2.12: Folk Music to Popular Music

Folk Music to Popular Music

Music is another significant part of our lives heavily influenced by the folkways of our ancestors. Folk music is homemade music, produced by unschooled musicians for local audiences. The instrumentation, lyrical content and performance techniques are, like other folk practices, conditioned by local conditions. The ethnicity of the musicians and their audiences also play a significant role in the evolution of musical form. There are thousands of folk music genres scattered across the globe, but this text will explore only briefly a few American folk music styles, focusing on the geographic factors that have shaped the sonic landscape of the United States.

Perhaps the oldest known American folk music, brought from Scotland and performed mostly in churches was a vocal form called lining out or “line singing”. Introduced to New England during colonial times, this style diffused to other parts of the US. Lining out, and its African-American cousin, call and response, evolved during a time when few people could read a hymnal, so instead relied upon a church leader to sing each stanza first, whereupon the congregation would sing it back, repeating both lyrics and melody. White churches and black churches both adopted this style of singing in the Deep South. This style died out in New England when literacy became widespread. In isolated rural locations, where illiteracy lingered and liturgy has changed little, lining out can be heard in a few churches.

Work songs and spiritual tunes crafted by slaves and free blacks in the South also have a long folk history in the United States. The musical styles that developed among blacks in the South was a product of inherited musical traditions, locally available instruments and the living conditions forced upon them. African influences upon American music are many, but an emphasis on percussion and syncopated rhythms, along with bent or blue notes. From the earliest folk-art forms, evolved better known musical genres, like jazz, blues, and gospel.

In almost all folk music traditions, lightweight, homemade instruments or a capella singing is the norm. Pianos and other large and/or expensive instruments are rarely used by folk musicians, except by those who happened to live in a port city. Indeed, most of the great piano-based musical traditions in the US are along the Mississippi River (New Orleans, St. Louis, etc.), where pianos could be transported more easily. In mountainous regions or out on the plains, easy-to-carry instruments are used. Therefore, harmonicas, violins, guitars, and banjos were common. Other “instruments” like jugs, washboards, spoons, etc. were used along with handclaps, whistles, and other vocalizations. It was also not uncommon for musicians to build their own instruments from locally available materials. Gourd banjos and cigar box guitars are excellent examples. Musical instruments, and the style in which they were played before the introduction of amplifiers, also shaped the nature of folk music. For instance, musicians who played for audiences at barn dances found that some instruments were far louder than others, so the music evolved to fit the venue. Drums were too big to carry, so banjos (they have a resonator to make them louder), fiddles (violins) and guitars became popular. The dulcimer, a common Appalachian instrument, but it couldn’t be heard at a barn dance, so it was never widely used by dance-oriented bluegrass groups. The mandolin is similarly quiet, so bluegrass players often play it rhythmically and percussively, to increase the volume. Consider how these adaptive strategies echo the development of early hip hop in the Bronx, New York.

Figure Stephen Foster American Original pop star managed to expertly blend African and European Musical traditions into many hits. His childhood home in Pittsburgh made this possible.

American music has nearly always been a product the hybridization of European and African musical traditions, with occasional Latin American inputs as well. Perhaps the earliest example of European-African musical hybridization was produced in the 19th century by Stephen Foster of Pittsburgh. As a youth, Foster would hang out along at the boat docks in Pittsburgh near where he lived. He became enamored with the music of the Lowland South, as performed by African American boatmen who had come north on steamboats from New Orleans and Memphis. Foster blended those sounds with what he learned taking music lessons from his classically trained, German music teacher to produce something uniquely American and wildly popular during his day. Foster’s music began as a type of “folk music” because it was a product of his local conditions, but it is fair to label Stephen Foster “America’s Original Pop Star” because his music grew internationally famous. Oh Sussana, Nellie Bly, Camptown Races, Old Folks at Home, Massa’s in the Cold Cold Ground, My Old Kentucky Home, Beautiful Dreamer count among his major hits. You know almost all these melodies, even if you don’t really know the songs because their popularity has lingered into the 21st Century. Tragically, Foster died penniless and alone at age 37. The formula used by Foster to blend African and European musical ideas and traditions established a precedent that has been repeated many times since by the creators of the blues, jazz, country, western, bluegrass, swing, R&B, rock n’ roll, and hip hop.

Memphis – The Crossroads Home of Rock n’ Roll

Probably, the most famous American musical invention is rock n’ roll music, and like all other musical forms, its sound is rooted in the time and place of its invention. Rock n’ roll was invented in Memphis, Tennessee, a crossroads location, where the youth living there in the 1950s could be influenced by various musical traditions popular both locally, and regionally. Kids growing up in Memphis in the post-war era could hear on the radio blues from the nearby Mississippi Delta, bluegrass from Kentucky, jump from St. Louis, and western swing from Texas. Of course, gospel singing was ubiquitous in the South. If you lived in the right neighborhood, you probably had friends whose parents listened to (or played) one or more of these musical styles. Like Stephen Foster, the kid from Pittsburgh who was influenced by multiple musical inspirations, kids from the Memphis region were also hearing lots of musical styles.

Elvis Presley is the most famous youths to come out of Memphis during this time. Presley was an expert at blending gospel, blues, bluegrass, country, western and R&B styles. Memphis’ Sun Records company produced Presley’s first record in 1954. It had only two songs. On the “A-Side” was “That’s All Right”, an R&B tune previously released by Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup in 1946. On the “B Side”, was another song from 1946, “Blue Moon of Kentucky”, a bluegrass song written by bluegrass inventor Bill Monroe. In hindsight, Presley’s first record seems an incredible mashup of regional musical styles that may have been nearly impossible to create elsewhere in the US.

Figure Memphis, TN. The Million Dollar Quartet demonstrates the power of place in the information of Memphis most famous musical innovation.

Presley was a musical genius in his own right, but clearly, geography played a role allowing that genius to develop. Special circumstances in the Memphis region may have allowed for a greater measure of musical interaction between blacks and whites than elsewhere in the United States – fermenting musical innovation. Geographers point to numerous notable rock n’ roll stars that emerged from the Memphis area in the same year as evidence that location played a significant role in the evolution of rock n’ roll. Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, and Jerry Lee Lewis, other famous early rockers, also got their start in the northern Delta and recorded for Sun Records.

As children, each of these performers had significant contact with African American musical mentors, without which, rock n’ roll may not have emerged when and where it did. Carl Perkins, for example, grew up the son of a sharecropper on a cotton plantation, where his father built him a homemade cigar box guitar. After later acquiring a factory-built guitar, he took informal lessons from his neighbor, a black man named “Uncle” John Westbrook. At nights Perkins listened to the “Grand Ol’ Opry” the nation’s most famous country and western radio program, broadcast from Nashville, Tennessee where he learned how to play country music. As a result, Perkins’ most famous song, “Blue Suede Shoes” so confused the record-buying public, that it topped the country, R&B and pop charts simultaneously. Blacks, whites and bubblegum pop teenagers all embraced the song. Reputedly, black audiences were surprised to learn that Perkins was indeed a white guy (see also the story of Charlie Pride, the first African American country music star).

The musical education of African American rockers from the Mid-South was often similar. Chuck Berry, the most famous and influential black rock star of the early era of rock n’ roll was from St. Louis. Like Memphis, St. Louis is a river town in the middle of the United States blessed with opportunities for young musicians to absorb musical influences from multiple nearby folk and pop music traditions in neighboring regions. Berry simply reversed the standard pattern of influence (i.e., white boys listening to R&B). Berry borrowed from western swing to created his own brand of blues-based rock n’ roll. “Maybellene”, a huge rock n’ roll hit for Berry in 1955 was an R&B adaptation of Bob Wills’ 1938 Western Swing tune “Ida Red”, itself an adaptation of a traditional mountain song of unknown origins, recorded in the 1920s.

Seattle’s Grunge Rock – Geography of Isolation

A more contemporary example of a folk-like, regional musical innovation evolving into an international pop-culture sensation was Seattle’s so-called grunge rock that enjoyed exceptional popularity during the early 1990s.

Surf Rock was the first subgenre of rock music to emerge from the Pacific Northwest. It rose and fell during the 1960s. According to music geographers who researched the evolution of the sound, bands competing to attract massive teenaged dance hall audiences realized that their singers couldn’t be heard in the noisy dance halls, so lyrics and the even singers themselves became progressively less important to audiences. Listen to the songs of bands like Kingsmen (Louie Louie) and the Ventures (Walk Don’t Run) and you’ll see (hear) how the performance venue shaped the sound. The Surf Rock sound died out around 1970, and for a generation, very few rock bands or musical artists emerged from the Seattle region. Talent scouts for the big record companies never thought to look for “the next big thing” in Oregon or Washington.

By the mid-1980s, aspiring rock musicians from the Pacific Northwest usually moved to Los Angeles if they wanted to “make it big”. Seattle was considered a backwater by record company talent scouts. As was the case in the early 1960s with the Surf Rock bands, Seattle-area hard rock bands working in the 1980s contented themselves with competing for local audiences and very little pay. By playing for local audience only they created a sound and look unique to the peculiar local taste preferences of the Pacific Northwest. They created a type of folk music. While local audiences might have liked it, the emergent grunge sound and look, was very different from that considered marketable by music executives in Los Angeles, and few predicted what would happen.

After several years of incubating the “grunge” style in isolation, a remarkable number of bands emerged in the region who played a brand of style hard rock that featured a distinct punk-rock aesthetic. Lyrically, grunge-type bands eschewed themes common to Los Angeles-based hard rock (e.g., girls/cars/partying). Instead, their lyrics took political stances, engaged topics like mental illness, child welfare or the dark side of drug dependency. Sonically, there wasn’t a strict grunge formula, although many Seattle-area guitarists detuned (lowered by an octave) their guitars to get a heavier sound. Several bands featured baritone vocalists and many played more slowly than their counterparts in Los Angeles, where up-tempo songs were common. Seattle bands also looked different. They often wore beards and long hair with unremarkable clothing (e.g., flannel shirts, work boots, jeans). This stood in stark contrast to either both the spandex-and-makeup “hair metal” bands, and the pirate/biker-gang looks that dominated Hollywood-based bands in the early 1990s.

After the Seattle-based band Soundgarden proved the grunge sound and look was marketable to a national audience, a slew of other Seattle bands (Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, etc.) signed major label record contracts. During the early 1990s, record company executives were clearly using location to evaluate the market potential of new bands from Seattle. Record company talent scouts operated on the logic, “…if one band from Seattle sold millions of records, there must be more bands there!” Soon, the isolation that had been critical to the development of the Seattle sound and look was replaced by intense attention from the international music industry. No longer playing just for local audiences and a few beers, Seattle based bands suddenly found themselves playing in front of record executives for the chance to make millions of dollars recording songs in Hollywood or New York and going on tours around the world. Recognizing the role of geography in the music industry, aspiring rock artists from all over the US suddenly moved to Seattle, hoping to land a recording contract. Bands that couldn’t move to Seattle began aping the grunge sound and look in hopes of attracting attention from record company talent scouts. Local had become global. Folk music had become popular music.