THE ARTS | Reshaping ideas, expressing identity
26 July 2008
Streams of Tradition: Sources of Popular Music
Ballads and other early forms derive from European roots
(The following is excerpted from the U.S. Department of State publication, American Popular Music.)
Every aspect of popular music today regarded as American has sprung from imported traditions. These source traditions may be classified into three broad “streams”: European-American music, African-American music, and Latin American music. Each of these is made up of many styles of music, and each has profoundly influenced the others.
The European-American Stream
Until the middle of the 19th century, American popular music was almost entirely European in character. The cultural and linguistic dominance of the English meant that their music established early on a kind of “mainstream” around which other styles circulated.
At the time of the American Revolution, professional composers of popular songs in England drew heavily upon ballads. Originally an oral tradition, ballads were circulated on large sheets of paper called broadsides. While some broadside ballads were drawn from folk tradition, many were urban in origin and concerned with current events. In most cases only the words were provided, with an indication of a traditional melody to which they were to be sung. Balladmongers hawking the broadsides sang them on the streets. Composers of broadside ballads often added a catchy chorus, a repeated melody with fixed text inserted between verses.
The pleasure garden was the most important source of public entertainment in England between 1650 and 1850. Large urban parks filled with tree-lined paths, the pleasure gardens provided an idyllic rural experience for an expanding urban audience. The pleasure gardens became one of the main venues for the dissemination of printed songs by professional composers. In the 1760s the first American pleasure gardens opened in Charleston, New York, and other cities.
The English ballad opera tradition was also popular in America during the early 19th century. Perhaps the best known is John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728). The main characters in ballad operas were common people, rather than the kings and queens of imported operas; the songs were familiar in form and content; and the lyrics were all in English rather than Italian.
The English folk ballad tradition thrived in America. In the early 20th century folklorists were able to record dozens of versions of old English ballads in the United States. While today these songs are preserved mainly by folk music enthusiasts, the core of the tradition lives on in contemporary country and western music. The thin, nasalized tone known as the “high lonesome sound” continues today as a marker of southern white identity.
Irish, Scottish, and Italian songs also influenced early American popular music. Copies of Thomas Moore’s multivolume collection of Irish Melodies were widely circulated in the United States, and Scottish songs such as “Auld Lang Syne” also enjoyed wide popularity. By the first decades of the 19th century, the Italian opera was also popular in the United States, and the bel canto style of operatic singing had a major effect on the development of popular singing.
Dance music was another important aspect of the European influence on American popular music. Until the late 19th century European-American dance was modeled on styles imported from England and the European continent. Country dances were popular. In the United States the country dance tradition developed into a plethora of urban and rural, elite and lower-class, black and white variants. It continues today in country and western line dances and in the contradances (folk dances performed in two lines with the partners facing each other) that form part of the modern folk music scene.
In addition to songs and dance music produced by professional composers, immigration brought a wide variety of European folk music to America. The mainstream of popular song and dance music was from early on surrounded by folk and popular styles brought by immigrants from other parts of Europe. The descendants of early French settlers in North America and the Caribbean maintained their own musical traditions. Millions of Irish and German immigrants came to the United States during the 19th century. Between 1880 and 1910 an additional 17 million immigrants entered the United States. These successive waves of migration contributed to the diversity of musical life. European-derived musical styles such as Cajun fiddling, Jewish klezmer music, and the Polish polka have each contributed to mainstream popular music while maintaining a solid base in particular ethnic communities.
[This article is excerpted from American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MP3 by Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman, published by Oxford University Press, copyright (2003, 2007), and offered in an abridged edition by the Bureau of International Information Programs.]
