Global Music Week 2

popular music before WW2 in

Britain and America

General Course Books

Fletcher, P. 2001. World Musics in Context (Oxford: OUP)

Frith, S. Straw W. 2001. The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock.

(Cambridge: CUP)

Middleton, R. 1990. Studying Popular Music. (London: Open UP)

Shuker, R. 2001. Understanding Popular Music. (London: Routledge)

Books for this Lecture Donald Clarke, The Rise and Fall of Popular Music, Penguin, 1995.

Dave Russell, Popular Music in England, 1840-1914 A Social History,Manchester University Press (1987)

Paul Oliver, Black Music in Britain OUP, 1990.

Arnold Shaw, Black Popular Music in America, Macmillan, 1884

Tony Palmer, All you need is Love, The Story of Popular Music 1976.

Paul Oliver, Songsters and Saints, CUP 1984

Peter Van der Merwe, Origins of the Popular Style, Oxford 1989

Wilder, Alex, American Popular Song, New York, 1990

Ted Gioia, The History of Jazz,

Ed. Mervyn Cooke and David Horn, The Cambridge Companion to Jazz, CUP, 2002, pp. 9-32

Gunter Schuller, Early Jazz, 1968, pp. 63-133

Lomax, Alan, Jelly Roll Morton,

Essay Title

How did the development of popular music in the

period 1900-40 in Europe differ to that of America.?

Popular music and the

masses

One definition is that poplar music is ‘Music of the masses’ (I.e.expanding urban middle classes).

‘Mass market for published music since the tin-pan alley era in the USA and Europe (1880s -1930s’)’.

Dissemination by sheet music, then also gramophone and later forms of recorded sound.

Exploited for commercial gain. Popular because it sold well.

From the 60s it has become a world-wide phenomena dominated by North American forms and styles.

Before the 1960s it was industrialised but not global.

2. Mass Culture Theory – the

starting point

Concepts of Mass Culture and Mass Society based on divisions into:

1. High Art – not for commercial gain (supposedly). Beethoven, etc.

2. Folk Art- from below as an expression of the people

3. Mass Media/Mass Culture Mass culture theory holds that through

`atomisation’ individuals can only relate to each other like atoms in a chemical compound. Individuals are vulnerable to exploitation by core institutions of mass media and pop culture. (example of rise of Nazism in 1930s and Orwell’s 1984)

3. Popular Music of the pre-

industrial Age Origins of popular music

Elizabethan Broadside ballads – idea exported to America.

Commercially printed from 16th to 18th century. Tabloids of the

age.

Common stock of tunes for ballads and songs

Ballad tunes from Dancing Master onwards

Folk Music

Its history and continuation in both America and Britain.

Constantly re-inventing itself.

Always has both a conservative and forward looking aspect.

Both urban and rural. Populist and purist.

Many connected with trades and the sea.

Industrial Urban Working

Class

Industrial Revolution produced an expanding lower middle-class and upper working-class with sufficient wealth and time to support a commercial music printing industry based on widespread ownership of home pianos. Novellos, Booseys, etc. A large amount of popular music printed at this time. Ragtime Scot Joplin was made famous through sheet music. Era of sheet music.

Tin Pan Alley

Tin Pan Alley

Piano industry at its height in Edwardian era – piano pieces songs and solos (two hands especially) produced by Tin Pan Alley. ‘Daisy Bell’

Early 19th century dance halls and pleasure gardens of Vienna, Strauss’s music, Military band music, Sousa marches, patriotic songs, operetta and music hall provided much of the material for Tin Pan Alley – at its height 1880s to 1920s. This era now a huge area of research – looking at how the printed output reflects the nationalistic and moralistic concerns of the day. My old man’s

Age of the player piano. Over by the 1930s. Its advantages were that you had someone’s performance but you could also control it.

Recorded Sound

1890s saw the start of recorded sound with Thomas Edison’s invention of the phonograph 1877. Eddison tape.

Many 19th century personalities were recorded – Queen Victoria, Edison, Brahms, Arthur Sullivan

Quickly the effects on the practice of music became apparent. Emile Caruso (1873-1921)the first recorded artist to achieve a huge audience through recordings rather than live performance.

Elgar the first composer to be actively involved with the recordings of his own works. All done without electric microphones.

By 1900 recordings were commonplace and all sorts of music was available – popular, opera, military, world music, etc.

Early companies successful – and some even around today.

Caruso singing ‘Cielo e Mar’ from la Giaconda by A. Pionchielli

8. America in the 19th

century

Slavery

Conquest of the West – Expansion in all directions

Immigration

Industrialisation

Creation of a nation

Entertainment – Minstrelsy, Vaudeville and Tim Pan

Alley

Songs of Stephen Forster

Stephen Forster Songs

New Orleans before Jazz

The Jim Crow Acts

11. Minstrels

Throughout 19th century the mainstay of popular entertainment was the minstrel band.

A caricature of the untrained black musician who had music in his soul.

Minstrels were also whites who blacked up and imitated blacks. This was a huge component of popular entertainment from 1840s-1920s and even until the 1960s later.

New Cristy Minstrels. Performed thoughout America and Europe after the first world war.

Video of Minstrel Music. The first American form of mass popular entertainment - like TV.

Minstrelsy and the War

between the States

Ragtime - Prehistory of Jazz

Congo square dances of black slaves in early 19th century New Orleans. The ring shout. Rhythmic content of African music.

Ragtime and Scott Joplin. Starts in the 1890s as a piano style full of syncopation. Died with Joplin in 1917. Revived in the 1960s and 70s.

Extract 1 – Maple Leaf – by Scott Joplin

Ragtime

By 1900

Many aspects of the modern popular culture industry

in place in America.

1. Record companies, 2. Tin Pan Alley, 3. Vaudeville, 4.

Ragtime and 5. Minstrel Show Networks.

1900-1920 – 1. Film Industry based on Hollywood, 2.

Broadway (from 1890s but not a concentration of

theatres until 1920) and The Musical, 3. Jazz.

First Hollywood studios in 1911.

12. Rise of Vaudeville and

Height of Tin Pan Alley

Jubilee Singers – success of ‘Negro Spirituals Swing Low,

Steal Away,

Oh My Darling by Percy Montrose.

Rise of Zeigfeld Follies – from 1907.

Between 1890-1907 sheet music production tripled –

Tin Pan Alley 28th Street – warren of small rooms with a

piano.

Daisy Bell – from 1890s.

Ziegfeld Follies

Burlesque - Vaudeville

American equivalent of Music Hall.

Bigger emphasis on music and novelty - less on stand up comics.

Lots of acts blacked up as minstrels. Banjo players and nonsense and novelty songs. Also dancing troupes and solo singers.

Less important than in Europe perhaps because of the importance of the movie industry and musicals - Zeigfield Follies -Gypsy Rose Lee.

Judy Garland - singer who moved from Vaudeville to Broadway to Films.

The Musical

From Vaudeville to the

Musical Revue and vaudeville with a storyline and an integrated show.

The Black Crook 1866 - an epic bringing together music and melodrama plus specialty acts and dancing.

Oscar Hammerstein and Jerome Kern came together with Show Boat 1927 bringing together European operetta tradition with American Vaudeville.

The Gerswins developed the style and form towards serious art music.

Jazz Age

From the first recordings included all manner of material - but dominated by serious art music.

The development of Jazz and the dance craze of the 20s saw the first big increase in popular music record sales.

The gramophone was there to dance to.

Video of Creoles and brass bands. New Orleans.

Early Jazz – New Orleans

Broadway, Hollywood and The

Great American Songbook

Both have great influence on popular music in America (and indirectly in Britain).

The development of popular song. Big stars because universally known through film.

Of mass culture in general.

On the musical in particular.

Great American Song Book

Term used for the developing tradition of popular song

associated with shows and films from 1900-1950.

Gerswins, Jerome Kern, Ervin Berlin, Richard Rogers

and Hart, Cole Porter.

Increasingly complicated harmonies and piano style.

Always assessable but arguably art music.

Showboat 1927 – Film 1935

Race and Hillbilly Music

Records v. radio

Radio became the medium of the nation and was used for political effect everywhere.

The BBC monopoly was copied all over the world – Auntie and Lord Reith. America had a different approach and popular music flourished on radio here.

During the 40s record sales continued to fall as Radio seemed to be the future.

Video of Swing Era

Radio Era

In 1920s the huge popularity of dance music (Charleston, Blackbottom, etc) and early Jazz produced a new a greater demand for records and gramophones. – For dancing in the home.

Invention of electric microphone a breakthrough for radio and recordings. In use from 1925.

In the late 1920s and especially after the Wall Street crash radio began to take over as the main medium for popular music. Basic crystal sets were cheap.

The quality was often better than shellac records which scratched easily. The live event was brought into the home.

Radio brought music into working class homes.

Britain in the first decades of

the 20th century

Gave way to America – looked to for new styles and

technical innovation.

Less commercially driven – lots of state intervention.

Less networked – America had Hollywood, Broadway,

Radio and Records working together much more.

Bing Crosby used all the media.

Britain - BBC from the 1930s

Divided up into the Home, Light and Third – after WW2.

Third played mostly serious music and more intellectual talk programmes.

Light was light entertainment - much of it music. Brass bands, organists, light orchestras etc.

Home was soaps, news and talk shows.

Areas of Mass Musical

Activity in Britain pre WW2

Brass bands - for parades and street marching events.

Social Dancing - boom in cheap dance halls.

Music Halls - urban entertainment before the age of television. Variety and Music Hall.

Singing clubs, hand bells, etc.

Importance of temperance movements in promoting music participation.

Brass Bands Took root in the 19th century - as an

encouragement to workers to better themselves and not drink their wages.

Firms sponsored bands - who gradually took to playing all brass instruments (strings and reed where slowly abandoned).

Strongly associated with temperance social clubs - people taking the pledge.

Spread from the north and midlands to the whole country - urban and rural areas.

Development of contesting as a social activity - like being part of a football club with fixtures.

Social Dancing Jazz as much a dance phenomena as a musical one.

Great succession of new dance emerged in the 1920s - blackbottom, charleston, stomp, etc. Jitterbugging in the 30s and 40s. Also latin dances and novelty dances. Often instructed on the floor and danced to by masses in lines.

Dance halls opening all over England from the 1890s to 1930s. Prices as low as a few pence to a few shillings. Many later converted into cinemas or pulled down.

Ettiquette of ‘Excuse Me’ and changing partners. Women could dance with women but men had to request a dance.

Died with the 1950s and the end of swing. New pop music had a different set of social rules and a new set of dance types. Many not involving a couples embrace.

Music Halls The home of light or variety entertainment before

television. Early television took over the forms and stars of the music hall.

Music halls developed after 1852 - but became biggest in the era before and after ww1 and the arrival of radio. First Music Hall behind the Canterbury Arms in Lambeth.

All large towns had music halls and impresarios who ran them for profit.

Every kind of entertainment was available - comedians, ventriloquists, jugglers, strong men, dancers, etc. Also popular singers.

You paid to enter and then could drink at the bar and see the show.

Music in the Music Hall

The most common form of entertainment was the popular singer - or a comedian that included

song as part of his/her act.

A band of some form would be present and often a pit was built in.

The best known stars - Marie Lloyd, George Leybourne, Gracie Fields (1898-1979), Dan Leno, etc, were hugely famous.

Many early Film industry stars came out of the music hall - Chaplin, Laurel, etc. A British

phenomena - but there was an equivalent in America. Video of Chaplin

Dan Leno

More

Many fine theatres were built for music hall primarily.

Female impersonators as well as male impersonators. Vesta Tilley.

Later music of this material came to be called simply variety.

Importance in Britain of seaside resorts -pavilions and piers.

Command performances. Becomes known as ‘variety’ and was a mainstay of early television.

Video Gus Ellen

Gus Elen

Dan Leno

A great star of his day - but forgotten now.

Would perform quick routines in many different halls in one night - traveling by cab from one to another.

Had several different personalities -many of whom sang humorous songs.

Charlie Chaplin in many ways moddled his character on Leno. video

Dan Leno

Josephine Baker – From St

Louis to Paris

Born in St Louis

Introduced hot jazz to Paris with La Revue Negre in

1925.

Dark Star of the Folies-Bergere.

Listen to a recording of her.

Gracie Fields – From Rochdale to

Hollywood

Huge popularity in the 1930s

War service - entertaining the troops.

Film Career.

Marriage and life in Capri.

Successful music hall artist from Lancashire who made to the big screen.

Songs often very humorous and complicated.

Nostalgia and patriotism.

Recording.

Gracie Fields

Lancashire cotton worker with a fine voice. Tremendous potential as a classical singer.

Early appearances at the Rochdale Hippodrome.

1920s stage shows and revue to Hollywood, then war appearances followed by gravitation to Italy - 300 records.

Gravitated to music halls and then to London.

Songs written by her husband - she made films and was important in the war effort.

By the 1950s she had retired to Capri.

Popular singers

Josephine Baker

Blues - Ma Rainie, Bessie Smith, Billie Holliday

Paul Whiteman, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra - movie clip of Crosby and the Singer with the band.

In Britain - George Formby,

Bing Crosby

America

All British popular forms looked to some extent to America.

Ragtime, Jazz, Blues, Musicals, Folk, Rhythm and Blues, Rock and Roll - all come from America and are imitated in Britain.

There are always differences however and the traditions and never quite the same.

Essay Title

Review the contribution of the various forms of Mass

entertainment in Britain and America.

How well did they integrate and work together?

Bing Crosby one of the first to be able to link up all the

important strands of mass media by 1930 – as a

primarily a popular singer – he could do it all.