American Popular Song: A Brief History

Americans have been singing since the first
Europeans and Africans began arriving in North America in the sixteenth
century. Work songs, hymns, love songs, dance tunes, humorous songs, and
parodies—such songs provide a record of American history, serving
both as historical sources and also as subjects of historical investigation.

During the colonial, revolutionary, and federal periods (1607-1820) most
American songs were strongly tied to the musical traditions of the British
isles. Hymn tunes, ballads, theater songs, and drinking songs were imported
from England or based closely on English models. The main exceptions were
the hymns of German-speaking communities in Pennsylvania, the music of
African-American slave communities, and the songs of New Orleans, which
were closely linked to the French West Indies and to France. Those exceptions
aside, the most distinctively American songs were patriotic ones, like
“Yankee Doodle” and the “Star Spangled Banner,” and
even these were adaptations of English originals.

The first uniquely American popular song tradition arose with the minstrel
show, beginning in the 1840s. Many songs still familiar today, such as
“Turkey in the Straw” (“Zip Coon”) (c. 1824), “Oh
Susanna” (1854), “Dixie” (1859), “Buffalo Gals”
(1844), and “Old Folks at Home” (“Swanee River”) (1851), were
originally composed for the minstrel stage and first performed on northern
stages by white singers in blackface. These blackface performers adopted
and exaggerated the styles of African-American song and movement in a
politically charged process. After the Civil War, African-American performers
were only able to establish a toehold in the entertainment industry by
conforming to the still popular, and demeaning, forms that originated
with white performers in blackface.

African Americans themselves created all-black minstrel shows, contributing
songs like “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny” (1878) and “O
Dem Golden Slippers” (1879) to the repertory. European songs, especially
sentimental songs like those contained in Moore’s Irish Melodies
(1808-1834) and arias from Italian operas, remained important in the first
half of the nineteenth century, joined by similar songs composed in America,
for example “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair” (1854), “Lorena”
(1857), and “Aura Lee” (1861), recorded with new lyrics in 1956
by Elvis Presley as “Love Me Tender.”

American song in the second half of the nineteenth century underwent
a tremendous commercial expansion, which extended into the twentieth century
and indeed has not abated today. Initially, sheet music and pocket songsters
were the primary means of circulating songs, since many Americans played
and sang music in their own homes. The music publishing industry was increasingly
concentrated in New York City’s famous “Tin Pan Alley”
by the 1880s. After that point, however, songs also came to be bought,
sold, and preserved in a succession of new media: sound recordings and
player pianos in the 1890s; radio in the 1920s, movie sound tracks in
the late 1920s, television in the 1950s, cassette tapes in the early 1960s,
CDs in the early 1980s, DVDs in the mid 1990s, and MP3s in the late 1990s.
This commercial expansion meant that more songs were composed, performed,
produced, and consumed in the United States, as well as exported to, and
received from, the rest of the world.

Expansion and commercialization extended a process that began with the
minstrel show: songs that had once been restricted to ethnic minorities
or immigrant groups were marketed to the entire nation. Irish ballads
like “Danny Boy” (1913), “My Wild Irish Rose” (1899),
and “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” (1913) became popular among non-Irish
singers and listeners; so did Italian songs like “O Sole Mio”
(1899). Jewish composers and performers likewise incorporated elements
from their culture into American music, as when Sophie Tucker alternately
sang her popular “My Yiddishe Momme” (1925) in English and Yiddish.
African-American traditions gave rise to a succession of distinctive song
styles: spirituals, ragtime, blues, and, later, rhythm and blues, all
appropriated enthusiastically by white American performers and audiences.

This was not simply a matter of cross-marketing or trading repertories.
Songwriters and performers from a wide range of backgrounds listened to
each other’s music, learned from it, parodied it, created new styles
out of it, and crossed back and forth between musical genres. By the 1970s,
for example, an African-American performer like Ray Charles, deeply rooted
in black religious music, the blues, and rhythm and blues, could easily
take a country music song like “You Are My Sunshine” (1940)
or a sentimental ballad like “Georgia on My Mind” (1930) and
make them his own.

By the 1950s two different, seemingly contradictory, things were coming
to be true about American popular music. The first is that some songs
remained familiar across long periods of time and to very different people.
A so-called “standard”—a song from Tin Pan Alley’s
glory days (roughly 1910 to 1954)—might be recorded hundreds of times
over several decades and remain familiar today. “St. Louis Blues”
(1914), “Stardust” (1929), and “God Bless America”
(1939) are still with us, in multiple versions. At the same time, with
the rise of rock ‘n roll in the 1950s and the great commercial success
of African-American rhythm and blues and soul music in the following decade,
taste in popular song was increasingly separated by age, race, ethnicity,
region, and gender. Perhaps the best sign of this is the proliferation
of musical categories in record stores and in music award shows.

These seemingly contrary tendencies may well be two sides of the same
coin and part of a long-standing process in American music. For at least
the past two centuries, much of what is dynamic in American music arose
out of a continual process of sampling, fusing, and appropriating the
different musics that make up American popular song. Commercial music
industries, from live entertainment to sheet music to recordings, while
catering to mainstream audiences, have also sought out musical styles
and performers from beyond the mainstream. Marginalized by factors such
as geography, race, and economic class, performers and styles such as
“hillbilly” or country music, delta blues, and hip hop have
worked their way onto stages and into recording booths throughout the
history of American popular song.