Music and Race Homework Help

Topic: Music and Race

Order Description

Music and Race

Blues Singer Stavin Chavin: Phtoto by Alan LomaxAmerican music draws on the sounds, rhythms and cultural experiences from several traditions, but the significance of African and African-American music in our dominant forms of our music – rock, blues, country, jazz is evident. Just as the question of the meaning of race in American history requires a special focus, the question of race and music also requires a special focus. The broad question we are exploring in this discussion is whether the relationship between African-American music and American Popular Music is one of cultural exchange or one of exploitation. To answer it adequately we will need to look at a variety of musical styles and consider how they developed over time.

In exploring these musical roots we will see that our readings offer different points of view. Starr and Waterman say that “jazz emerged from the confluence New Orleans diverse musical traditions, including ragtime, marching bands, the rhythms used in Mardi Gras and funerary processions, French and Italian opera, Caribbean and Mexican music, Tin Pan Alley songs, and African American song traditions, both sacred (spirituals) and secular (the blues)” (Starr and Waterman 85).

In Blues People, author Amiri Baraka, doesn’t see the clear dichotomy between the sacred and secular in African-American music; both arise from the same experience of captivity and suffering. More importantly, he sees jazz as “instrumental blues” which emerged when Africa-Americans began to become master more and more European instruments” (Baraka 71-2.) To Baraka, the roots of the music are African-American.

In Life, Keith Richards, the lead guitarist of what some say is the greatest and all would acknowledge as the longest lived players of America’s most popular musical form, says that the “blues are universal” (Richards 71). But he also describes how in his formative years as a musician when he was looking for the core of the music, or his words, “the expression – you would have no jazz without blues or slavery” (Richards 84).

We began this discussion at least in part, with our exploration of the significance of Chuck Berry’s Maybelline. In this discussion, we will take that a bit further.

In this discussion we will also explore the history of rap as it emerged from the streets of the South Bronx in New York City and became a widely popular musical form. We’ll also examine jazz as it developed in New Orleans and then grew to become the popular music of the earliest 20th century and examine the history of rock ‘n’ roll.

But as a starting point, we need to look at one musical form so we can have a basis for comparison. Let’s look at the music that eventually became known as “doo-wop.” What were some of the roots of this music? How did it change over time? Why did these changes occur?