An Archaeology of Rock & Roll
Tuesday, April 27, 2010 at 11:39 AM Who invented rock and roll?
No one, of course; popular styles are probably never really invented, even by the most innovative and ingenious of cultural icons. When we study popular culture, it’s often a good idea to turn away from “great musicians” and questions of “who influenced whom” (questions that call to mind all those intense posters chronicling popular music as though it were a gigantic family tree). For this exercise, turn instead toward more material questions like “how did broadcast media change?” and “what were audiences likely to seek?” In particular, what might radio listeners and record buyers have considered necessary expressions, and necessary representations, in their lives? Popular music, in this sense, is an expression that belongs just as much to an audience as it does to an artist.
I’ve named this exercise “An Archeology of Rock & Roll” with tongue-in-cheek: if we’re more interested in the materials of music history, than in its great legendary minds, could great moments in rock and roll be like musical objects, discovered in a layered archeological dig?
In lecture, we discovered that lots of popular music starts out as community music: the music of a locale, or a subculture, and later transforms itself to new purposes and meanings in the ears of a larger public.
- This was true of boogie woogie, which, in the early 1930s, was an obscure dance style, named after a euphemism for sex, and favored by poor and mostly urban black communities in St. Louis and Kansas City. Paradoxically, musicians of color often seemed more innocuous, or clown-like, in media representations of the style.
- It was also true of the Delta minstrel or “blues” style, which was a rich tradition among working-class black songwriters across the American South in the 1910s and 1920s, reflecting those communities’ exposure to new cultures and ideas. When the style was internationalized, it came to represent everything from rural authenticity in Scotland to anti-colonial fervor in Ethiopia.
- When popular “Country & Western Music” was born on 1930s “border radio” stations, it cultivated a specific audience of depression-era white listeners, who were looking for a sense of identity in “rugged individuals”, and in myths of the American cowboy. In the 1950s and 1960s, the style reached an even broader audience who saw their 1930s predecessors as evidence of something stable in the face of vast technological change.
After World War II, all three styles were increasingly marketed to broader audiences, more and more remote from whatever sense of identity was originally found in them. And as these styles became popular commodities, the very make-up of American society was changing. Rock and Roll is, in some way, the product of all these processes rolled into one.
The following three reading assignments (12-20 pp each) will provide you with different perspectives on this history; they will help us learn a little more about what might be the musical and historical origins of “Rock and Roll.” As you’re reading, you may want to make reference to the listening examples on the pages listed under the heading “Listening Before Rock and Roll” on the top of the menu to the left. [If you’re in 197, the username and password were sent to you via email. Contact me if you can’t find it.]
Choose two of the following reading assignments:
1. Relevant to swing, boogie, and television-
Peterson, Richard. 1990. “Why 1955? Explaining the Advent of Rock Music.” In Popular Music, Vol. 9, No. 1. (Jan., 1990), pp. 97-116.
2. Three brief excerpts on musicians in the Chicago blues tradition-
Johnson, Maria V. 2007. Just pp. 51-57 of “Black Women Electric Guitarists and Authenticity in the Blues.” In Black Women and Music: More Than the Blues. Edited by Eileen Hayes and Linda Williams. Chicago: University of Illinois. <—6 pages total
Read together: Santoro, Gene. 2004. “Chess Records” [Ch. 10 (2 pages!) of Highway 61 Revisited. New York: Oxford University Press.]; which gives context and preview for pp. 140-148 of Cohodas, Nadine. 2000. “2120 South Michigan” [Just focus on those middle 8 pages of this pdf, which is Ch. 10 of Spinning Blues into Gold. New York: St. Martin’s Press.] <—10 pages total
3. Good background on the popularization of ‘Country & Western’ Music:
Wilgus, D. K. 1970. pp 162-174 of “Country-Western Music and the Urban Hillbilly.” [The most relevant passage begins “The subsequent history of hillbilly music…” (162), and ends with a paragraph about Hank Williams’ death (174).] In The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 83, No. 328.
Furthrer reading of interest:
Ehrenreich, Barbara. 1983. “The Grey Flannel Dissidents.” Chapter 3 of The Hearts of Men. New York: Doubleday, 29-41.