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Chapter 6: Popular Music

Terms in this set (30)

Tin Pan Alley
A period of popular song writing that began in the 1890s and whose most productive years were in the 1920s and 1930s. Many of America's most beloved songs—the standards—are part of the Tin Pan Alley tradition. The phrase Tin Pan Alley also referred to the part of the music industry devoted to the sale of popular songs. The name comes from the nickname given to the street in New York City where nearly every publisher of popular music was located in the early part of the twentieth century.
Vaudeville
A variety show consisting of unrelated acts by singers, dancers, comedians, jugglers, child performers, trained animals, and actors. It replaced the minstrel show as America's most popular stage show. New York City was the center of vaudeville; the most sophisticated shows were produced on Broadway. These shows were variously known as revues, vanities, scandals, and follies, of which the most famous were the Ziegfeld Follies produced from 1907 through 1932.
Musical
Genre developing from popular songs and the vaudeville tradition. These were narrative stories with a plot, set, costume, and all of the elements associated with a staged play, but now with popular songs interspersed within them.
Hillbilly
A style of popular song derived from the rural, southern folk tradition and from sentimental songs of the late nineteenth century. It represents a merging of rural and urban influences and a regional, ethnic music made popular nationally and successful commercially.
Cowboy Songs
Popular song with Western themes. The movie industry promoted these songs and featured artists who appeared as singing cowboys. Gene Autry is a famous singing cowboy.
Western Swing
Popular songs with western themes performed with a large ensemble similar to the standard jazz ensemble.
Bluegrass
A style of country music that combines a return to the rural, folk traditions of hillbilly music and the urban, commercial music that is part of our national, popular culture. Typical bluegrass instrumentation includes the acoustic guitar, fiddle, mandolin, bass fiddle, and banjo—no electric instruments.
The Nashville Sound
The sound of hillbilly music produced by sophisticated recording techniques and arrangements controlled by the recording studios to ensure the popularity and commercial success of their songs. It minimizes the country twang of the singers, reduces the emphasis on fiddle and steel guitar, and includes background singers.
Motown
Term that refers to Detroit. In music it also refers to Motown records, a record company that at first featured black performers
Rhythm and Blues
A style of black popular music that originally featured a boogie-woogie-style piano accompaniment in blues form, a blues singer, and electric guitar. Later, the term R&B referred to any blues-based black popular music. Today, urban R&B is not necessarily blues based.
Soul
Any popular music performed by blacks for black audiences. Soul combines elements of R&B, jazz, and black gospel.
Rock
An underground, antiestablishment, and protest music that emerged in the 1950s and evolved into a phenomenally successful commercial product. It was derived primarily from a merging of black and white traditions (rhythm and blues and hillbilly) and appealed mostly to teenagers for both listening and dancing. Influenced by the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, and other British groups, rock and roll (now known as rock) assumed a new character that featured advanced electronic technology, sophisticated arrangements, and extreme visual impact and onstage behavior. Rock transformed American popular music and gave rise to the formed study of popular culture.
Rap
A style of black popular music that, in the 1980s, emerged from the inner city to become mainstream— an ethnic style becoming nationally popular. The rhythm is highly repetitive; the poetry is recited in a highly rhythmic manner. Electronic keyboards, sampled sounds and rhythms, drum machines, and prerecorded tracks are common in rap records.
Hip-Hop culture
A culture that originally included inner-city manifestations of four distinct arts: street poetry, rap music, graffiti, and break dancing
Minstrel Shows
A variety show, popular in the nineteenth century, that included songs, dances, and comical skits. Lively, syncopated minstrel songs formed the nucleus of the minstrel show. A product of the merging of rural American folk traditions with urban, composed music, the minstrel song can be considered the first distinctively American musical genre.
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