were largely low church, the hymns sung and adopted by nonconformists, such as the Puritans, whose Bay Psalme Book was the first book to be designed and printed in the English speaking new world (a copy of which was sold at Sotheby’s in Manhattan for 14 million dollars.) The notion that there was no set canon for church music unleashed a fair amount of creativity in church music, culminating in the splendid and distinctly compositions of William Billings, America’s first indigenous choral composer.

The hymn tradition inherited and transformed by Billings soon went south, brought by itinerant singing masters who taught a sol fa system of only four notes, unique to the English and which spread throughout the 13 colonies. From this grew a hymnal called the Sacred Harp, the core of the shape note singing movement, which in the south was often sung for pleasure or, for spiritual inspiration outside of formal church services.

Sacred Harp singing survived in the deep south and was recorded and brought to the wider public’s attention by Alan Lomax after WWII. Now New York now has several Sacred Harp groups that sing from the hymnal a few times each month, at various locations around town. Visitors are welcome.

The Devil Made Me Do It: The Semi-Pagan Nature of American Ballads

When the English, Scots, Irish and Scots/Irish of England’s borderlands came to the New World, they brought with them a sung ballad tradition that went back to the English middle ages if not earlier, perhaps to a time before the people of the British Isles adopted Christianity. And indeed, when one looks at the stories and themes expressed in these ballads, they are as earthly as the Puritan hymns are celestial. And that is why although there are ballads with religious themes, so many of them dwell on themes of the supernatural, tragedy, love, legend, history, humor and with the “Broadside ballads” issues of a political and historical nature.

Ballads are a kind of verse that often rhymes, and which constitutes a narrative story with beginning, middle and end. In that sense they are dramatic recreations of some real or imagined event, captured in song and verse. From the point of view of song lyrics, they are often detailed and complex characterized by repeating choruses.

Alan Lomax argued that they correlate with an advanced agricultural/industrializing society. He also argued that when British ballads crossed the Atlantic, they became more egalitarian, in keeping with American political values.

Ballads were often used to accompany dances and so the verse and the refrain often correlate with dance movements. One of the most popular is the four-line stanza, but there are others as well. Very often the rhyming scheme is for every other line.

Ballads vary over time and space and there is never one “proper” version. There are often hundreds. The Anglo-American ballad, Barbara Ellen, has more than 1200 versions and has been covered by hundreds of both traditional and contemporary ballad singers, such as the late Pete Seeger. And ballads continue to provide the format for most folk songs, rock songs, and Country and Western.

But the ballad tradition was not a one-off thing. The Irish have been emigrating in waves to the New York since the civil war, and they have maintained a living pub culture of song and instrumental “seshuns” where the ballad tradition lives on in the oral traditions of the heart of the city.

From the time of its Dutch founders, New York City has always been home to the rich and the powerful. During colonial times, New York was one of the key ports in the trade to Europe and quickly developed an elite aristocracy based on business success, and whose tastes were formed by the royalty of Europe whom they emulated in many ways.

The most colorful founder of the classical musical tradition in New York was Lorenzo Da Ponte. He was born in Venice 1749 and died in New York in August 1838. A poet and a libretto writer, he composed librettos for 28 operas by 11 composers including Mozart’s Don Giovanni, The Marriage of Figaro and Cosi fan Tutte. Although he was born Jewish, he converted to the Catholic faith. In 1828, at the age of 79, he became an American citizen. At the age of 84, he founded the New York Opera, which survived for only two years. However, it provided stimulus and inspiration for the rise of the New York Academy of Music and the New York Metropolitan Opera.

Since Da Ponte’s time, New York has maintained itself as a center for European classical music, with a range of institutions, performers and concerts the equal to London, Paris, and Rome and with regards to Early Music, sometimes in advance of these cities. This imported musical tradition is best illustrated at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, and the Julliard School of Music as well as at the numerous music programs, conservatories and concert halls spread across Manhattan and the Boroughs.

Africa in the New World

We do not know what the music of the New World’s earliest African inhabitants sounded like, as there were no recordings made at the time and even fewer transcriptions. But there is written evidence that it was vibrant and diverse. In those areas where instruments were not forbidden by slave masters, such as in the Caribbean and South America, Afro American drumming, singing and dancing styles maintained traditions similar to their origins in Africa derived from the complex, often hierarchical musical cultures of Sub Saharan Africa, from where so many slaves were taken.

In the United States, musical instruments among slaves were banned, but African Americans were permitted to adopt European instruments of all kinds in South America, and were able to play them in West African style.

Since the United States changed its immigration laws in the 1960s, New York has become a magnet for West African master drummers and ensembles whose modern versions of traditional African music are as close as we can get to the source of the African American musical tradition.

Since African countries gained their independence more than 50 years ago, their exposure to African American influenced popular music has reinvigorated their own traditions producing the Afro Pop of Nigeria’s Fela Ransome Kuti and the Afro Cuban music of Franco, the late great superstar of Central Africa.

Part Two

American Repertoires

If you visit the Grammy Awards Musical Museum in Los Angeles, you will see a large table with an interactive surface. There, you will see an interactive digital mosaic of over 140 American musical repertoires, from Blue Grass to Rock and Roll, Texas Swing to Zydeco. Musicologists and music writers are continuously arguing about the names and boundaries of the almost exponential number of musical repertories that have emerged and continue to emerge in the United States. Indeed the quantity and the quality of these creative initiatives is staggering and has not stopped.

Not only has it not stopped but American music has influenced every other musical tradition in the world during the last 100 years from the Bluesy sounding Baglama playing of Turkey’s Orhan Gencebay, to the Polish and German jazz that was popular between the first and second world war. But in America every time a new repertoire or style erupts, you can be sure that it is some combination of the African and Anglo-American traditions, with a large dose of Spain, Western Classical music and among the Avant Garde, Native American soundscapes.

So, to answer the question where did all the ballads go? First of all, in late 19^th century rural America they went into ensembles called String Bands which played a combination of the old dances and fiddle music of the Scots Irish, tinged with the blues of the Piedmont and the Delta and which erupted in what we now call Blue Grass just after WWII.

When the ballad, string bands and bluegrass collided with the radio and TV broadcasting that began both before and after WWII, and these once rural providers and consumers of acoustic music went electric, we see in the Grand Ol Opry the birth of Country and Western. Some families either managed or catalyzed the traditions as we see with the Carter Family, who first sang popular versions of rural Appalachian songs and whose most famous member, June, ended up singing modern country and western with her husband, the late Johnny Cash.

And then, once all of this seemed to have been set in stone by the mid 1960s, the middle class college students of the north of the United States adopted the more pristine ballads and blues from the south, often recorded before WWII or even earlier, and made them their own, triggering the sixties folk revival which continues here and there across the United States and can be tracked on the Americana web site in Nashville.

From Field to Church to Concert Hall Jazz

Like the Anglo-American tradition, the African American tradition has both its secular and sacred domains, although from a musical point of view they often overlap and feed off each other. At the turn of the 20^th century, rural African Americans created the Blues. It started in Mississippi, went north to Chicago, jumped to England and then came back to white audiences during the 1960s. White Brits then rediscovered American blues men and then brought them back to younger American audience as was the case with Muddy Waters, a tractor driver who was first recorded and discovered by Alan Lomax.

Then there is African church music in all its diversity. The most noteworthy repertoire to emerge from the African American church is gospel singing, a form of religious music that is choral, rhythmic, collective and in many ways ecstatic when compared to its White Protestant counterparts. These two repertoires have also been part of the roots of Jazz, and the three streams provide the source for so much of new styles of African American pop music from soul to Hip Hop.

Finally there is Jazz, a form of blues-based improvisation that came from New Orleans and moved to New York. Heavily influenced by Creole musicians from Louisiana who were also masters of French opera, many argue that it is the modern classical music of the United States.

Theme Number Eight: The 19^th Century: Two Kinds of Popular MusicBlack Faced Minstrelsy

Although there was no broadcasting until the early 20^th century, during the 19^th century, America did produce different streams of popular music that emerged from the clash and hybridization of different musical styles. The two most popular were Parlor music (just think of Stephen Foster of ‘Camptown Races‘ fame) and Black Faced Minstrelsy and these two repertoires often overlapped.

As far as sources go, we have only written texts and printed music to go by, but a picture does emerge. In addition to the ongoing imports of rural ballads, African American church music and the imported classical tradition, with the rise of the middle classes in 19^th century America, Black Faced minstrelsy became one of the most popular forms of popular music entertainment, for despite slavery and despite Jim Crowe, after the Civil War there was enormous musical interchange between white and black Americans.

Black Faced minstrels were often white men dressed up as black men, who travelled with minstrel shows and in the wake of circuses and who performed an urbanized form of African American folk music, using that truly African American invention as their central instrument, the Banjo.

In retrospect it was a form of “acting out” anxieties about race and power and it died out just before WWII as Black Americans adopted it as well. It has been reviled and suppressed for some time because of the grotesque racism which permeated the art form but, recently, college educated African American musicians interested in the Black Banjo revival, have revived some of the repertoire. As one proponent of it told me, “There are some beautiful pieces to be rediscovered in minstrelsy, but some are so filled with bigotry that they should remain in the archives.”

American Popular Music and the Rise of Sheet Music

It is often thought that American popular music is a 20^th century phenomenon facilitated by the explosion of broadcasting, the move to the cities by many rural people and the resulting musical mix ups and mash ups that have created so many distinctive popular musical styles.

The truth of the matter is that American popular music developed in America’s cities during the nineteenth century. It was facilitated by the rise of sheet music and of course the emergent American musical theatre starting with the minstrel show, comic opera and its imports from Britain and Europe, and the rise of parlor music and songs among the middle classes. The two greatest exponents of this tradition were Stephen Foster whose songs are still sung today and who was the archetypal American song writer who mixed popular and traditional, black, and white styles with influence from the Western European classical tradition. At the higher level, we have virtuosos like Gottschalk who mixed African Creole, Latin and European rhythms and harmonies that foreshadowed the ragtime piano of Scott Joplin and the early New Orleans jazzmen.

Parlor music songwriters include composers such as Charles Harris and Anna Priscilla Risher. Some of the classic parlor songs include “Home, Sweet Home,” composed by Henry R. Bishop with lyrics by John Howard Payne, “The Old Arm Chair” by Henry Russell, “When the Swallows Homeward Fly” by Franz Abt, “Kathleen Mavourneen” composed by Frederick Nicholls Crouch with lyrics by Marion Crawford, “The Lost Chord” composed by Arthur Sullivan with lyrics by Adelaide A. Proctor, “Take Back the Heart” by Claribel (Mrs. Charlotte Barnard), “Oh Promise Me” by Reginald de Koven, “I Love You Truly,” “A Perfect Day” by Carrie Jacobs-Bond, and “The Rosary” by Ethelbert Nevin. This is the music of middle-class Victorian sentimentalism.

Parlor music drew upon classical, African, Anglo, Irish and church music. It was the ability of its writers and singers to draw on all of Americas imported traditions and contributed to a national music. It was as democratic music as the people who sang it if not even more so.

Theme Number Nine: “Give My Regards to Broadway” - The Triumph of American Popular Music Theater

It is almost possible to divide the rise and spread of American music theatre into five periods. The first is the from pre-independence to the Civil War. This was a period of the first native ballad operas and the rise of popular songwriters such as Stephen Foster. This was followed by the emergence of the Minstrel Show after the civil war and which died out before WWII.

Extravaganzas, vaudeville, the importation and imitation of Gilbert and Sullivan, and the rise of name acts were the order of the day.

The theme of all American musical theater is demotic, concerning the daily life or the fantasies of America’s rising classes. It is often humorous, more often sentimental and a theater of the “Everyman.” It depends as much on old spirituals, Irish ballads, German lied (song), Yiddish lullabies, blues, Jazz and imitations of Bach, Handel, and Beethoven. It is the ultimate American Smorgasbord and has almost defined the musical history of New York for the last century. Ethan Mordden, a leading historian of New York’s Broadway, aptly titled his book, Anything Goes: A History of American Musical Theatre, reflecting the genre’s eclectic and inclusive spirit.

Theme Number Ten: “Hail Hail Rock and Roll”Post War Pop Music and the Rise of the Southern Sound

After WWII, the great American songbook was dominant. Big bands were still big, and Frank Sinatra was the voice of post war America. But then the children born during the war hit puberty and this is what happened.

The recording industry and broadcasting allowed the southern folk music which had liberally mixed rural south black and white styles in various parts of the southern states to be heard by northerners. And thus southern rockers like Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis Presley took over the north (and the south) and became the music of the post war youth.

Later as civil rights consciousness grew, the African American sounds of Motown were heard on the waves and, by the sixties, Black and White musicians were performing together across a whole range of styles, epitomized perhaps by the rise of Jimi Hendrix, a man who could write detailed ballads in the Anglo American tradition and make them sound like Blues and Soul. It is unfair but one line can define the British Rock invasion—these were young Brits who grew up on 1950’s American Rock and Roll and brought it back with some strident post war British angst. Yes, even the Beatles were tougher than Dion and the Belmonts!

Rock and roil, soul, pop, heavy metal, hip hop, punk, and grunge have become the mélange of the late 20^th and early 21^st century, not to mention the spectacular Michael Jackson and the European-style diva vocalist Celine Dion, with her roots in opera and the ballad, both French and English. Rock and Roll is here to stay and not surprisingly one of its longest lasting stars is New York’s own Bruce Springsteen, who grew up in New Jersey in sight of the Manhattan skyline.

Well, our walk in the park is over. I’m about to return to Columbus Circle and the subway home. As I walk by Madison Square Garden, I see an advertisment for “Songs of New York.” I’ll have to buy a ticket!