many streams that have nourished it, each with their own histories of assimilating streams that have in turn fed them. Tin Pan Alley, blues, early rhythm and blues, gospel, and country flourished in various regional and national forms before rock took over as the primary musical language. The major events that provide the backdrop for this era are the birth of the recording industry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, World War I, the boom in commercial radio broadcasting and growth of markets aimed at blacks and southern whites in the 1920s, the Great Depression, and World War II and the immediately ensuing postwar prosperity.
TIN PAN ALLEY
Tin Pan Alley (West Twenty-Eighth Street in the vicinity of Broadway, between Fifth and Sixth Avenue in Manhattan) was an important distribution center for sheet music in the early twentieth century and has come to stand in as a name of the predominant style of popular songwriting at the time. The string of shops located there would feature pianists (song pluggers) demonstrating the latest compositions for the general public to purchase and play on their own home pianos. The origins of the term Tin Pan Alley are wrapped up in myth, but it is generally believed to be a description reported by a journalist around 1900 of the piano sounds filtering out of the publishing houses along Twenty-Eighth Street (Mathieu 2017).
The exact location of the concentration of sheet-music publishers followed the movement of theaters north along Broadway, initially around Union Square (Fourteenth Street and Broadway) in the 1880s, then beginning in the mid-1890s to Twenty-Eighth Street, and finally north of Forty-Second Street in the 1920s.1 Many of the songs came from the world of musical theater, generically known as Broadway because of the concentration of theaters initially around Broadway downtown, eventually moving north to Midtown (roughly between Forty-Second Street and Fifty-Second Street). Songs coming of out Broadway shows set the standard for popular music in the first half of the twentieth century.
The model for what would later be called payola, an illegal practice in which record companies would pay disc jockeys to play recordings of their contracted artists, was set by Tin Pan Alley publishers, who would financially reward vaudeville vocalists to popularize their songs in their shows. (Vaudeville is a concert-show form in which a variety of music, comedy, dance, and other acts would perform.)
Composers and lyricists in the golden age of Broadway musicals in the 1920s–30s were overwhelmingly first-generation American-born Jews from New York City of parents emigrating from Russia, eastern Europe, and Germany. They included composers Irving Berlin (born in Russia), George Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, Harold Arlen (born in Buffalo), and Jerome Kern; and lyricists Ira Gershwin, Oscar Hammerstein II (Jewish father, raised Episcopalian), Yip Harburg, and Lorenz Hart, all four of whom were born within two years of one another (1895–96). Almost all had changed their last names to assimilate and avoid discrimination in the industry. The most notable exception in this crowd was composer and lyricist Cole Porter, born in Indiana in 1891, who experienced a wealthy white Anglo-Protestant upbringing in small town Indiana, earning a Yale college degree. The musical style had roots in European popular song, especially the musical theater (comic operas) of the British team of lyricist W. S. Gilbert and composer Arthur Sullivan, who were active in the 1870s–90s. In general, the lyric content and song style reflected a northern urban white middle-class lifestyle, filled with romance and occasional humor.
One of the most widespread musical forms in this genre can be diagrammed as AABA (as in the Gershwins’ song “I Got Rhythm”), wherein each letter represents eight bars of musical material, for a total of thirty-two bars. In this form the A sections present the same melody and chords, but with different lyrics, and the B section (or bridge) presents a contrasting melody and accompanying chords. In terminology used in the jazz world, each time through the AABA form is called a chorus. A jazz performance might consist of playing the melody once (one AABA chorus), improvising over several choruses of the AABA form, and then playing the melody one more time to end the song. The thirty-two-bar AABA form (or other related thirty-two-bar forms) dominated popular music until twelve-bar blues forms became common currency in the 1950s, although it still retained relevance in the vocal group style called doo wop.2
BLUES
The most important musical stream that has fed rock and R&B in their early years is blues. An expression of southern African American lifestyle changes over the many decades following emancipation, blues existed as a form of musical expression at least a few decades before the first recordings of it were made in the 1920s. In his 1963 classic, Blues People, Amiri Baraka identifies a number of features of postslavery life in the later part of the nineteenth century that led to the development of the blues:
1. increased leisure time and opportunity for solitude;
2. a new personal freedom to travel;
3. work songs no longer responding to the new experiences of black life, which included new opportunities for choosing partners;
4. a lesser hold of the Christian church on black life leading to less communal and more individual social experiences;
5. a new search for employment and struggle for economic security;
6. and the use of new musical instruments. (1963: 61–69)
The new individual forms of musical expression, which grew out of postemancipation experiences and lifestyles, were informed by older communal forms but developed beyond them. Just as communally sung spirituals eventually gave way to composed gospel songs and then recordings featuring star vocal soloists, communal work songs (as well as field hollers) gave way to individual blues musicians singing their own stories. The guitar, which became available through inexpensive mail order by the end of the nineteenth century, replaced the slavery-era banjo and fiddle as the instrument of choice among southern rural blacks.
In the course of making a strong case for the historical conditions that gave rise to the blues, Baraka (1963: 82) also suggested that “musical training was not a part of African tradition—music like any art was the result of natural inclination.” Nowadays, one might note two sides of a claim like this (besides the fact that African musicians can indeed go through rigorous apprenticeship and training). On the one hand, the statement could be taken to reflect racial pride in artistic abilities. On the other hand, suggesting that a people are born with certain inclinations (that they have an inner essence) can also serve to reinforce stereotypes, with the potential implication that they are not born with certain other capabilities.
Blues probably initially developed in the Mississippi Delta region, the two-hundred mile stretch between Memphis in the north and Vicksburg in the south between the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers (in the east and west) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. (The actual river delta is several hundred miles farther south.) It was an especially saturated region of cotton farming, with one of the highest concentrations in the country of black tenant and sharecropping farmers. The towns chronicled by Charley Patton (billed as both “Founder” and “King” of the Delta blues) in “High Water Everywhere, Part 1,” about the devastating river flood of 1927, reads like a guide to the region: Sumner and the county it’s in (Tallahatchie) in the north on the Yazoo side; Rosedale (to the west) and Greenville (farther south) on the Mississippi River and nearby Leland; Sharkey County in between the two rivers in the south; and Vicksburg, where the two rivers meet (see figure 11).
The earliest documentation of the blues appeared in writings in the early part of the first decade of the 1900s. Country blues, performed by men singing and accompanying themselves on the guitar, developed in three southern regions:
• Mississippi Delta (Charley Patton, his protégé Son House, and next generation Robert Johnson);
• East Texas (Blind Lemon Jefferson); and
•
