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Dictionaries of Race and Music

Coleman Julie

in A History of Cant and Slang Dictionaries: Volume IV: 1937-1984

Glossaries of African-American English began to appear between the wars. This period saw them take on a political function in the fight for civil rights and a practical role in attempts to improve ... More

Glossaries of African-American English began to appear between the wars. This period saw them take on a political function in the fight for civil rights and a practical role in attempts to improve educational levels in inner-city schools. Musicians' slang was heavily influenced by African-American slang, and musicians carried this slang into more general usage.Less

Dictionaries of Youth

Coleman Julie

in A History of Cant and Slang Dictionaries: Volume IV: 1937-1984

Slang only becomes associated with young people in general during the period covered by this volume. The production of dictionaries of youth slang was fuelled by fears of juvenile delinquency and by ... More

Slang only becomes associated with young people in general during the period covered by this volume. The production of dictionaries of youth slang was fuelled by fears of juvenile delinquency and by the influence of ‘black’ music on white teenagers. However, many glossaries of youth slang from this period were produced as tools in marketing and advertising campaigns.Less

“Still Talking About My Generation!”: The Representation of Youth in Popular Music

Andy Bennett

in The Changing Portrayal of Adolescents in the Media Since 1950

Rock and Roll became an important form of popular music, entering mainstream youth culture by white translators of black music such as Elvis Presley. Youth readily identified with the themes of Rock ... More

Rock and Roll became an important form of popular music, entering mainstream youth culture by white translators of black music such as Elvis Presley. Youth readily identified with the themes of Rock and Roll, such as rebelling against parents, having fun, and earlier themes of love and romance. Succeeding generations expressed the concerns of youth at the moment. Disenchantment with the war in Vietnam produced the Hippy movement. The economic downturn of the 1970s led to Punk as a voice for the disempowered that later emerged in the form of Grunge. Gender bending and challenges to conventional interpretations of sexuality were expressed in Glam. Soul and Reggae music represented the voices of non-white youth, with Rap emerging in the 1980s and becoming a global influence. Each of these expressions of youth concerns has had a lasting effect on each generation as well as on culture at large.Less

A Freak Deferred: Johnnie Ray Navigates Innovation and Convention

Vincent L. Stephens

in Rocking the Closet: How Little Richard, Johnnie Ray, Liberace, and Johnny Mathis Queered Pop Music

This chapter argues that the deaf, bisexual, and racially progressive white crooner Johnnie Ray was successful in the early 1950s because his “freak” persona endeared him to audiences fascinated by ... More

This chapter argues that the deaf, bisexual, and racially progressive white crooner Johnnie Ray was successful in the early 1950s because his “freak” persona endeared him to audiences fascinated by his queer masculinity. Ray was one of the first white singers to incorporate black R&B phrasing into his style. Rather than capitalizing on this and transitioning successfully into rock and roll, he retreated by recording blander pop material and consciously “self-domesticating” his image. Though tabloids coyly spread rumors regarding his sexuality and focused on his arrests for public sex and disorderly conduct, these did not deter his audiences. Instead, his struggle with his sexuality, inability to modernize his sound, and retreat toward blandness stifled the unique qualities that made him interesting initially.Less

Introduction

Nina Goss and Eric Hoffman (eds)

in Tearing the World Apart: Bob Dylan and the Twenty-First Century

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Bob Dylan's output in the new millennium. It traces how Dylan's embrace of capitalist culture is perhaps not so much a resignation as it is a final ... More

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Bob Dylan's output in the new millennium. It traces how Dylan's embrace of capitalist culture is perhaps not so much a resignation as it is a final rejection of a generation whose voice he did not want to represent. For Bob Dylan's voice is not the voice of a single postwar American generation, but rather a voice that is in many ways outside time, an American voice that derives from a rich musical tradition, from folk music to rock and roll, from Tin Pan Alley to bluegrass, from jazz to Western swing, from blues to ballads. It is, moreover, a uniquely poetic voice, and one that brings with it a lyrical tradition that stretches back to the French trouvères, forward to the Beats and beyond.Less

Introduction

Christopher Gair

in The American Counterculture

This chapter examines the factors leading to the emergence of the counterculture. It focuses on dempgraphic, economic and technological change and offers an overview of the material to follow.

Music

Christopher Gair

in The American Counterculture

This chapter commences with a reading of the Beat Generation interest in bop jazz. It then looks at the importance of Blues and rock and roll as musical forms that would be at the heart of later ... More

This chapter commences with a reading of the Beat Generation interest in bop jazz. It then looks at the importance of Blues and rock and roll as musical forms that would be at the heart of later countercultural practice.Less

Singing Farmers

Gene Logsdon

in The Mother of All Arts: Agrarianism and the Creative Impulse

This chapter discusses singing farmers and looks at the role of music in farm and rural life. Part of the discussion looks at the rise and career of a country singer, Chris Logsdon, who said that ... More

This chapter discusses singing farmers and looks at the role of music in farm and rural life. Part of the discussion looks at the rise and career of a country singer, Chris Logsdon, who said that growing up on a farm influenced him toward a life of a singer-artist. The chapter also delves into the musical practices of farmers in America and reveals that when rock and roll came along, people from the cities surged out onto the farms to listen to it. No matter how the tradition of real farmers singing in professional country music has somewhat diminished, it still remains.Less

The West as Surrogate Shangri-La: Rock and Roll and Rangzen as Style and Ideology

Keila Diehl

in Echoes from Dharamsala: Music in the Life of a Tibetan Refugee Community

This chapter analyzes the Tibetan refugee dreams of political independence or autonomy for the homeland. It discusses the idealized romance with the West engaged in by young Tibetan refugees facing ... More

This chapter analyzes the Tibetan refugee dreams of political independence or autonomy for the homeland. It discusses the idealized romance with the West engaged in by young Tibetan refugees facing limited opportunities in their South Asian settlements and suggests that Western rock-and-roll music was a powerful resource for young Tibetan refugees trying to imagine and pursue personal and political rangzen. It argues that participation in an international pop culture was a way for Tibetan refugees to express solidarity with a wider human struggle through sounds that have a historical relationship with social change.Less

“Jazz means the blues”

Todd Decker

in Music Makes Me: Fred Astaire and Jazz

In 1952, Fred Astaire remarked that “jazz means the blues,” and this chapter examines this comment in practical terms by detailing Astaire's varied use of the twelve-bar blues progression as a ... More

In 1952, Fred Astaire remarked that “jazz means the blues,” and this chapter examines this comment in practical terms by detailing Astaire's varied use of the twelve-bar blues progression as a musical scaffold for dance making. All the important popular blues-based idioms turn up in his work, from boogie-woogie and swing blues (use of the blues progression by big bands) to 1950s rock and roll and 1960s soul jazz. Astaire danced to popular music, whose structural building blocks are straightforward: thirty-two-bar choruses built on eight-bar phrases in an AABA or ABAC arrangement, twelve-bar blues choruses, introductions, verses, vamps, and big finishes. There was nothing arcane or concealed about the musical forms he deployed: they can be heard easily if we attend just to the music—sometimes hard to do with all that dancing going on. Accompanied on-screen by a group of African American sideline musicians, Astaire created an extended solo dance to “Bugle Call Rag.” His final studio-era solo was a rock-and-roll blues number by Cole Porter.Less

Rock, Pop and Tartan

J. Mark Percival

in From Tartan to Tartanry: Scottish Culture, History and Myth

This chapter focuses on issues of tartan and meaning in rock and pop in an international context, and on the contrasting meanings constructed around the use of tartan by artists perceived as either ... More

This chapter focuses on issues of tartan and meaning in rock and pop in an international context, and on the contrasting meanings constructed around the use of tartan by artists perceived as either Scottish or non-Scottish. It notes that tartan in post-1940s Anglo–US popular music culture is a site where notions of Scottishness and national identity meet discourses of commerce, creativity, and authenticity. It discusses tartan and popular music culture in two broad eras: 1. Rock and roll to glam: tradition and showing out, 1954–75; 2. Punk and its legacy: irony, subversion, and new authenticities, 1976–2010.Less

Sexual Revolution?: Contexts of Countersubversive Moralism

Benjamin A. Cowan

in Securing Sex: Morality and Repression in the Making of Cold War Brazil

Chapter Two contextualizes the Cold War linkage of countersubversion and moralization exploring what, precisely, rightists reacted against, and in what circumstances. I analyze linked cultural ... More

Chapter Two contextualizes the Cold War linkage of countersubversion and moralization exploring what, precisely, rightists reacted against, and in what circumstances. I analyze linked cultural histories to uncover the ways in which emergent youth culture, sexual revolution, and radical politics were focal points for broad public debates in 1960s Brazil. Within those debates, right-wing reaction against changing gender and sexual norms represented only one of many publicly permissible viewpoints. The sheer diversity of these viewpoints makes clear several critical contextual factors. First, regardless of how extensively new gender and sexual patterns actually affected women, young people, students, or other demographics on which anxieties focused, moral panic was not the sole possible response to perceived changes in these realms. Second, though counterculture, political radicalism, and nonnormative sex each attracted considerable attention, narratives that conflated these categories did not monopolize public discourse—even those who denounced moral and sexual change did not always associate it with subversion. Lastly, for all of the Right’s insistence on this association, the regime’s fiercest and most visible opponents never embraced sexual liberalization. Many were the voices who constructed “youth,” “sexual revolution,” and “subversion”—and not everyone, least of all those on the political Left, saw direct articulation between the three.Less

if Jazz Dance, Then Jazz Music! 

Billy Siegenfeld

in Jazz Dance: A History of the Roots and Branches

In the current generation of jazz dance artists, swing does not appear to figure at all as a necessary ingredient of creative practice. Swing music embodies two different rhythms, “ground rhythm” and ... More

In the current generation of jazz dance artists, swing does not appear to figure at all as a necessary ingredient of creative practice. Swing music embodies two different rhythms, “ground rhythm” and “jump rhythm,” each with their own personality. Swing emerges from balancing expression in these contrasting states, allowing offbeat accentuations that are at the heart of the jazz experience to pop off the ground with stunning unpredictability. Rock and roll primarily communicates only a single rhythm to the ear. This rhythm tends to repeat without any variation through the duration of a given piece of music. This author feels that if the movements of a dance have been consciously shaped to express the single, two-beat-based rhythm of a piece of music, by definition that dance cannot be considered a “jazz” dance— even if every last movement in the piece replicates in shape a physical gesture borrowed from authentic swing choreography.Less

Jazz Dance and Racism

Carlos Jones

in Jazz Dance: A History of the Roots and Branches

This chapter examines the complications of race and class as a part of the jazz dance story. Acceptance as an art form has eluded jazz dance for decades. Much of this can be attributed to the ... More

This chapter examines the complications of race and class as a part of the jazz dance story. Acceptance as an art form has eluded jazz dance for decades. Much of this can be attributed to the separation between the artistic community and what is considered entertainment, and therefore less sophisticated. The development of jazz dance as a codified technique during the latter half of the twentieth century has blurred or erased movement that does not emanate from white ideas of artistic value. This chapter offers theories that encompass the discussion of race and class in America, highlighting the contradiction that allowed jazz dance to become a marginalized dance form while still having great commercial success. Discussion includes the influence of rock and roll music, Motown, and shows like American Bandstand and Ready Steady Go¡Less

Italian Doo-Wop: Sense of Place, Politics of Style, and Racial Crossovers in Postwar New York City

Simone Cinotto

in Making Italian America: Consumer Culture and the Production of Ethnic Identities

Relations between Italian Americans and African Americans have been often tense, marked by racism, competition on the labor and housing market, and occasional violence. In the 1950s and 1960s Italian ... More

Relations between Italian Americans and African Americans have been often tense, marked by racism, competition on the labor and housing market, and occasional violence. In the 1950s and 1960s Italian Americans in New York and other cities, along with other white ethnics, resisted urban change and supported residential segregation. However, in the field of popular music, the two groups have regularly exchanged mutual appreciation for the talent, style, and authenticity of the other. The chapter focus on Italian American artists’ hegemonic presence in a black musical genre (doo-wop) to show how popular and consumer culture provided the space for otherwise impossible cross-cultural exchanges at the dawn of the civil-rights era.Less