Elvis Presley's 'Popular Music'
Popular Music
Popular music, or pop music', means music of the populace'. The term embraces all kinds of folk music which, originally made by illiterate people, were not written down.
The creation of a popular music that aims simply at entertaining large numbers of people is a product of industrialisation, in which music became a commodity to be bought and sold. It is in the rapid industrialised nations, notably Britain and USA, that we first encounter composers who have devoted themselves to fulfilling a demand for popular, entertainment music.
· Foster
Stephen Foster (Born Lawrenceville in 1826; died in New York in 1864)
Foster was an American composer, mainly self-taught in music. He wrote over 200 songs, several of which …show more content…
have come to be regarded almost as American folk-songs. Though a Northerner, several of his songs capture the Southern plantation spirit in an authentic and eloquent manner. His songs are considered as escapist', through nostalgia. All of Foster's songs yearn for the good old days', but their yearning is not innocent, as real folk music is.
· Sousa
John Philip Sousa (Born in Washington DC in 1854; died in Reading, Pennsylvania in 1932)
Sousa was an American composer and bandmaster. As a youth he played the violin in an orchestra. He conducted the US Marine Corps band in 1880-92. He formed his own military band in 1892, which became very popular and toured Europe four times between 1900 and 1905, and toured the world in 1910-11. Unfortunately it was victim of the 1931 Depression. Sousa was best known for his superb marches, of which he composed nearly 100. His music is also considered escapist', by means of hedonism.
· Gottschalk
Louis Moreau Gottschalk (Born in New Orleans in 1829; died in Brazil in 1969)
Gottschalk was an American pianist, conductor and composer. He went to Paris to study in 1842. His pianoforte debut was in 1844 was praised by Chopin. On return to the USA he toured widely, playing and conducting his own sentimental and naïve music for unsophisticated audiences who enjoyed his virtuoso panache and his arrangements of national aires. He wrote two operas, two symphonies and many piano pieces.
· Blues and Ragtime
Though jazz is a twentieth century phenomenon, mainly associated with cities, its origins were in Africa. The black man's music, transmuted into the white mans world. In his new, white American world, the black man, enslaved, inevitably used the musical techniques he had been reared on. As an outcast, he no longer sings a tribal song but calls on ancient vocal formulas of the pentatonic scale and a tumbling descent from a high note, and on traditional techniques of vocal production - modified because he sings in the American, rather than in African language. Inevitably it came into contact with the musical manifestations of the New World, especially the march and hymn. The hymn followed a pattern of tonic, dominant and subdominant harmony, while the march provided a four-square beat. When the American black, responding to these types of music, took over the white man's guitar, the blues was born, and with it the heart of jazz.
· Blues
There was no decisive break between the folk holler and the blues. Pete Williams, a black man in the Southern prison, uses the guitar to accompany himself in what he calls Prisoner's talkin' blues' and Levee camp blues', but these are still hollers in which speed is heightened, with the guitar providing a repeated figure. The words of vocal blues often concern the agony of desertion, betrayal and unrequited love and sexual references are frequent. Blues form', as it evolved, tends to fall into a pattern, as shown:
Bars 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
Chords I----------------IV-----I--------V--------I-------
But the form is not static. It provided a harmonic framework against which the black singer could interpret his words or the instrumentalist could improvise. Thus black melody and white harmony interact.
· Ragtime
Ragtime is an early type of jazz particularly for solo piano and composition rather than improvised. The famous exponent and composer of it was Scott Joplin popular from 1895-1920 when other forms of jazz took over.
· Scott Joplin
Scott Joplin was born in 1897 died in 1917. He was known as the King of Ragtime'. He took his musical convention from white military two-step. But Joplin's music, both in the Maple Leaf Rag in 1899 that made him famous and in more harmonically sophisticated pieces like Euphonic Sounds in (1909), has an improvised feel mostly because the rhythms are ragged' in being syncopated. In the music of the notable rag composers, for example James Scott and Eubie Blake and as well as Joplin, the music has pathos but not sentimentality.
· Piano Jazz
Blues and jazz meet in the evolution of piano jazz. When blacks came across broken down pianos they treated them as mechanized guitars. "Barrelhouse" pianists came to make basic, usually very fast use of the harmonies of the 12-bars blues and to seek pianistic substitutes for the guitar's expressiveness by way of "crunched" tones, slides and displaced accents. The pianist exploited the power of a percussive keyboard, creating momentum with a pounding left hand usually in patterns of repeated tones or unequal rhythms the came to be known as boogie basses. Gradually, barrelhouse pianist exploited complexities of texture as well as to exploit rhythmic force. Leroy Carr, as a singer and pianist, shows how white art may lead elegance to black passion, as the rumbustiousness of the barrelhouse piano came to term with the artificialness of rag. James P. Johnson trained in both barrelhouse piano and ragtime traditions and distinguished for his command of an irresistibly striding bass and for the delicate precision of the right-hand figurations.
· Blues Singing
Fusion of blues and rag exemplified in Johnson's playing is crucial to the evolution of jazz, especially during the 1920s. The most revered singers were women. The earliest of the great women blues singers, Gertrude Rainey nickname "Ma". Her vocal timbre often had a liturgical flavour. She found no barriers between country blues gospel and minstrel show music.
· Bessie Smith
Bessie Smith (1894-1937), the most famous blues singer of the 1920s was known as the Empress of Blues'. Like all the finest jazz her music sprang from tension: between country and town, black and white, art and entertainment. Like other women blues singers, Smith usually performed in dialogue with a melody instrument, which both intensified and depersonalised the vocal line. She gave superb versions of folk blues like Careless Love' and Reckless Love' with Louis Armstrong playing a cornet obbligato and of her own Young women blues and Poor man blues with the cornet of Joe Smith her favourite collaborator.
· Jazz
Since women blues singers worked with jazz players and used conventions from both jazz and minstrel show, their work had many features in common with the music of the early jazz band. This began in New Orleans where, as we have seen, a lively black population mingled with a cosmopolitan society of white Americans, Frenchman, Spaniards, Italians and German. From these cross-fertilizations the New Orleans jazz band became established with instruments from the white military band. The cornet (later trumpet), clarinet and trombone were the main melody instruments. A tuba (later string bass) provided the bottom line, reinforced by drums and other percussion instruments. The banjo substituted for the guitar as harmonic fill-in. Later when bands no longer marched the piano became the main harmony instrument, combined with plucked strings. The music of the New Orleans band compromises between the 12- bar blues and 32-bar form. The musical substance lies in the tension between the trumping military beat and the symmetries of white harmony on one hand and on the other the black solo lines which, with their African flexibility of pitch and rhythm, try to override the basic form. The supreme New Orleans soloists- Louis Armstong, cornet and trumpet, Johnny Dodds, clarinet and sidney Bechet (soprano saxophone) - attain a levitating ecstasy with their soaring improvised melodies. They also affirm their humanity in imbuing their instruments with the expressivities of the voice.
· Louis Armstrong
The voice and instrument speak, the body move: so the heart of music is in the spoken and unspoken word and in physical movement. What is remarkable about New Orleans jazz is that this word -body relationship flourished within the context of westernised commercial music. We can hear this in the supreme achievements of band jazz, the recordings made by Louis Armstrong with his Hot Five and Hot Seven in 1926-8, Tight Like This. Tragedy is overt in Armstrong's famous unaccompanied solo opening to West End blues. The consummation of New Orleans Chicago jazz involves a marriage between black folk melody and the harmony of white art music is revealed in Armstrong's recording of "King Oliver's Weather Bird which he presents simply as a duet with Earl Hines. Armstrong and Hines have proceeded from the folk heterophony of early jazz to a true improvised polyphony. These tracks were recorded in 1928, just before Armstrong left Chicago for New York, later to embark on a career as a show-business entertainer as well as a jazzman. Jelly Roll Morton, a light-skinned New Orleans black, produced, between 1926-1930, a series of recordings with his Red Hot Peppers. He composed most of the numbers in the convention of the Sousa march and trio and even wrote down 12-bar blues with precise indication of harmony and figuration. The music involved jazz improvisation, though Morton, as pianist-director of his steel basically New Orleans ensemble, controlled real acerbic blues like Smokehouse Blues or in a cross between the two like The Chant, they generate passion while managing to sound blithely carefree. Their improvised composition, as distinct from Louis Armstrong's improvisation, is an irresistible affirmation of the human spirit.
· Duke Ellington
A further refinement of Morton's approach occurs in the music of Duke Ellington, born in Washing DC. Morton was the first, Ellington was the second composer in jazz history; he remains the finest. He scored for a bigger band, using choir of saxophones blending, or playing in contrast, with brass and reeds, supported by string bass and percussion Ellington directed from or beside the keyboard. Ellington composed almost all the bands material using a 32-bar format rather more than the 12 bar blues. The artful quality of Ellington's music lies first in the tunes which are memorable and recognisable his such as Black Beauty (1928) and Solitude and Mood Indigo (1930). Ellington starts from the clichés of white march and hymn, he adds chromatic richness that can plum our emotions. The music remains folk improvisation in tune with the spirit of the blues and at heart profoundly African. In a piece like The Mooche (1928), the orchestral colours are dreamily romantic, yet the piece remains sinister because of the padding cat beat and the cross-rhythms of the guitar. One example of this ambiguity is the Black and Tan Fantasy (1927). Ellington fuses the spirit of New Orleans jazz with the precise realization of art. Compromise between black jazz and white art entails the acceptance of white show business, which, in an industrial society, is arts popular manifestation. There are two complimentary strands in this process. One develops black jazz into a mechanized powerhouse; the other combines popular conventions with the escape art of musical comedy. The two streams converge, as did blues, minstrel show and rag in the earlier generation.
· American Musical
The jazz musicians we have discussed have all been black, indirectly of African descent. The musicians who worked in music theatre on Broadway during the same decades were all white, mostly of Jewish European ancestry. Musical comedy had its roots in European operetta, Viennese, French and English. One of the earliest and most talented of Broadway composers, Jerome Kern, though born in New York in 1885, studied in Europe, intending to become a classical composer. He returned the USA and to Tin Pan Alley. He produced his first show in 1912. During the next 30 years composed musicals such as Sunny (1925), Showboat (1927) and The Cat and the Fiddle (1931), which gave "classic" formulation to musical comedy conventions. The format of musical comedy steers it towards escapism. Broadway musical comedy emulates the operettas of such composers as the Strausses, Lehar, Offenbach and Sullivan, transplanting both themes and forms in to an American environment. The themes are again either hedonistic or nostalgic. The forms follow a predictable pattern, the tunes constructed within rigidly diatonic, symmetrical eight-plus-eight-measure periods, though the harmony and modulations, especially in the middle eight, may be more adventurous than those of the old minstrel music.
· Irving Berlin
Irving Berlin, born in Russia as Israel Baline in 1888, was taken to New York as a baby. He had no musical training except what he picked up as a singing waiter. When he discovered that he had gift for writing word and tunes he was content to pick out the melody with one finger on the piano, leaving harmonization and notation to a professional. Berlin's songs have only two basic themes: an adolescent pleasure in the present moment and an equally adolescent nostalgia, sometimes tinged with self-pity. The tunes, with their narrow range and stepwise movement, more or less sing themselves. Such songs do not deny that love may hurt: they seek pleasure from the hurt itself and create and illusion that we can live on the surface of our emotions.
· Cole Porter
Cole Porter (1891-1964). The cynical title of Porter's musical Anything Goes (1934) is typical; so too is the fact that it conveys the mood of the 1930s with carefree irresponsibility, with no trace with the bitterness of current social-political art. Their is no positive element except the rudimentary boy-girl relationship, as expressed in the song "All Through the Night". Its tune is merely a descending chromatic scale that, prompting dreamy modulations, induces trance, making the love seem almost too innocent to be true. Porter's chromatics cast an ironic reflection on the diatonic love-songs of Berlin. The satirical elements in Porter's songs are not sharp; they tend to defuse passion and violence, and become part of the American Dream. Yet his irony sometimes carries an uneasy honesty that we do not find in later musicals such as Richard Rodgers's Oklahoma (1943). Occasionally, for instance in "Night and Day", Porter allowed wit to be disturbed not only by passion but also by something not far from fright.
· George Gershwin
Only one composer of Broadway and Tin Pan Ally overrode the illusory nature of the conventions to produce works of genius; George Gershwin. Many songs he contributed to ephemeral musicals have survived in their own right. Evidence of Gershwin's percipience lies in his discovery of his essential theme in a novel by Dubose Hayward dealing with life among the blacks in New Orleans. From it was made a libretto for Porgy and Bess which, starting out as an ambitious musical, ended up as a fully-fledged opera exploiting an interplay of speech, recitative, arioso and pop "aria" and exhibiting a musical-theatrical craft to rival Puccini, if not Verdi.
· Swing era
Gershwin's understanding of the black blues, though intuitive, was profound is indicated by the fact that his tunes have always been favoured material for jazz improvisation. Porgy and Bess itself have been given superb jazz treatments by such distinguished musicians as Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald, Miles Davis and Gil Evens, Ray Charles and Cleo Laine. This provides a link to the evolution of jazz, now both black and white, in the 1930's and 40's; the era of swing, during which the relationship of band to soloists changed. Even Ellington's band grew to considerable dimensions and has affiliations with the big white bands that were more a part of show business than of jazz. The earliest was the concert band of Paul Whiteman, for which Gershwin composed Rhapsody in Blue, and to which some of the most talented of white jazz wind players contributed. Dominating the era of world war II was the big band of Glenn Miller. More interesting both musically and sociologically is Benny Godman, a white clarinetist who directed big and small bands and who looked, from the world of commerce, towards both jazz and art. It is significant that Goodman, himself a fine musician, was the first white impresario to promote black jazzmen on equal terms.
· Count Basie
The supreme achievements of jazz during the swing era remain black, notably the Kansas City bands of Count Basie. The Basie band is an authentic successor to the barrellhouse music of shanty-town piano thumpers. The machine- made energy of the massed brass is now set against the wiry agility of Basie's piano playing. Basie's line and rhythm, though nervously fragmented, are strong as steel. In Basie's music, which is more blues-influenced than Ellington's, rhythmic momentum liberates the soloist but at the same time threatens his individuality.
· Cabaret singers
The big band era was also the age of the great jazz cabaret singers. Basie worked with male blues "shouters" such as great Jimmy Rushing. He also worked with Billie Holiday, the finest female jazz singer since Bessie Smith, who restricted herself mostly to pop standards. Holiday died young, of heroin, but other great cabaret singers of the 1940's and 50's, notably Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan and Betty Carter, have carried on performing into the 1980's. The individual voice and spoken or sung word may still triumph.
· Instrumentalists
During the 1950's and 60s what came to be called Modern jazz reverted to private values. A pianist-composer like Thelonious Monk had some of the attributes of a high priest, literally turning his back on his audience as he created a nervously tight, harmonically and tonally contorted revamping of old barrellhouse styles. Miles Davis, in his cool' jazz of the 1950s, tempered jazz heat with the muted sonority of his trumpet. Often he was abetted by the swinging lilt of Bill Evans's piano-playing. Evans was a white man. So is the composer-arranger Gil Evans, with whom Davis collaborated in some of the most beautiful jazz tone poems' since Ellington, notably the suite derived from Porgy and Bess (1958).
Among the saxophonists of modern jazz Charlie Parker stands supreme, the most inventive and influential jazz soloist since Armstrong. Although he used blues and pop conventions, his rapid chord changes and flexible meter steered jazz improvisation once more towards a linear approach. This is evident too in the playing of Stan Getz and in that of John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman. We can also hear the influence of Parker in the jittery linearity of the playing of Bud Powell who, like Parker, was a drug-infected victim of jazz neurosis. McCoy Tyner starting in the 1960s in duo with Coltrane as a brilliant exponent of blues and standard forms.
· White Country Music
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the original white settlers on the American continent brought their folk music with them, and it too has been transformed into an industry: the pop music known as country and western. The music originated, however in the Eastern States, where emigrants from Britain had sung their old songs, rendered scrawnier and more rasping by the tough conditions of pioneer life. Even in the mid-twentieth century this is still evident in the singing of men and women living in remote areas of the Carolinas, Kentucky and Virginia. The instrumentalists, however, who made music not so much to alleviate loneliness as to stimulate communal activity, transformed their old-world models more radically. Georgian, Arkansas and Virginian fiddlers such as Fiddlin' John Carson played the old Scots and Irish reels with wild abandon, making music of almost manic cheerfulness. To keep their spirits up, the old music had to be defused of pain and passion. This provided a recipe for pop or entertainment, as distinct from folk, music. The fiddling of the string bands of the 1920s abandons everything to hedonism. This euphoria is no less evident in the banjo and guitar pickers who often support the fiddlers themselves play European-based dance music, or accompaniments to songs, some derived from British sources, others newly invented. Both fiddle music and plucked string music tends to be fast, regular in meter and diatonic.
· Bluegrass
Some fiddlers and string players formed string bands such as the Skillet Lickers, the Gully Jumpers or the North Carolina Ramblers. The music they made in the 1920s and 30s was still a melody of old British songs and dances drained of hurtful elements and seasoned with bits of American hymnody, march and ballad. At first this concerted music was still folk music. It served the needs of the community. During the 1940s it became more streamlined, exploitable on radio and recording. It was named "bluegrass" in homage to its Eastern mountain origins. Bluegrass music was performed by a lead singer who also played the guitar, banjo or mandolin, vigorously supported by other players of guitar, banjo and harp, with an interlacing of fiddlers. Tunes were fast and plainly diatonic. There may be a hint of desperation in the way in which the most melancholy local events - railway accidents, hanging etc- are recounted with headily impervious glee. One finds something similar in the more jazz-influenced string bands that, in the 1940s, came to be known as "Western swing".
· Carter Family
The Carter family, a Virginian mountain family who collected and arranged old-time hymns and ballads, sang quavery bass in the vocal trio. All the Carters' songs, whatever their origin or theme, come out at moderate-to-fast tempo, regular in meter and in unsullied diatonicism. The Carters' importance is attributable not to exceptional talents but to their incorruptible integrity. Through popularised, even commercialised, they were little changed between the 1920s and the 1950s. With the Carters and the frail, clown like figure of Jimmy Rodgers the Lonesome Cowboy, country music became an industry in which the opposite poles of pop music, hedonism and nostalgia, were identified. Country singers like Dolly Parton and Lacy J Dalton have entered big business in becoming pop stars, without destroying the folk-like creativity they started from.
· Rock
The rock explosion that occurred in the wake of World War II and came to fruition in the 1960s was an attempt to re-create music, having become an industry, tried to absorb the life-giving primitivism of black jazz. Black-white integration worked both ways. If white culture engulfed black, black culture was now eager to take advantage of white technology to boost its growing self-confidence. From this process emerged what came, appropriately, to be called soul music: the traditional passion and pain of black gospel music and of the blues are given greater punch by electric rather than acoustic guitars and keyboards, in powerful amplification. The most distinguished male and female soul singers- Otis Redding and James Brown, Nina Simone and Aretha Franklin. Also, in the 1960s blacks established their own record-producing industry, based in Detroit, manufacturing their own black style, called Motown. This fast, regular-metered, cheerily diatonic music, reflecting the black's self- assurances, is best represented by Diana Ross and her Supremes. The sound of Motown has been wildly imitated by pop groups on both sides of the Atlantic from the late 1970s. But the emergence of rock and roll in the mid-twentieth century was a white phenomenon, in that young whites listened to black rhythm and blues out of frustration with their own society. It is possible to see Elvis Presley as a successor to the country singer Hank Williams. Both were Southern white boys with an evangelical background.
· Hank William
Williams composed most of his own material in an idiom related to that of the Carter family, though with a touch of the black blues that gave a darker shade to the hymn-like and ballad style.
· Elvis Presley
Occasionally the black elements in Williams's songs reinforced by the electric beat, guide him towards early Presley- style rock and roll.
Elvis Presley responded to a non- conformist small-town background far more rebelliously. Whereas Williams created his own songs, mostly about broken loves, Presley used other people's modes and manners to evoke an image of narcissistic self-esteem. Dressed extravagantly he brought it off because he had abilities to bolster charisma. Presley's confidence in his voice projected his image, Heartbreak Hotel, the number that bought him instant fame in 1956, was in origin a Southern country song. Presley uses both black barrelhouse and white Pentecostal styles as part of his performing expertise. Strait romantic lyricism is held in tension. The performance stimulates because it is precarious. He was always a performer and never a composer. The two poles of his nature- white dream-maker and black rebel- were both attempted escapes from routine. Presley was a solo performer: he could brook no competition. But as rock music developed it increasingly took over from gospel music the concept of the group. The rock group reached its climax not in the USA but in traditionally conservative
Britain.
· Rolling Stones
The Rolling Stones, whose heyday was in the 1960's, represents the closest approach pop ha made to an orgiastic music comparable with that created in African societies. This is seen in the group's singer Mick Jagger's Africanised yelling and bodily gyrations, as well as in the fact that he adopted much of his material from black bluesmen like Muddy Waters. The Rolling Stones' instrumental resources also have rudimentary origins, electric guitars and keyboards being vastly amplified versions of blues guitar, country harmonica, bagpipes and autoharp. Amplification intensifies primitivism, since electronics may create a nightmarish inflation of the pitch distortions typical of folk music. Percussion is more violent than tribal drumming, both because it is metrically cruder and because, in amplification it is so loud, passing the threshold of tolerance. Breaking the sound barrier may become not a permissive euphoria but a destructive force relatable to voodoo. In 1970 Jagger's rendering of Under my thumb triggered a Hell's Angels ritual murder at the site of the performance. Primitive pentatonic melody here relies mainly on the driving beat for its momentum; harmony, as in real tribal music, is minimal or non-existent. This may be observed too in hard' American rock groups such as the Doors, the Grateful Dead and the drug-orientated Velvet Underground.
· Music-Theatre, rock musicals
Just as the energy of the Rolling Stones seemed to have weathered the years, so something has survived from the happier and hippier cults of the 1960s. There is a direct return, if in simple form, to the Greek concept of music-theatre ritual. This is also demonstrated in the tribal musicals' of which Galt McDermott's Hair (1969) was the first to achieve artistic and material success. Similar themes and structure appear in The Who's Tommy and in Andrew Lloyd Webber's Jesus Christ Superstar. The use of multiple media word, sound, movement, lighting and of improvisation and audience participation means involvement rather than passive reception.
Most pop concerts have become theatre ritual in this sense. Audiences will no longer tolerate a pop concert without visual as well as audible appeal. The Yes's performance of their Tales from Topographic Oceans (1973) has something in common with the later music rituals of Stockhausen, in intention as well as in technique and technology.` Pop is ritual in an emergent stage, and its ambiguity may be a strength. The long-playing record, tape and audio-visual are more radical innovations than we once realized. They transplant ritual from temple or theatre to any place. Individuals may create one, as do The Who in Quadraphenia (1965) or Pink Floyd in Atom Heart Mother (1968) and The Wall (1979). Intellect and technology are combined with feeling and instinct.
· The Beatles
The most successful group in pop history, the Beatles, was the best. Their quality depended on the fact that they made songs of pronounced individuality. The return to origins in the basic beat, the often modal tunes, the side-stepping harmonies, were given a location and a name. American blues and country music interlaced with British hymn and music hall in the memorable melodies. With Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) the Beatles made history with the first self-contained cycle prompted by the long-playing disc; they explored with instinctive verbal articulateness and in fresh, original music the perennial problems of adolescence: loneliness, fear, friendship, sex, the generation gap, alienation, nightmare.
· Bob Dylan
With the Beatles, Bob Dylan is probably the most remarkable pop musician. He has consistently written his own words and music. He became a spokesman for American youth, starting from the minimal conventions of white country music and black blues. He at first castigated a sick society in protest' songs in part inspired by those of his master, Woody Guthrie. Variations of pitch and inflection were part of the composition.
The social validity of Dylan's songs is deepened, not denied, when he move from protest against the world outside to self-confrontation. This is initiated in Mr Tambourine Man (1965) which, related to white hillbilly music rather than to blues, looks like an escape from life to dream. In the next phase of Dylan's work, notably the double album Blonde on blonde (1966) prompts comparably rich permutations of country music and blues, calling on electronic technology in the process. In John Wesley Harding (1968) Dylan abandons this gadgetry, returning to his country roots and acoustic guitar; the verses now have a fundamentalist Christian background. The political protest, having passed through the fire of the inner self, merges in religious consciousness and conscience.
Not only Nashville Skyline (1970), a deliberate compromise between the folk and the commercialised country world, but also John Wesley Harding and the later Wild West songs were produced' in Nashville, factory of the pop music industry. The gospel songs of his born again' phase contain some of his blackest music, close to pentatonic yell and tumbling strain, abrasive in vocal production.
· Joni Mitchell
Some of the finest singing poet-composers should be women. Joni Mitchell matriarchally complements Dylan's white-jewish-black patriarchy, creating verses dedicated to women. The pathos of her verses in early songs like To a seagull and Margie (1968) flows into modal tunes and empirical, guitar-derived harmonies. She does not grow', as Dylan does, and in her middle phase, especially in Hejira (1976), she was prone to self-pity. Yet that was a response which could not destroy her poetic gift, and from which she emerged with the help of black jazz rather than rock. In recent songs Mitchell's ethnic qualities are as varied as Dylan's embracing white folk, black jazz and South American music along with a ghost of the Aboriginal Amerindians.
Popular music, or pop music', means music of the populace'. The term embraces all kinds of folk music which, originally made by illiterate people, were not written down.
The creation of a popular music that aims simply at entertaining large numbers of people is a product of industrialisation, in which music became a commodity to be bought and sold. It is in the rapid industrialised nations, notably Britain and USA, that we first encounter composers who have devoted themselves to fulfilling a demand for popular, entertainment music.
· Foster
Stephen Foster (Born Lawrenceville in 1826; died in New York in 1864)
Foster was an American composer, mainly self-taught in music. He wrote over 200 songs, several of which …show more content…
have come to be regarded almost as American folk-songs. Though a Northerner, several of his songs capture the Southern plantation spirit in an authentic and eloquent manner. His songs are considered as escapist', through nostalgia. All of Foster's songs yearn for the good old days', but their yearning is not innocent, as real folk music is.
· Sousa
John Philip Sousa (Born in Washington DC in 1854; died in Reading, Pennsylvania in 1932)
Sousa was an American composer and bandmaster. As a youth he played the violin in an orchestra. He conducted the US Marine Corps band in 1880-92. He formed his own military band in 1892, which became very popular and toured Europe four times between 1900 and 1905, and toured the world in 1910-11. Unfortunately it was victim of the 1931 Depression. Sousa was best known for his superb marches, of which he composed nearly 100. His music is also considered escapist', by means of hedonism.
· Gottschalk
Louis Moreau Gottschalk (Born in New Orleans in 1829; died in Brazil in 1969)
Gottschalk was an American pianist, conductor and composer. He went to Paris to study in 1842. His pianoforte debut was in 1844 was praised by Chopin. On return to the USA he toured widely, playing and conducting his own sentimental and naïve music for unsophisticated audiences who enjoyed his virtuoso panache and his arrangements of national aires. He wrote two operas, two symphonies and many piano pieces.
· Blues and Ragtime
Though jazz is a twentieth century phenomenon, mainly associated with cities, its origins were in Africa. The black man's music, transmuted into the white mans world. In his new, white American world, the black man, enslaved, inevitably used the musical techniques he had been reared on. As an outcast, he no longer sings a tribal song but calls on ancient vocal formulas of the pentatonic scale and a tumbling descent from a high note, and on traditional techniques of vocal production - modified because he sings in the American, rather than in African language. Inevitably it came into contact with the musical manifestations of the New World, especially the march and hymn. The hymn followed a pattern of tonic, dominant and subdominant harmony, while the march provided a four-square beat. When the American black, responding to these types of music, took over the white man's guitar, the blues was born, and with it the heart of jazz.
· Blues
There was no decisive break between the folk holler and the blues. Pete Williams, a black man in the Southern prison, uses the guitar to accompany himself in what he calls Prisoner's talkin' blues' and Levee camp blues', but these are still hollers in which speed is heightened, with the guitar providing a repeated figure. The words of vocal blues often concern the agony of desertion, betrayal and unrequited love and sexual references are frequent. Blues form', as it evolved, tends to fall into a pattern, as shown:
Bars 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
Chords I----------------IV-----I--------V--------I-------
But the form is not static. It provided a harmonic framework against which the black singer could interpret his words or the instrumentalist could improvise. Thus black melody and white harmony interact.
· Ragtime
Ragtime is an early type of jazz particularly for solo piano and composition rather than improvised. The famous exponent and composer of it was Scott Joplin popular from 1895-1920 when other forms of jazz took over.
· Scott Joplin
Scott Joplin was born in 1897 died in 1917. He was known as the King of Ragtime'. He took his musical convention from white military two-step. But Joplin's music, both in the Maple Leaf Rag in 1899 that made him famous and in more harmonically sophisticated pieces like Euphonic Sounds in (1909), has an improvised feel mostly because the rhythms are ragged' in being syncopated. In the music of the notable rag composers, for example James Scott and Eubie Blake and as well as Joplin, the music has pathos but not sentimentality.
· Piano Jazz
Blues and jazz meet in the evolution of piano jazz. When blacks came across broken down pianos they treated them as mechanized guitars. "Barrelhouse" pianists came to make basic, usually very fast use of the harmonies of the 12-bars blues and to seek pianistic substitutes for the guitar's expressiveness by way of "crunched" tones, slides and displaced accents. The pianist exploited the power of a percussive keyboard, creating momentum with a pounding left hand usually in patterns of repeated tones or unequal rhythms the came to be known as boogie basses. Gradually, barrelhouse pianist exploited complexities of texture as well as to exploit rhythmic force. Leroy Carr, as a singer and pianist, shows how white art may lead elegance to black passion, as the rumbustiousness of the barrelhouse piano came to term with the artificialness of rag. James P. Johnson trained in both barrelhouse piano and ragtime traditions and distinguished for his command of an irresistibly striding bass and for the delicate precision of the right-hand figurations.
· Blues Singing
Fusion of blues and rag exemplified in Johnson's playing is crucial to the evolution of jazz, especially during the 1920s. The most revered singers were women. The earliest of the great women blues singers, Gertrude Rainey nickname "Ma". Her vocal timbre often had a liturgical flavour. She found no barriers between country blues gospel and minstrel show music.
· Bessie Smith
Bessie Smith (1894-1937), the most famous blues singer of the 1920s was known as the Empress of Blues'. Like all the finest jazz her music sprang from tension: between country and town, black and white, art and entertainment. Like other women blues singers, Smith usually performed in dialogue with a melody instrument, which both intensified and depersonalised the vocal line. She gave superb versions of folk blues like Careless Love' and Reckless Love' with Louis Armstrong playing a cornet obbligato and of her own Young women blues and Poor man blues with the cornet of Joe Smith her favourite collaborator.
· Jazz
Since women blues singers worked with jazz players and used conventions from both jazz and minstrel show, their work had many features in common with the music of the early jazz band. This began in New Orleans where, as we have seen, a lively black population mingled with a cosmopolitan society of white Americans, Frenchman, Spaniards, Italians and German. From these cross-fertilizations the New Orleans jazz band became established with instruments from the white military band. The cornet (later trumpet), clarinet and trombone were the main melody instruments. A tuba (later string bass) provided the bottom line, reinforced by drums and other percussion instruments. The banjo substituted for the guitar as harmonic fill-in. Later when bands no longer marched the piano became the main harmony instrument, combined with plucked strings. The music of the New Orleans band compromises between the 12- bar blues and 32-bar form. The musical substance lies in the tension between the trumping military beat and the symmetries of white harmony on one hand and on the other the black solo lines which, with their African flexibility of pitch and rhythm, try to override the basic form. The supreme New Orleans soloists- Louis Armstong, cornet and trumpet, Johnny Dodds, clarinet and sidney Bechet (soprano saxophone) - attain a levitating ecstasy with their soaring improvised melodies. They also affirm their humanity in imbuing their instruments with the expressivities of the voice.
· Louis Armstrong
The voice and instrument speak, the body move: so the heart of music is in the spoken and unspoken word and in physical movement. What is remarkable about New Orleans jazz is that this word -body relationship flourished within the context of westernised commercial music. We can hear this in the supreme achievements of band jazz, the recordings made by Louis Armstrong with his Hot Five and Hot Seven in 1926-8, Tight Like This. Tragedy is overt in Armstrong's famous unaccompanied solo opening to West End blues. The consummation of New Orleans Chicago jazz involves a marriage between black folk melody and the harmony of white art music is revealed in Armstrong's recording of "King Oliver's Weather Bird which he presents simply as a duet with Earl Hines. Armstrong and Hines have proceeded from the folk heterophony of early jazz to a true improvised polyphony. These tracks were recorded in 1928, just before Armstrong left Chicago for New York, later to embark on a career as a show-business entertainer as well as a jazzman. Jelly Roll Morton, a light-skinned New Orleans black, produced, between 1926-1930, a series of recordings with his Red Hot Peppers. He composed most of the numbers in the convention of the Sousa march and trio and even wrote down 12-bar blues with precise indication of harmony and figuration. The music involved jazz improvisation, though Morton, as pianist-director of his steel basically New Orleans ensemble, controlled real acerbic blues like Smokehouse Blues or in a cross between the two like The Chant, they generate passion while managing to sound blithely carefree. Their improvised composition, as distinct from Louis Armstrong's improvisation, is an irresistible affirmation of the human spirit.
· Duke Ellington
A further refinement of Morton's approach occurs in the music of Duke Ellington, born in Washing DC. Morton was the first, Ellington was the second composer in jazz history; he remains the finest. He scored for a bigger band, using choir of saxophones blending, or playing in contrast, with brass and reeds, supported by string bass and percussion Ellington directed from or beside the keyboard. Ellington composed almost all the bands material using a 32-bar format rather more than the 12 bar blues. The artful quality of Ellington's music lies first in the tunes which are memorable and recognisable his such as Black Beauty (1928) and Solitude and Mood Indigo (1930). Ellington starts from the clichés of white march and hymn, he adds chromatic richness that can plum our emotions. The music remains folk improvisation in tune with the spirit of the blues and at heart profoundly African. In a piece like The Mooche (1928), the orchestral colours are dreamily romantic, yet the piece remains sinister because of the padding cat beat and the cross-rhythms of the guitar. One example of this ambiguity is the Black and Tan Fantasy (1927). Ellington fuses the spirit of New Orleans jazz with the precise realization of art. Compromise between black jazz and white art entails the acceptance of white show business, which, in an industrial society, is arts popular manifestation. There are two complimentary strands in this process. One develops black jazz into a mechanized powerhouse; the other combines popular conventions with the escape art of musical comedy. The two streams converge, as did blues, minstrel show and rag in the earlier generation.
· American Musical
The jazz musicians we have discussed have all been black, indirectly of African descent. The musicians who worked in music theatre on Broadway during the same decades were all white, mostly of Jewish European ancestry. Musical comedy had its roots in European operetta, Viennese, French and English. One of the earliest and most talented of Broadway composers, Jerome Kern, though born in New York in 1885, studied in Europe, intending to become a classical composer. He returned the USA and to Tin Pan Alley. He produced his first show in 1912. During the next 30 years composed musicals such as Sunny (1925), Showboat (1927) and The Cat and the Fiddle (1931), which gave "classic" formulation to musical comedy conventions. The format of musical comedy steers it towards escapism. Broadway musical comedy emulates the operettas of such composers as the Strausses, Lehar, Offenbach and Sullivan, transplanting both themes and forms in to an American environment. The themes are again either hedonistic or nostalgic. The forms follow a predictable pattern, the tunes constructed within rigidly diatonic, symmetrical eight-plus-eight-measure periods, though the harmony and modulations, especially in the middle eight, may be more adventurous than those of the old minstrel music.
· Irving Berlin
Irving Berlin, born in Russia as Israel Baline in 1888, was taken to New York as a baby. He had no musical training except what he picked up as a singing waiter. When he discovered that he had gift for writing word and tunes he was content to pick out the melody with one finger on the piano, leaving harmonization and notation to a professional. Berlin's songs have only two basic themes: an adolescent pleasure in the present moment and an equally adolescent nostalgia, sometimes tinged with self-pity. The tunes, with their narrow range and stepwise movement, more or less sing themselves. Such songs do not deny that love may hurt: they seek pleasure from the hurt itself and create and illusion that we can live on the surface of our emotions.
· Cole Porter
Cole Porter (1891-1964). The cynical title of Porter's musical Anything Goes (1934) is typical; so too is the fact that it conveys the mood of the 1930s with carefree irresponsibility, with no trace with the bitterness of current social-political art. Their is no positive element except the rudimentary boy-girl relationship, as expressed in the song "All Through the Night". Its tune is merely a descending chromatic scale that, prompting dreamy modulations, induces trance, making the love seem almost too innocent to be true. Porter's chromatics cast an ironic reflection on the diatonic love-songs of Berlin. The satirical elements in Porter's songs are not sharp; they tend to defuse passion and violence, and become part of the American Dream. Yet his irony sometimes carries an uneasy honesty that we do not find in later musicals such as Richard Rodgers's Oklahoma (1943). Occasionally, for instance in "Night and Day", Porter allowed wit to be disturbed not only by passion but also by something not far from fright.
· George Gershwin
Only one composer of Broadway and Tin Pan Ally overrode the illusory nature of the conventions to produce works of genius; George Gershwin. Many songs he contributed to ephemeral musicals have survived in their own right. Evidence of Gershwin's percipience lies in his discovery of his essential theme in a novel by Dubose Hayward dealing with life among the blacks in New Orleans. From it was made a libretto for Porgy and Bess which, starting out as an ambitious musical, ended up as a fully-fledged opera exploiting an interplay of speech, recitative, arioso and pop "aria" and exhibiting a musical-theatrical craft to rival Puccini, if not Verdi.
· Swing era
Gershwin's understanding of the black blues, though intuitive, was profound is indicated by the fact that his tunes have always been favoured material for jazz improvisation. Porgy and Bess itself have been given superb jazz treatments by such distinguished musicians as Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald, Miles Davis and Gil Evens, Ray Charles and Cleo Laine. This provides a link to the evolution of jazz, now both black and white, in the 1930's and 40's; the era of swing, during which the relationship of band to soloists changed. Even Ellington's band grew to considerable dimensions and has affiliations with the big white bands that were more a part of show business than of jazz. The earliest was the concert band of Paul Whiteman, for which Gershwin composed Rhapsody in Blue, and to which some of the most talented of white jazz wind players contributed. Dominating the era of world war II was the big band of Glenn Miller. More interesting both musically and sociologically is Benny Godman, a white clarinetist who directed big and small bands and who looked, from the world of commerce, towards both jazz and art. It is significant that Goodman, himself a fine musician, was the first white impresario to promote black jazzmen on equal terms.
· Count Basie
The supreme achievements of jazz during the swing era remain black, notably the Kansas City bands of Count Basie. The Basie band is an authentic successor to the barrellhouse music of shanty-town piano thumpers. The machine- made energy of the massed brass is now set against the wiry agility of Basie's piano playing. Basie's line and rhythm, though nervously fragmented, are strong as steel. In Basie's music, which is more blues-influenced than Ellington's, rhythmic momentum liberates the soloist but at the same time threatens his individuality.
· Cabaret singers
The big band era was also the age of the great jazz cabaret singers. Basie worked with male blues "shouters" such as great Jimmy Rushing. He also worked with Billie Holiday, the finest female jazz singer since Bessie Smith, who restricted herself mostly to pop standards. Holiday died young, of heroin, but other great cabaret singers of the 1940's and 50's, notably Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan and Betty Carter, have carried on performing into the 1980's. The individual voice and spoken or sung word may still triumph.
· Instrumentalists
During the 1950's and 60s what came to be called Modern jazz reverted to private values. A pianist-composer like Thelonious Monk had some of the attributes of a high priest, literally turning his back on his audience as he created a nervously tight, harmonically and tonally contorted revamping of old barrellhouse styles. Miles Davis, in his cool' jazz of the 1950s, tempered jazz heat with the muted sonority of his trumpet. Often he was abetted by the swinging lilt of Bill Evans's piano-playing. Evans was a white man. So is the composer-arranger Gil Evans, with whom Davis collaborated in some of the most beautiful jazz tone poems' since Ellington, notably the suite derived from Porgy and Bess (1958).
Among the saxophonists of modern jazz Charlie Parker stands supreme, the most inventive and influential jazz soloist since Armstrong. Although he used blues and pop conventions, his rapid chord changes and flexible meter steered jazz improvisation once more towards a linear approach. This is evident too in the playing of Stan Getz and in that of John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman. We can also hear the influence of Parker in the jittery linearity of the playing of Bud Powell who, like Parker, was a drug-infected victim of jazz neurosis. McCoy Tyner starting in the 1960s in duo with Coltrane as a brilliant exponent of blues and standard forms.
· White Country Music
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the original white settlers on the American continent brought their folk music with them, and it too has been transformed into an industry: the pop music known as country and western. The music originated, however in the Eastern States, where emigrants from Britain had sung their old songs, rendered scrawnier and more rasping by the tough conditions of pioneer life. Even in the mid-twentieth century this is still evident in the singing of men and women living in remote areas of the Carolinas, Kentucky and Virginia. The instrumentalists, however, who made music not so much to alleviate loneliness as to stimulate communal activity, transformed their old-world models more radically. Georgian, Arkansas and Virginian fiddlers such as Fiddlin' John Carson played the old Scots and Irish reels with wild abandon, making music of almost manic cheerfulness. To keep their spirits up, the old music had to be defused of pain and passion. This provided a recipe for pop or entertainment, as distinct from folk, music. The fiddling of the string bands of the 1920s abandons everything to hedonism. This euphoria is no less evident in the banjo and guitar pickers who often support the fiddlers themselves play European-based dance music, or accompaniments to songs, some derived from British sources, others newly invented. Both fiddle music and plucked string music tends to be fast, regular in meter and diatonic.
· Bluegrass
Some fiddlers and string players formed string bands such as the Skillet Lickers, the Gully Jumpers or the North Carolina Ramblers. The music they made in the 1920s and 30s was still a melody of old British songs and dances drained of hurtful elements and seasoned with bits of American hymnody, march and ballad. At first this concerted music was still folk music. It served the needs of the community. During the 1940s it became more streamlined, exploitable on radio and recording. It was named "bluegrass" in homage to its Eastern mountain origins. Bluegrass music was performed by a lead singer who also played the guitar, banjo or mandolin, vigorously supported by other players of guitar, banjo and harp, with an interlacing of fiddlers. Tunes were fast and plainly diatonic. There may be a hint of desperation in the way in which the most melancholy local events - railway accidents, hanging etc- are recounted with headily impervious glee. One finds something similar in the more jazz-influenced string bands that, in the 1940s, came to be known as "Western swing".
· Carter Family
The Carter family, a Virginian mountain family who collected and arranged old-time hymns and ballads, sang quavery bass in the vocal trio. All the Carters' songs, whatever their origin or theme, come out at moderate-to-fast tempo, regular in meter and in unsullied diatonicism. The Carters' importance is attributable not to exceptional talents but to their incorruptible integrity. Through popularised, even commercialised, they were little changed between the 1920s and the 1950s. With the Carters and the frail, clown like figure of Jimmy Rodgers the Lonesome Cowboy, country music became an industry in which the opposite poles of pop music, hedonism and nostalgia, were identified. Country singers like Dolly Parton and Lacy J Dalton have entered big business in becoming pop stars, without destroying the folk-like creativity they started from.
· Rock
The rock explosion that occurred in the wake of World War II and came to fruition in the 1960s was an attempt to re-create music, having become an industry, tried to absorb the life-giving primitivism of black jazz. Black-white integration worked both ways. If white culture engulfed black, black culture was now eager to take advantage of white technology to boost its growing self-confidence. From this process emerged what came, appropriately, to be called soul music: the traditional passion and pain of black gospel music and of the blues are given greater punch by electric rather than acoustic guitars and keyboards, in powerful amplification. The most distinguished male and female soul singers- Otis Redding and James Brown, Nina Simone and Aretha Franklin. Also, in the 1960s blacks established their own record-producing industry, based in Detroit, manufacturing their own black style, called Motown. This fast, regular-metered, cheerily diatonic music, reflecting the black's self- assurances, is best represented by Diana Ross and her Supremes. The sound of Motown has been wildly imitated by pop groups on both sides of the Atlantic from the late 1970s. But the emergence of rock and roll in the mid-twentieth century was a white phenomenon, in that young whites listened to black rhythm and blues out of frustration with their own society. It is possible to see Elvis Presley as a successor to the country singer Hank Williams. Both were Southern white boys with an evangelical background.
· Hank William
Williams composed most of his own material in an idiom related to that of the Carter family, though with a touch of the black blues that gave a darker shade to the hymn-like and ballad style.
· Elvis Presley
Occasionally the black elements in Williams's songs reinforced by the electric beat, guide him towards early Presley- style rock and roll.
Elvis Presley responded to a non- conformist small-town background far more rebelliously. Whereas Williams created his own songs, mostly about broken loves, Presley used other people's modes and manners to evoke an image of narcissistic self-esteem. Dressed extravagantly he brought it off because he had abilities to bolster charisma. Presley's confidence in his voice projected his image, Heartbreak Hotel, the number that bought him instant fame in 1956, was in origin a Southern country song. Presley uses both black barrelhouse and white Pentecostal styles as part of his performing expertise. Strait romantic lyricism is held in tension. The performance stimulates because it is precarious. He was always a performer and never a composer. The two poles of his nature- white dream-maker and black rebel- were both attempted escapes from routine. Presley was a solo performer: he could brook no competition. But as rock music developed it increasingly took over from gospel music the concept of the group. The rock group reached its climax not in the USA but in traditionally conservative
Britain.
· Rolling Stones
The Rolling Stones, whose heyday was in the 1960's, represents the closest approach pop ha made to an orgiastic music comparable with that created in African societies. This is seen in the group's singer Mick Jagger's Africanised yelling and bodily gyrations, as well as in the fact that he adopted much of his material from black bluesmen like Muddy Waters. The Rolling Stones' instrumental resources also have rudimentary origins, electric guitars and keyboards being vastly amplified versions of blues guitar, country harmonica, bagpipes and autoharp. Amplification intensifies primitivism, since electronics may create a nightmarish inflation of the pitch distortions typical of folk music. Percussion is more violent than tribal drumming, both because it is metrically cruder and because, in amplification it is so loud, passing the threshold of tolerance. Breaking the sound barrier may become not a permissive euphoria but a destructive force relatable to voodoo. In 1970 Jagger's rendering of Under my thumb triggered a Hell's Angels ritual murder at the site of the performance. Primitive pentatonic melody here relies mainly on the driving beat for its momentum; harmony, as in real tribal music, is minimal or non-existent. This may be observed too in hard' American rock groups such as the Doors, the Grateful Dead and the drug-orientated Velvet Underground.
· Music-Theatre, rock musicals
Just as the energy of the Rolling Stones seemed to have weathered the years, so something has survived from the happier and hippier cults of the 1960s. There is a direct return, if in simple form, to the Greek concept of music-theatre ritual. This is also demonstrated in the tribal musicals' of which Galt McDermott's Hair (1969) was the first to achieve artistic and material success. Similar themes and structure appear in The Who's Tommy and in Andrew Lloyd Webber's Jesus Christ Superstar. The use of multiple media word, sound, movement, lighting and of improvisation and audience participation means involvement rather than passive reception.
Most pop concerts have become theatre ritual in this sense. Audiences will no longer tolerate a pop concert without visual as well as audible appeal. The Yes's performance of their Tales from Topographic Oceans (1973) has something in common with the later music rituals of Stockhausen, in intention as well as in technique and technology.` Pop is ritual in an emergent stage, and its ambiguity may be a strength. The long-playing record, tape and audio-visual are more radical innovations than we once realized. They transplant ritual from temple or theatre to any place. Individuals may create one, as do The Who in Quadraphenia (1965) or Pink Floyd in Atom Heart Mother (1968) and The Wall (1979). Intellect and technology are combined with feeling and instinct.
· The Beatles
The most successful group in pop history, the Beatles, was the best. Their quality depended on the fact that they made songs of pronounced individuality. The return to origins in the basic beat, the often modal tunes, the side-stepping harmonies, were given a location and a name. American blues and country music interlaced with British hymn and music hall in the memorable melodies. With Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) the Beatles made history with the first self-contained cycle prompted by the long-playing disc; they explored with instinctive verbal articulateness and in fresh, original music the perennial problems of adolescence: loneliness, fear, friendship, sex, the generation gap, alienation, nightmare.
· Bob Dylan
With the Beatles, Bob Dylan is probably the most remarkable pop musician. He has consistently written his own words and music. He became a spokesman for American youth, starting from the minimal conventions of white country music and black blues. He at first castigated a sick society in protest' songs in part inspired by those of his master, Woody Guthrie. Variations of pitch and inflection were part of the composition.
The social validity of Dylan's songs is deepened, not denied, when he move from protest against the world outside to self-confrontation. This is initiated in Mr Tambourine Man (1965) which, related to white hillbilly music rather than to blues, looks like an escape from life to dream. In the next phase of Dylan's work, notably the double album Blonde on blonde (1966) prompts comparably rich permutations of country music and blues, calling on electronic technology in the process. In John Wesley Harding (1968) Dylan abandons this gadgetry, returning to his country roots and acoustic guitar; the verses now have a fundamentalist Christian background. The political protest, having passed through the fire of the inner self, merges in religious consciousness and conscience.
Not only Nashville Skyline (1970), a deliberate compromise between the folk and the commercialised country world, but also John Wesley Harding and the later Wild West songs were produced' in Nashville, factory of the pop music industry. The gospel songs of his born again' phase contain some of his blackest music, close to pentatonic yell and tumbling strain, abrasive in vocal production.
· Joni Mitchell
Some of the finest singing poet-composers should be women. Joni Mitchell matriarchally complements Dylan's white-jewish-black patriarchy, creating verses dedicated to women. The pathos of her verses in early songs like To a seagull and Margie (1968) flows into modal tunes and empirical, guitar-derived harmonies. She does not grow', as Dylan does, and in her middle phase, especially in Hejira (1976), she was prone to self-pity. Yet that was a response which could not destroy her poetic gift, and from which she emerged with the help of black jazz rather than rock. In recent songs Mitchell's ethnic qualities are as varied as Dylan's embracing white folk, black jazz and South American music along with a ghost of the Aboriginal Amerindians.