Welcome to my Music History 333 Blog Post of what we have covered thus far!
Over the past two weeks we have started covering basics and history of songs in the early 1900s. Signing up for this class I had no idea what to expect. Having just about zero experience with music besides my daily dose of Spotify, I had no idea what to expect. I thoroughly enjoy this class way more then I had expected! The first week we covered some of the basics of sound such as tempo, rhythm, melodies, meters, beat, syncopation, texture, versus and chorus’. Being completely foreign to these meanings, I felt as though Dr. Baumer did a great job adjusting and aiding us to these meaning. For example, having us clap along to the beat and rhythm of minstrel, country, and blues song of top artists during that time period.
Towards the end of the first week and beginning of the second we started to talk about was Minstrelsy. This was a word/topic I have never heard of before. Minstrelsy is a popular stage entertainment featuring songs, dances, and comic dialogue in highly conventionalized patterns, usually performed by white actors in blackface. It developed in the US in the early and mid 19th century. One of the famous Minstrelsy actors we were learned about was a man by the name of Thomas Dartmouth Rice. Rice imitated the dancing of a black man, but his character was Jim Crow. Jim Crow represented the former practice of segregating black people in the US.
Moving forward to the 3rd week, we started covering early R&B between 1945-1955. What I found very interesting is that R&B was used in reference as “Race” records or “Race & Black”, a term invented by Ralph Peer. The first artist we covered goes by the name of Louis Jordan who was famous for the song Choo-Choo Ch-boogie, and Caldonia. Louis Jordan was a pioneering American musician, songwriter and bandleader who was popular from the late 1930s to the early 1950s. Known as “The King Of Jukebox” he was highly popular with both black and white audiences in the later years of the swing era. Mr. Jordan regularly topped the R&B charts and was one of the first black recording artists to achieve significant crossover in popularity with the mainstream “white” American audience.
Following Louis Jordan, we started to cover Urban Blues. The first artist we started studying goes by the name of Muddy Waters. He made a name for himself by playing one of the first electric guitars. Electric guitars became a huge hit because with basic acoustic and a large crowd, the acoustic was simply just not loud enough. Following Louis Jordan we covered T-Bone Walker-the originator of the electric blues sound. He was a critically acclaimed American blues guitarist, singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, who was an influential pioneer and innovator of the jump blues and electric blues sound and became popular from one of his top hits called “Hoochie Coochie Man”
As mentioned previously, all the information we have covered in class is so fascinating to me and I look forward to learning more as we progress through the 1940s-1950 to more modern time.