ROCK AND ITS ROOTS

ROCK IN 1960s

ROCK IN 1970s

ROCK IN 1980s

By far the most popular music after 1955 was rock music,which was at first called rock and( or`n`) roll. This music had its beginnings in the blues, gospel music, and jazz-influenced vocal music popular among African-American audiencesafter World War II. So-called "hep harmony" singing groups, such as the Mills Brothers and Ink Spots, added swinging rhythms and clever harmonies to standards popular songs and featured smooth-voices singers over a background of rhythmically catchy singing. Small swing bands "jump bands" presented saxophone soloists who honked repeated phrases, and there were such city-styled blues singers as Joe Turner, Dinah Washington, coomposer -singer Percy Mayfield and the influential guitarist-singer T-Bone Walker.

The country blues traditions of the South were further sources of rock and roll. Most blues songs are in choruses of 12 measures in AAB form. Guitar players who sang blues travelled to plantations, lumber camps and small towns to perform for dancers. Several intense Mississippi singers including Charlie Patton, Robert Johnson and Big Joe Williams were among the outstanding blues performers. Such leading blues singers as Leroy Carr and Little Brother Montgomery accompanied themselves on the piano.

After many black Americans moved from the rural South to Northern cities in the 1940s, Chicago became the center of blues recording. There a new kind of blues began to appear. It featured electrically amplified guitars and even harmonicas and drummers who emphasize afterbeats(beats 2 and 4 of each measure; nearly all blues are in 4/4 meter). The simplest boogie-woogie rhythms were the basis of Chicago blues.

Black gospel music also grew in popularity after World War II, influenced by sophisticated singers such as the rich-voiced Mahalia Jackson and singing groups such as the Soul Stirrers. Gospel singers` techniques were used by such popular black singers as Ruth Brown and Faye Adams and the lead(melody) singers of such groups as the Dominoes and th Midnighters.

Most of these kinds of black popular music were given the label rhythm and blues (or R&B) and were played on big-city radio stations. It was the power of radio that spread this music`s appeal from black communities to towns throughout all of the United States. By the mid-1950s such performers as Little Richard , Joe Turner, and Chunk Berry were also popular with white audiences. Adopted with resounding success by white musicians such as Bill Haley and Elvis Presley - who also drew on elements of country and western music - rock and roll was agressively marketed to mass audiences, particularly teenagers.

In the early 1960s the music took root in England, and by 1964, when the British group the Beatles first toured the U.S., the dominant instrumentation of the 1960s had emerged: electric lead, rhythm, and bass guitars; drums; and often piano or electronic organ. About this time the term rock began to replace the expression rock and roll. In the late '60s the mildly suggestive or good-time lyrics (themselves a compromise between the earthy lyrics of rhythm and blues and the blander lyrics needed for mass marketing) gave way to socially radical and introspective, mystical, or drug-alluding ones. Sign of the changes in society was the rise of hippie rock bands and acis rock, which featured song lyrics about psychedelic drugs.

Particularly in the acid rock movement centered in San Francisco, the variety of instruments widened; electronic amplification, feedback, and distortion increased; light shows and intense, often outlandish stage acts appeared. Guitarist Jimi Hendrix, the harsh-voiced singer Janis Joplin, the Jefferson Airplane, and the Grateful Dead were the most prominent of these performers. Hendrix created solos using extremely loud volumes, as he explored ways to create sound effects with his electronic guitar attachments and huge amplifiers. He ended his shows by setting fire to his guitar. Joplin and Hendrix died of their drug addictions within a onth of each other in 1970: she was 27; he was 28. The Grateful Dead first appeared in San Francisco in 1965, and in the late 1980s they were the only psychedelic band still performing.

As rock music`s popularity spread around the world, virtually every nation had its own rock performers. Jamaica produced reggae music, which is a much-imitated development of rock. Reggae cross-rhythms are often extremely complex, and reggae music features songs about poverty, politics and Rastafarianism, the Jamaica-based religous cult. In the United States Bob Marley & the Wailers and Toots & the Maytals were the best known of Jamaica`s reggae bands.

Nightclubs that offered recorded rock music for dancing were called discotheques. In the 1970s long rock song, usually at fast tempos and with skipping rhythms, became known as disco music. It was originally popular with European and African American audiences, and it was primarily intended for dancing. Disco music was featured in the movie 'Saturday Night Fever', and album of music from the film, performed by the Bee Gees, became the most popular record of the 1970s, selling 30 millions copies

The popularity of rock was the main reason that phonograph records became a billion-dollar business in 1967 and a 3.5 billion-dollar industry ten years later. Among the performers who helped to boost popular record sales in the 1970s were Creedence Clearwater Revival, Peter Framton, Rod Steward, Elton John, soul singer Al Green , and Stevie Wonder.

In the late 1970s, uncomplicated, squarely rhythmic disco music became popular for dancing. Its antithesis was punk rock, a loud, hard rock style derived from acid rock and marked by extremes of costume and staging. The main feature of punk rock, which began in England in the 1970s, was its lyrics despairing, violent condemnations of the dishonesty of the British ruling class. Punk also made a sleazy fashion statement torn clothes and garishly colored hair, with razor blades and safety pins for decoration. The leading punk rock band was the Sex Pistols, featuring Sid Vicious.

Heavy Metal is anothor very loud style of rock. It features guitars, with their sounds distorted by fuzz-tone devices and technique that make their ampilfiers screech. Among the leading heavy metal were Kiss, Grand Funk Railroad, Blue Oyster Cult, and Aerosmith, in the 1970s.

By the early 1980s the "new wave" movement, an outgrowth of punk rock, was generating more sophisticated lyrics and arrangements. In the '80s a vigorous talk-song style called rap became extremely popular among urban black teenagers. Rap music consists of simple rhymes recited in rhythm by speakers who function as vocalist for example, RUN-D.M.C.