Participants Program Guide

Participants’ Program Guide

A project of the Tribeca Film Institute

in partnership with

The American Library Association Public Programs Office

Tribeca Flashpoint

and The Society for American Music

Made possible by a major grant from

The National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the Human Endeavor

INTRODUCTION TO AMERICA’S MUSIC

The history of modern American popular music encompasses diverse traditions and extraordinary musical inventions. Americans made their popular music through a fundamental process of exchange across social lines, the same lines where American identity is formed and continually reformed, and where diverse cultural traditions meet, collide and mix. How Americans respond to this diversity of traditions, seeing it as a threat or a wealth of possibilities, informs our great promise as a nation.

American popular music comprises a diverse array of styles that reflect the country’s multi-ethnic population. Beginning in the 17th century, immigrants from England, Spain and France, and later Ireland and Germany, brought unique styles and instruments with them. Each subsequent group of immigrants would add to the mix of musical styles. African American slave communities, for example, brought influential musical traditions that drew on sophisticated rhythms and improvisation that they combined with European traditions and other indigenous music.

While American music grew from hundreds of indigenous or immigrant groups who developed their own local or regional styles, cross-cultural hybridization has long characterized American popular music. The most distinctly American musical genres resulted from close contact between different social groups. Scholars mark the Civil War as a turning point for new distinctly American musical forms. People from many regions came together in army units where they traded musical styles and practices. Civil war ballads became a truly national American folk music, with discernible features distinct from any one regional style.

The turn of the twentieth century marked a period of sweeping change in American society. In 1890, fewer than one in four Americans lived in cities. By 1920, more than half lived in urban areas. Massive migration from both Europe and the American heartland changed the nation’s demographic make-up and established the city as the center of an emerging national culture.

During the early 20th century, these social changes combined with new technologies to create a mass market for popular music. While sound recording was invented by Thomas Edison in the United States and Charles Cros in France in the late 19th century, not until the 1920s did the record industry and then radio become the primary means for disseminating music. By the beginning of the 20th century, the music publishing industry became centralized in New York City; in a downtown area called Tin Pan Alley, where an army of composers and marketers wrote and promoted hundreds of new songs. The Tin Pan Alley publishing firms -- many of them started by Jewish immigrants who found other professions closed to them -- produced and publicized popular songs like any other manufactured product. Performers such as Al Jolson and Sophie Tucker promoted songs in cross- country tours. By the 20s and 30s, Tin Pan Alley songs were popularized in Broadway musicals, which set the standard for popular songs throughout the century.

While Tin Pan Alley songwriters catered to a national taste for sentimental ballads, a new kind of music was evolving in the South. Jazz’s signature home was New Orleans, whose multi-ethnic mix of African Americans, Creoles, Native Americans, and people of European, Caribbean and Latin American descent was unique. The first jazz music combined elements of ragtime, marching band, and blues -- an African American style that grew from the harsh conditions of the Jim Crow South. What made jazz different from these earlier styles was the use of improvisation.

America’s increasing industrialization during the first two decades of the 20th century created great demographic shifts as workers moved from rural areas seeking greater economic opportunity. African Americans took part in the Great Migration to the North to find work and to escape the prevailing racism of the South. Among the migrants were musicians who brought jazz to cities like Chicago and New York, blending their Southern roots with a new urban sensibility. The 1920s became known as the "Jazz Age" when Americans, still reeling from the experiences of WWI, embraced the ‘new’ as they forged a 20th century identity. Among the greatest early jazz pioneers was Louis Armstrong, who brought his distinctive timbre, scat singing and relaxed, swinging phrasing to this distinctly American musical form.

The popularity of jazz peaked in the swing era, which lasted through the Depression and World War II. The African American bands of Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington, and Count Basie created a powerful rhythmic driving sound for dancing that swept up millions. White bands headed by such musicians as Artie Shaw, Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey adapted and brought the music to widespread popularity. Facing the greatest economic calamity in their history and then a World War, Americans embraced swing as a respite from worry and the music became a source of renewal and optimism.

While swing jazz grew to be America’s most popular music, other forms of popular music were also emerging. By the 1930s, the religious spirituals and blues music of African Americans had evolved into what is now known as gospel music. Based in storefront churches as well as national ministries, the gospel movement brought an unconstrained fervor and emotionalism to music that had not been heard before. Country music, initially made and embraced largely by rural working white folks, also developed in the first half of the 20th century. Appalachian string band dance tunes, traditional ballads and sentimental pop songs all influenced the remarkable sounds of so called “hillbilly music.” Country music was popularized and disseminated through radio and recordings beginning in the 1920s.

Gospel and country are distinct genres, but share some common history. Both began in the hard times of rural life, yet grew roots and branches in the cities. Bluegrass, a sub-genre of country, especially had an appeal to urban audiences. Both country and gospel developed separate white and African American strands, even though they originated in music that crossed the color line. In the face of the modernization of the early 20th century, both gospel and country music spoke to people’s nostalgic yearning for the past. Yet both confronted the realities of living in the modern era, with themes ranging from everyday working life to life on the road or romance gone wrong, to the search for spiritual roots in a modern world.

The second half of the 20th century witnessed an explosion of musical styles whose development coincided with immense social and political change. The years after World War II found the United States at the forefront of global economic and military power, and politically locked in a cold war. Domestically, the country underwent tectonic demographic shifts, especially suburbanization, while an emerging Civil Rights movement and later an anti-war protest movement began to rock the foundations of its traditional power structure. The 1950s saw the arrival of rock and roll and rhythm and blues, which drew on many older styles -- country, blues, gospel and pop. Fueled by adolescent listeners, the music came to prominence through independent record labels that promoted distinct regional styles in cities like Memphis, New York, and Detroit. Rock captured young listeners in the U. S. and spread around the world to grow to greater prominence than jazz.

The music of the 50s and 60s also engaged cold war and civil rights politics, and resonated with the aspirations and anxieties of American life. While the United States grappled with the claims of people of color for equal rights, rhythm and blues as ‘soul music’ brought African American culture without apology to a mainstream audience. The baby boom generation’s utopian hopes for an American society plagued by poverty and inequality found expression in the ideas and emotions at the core of popular music. Music was indispensable to the history of that time when Americans grappled with the claims of their fellows for full and equal citizenship.

The last decades of the 20th century witnessed the continuing influence and diversification of American popular music. In the 1980s, charismatic performers – Bruce Springsteen, Michael Jackson, Madonna – reached worldwide mass audiences by challenging the boundaries of identity and social background. Rap, hip hop, disco and punk were all musical genres born in the declining industrial cities, springing from the experiences of working class and racial minorities increasingly segregated in urban enclaves, and appealing to middle-class suburban youth responding to an era of economic and political instability. Always an influence in American music, Latin music exploded into the mainstream with the success of the mambo, cha cha and other dance crazes that swept the country in mid-century, and later with salsa and Tex Mex singer Selena in the 1990s and artists like Jon Secada and Ricky Martin. Technological advances and new packaging techniques, starting with MTV’s rock videos and continuing with the rapidly

evolving use of digital technologies, have generated new questions about the availability and ownership of all music in the new technologies.

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Session One: The Blues and Gospel Music

Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues: Episode 1, Feel Like Going Home

Produced and Directed by Martin Scorsese, 2004

Grammy Award Winner, Best Historical Album

Emmy Award Nomination Outstanding Non-Fiction Series

Emmy Award Winner Outstanding Cinematography for Non-Fiction Program

Say Amen, Somebody

Produced and Directed by George T. Nierenberg, 1983

* N.E.H. sponsored

Telluride, New York, Toronto, London, Cannes Film Festivals

Boston Society of Film Critics Best Documentary of the Year

One of 10 Best Films of the Year: People Magazine, Rolling Stone,

Miami-Herald, At the Movies, Chicago Sun Times

Introductory Essay

Charles F. McGovern, Associate Professor of American Studies and History, Director of Graduate Studies - American Studies Program, College of William and Mary

If American music is unique, it is largely due to its bedrock foundation of blues and gospel music, two forms of music that emerged in the late 19th and early 20th century. Anchoring the sounds of African America, these styles underlay the musical innovations of the century: jazz, rhythm and blues, rock, soul and hip hop. They are known and cherished around the world and in every corner of the U.S. It would be impossible to imagine American music without them.

The story of black music is also the tale of the enduring social struggles of American history. Blues and gospel, the secular and sacred songs of everyday black folk, are both bound up in sorrow, loss, despair, hope, redemption, resilience and dreams. While remaining recognizable over many decades, the spirit and musical forms of these styles have influenced much of the American music that has followed. The “blue notes” that are characteristic of the form became prominent in country music, rock and roll and jazz. The simple 12 bar A A B form of blues became the template for the first rock and roll songs, from “Good Rockin’ Tonight” to “Rocket 88" to “Hound Dog” to “Johnny B Goode.” And the world wide interest in American blues inspired such musicians as the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and others abroad to not only take up their own instruments, but to re-influence American popular music, borrowing the beat, the form and the sound of the blues and infusing them with new sensibilities.

Blues greats such as Bessie Smith, Robert Johnson, Memphis Minnie, Muddy Waters, Son House, T-Bone Walker, and BB King, and gospel stars such as Mahalia Jackson, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the Gold Gate Quartet, Sam Cooke, the Staple Singers and Clara Ward all occupy prominent places in the pantheon of great American artists. Their music marks one of the great contributions of Americans to world art. But, like other folk art forms, blues and gospel came from the experiences of everyday life.

“The blues was born behind a mule,” said the great Mississippi Delta bluesman Muddy Waters. Blues and gospel music originated in the oppressive experiences of African Americans in the post-emancipation South. When the United States Congress ended Reconstruction in 1877, the political gains and civic protections African Americans had gained after the Civil War were suppressed, and millions of blacks were economically and politically disenfranchised. In the cotton South, African Americans endured harsh conditions: an endless cycle of debt in farm tenancy and sharecropping, peonage, curfews, and lynchings. The daily humiliations of Jim Crow and the constant threat of violence made life difficult and often dangerous. Those who migrated to northern cities in great numbers after 1910 faced different difficulties: segregation, substandard housing, subsistence wages, second class status and discrimination. But rural or urban, African Americans wrought their lives in music that stemmed from their daily experiences.

Blues music characteristically features musical tones that differed from the Western diatonic scale (do re mi). The blues features notes that fall between the intervals of the scale, microtones that flattened the pitch of conventional music, creating powerful tensions and resolutions. The blues also feature a heavily accented and often irregular beat. Simple blues forms follow an A A B structure over twelve bars; a form that has become the bedrock of jazz, pop, country and rock and roll over the years. Blues music drew on numerous African American sources. In Southern plantations, lumber camps, prisons and fields, black work songs, field hollers, chants, and ballads all combined to shape a unique new music with strong ties to African antecedents.

Blues songs first emerged in the Mississippi Delta, the Piedmont Southeast, Texas and Appalachia, around the turn of the twentieth century. Soon after, urban-based blues appeared in cities such as Memphis, St. Louis, Chicago, Dallas, New Orleans and New York. Itinerant songsters, stage artists, vaudeville singers and schooled musicians all performed blues using the brass and string instruments of marching bands and orchestras. But whether with the simplest of instruments - a one string “diddly bo” or “quills” cut from sugar cane, or on guitars, pianos, and brass, blues musicians played a variety of styles that captured sadness, elation, resignation, despair and hope, perhaps more evocatively than any other form of indigenous music the U.S had yet witnessed.

Among the most powerful resources that sustained African Americans through adversity and difficulty was strong religious faith. The “sorrow songs” sung in slave times gave birth to religious songs known as spirituals. After emancipation, black religious music - dignified, respectable, and powerful - galvanized audiences around the world thanks to the touring of the Fisk University Jubilee Singers in the late 19th century. By the 1920s storefront churches throughout black America had moved away from the staid spirituals to an unrestrained, emotive and fervent form of religious music, often sung and played by the whole congregation instead of a choir. In the 1930s Thomas Dorsey, a former blues musician, married a blues sensibility to religious themes, pioneering the style known as gospel music. With such collaborators as Sallie Martin, Willie Mae Ford Smith and Mahalia Jackson, the sounds of Gospel resonated in black churches throughout the U.S.

Blues and gospel proved empowering for the artists who made the music as well as the audiences who embraced it. Many of the traveling blues artists of the 1920s and 30s eagerly took to that life as one of the few alternatives to the heavy and unremunerated labor of farm or factory. Similarly, women found a prominence and influence in gospel as singers, choir leaders and composers that gave them a say equal to the male preachers who dominated black churches. Gospel gave black women a public prominence in church that they seldom enjoyed elsewhere in black America. Music offered freedom to those who pursued it - the promise of freedom and money.

Blues artists became heroes and legends in the black community. One of the most enduring tales concerns the elusive bluesman Robert Johnson. Johnson’s music was so powerful, many of his listeners believed the myth that he had sold his soul to the devil in exchange for it. Similar tales of other musicians made clear that African Americans saw music as a spiritual, deeply powerful art. Such tales resonated with African stories and myths kept alive in the black community, and were embraced as well by a wider world eager to understand the source of blues music’s appeal. Similarly, gospel music’s deep connection to religious faith often transported both performers and audiences: trances, speaking in tongues and ecstatic emotional outbursts often accompanied the gospel music and services. This music could and did change lives.