VaudevilleanMamie Smith records "Crazy Blues" for Okeh Records, the first blues song commercially recorded by an African-American singer,[1][2][3] the first blues song recorded at all by an African-American woman,[4] and the first vocal blues recording of any kind,[5] a few months after making the first documented recording by an African-American female singer,[6] "You Can't Keep a Good Man Down" and "That Thing Called Love", which were successful enough for Okeh to commission "Crazy Blues".[3] Stylistically, it resembles other vaudeville music of the era, but it borrows a poetic and melodic form from African-American folk music, as well as elements of unrelated "field-holler" vocal practices. More than its traditional predecessors, this mixture would come to define and epitomize the blues for later generations. The song[7] becomes a surprising commercial success that would open up the market for African-American music[1][8] by selling more than 8,000 copies a week for several months.[3] It is followed by a string of hits by African-American women singers.[9][10][11]
A paper shortage contributes to a cost increase and a downturn in the sheet music publishing industry.[12]
Joseph Patek forms a family band that will become one of the longest-lasting and most influential Czech-Texan groups.[13]
In jazz bands, the cornetist becomes more and more frequently assigned to the melody of a piece, rather than shifting that responsibility among various instrumentalists.[17]
American audiences begin to turn away from predominantly German classical music towards works by the like of Frenchman Erik Satie and the Russian Alexander Scriabin.[18]
Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg begins advocating serialism, a composition technique that will come to dominate American classical music later in the 20th century.[20]
A printers strike and paper shortage decimates the music publishing industry by raising costs, as customers are beginning to focus more on recordings than sheet music.[22]
The golden age of the "black female blues singer" begins and ends.[23]
American public schools begin offering music instruction for band and orchestra.[16]
Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle's Shuffle Along is an influential work in the history of African American theater, re-establishing the black musical theater tradition.[26][27][28] It is the first black musical to achieve major success.[29]
The Norfolk Jazz Quartet begins recording for OKeh, becoming "one of the earliest and most popular group to emerge" from the Tidewater area of Virginia, a fertile region for African-American singing quartets.[30]
The National Baptist Convention's Gospel Pearls, a compilation of hymns, collected by Lucie Campbell, is released in its second edition, becoming so popular it remains in print, without a new edition, into the 1990s.[31] It is an influential landmark in African-American church music,[32] and is the first use of the term gospel in a collection of songs by a black church to describe the music later known as gospel music.[33]
Vincent Lopez's dance band makes first live broadcast of a performance on the radio.[34]
Thomas A. Dorsey moves to Chicago for the second time in his life, this time hoping to make his way in the burgeoning blues and jazz scenes; he is electrified by the singing of W. M. Nix, thus beginning his career as a pioneering gospel singer.[35] He also composes his first song, "If I Don't Get There".[36]
The Penn Hotel becomes the first African-American-owned hotel in Baltimore; it is on Pennsylvania Avenue, then a major center for black culture and business, and where the Douglass Theater, later more famously known as the Royal Theatre, is opened as one of the finest African-American theaters in the country. The Royal Theatre will become one of the major stops on the black entertainment circuit.[37]
Ford Dabney's orchestra ends their eight-year run on Broadway, in the Ziegfeld Midnight Frolic Show at the New Amsterdam Theatre. They are the first "black orchestra to fill such a long engagement".[42]
OKeh Records becomes the first major record company to realize the commercial potential of the African American market, creating a line, called the Original Race Records with Clarence Williams as director, to produce what was then called race music.[43]
Thomas A. Edison, Inc. sends out a survey to more than 20,000 phonograph owners, one of the very few primary sources from this era on the characteristics of people who actually listened to recorded music.[44]
Kid Ory's Sunshine Orchestra becomes the first African-American jazz ensemble to record.[45]
Eck Robertson and Henry Gilld show up at Victor Records offices, dressed in Confederate Army uniforms, and demand to record their music. The first recording to be released from the subsequent sessions will be Robertson's "Sallie Gooden", which is the first recording of what is now called country music.[48][49][50]
Francis La Flesche begins producing an important musicological study of the Osage tribe, entitled The Osage Tribe.[52]
The Grand Street Follies in Greenwich Village is the first revue "to be controlled largely by women", specifically director Agnes Morgan and composer Lily Hyland. This is the beginning of 'intimate revue', a type of show that is "literate, sophisticated, witty, amusing, satirical, and topical".[53]
James D. Vaughan forms a record label to expand the audience for the gospel quartets he manages, an influential point in the early history of the gospel industry.[55]
The New Orleans Rhythm Kings, the "most significant and influential of the early white jazz bands", record for Gennett, producing records that "had a direct impact on the young white musicians who developed what became known as the 'Chicago Style'."[56]
OKeh Records begins using the term race music, which soon becomes the standard referent for African-American popular music.[57]
Trixie Smith, a popular blues singer, recorded "My Man Rocks Me (With One Steady Roll)", one of the earliest uses of the terms rock and roll together in secular music.[58]
The first Southern radio station to broadcast rural white music is WSB in Atlanta.[59]
Rural folk performers begin to perform for local radio stations in Atlanta and Fort Worth.[19][60]
Kid Ory and his Sunshine Orchestra record "Ory's Creole Trombone" and "Society Blues". These are the first instrumental jazz recording of an African-American group,[61] and marks the beginning of the record industry focusing on "the instrumental ensemble as a source of entertainment in its own right rather than as accompaniment for singers".[62]
A legend states that comedian Ed Wynn is responsible for creating the first studio audience when he refuses to perform without an audience watching.[64]
Spanish folk songs recorded by Charles Fletcher Lummis and transcribed by Arthur Farwell in the mid-1900s are finally published in an anthology called Spanish Songs of Old California.[65]
Arnold Schoenberg, an innovative experimental composer of the period, begins to be performed more frequently in New York City after this year's production of Pierrot Lunaire.[66]
Clay Custer's "The Rocks" is the first known recording of a boogie piano bass line.[39]
Ralph Peer of OKeh records fiddling and singing from Fiddlin' John Carson in Atlanta; he is convinced to release the singing records by a local distributor, and Carson's songs become a surprise hit.[19] This is an important part of the early evolution of country music.[2][67] Peer thus becomes the first professional talent scout.[68]
Jelly Roll Morton makes his first recordings, as a jazz band member and as a solo pianist, and begins publishing songs through the Melrose Brothers Music Company.[69] Morton is the "first to perceive and define the distinction between ragtime and jazz, insisting that the latter, whatever its sources or borrowings, was a new type of music that transformed what it absorbed".[70] He is working with the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, the first white Chicago jazz band to record, using a black group (King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band) as a model. Morton's recording with the New Orleans Rhythm Kings constitutes the first "interracial recording sessions".[70][71][72][73]
King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band, performing at the Lincoln Gardens in Chicago, records with Gennett Studios, resulting in a set of recordings that are "landmark(s) in the history of jazz... the first major set of recordings by black jazz musicians". After this point, the music of "black jazz performers as well as white was preserved and circulated on record."[74]
The radio station WBAP in Fort Worth, Texas becomes one of the first to gain an overwhelming response with rural white music, specifically square dance music.[59]
A new style of popular black-performed blues emerges, consisting of often self-composed songs, accompanied by a piano, exemplified by the work of singers like Clara Smith, Victoria Spivey, Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey.[10] Smith's first recordings, "Down Hearted Blues" and "Gulf Coast Blues", are recorded this year, and becomes a "sensational" success, selling more than ten million copies[11] and turning Smith into the most successful blues singer of the era.[75]
George Gershwin accompanies singer Eva Gauthier at a concert that is an "important event in America's musical history" because it helped to bridge the gap between popular and classical music.[77]
Sylvester Weaver records "Guitar Blues" and "Guitar Rag". These are the first recordings by a male of the blues guitar.[78]
Roland Hayes, the first African-American male to "win wide acclaim at home and abroad as a concert artist", gives a recital at Boston's Symphony Hall, which makes the beginning of his "long, illustrious career".[80]
The first national contest for school bands is held, supported in part by the manufacturers of musical instruments.[81][82]
The end of the Tin Pan Alley-led fad for blues and blues-like songs among mainstream listeners.[1]
George Gershwin premiers Rhapsody in Blue, an historically significant piece[83] that fused three strands of American music: modernist classical music, instrumental jazz and popular blues; the piece "played a role in defining American musical modernism" in the 1920s,[84] though it was "probably the most successful work in the movement to bring jazz into the concert hall", it is "better known today through lush arrangements for full symphony orchestras that have necessarily smoothed out the vernacular idiosyncrasies of its original performance style.[85]
Ed Andrews' "Barrelhouse Blues" is the first recording of rural blues.[39] It is still among the "most popular of American compositions".[86]
George and Ira Gershwin's Lady, Be Good opens on Broadway; the musical, the duo's first hit,[53] was a "groundbreaking... absorption of Jazz Age lingo (and the composers') felicitous skill at setting vernacular speech to music".[90]
Herbert Léonard becomes the first known bluesman to record using "first position".[91]
Juanita Arizona Dranes begins recording for OKeh, making her a "much in-demand artist at black churches and revivals".[92]
Ma Rainey becomes a wildly popular blues singer across the country, with her band the Jazz Wild Cats.[93]
The most popular of the early Lithuanian American performers, Antanas Vanagaitis, comes to the United States with a performance group.[96]
Immigration Act of 1924 formally enacts a restriction on Japanese immigration that had effectively been in place since 1908; this is said to constitute the end of issei, or the first generation of Japanese immigration.[97] The same bill has similar effects in other communities, making it a common marker separating different forms of immigrant culture and music, such as among Arab Americans.[98]
Bascom Lamar Lunsford, a regionally famous passionate advocate for Appalachian music, becomes the first person to record old-time banjo music, with "Jesse James" and "I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground", both for Okeh.[99]
WLS begins broadcasting National Barn Dance, a popular radio program that exposes new audiences to traditional Southern and Appalachian music.[100] This will become the first major country music radio program, lasting until 1969 (by then broadcast on WGN).[101]Bradley Kincaid is the show's first star; he will later be the first country star to profit from the sale of mail-order songbooks.[102]
Rudolf Friml's Rose-Marie is an "immensely successful operetta that (marks) a turning point in the American musical theater". It will be the largest-grossing show until Oklahoma! in the 1940s.[104]
Bix Beiderbecke joins the Wolverine Orchestra, making his first recordings; he will be more influential than any white composer or performer in Chicago in the era,[70] and will be perhaps the first white jazz performer to be widely respected by African-American jazz audiences.[109][110] Beiderbecke was also the "first important jazzman to be inspired by contemporary classical music".[111] His Wolverine Orchestra is the first white group to play jazz in an authentically African American style.[112]
Scholars and collectors of folk songs become increasingly concerned about the authenticity of the blues they were recording and describing.[116]
Hall Johnson and Eva Jessye lead a number of professional choirs to fame, bringing media attention to the concert-arranged African-American spiritual.[38]
Record companies begin recording and marketing to Mexican Americans in California.[117]
A more traditional sound in Finnish-American commercial recordings supplants the earlier format, which was based around semi-classical performance.[96]
With the advent of national radio broadcasting companies, large businesses begin to sponsor a single show in its entirety. By 1927, as much as half of the total budget at major advertising companies is spent on radio.[118]
John Harrington Cox, archivist and editor for the West Virginia Folklore Society, publishes a collection of folk songs called Folk-Songs of the South: Collected Under the Auspices of the West Virginia Folk-Lore Society.[120]
Barn dance programs become a major part of the radio industry, led by the WSM Barn Dance in Nashville,[19] which will later become the Grand Ole Opry.[59][60][121] Other barn dance programs during the era are broadcast by WBAP in Fort Worth and WSB in Atlanta.[122]
Louis Armstrong begins recording with his Hot Five and Hot Seven bands, for OKeh in Chicago. These resulting records are widely influential and establish the early jazz style,[123][124] and helped launch Armstrong's career, which will eventually make him "one of the best-known and best-loved entertainers in the world".[125] Music historian Richard Crawford has called these recordings "an enduring contribution to music history (that transcend) categorical boundaries to introduce a powerful new, utterly American mode of expression".[126] The recordings establish Armstrong's career as the first virtuoso soloist in jazz, and move the field from one based on collective improvisation among all members of an ensemble to one in which one or more individual performers lead the performance through improvising.[127][128][129] The Hot Five was Kid Ory, Johnny Dodds, Lil Hardin and Johnny St Cyr, while the Hot Seven added Pete Briggs and Baby Dodds, replacing Ory with John Thomas.[130]
Lonnie Johnson begins his performing career after winning first prize at a blues concert. He will become "probably the first improvising guitarist to base his style on cleanly articulated single-string lines rather than heavily strummed chords"[132]
Bennie Moten's territory band releases "South", a classic hit recording that helps establish the band's career as one of the most successful and prolifically recording territory band.[134]
James Weldon Johnson's Book of Negro Spirituals is an important reference work that contains clues "about how long and how pervasive the penchant for harmonizing was among African Americans".[136]
The Scopes Trial is discussed in a ballad, whose broadside is sold outside the courthouse during the trial, selling more than 60,000 copies. Music historian claims that this publication brought the broadside up to date for the new media of the time.[137]
Florence Price is the first female African American to gain international renown as a composer, winning her first of two Holstein Awards this year.[38]
Charlie Poole leads a group recording several songs, most successfully including "Deal", which will inspire numerous rural performers to imitate this repertoire and three-finger banjo style.[140]
Dock Walsh becomes one of the first to record three-finger banjo picking.[141]
George Antheil's Ballet mécanique is finished; it was intended to accompany a Fernand Léger film, but was later adapted into a complete composition, using "eight pianos, pianola, eight xylophones, two electric doorbells, percussion, wind machine, and 'airplane propellor', (described as) 'an adapted fan with a forty-eight-inch reach, six vicious blades, and a capacity of 4,000 revolutions per minute'". The piece will make Antheil "internationally notorious".[143] The work may also be the "first use of (long periods of silence) for all instruments".[144]
Blind Lemon Jefferson begins making his first recordings, for Paramount Records, which include his first two hits, "Booster Blues" and "Dry Southern Blues". He will become "one of the most important and influential of the early bluesmen",[145] and his success will inspire record companies to search for more authentically rural styles of the blues.[146]
The American Society of Ancient Instruments is founded by Ben Stad, a Dutch violinist, in Philadelphia. It is the "first American ensemble known to have performed on period instruments". The original ensemble included a harpsichord, viols, Baroque violins and cellos.[147]
Roba Stanley becomes the first woman to record a solo country song, her most popular this year being "Single Life".[148]
Sam Wooding & His Orchestra begin performing outside the United States. Wooding will become one of Philadelphia's first internationally prominent jazz musician, and he will be the first African American to tour with a jazz band outside the country, and the first American to play jazz in the Soviet Union, tour South America and record in Europe.[149]
Ernest Van "Pop" Stoneman's "The Titanic" is one of the first major hits of what is now called country music. In this same year, Al Hopkins & the Hill Billies become the first country recording artists to record in New York, make a short film, base themselves in Washington, D.C., play for a president (Calvin Coolidge) and use a piano and Hawaiian guitar.[150]
The dispute between theater owners who play music during silent films and the American Society for Composers, Authors and Publishers over the fees paid for the use of popular songs ends with the joining of more than 11,000 owners to the Society, pay more than $500,000 in fees. The dispute had severely limited the use of pop Tin Pan Alley songs in theaters.[151]
The first permanent orchestra is established in Seattle.[152]
Jelly Roll Morton forms the Red Hot Peppers and records for Victor, resulting in an "epic" set of recordings,[154] particularly notable for "one of the best rhythm sections in early jazz".[124]
Men begin to dominate recordings of blues music, after women have been the most common recording performer since 1920.[9]
Ernö Rapée's "Charmaine", the theme song for the film What Price Glory?, is a major hit, one of the first such written expressly for a film.[22]
NBC, the first of the major broadcasting networks, is created.[59][64]
Arizona Dranes begins recording, soon becoming one of the "most celebrated pioneers of the Holiness-Pentecostal" gospel style.[157][158]
Several popular songs by vaudeville singer Blind Lemon Jefferson kicks off a wave of solo male folk-blues artists recording commercially.[10] Jefferson is believed to become the first to record a slide guitar in this year.[159]
The New York city council enacts a set of restrictions on music performance, intending to crack down on cabarets. The restrictions hamper the city's musical life until their repeal in 1988.[160]
The Los Angeles newspaper Rafu Shimpo begins documenting Japanese music in that city.[97]
New York's Savoy Ballroom opens, with Chick Webb as bandleader. It will become a major jazz venue, and Webb will reign "over the birth of such dances as the Lindy Hop and the Susie Q".[161]
Eva Jessye moves to New York, where she will soon become a fixture in the city's musical life, eventually becoming the "first black woman to win international distinction as a professional choral conductor".[162]
The Carnegie Corporation purchases an extensive collection of books on African-American culture from Arthur Schomburg. The collection will become the cases for the New York Public Library's Schomburg Collection of Negro Literature and History, the "most famous collection of books on black in the world".[163]
The O'Byrne DeWitt House, an Irish music store in Boston, is opened by Ellen and Joshua O'Byrne DeWitt. Ellen, much to the consternation of some Bostonians, was the manager and namesake of the store. She will soon approach Columbia Records about recording Irish American music, the success of which inspires many record companies to expand into Irish and other ethnic folk musics in the United States.[167]
Stamps-Baxter is formed from the merger of two publishing companies. It will soon be one of the dominating forces in the white Southern Gospel industry.[168]
Carl Sandburg publishes The American Songbag. He, along with compatriots like Edna Thomas, will become among the first major American urban folk performers.[170]
The second major radio network, CBS, is formed, followed by several minor regional networks, the Yankee Network and Don Lee Network among them.[64]
OKeh executive Ralph Peer records a wave of old-time musicians after letting it slip that Pop Stoneman had earned more than three thousand dollars in royalties the previous year; among those who come to seek their own fortune are the Carter Family, who will become wildly popular in the burgeoning country music industry,[19][172] and Jimmie Rodgers, who was the most influential figure in what was then known as hillbilly music.[173] These legendary recording sessions are often considered the historical foundation for country music.[2][174][175][176] Peer's codified the standard contractual arrangements between music publishers and performers with regards to session fees and songwriting remuneration.[177]
Roger Pryor Dodge begins transcribing the jazz solos; these transcriptions will be performed onstage, proving "that a sympathetic reading of hot solos from notation... lost nothing of the intrinsic beauty of the melodic line".[178]
Bix Beiderbecke makes a series of recordings with Frank Trumbauer; though Beiderbecke would remain fairly obscure during his lifetime, he will go on to be remembered as perhaps the first "legendary jazz musician". This reputation will be helped by the fact that he was white, rather than black, as were most respected jazz musicians of the time.[180]
Hamilton Sisters and Fordyce, variety entertainers/singers, later known as Three X Sisters credited as being one of the best American stage performer's of this year. Travel to England with Henry Levine, a later addition of the Original Dixieland Jass Band, and Rudy Vallee. They sign with BBC radio for two years. Record early Gershwin and Rogers and Hart songs with the Savoy Orpheans, Bert Ambrose, and pianist Billy Meryl. Tour with the Savoy Havana Band.
Henry Cowell founds the quarterly periodical New Music, which helped expose, introduce and organize European and Russian music to American composers.[85]
Jerome Kern's musical Show Boat is a "watershed (that leaves) earlier, more loosely constructed musicals far behind".[26] Its major innovation is in using a well-developed plot, based on a novel by Edna Ferber, rather than appealing primarily in showy dancing, sets and catchy songs. It has been called the "first great American musical show".[181]
Jim Jackson's "Kansas City Blues" becomes one of the biggest early blues hits; both its melody and lyrics would influence later rhythm and blues and rock and roll records.[183]
Duke Ellington's career begins when he is hired a whites-only nightclub called the Cotton Club in Harlem. He will go on to develop one of the most distinctive styles in early jazz, combining elements of "sweet" dance bands, ragtime, stride and other genres. Trumpeter Bubber Miley creates a "growling" sound that becomes a characteristic element of Ellington's style, an element later adapted for the trombone by Tricky Sam Nanton.[124]
Flautist Alberto Socarras comes to New York, where he will become an important part of jazz history by bringing Afro-Cuban musical elements to the American jazz scene.[184]
Arthur Smith begins performing for WBT, going on to become one of the most successful and innovative fiddlers of the era, the first to record the fiddle for listening rather than dancing.[186]
The Jazz Singer becomes the first motion picture with sound,[187] beginning the connection between music and cinema.[12] The film sets a historical precedent for the commercializing potential of a music star in a movie.[188]
The composer George Antheil is the subject of a concert, billed as "The Biggest Musical Event of the Year", and promoted by Ezra Pound and Donald Friede, which features his ultramodern works, ending with the "presumptive piece de resistance", Ballet mécanique, which turns out to be a "colossal flop". One review said that no piece had ever "(flopped) to earth with a more sickening and merited thud".[189]
A major flood in Mississippi will become one of the most musically notable natural disasters in American history, subject of many blues and gospel songs, most famously Charley Patton's "High Water Everywhere" and Elder Edwards' "The 1927 Flood". This year's "Explosion in the Fairmount Mines" by Blind Alfred Reed, referring to a mining accident in West Virginia that resulted in more than 300 deaths, is perhaps the most popular of many songs about mining disasters released during this era.[190]
The Communist International officially defines jazz as a "proletarian music", leading to an association between jazz and leftist politics in the United States.[197]
Jackson, Mississippi music store owner H. C. Speir becomes a talent scout for all the major record labels, and will be responsible for signing many of the major Mississippi bluesmen who will become famous later in the century.[198]
Most radio broadcasting switches from locally produced material to nationally broadcast network programming, causing a decrease in the diversity of music on American radio.[204]\
Variety shows, a mixture of music, light entertainment and vocal music, becomes the most popular form of radio program in the country, led by the show of Ed Cantor.[205]
"Follow de Drinkin' Gou'd", a publication by the Texas Folklore Society, includes an article by H. B. Parks concerning a song entitled "Follow the Drinking Gourd", which had been used to communicate safe escape routes to the North to slaves before the Civil War. J. Frank Dobie, editor and historian, calls it the "most original contribution ever printed by the society".[216]
The Savoy Ballroom opens in Chicago, soon becoming the premier African-American music venue in the city.[217]
The Silver Leaf Quartette's "Sleep On, Mother" introduces a new technique to African-American singing quartets, in which the lead "vocalist... apart from the remaining voices, which (supply) a repeating rhythmic pattern or riff", allowing the Quartette to develop the use of nonsense syllables as a rhythmic device (the clanka-lanka technique).[218]
George Herzog is the first musicological scholar to identify the "rise", the "formal device of including repeated or new melodic material sung at a higher pitch level than the opening phrases of a song", which his research showed was characteristic of the Mohave and Diegueño Native Americans; Bruno Nettl will later conclude that it is distinctive to most of the California region.[220] This research established the basis for the modern study of music areas, the distribution of musical traits across a region.[221]
Recordings by Tampa Red, Georgia Tom, Scrapper Blackwell and Leroy Carr popularize an urban style of piano and guitar-based music.[10] This year's "How Long How Long Blues" by Carr and Blackwell proves especially influential.[222]
Bradley Kincaid publishes a songbook entitled My Favorite Mountain Ballads and Old-Time Songs, a popular collection that will help "keep alive the kind of mountain songs that (are) fast disappearing from the American musical landscape".[224]
Pine Top Smith's "Pine Top's Boogie Woogie" inspires a wave of recordings that begin to popularize boogie-woogie, a style of piano-based popular blues that can be traced back to the 1910s.[10][227] The first use of the term boogie woogie as a genre comes this year.[158]
Hoagy Carmichael's "Star Dust" is an extraordinarily sentimental ballad, selling millions of copies and being recorded hundreds of times in dozens of arrangements and languages.[237]
The first major black entertainer on a major radio network is Jack L. Cooper of WSBC in Chicago, who hosts a music and comedy show.[205]
Warner Brothers purchases M. Witmark & Sons, a music publishing firm. Though this is not the first film company to incorporate a music publishing business, the purchase is a major event that signals Hollywood's new approach to the use of music in films.[151]
A. A. Harding begins a series of instructional clinics for bandmasters, eventually becomes known as the "dean of university band directors".[238]
Jazz musicians begin "basing their improvisations chiefly on harmony, so that after an opening melodic statement only the piece's harmonic pattern mattered."[239]
A performance of Thomas A. Dorsey's "If You See My Savior" causes a stir at the National Baptist Convention in Chicago, a pivotal event in the development of African-American gospel music and an impetus for Dorsey's success as a composer.[241][242][243] Gospel is first publicly endorsed by the Convention this year, a date sometimes figured as the beginning of gospel history.[244]
Manuel Acuña emigrates from Mexico to California, where he will become one of the leading musical directors in the Mexican-California music industry.[117]
One of the most popular performers of Peking opera in history, Mei Lanfang, visits the United States, bringing that tradition to North America.[246]
Henry Cowell publishes New Musical Resources, which is "probably the earliest comprehensive statement of intent by a 'modernistic' American composer (and) and indispensable document in the history of American music".[247]
With "Mood Indigo", Duke Ellington becomes "increasingly innovative... in his use of chromaticism and bitonal harmonies, as well as in the temporal extension of his compositions".[248]
Ken Maynard is the first vocalist marketed as a "singing cowboy".[249]
The creative peak of jazz in Kansas City,[21] as the "city becomes a magnet for black musicians", including touring bands from across the country, Delta and urban blues singers, and jazzmen from New Orleans and elsewhere. Major characteristics of the Kansas City jazz style include the use of repeated riffs, "short melodic ideas – repeated again and again by the full ensemble, often in unison by the brasses and sometimes by the rhythm section to support solo improvisation", and the accenting of all four beats equally, rather than the first and third as in New Orleans jazz. The Kansas City style also influences the blues, which becomes "lustier and more powerful".[252]
Eva Jessye becomes one of the first "professional female choral conductors, black or white, in the United States", leading a choir on NBC and CBS.[38]
Chicago becomes the center for the blues record industry.[10]
Frank Sinatra begins performing; he will go on to become one of the first musical superstars and the first teen idol, and inspires a legion of Italian American performers.[201]
The end of the golden age of Finnish American entertainment, which was dominated by solo troubadours.[96]
Richard Ranger begins work on an organ, using photoelectric cells. This is one of the earliest electronic instruments created in the United States.[253]
John Tasker Howard's Our American Music is published; it is the only general history of American music written during the era. His work focused on Americans who composed in European styles.[262]
Max Steiner's score for the film Cimarron garners favorable reviews, and helps move the motion picture industry towards accepting music as a film element equal to speech and sound effects in importance.[187]
Alfred Newman's symphonic jazz main title arrangement for the film Street Scene is the first "nonvocal film music issued... as sheet music for sale to the public" in the United States.[187]
Myles O'Malley signs with Decca Records, which is expanding into ethnic folk music; O'Malley will soon become known as the Irish "Tin Whistle King".[264]
American composer Aaron Copland visits a Mexico City dance hall, and is inspired to begin the composition of El Salón México, which used Mexican melodies and other musical elements.[277]
The Reverend J. H. L. Smith takes the influential Ebenezer Baptist Church in Chicago in a Pentecostal direction, featured Southern-style music in a new choir directed by Theodore Frye and accompanied by gospel composer Thomas A. Dorsey.[281][282] Dorsey will open the Dorsey House of Music, the "first music publishing company founded for the sole purpose of selling the music of black gospel composers".[243]
The radio station WSM switches to a higher-power system, expanding the reach of the fledgling show Grand Ole Opry.[59]
J. R. Brinkley opens XERA, the first Mexican border radio station (X station) created to promote a product, in this case, Brinkley's promise to boost male virility through goat glands.[286]
Shirley Graham becomes the first female African American to gain fame composing operas and librettos, beginning with Tom-Tom, which is first produced in Cleveland and possibly the first "black opera produced on a grandiose scale with a professional cast".[38]
Bird of Paradise is credited with helping to sustain popularity for Hawaiian music, and Hawaii-themed stage and film productions.[287]
Fats Waller broadcasts Fats Waller's Rhythm Club over WLW in Cincinnati. He is the best known of the Harlem-based jazz pianists, and the first to "adapt the style of jazz pianism to the pipe organ and the Hammond organ".[289]
John Lomax finds support from Macmillan Publishers and Carl Engel at the Library of Congress, for a collection of American folk songs. With his son Alan, John records a wide variety of folk music, much of it collected from African Americans at prisons and work camps. They also discover the pioneering blues musician Lead Belly. This recording trip helped inspire the American roots revival,[292] and took the Lomaxes to Texas, Mississippi, Virginia, Louisiana, Georgia, Kentucky and Florida.[293]
Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster, Herschel Evans and Lester Young participate in "the most famous cutting contest in all of jazz history", with the end result being an increase in popularity for the light, melodic sound of Lester Young as opposed to the more heavy vibrato sound of Coleman Hawkins.[296]
"Echale Salsita", a recording by Ignacio Piñeiro, is the first known use of the word salsa in a musical context; it will eventually come to denote a specific form of Latin-North American popular music known as salsa.[184][298]
John J. Becker conducts a concert with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, which was "historic in that it brought to the Midwest the first presentation of an advancing trend in the creative originality of contemporary American music", the avant-garde.[300]
Lester Young joins Count Basie's band, beginning his career. He will be the first major jazz saxophonist, helping make that instrument an integral an iconic part of jazz, and will establish the saxophone as an instrument capable of creating a unique style, rather than merely accompanying the other instruments or playing in a manner derivative of Louis Armstrong.[302]
Hostility towards the local musicians union in Chicago, led by James C. Petrillo, grows so harsh the union's windows are bulletproofed. Petrillo has led the union a series of major strikes.[274]
Ballroom-style polka becomes the dominant form of the music among Polish-American communities.[13]
The first permanent orchestra is established in Kansas City.[152]
The Metropolitan Opera forms an Opera Guild to sponsor informative lectures, organize inexpensive concerts for children and involve other organizations in fundraising efforts.[305]
Alan and John Lomax went on a music recording trip to the South, in search of music among the blacks who "had had the least contact with jazz, the radio, and with the white man". One of their recording subjects was Lead Belly, who then accompanied the Lomax's on a renowned tour of college campuses.[306] This tour would help inspire the American folk revival of the mid-20th century.[307]
John Collier, Commissioner of Indian Affairs, introduces the Indian Reorganization Act, which gives legal sanction to tribal holdings and promotes native culture, including music and dance.[309]
Benny Goodman buys the compositions and arrangements of Fletcher Henderson, a well-known black bandleader, then uses them in Let's Dance, an NBC radio show, the following year; this is, for many in the mostly white audience, their first exposure to swing music.[124] Goodman becomes the first white bandleader to be considered a jazz master.[310]
The Oglala Sioux tribal council takes over the management of the traditional Sun Dance, turning it into a tourist attraction through advertising and make the calendrical date permanent.[313]
Virgil Thomson's Four Saints in Three Acts is the first opera with a black cast presented on Broadway. It is perceived as "electrifying (and) shocking" by opera critics, for it flouted many of the conventions of the genre.[316]
Kenneth Morris begins working for the gospel publisher Lillian E. Bowles, where he will give gospel its "second infusion of jazz". Morris will later found one of the largest gospel publishing companies in the world.[320]
"Big band jazz enters "the public consciousness... when a white dance band led by clarinetist Benny Goodman played at the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles"; this has been "credited with launching the Swing Era, a new age of popular music".[240] Goodman will become "internationally acclaimed as both solo performer and bandleader".[322]
George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess premiers on Broadway; the "folk opera" was an innovative piece that mixed African-American music with techniques from the musical theater and American popular song.[325] It is the first distinctively American opera.[326]
Ethnomusicologist George Herzog identifies the "main stylistic identifier" of the Native Americans of the Great Basin, the paired phrasing of the melody and text of each of the phrases that constitute the piece.[332]
Narciso Martínez's polka "La chicharronera" becomes a "big hit", and an "instant and lasting success" that set the foundation for the American conjunto style.[333]
The Soul Stirrers form. They will establish "most of the practices of the modern gospel quartet style", including the addition of a fifth man and guitar accompaniment.[334]
Lulubelle and Scotty begin their career with the National Barn Dance; they will soon become popular music staples, and the first major husband-wife duo in country music history.[337]
The Gibson guitar company begins producing electric guitars with the ES-150, a Spanish guitar, introduced this year or the following year. Its pickup, designed by Walt Fuller, will become known as the Charlie Christian pickup once the jazz performer Charlie Christian popularizes the guitar model. Around the same time, Gibson began producing electric lap steel guitars.[261]
Al Dexter's "Honky Tonk Blues" is perhaps the first country song to use the term honky tonk in its title.[341]
Count Basie's orchestra gains a national following, the first major jazz band from Kansas City. He also developed a "new, stripped-down style that would remain his signature for the rest of his career".[342]
To counteract a German "cultural offensive" in Latin America, the United States government institutes a cultural program, the Division of Cultural Relations, which will soon be folded into the Office of War Information.[208]
The Oklahoma Indian Welfare Act is introduced, promoting the indigenous culture, including music and dance, of the Native Americans of Oklahoma.[309]
The Harlem Hamfats form, going on to pioneer the precursor to the modern blues band.[10]
The Monroe Brothers begin recording, setting the stage for the development of bluegrass, and establishing their style: "sad songs sung with tight vocal harmonies that were often played at lightning speeds with spell-binding instrumental virtuosity".[346]
Benny Goodman's band is joined by Teddy Wilson and Lionel Hampton, making Goodman the first white jazz bandleader to use African-American performers regularly, the first in the industry to do so.[72]
Maude Cuney Harris' Negro Musicians and their Musicis the first major publication on African-American music "produced by a musician who was also an experienced writer".[350]
Thomas A. Dorsey promotes a song battle between Roberta Martin and Sallie Martin, which is "apparently... the first time anyone had asked for an admission fee for a sacred-music concert".[351]
The radio industry matures, beginning to more successfully focus on increasing market share rather than "abstract cultural good", diminishing the "demand for fine-art music and correspondingly (increasing) the demand for popular music".[59]
Big bandswing music makes jazz a part of mainstream American pop. The popularity of swing ensembles inspires many jazz enthusiasts to focus on the improvisation and innovation, rather than the danceable pop sound of swing. This is the first form of popular music to be divided into separate realms of commercial and artistic success.[354] A number of jazz music journals also begin documenting the burgeoning genre of swing.[257]
Early record companies specializing in jazz appear, like Commodore HRS and Blue Note, as do the first of a steady stream of American books on jazz, including Frederic Ramsey and Charles E. Smith's Jazzman, Wilder Hobson's American Jazz Music and Henry Osgood's So This Is Jazz.[317]
Chicago becomes a "center for blues performance" in the city's large African-American community,[355] while a kind of piano-based blues called boogie-woogie becomes the most popular form of the blues.[10]
The Golden Gate Quartet becomes one of the most popular recording artists in the country, beginning the era of greatest popularity for gospel music.[356]
The term gospel comes to be applied to the genre now known as gospel music.[357]
The Hollywood musical settles on a format based around a "romantic comedy" with "four or five songs and a dance or two".[359]
The town of Lindsborg, Kansas begins holding public celebrations of Swedish culture; the town will become a center for Swedish American music later in the century.[96]
The piano accordion reaches its height of popularity, with many schools teaching the instrument and its repertoire, which depends in large part on Italian-derived music.[201]
The bands of Lu Watters, Eddie Condon and Bob Crosby become popular in New York City, inspiring a revival of interest in old-time New Orleans-style jazz that will peak at the end of the following decade.[360]
The importance of the tres in the Cuban son peaks, while Arsenio Rodríguez enjoys the height of his popularity; Rodriguez' main innovation is to incorporate the mambo, which is introduced in Cuba in this same era.[362]
The Wings Over Jordan Choir begins performing on radio, becoming one of the first major large choirs in gospel music.[363]
Nat "King" Cole forms a piano, guitar and bass trio, which is credited as the beginning of a rhythm and blues style meant to accompany conversation instead of dancing, known as club blues or cocktail music in black and white clubs, respectively.[371]
Aaron Copland's El Salón México is premiered in London, published by Boosey & Hawkes, and then premiered in Boston. The work is a surprise success across the country.[373] Copland becomes the "first North American composer since Gottschalk to form a far-reaching connection with Latin America".[374]
Charlie Low opens the Forbidden City, the first Chinese American nightclub in San Francisco, with Larry Ching as its main attraction. It will be a major local venue and an attraction for visiting performers like Duke Ellington and Bing Crosby.[376]
Eleanor Kane, Jim Donnelly and Packie Walsh record for Decca, the last Irish American Chicago recording until the 1970s.[345]
Ira Tucker joins the Dixie Hummingbirds. He will become "one of the most influential lead singers in the history of gospel music", and will change the music's image with his energetic stage presence that has been called one of the roots of the showmanship of rhythm and blues and rock and roll.[377]
John H. Hammond, a talent scout and the "first important jazz critic and record collector to become an impresario and record producer in his own right", stages the first of his From Spirituals to Swing series of concerts, a watershed event in American music history.[378][379] Held at Carnegie Hall, these shows would "introduce the jump blues of Big Joe Turner" to New Yorkers.[380] The concert would also introduce Rosetta Tharpe[381] and provide New York with its first major concert produced for an integrated audience,.[382] This same year, Carnegie Hall features its first jazz band, led by Benny Goodman, in a concert that helps establish the legitimacy of swing music in the eyes of music aficionados and scholars.[383]
Louis Jordan leaves Chick Webb's orchestra to form a small band, the Tympany Five, that will contribute towards transforming the popular big band swing style to a smaller, combo style known as jump blues, an important milestone in the evolution of rhythm and blues.[371]
Music critic and classical performer Winthrop Sargeant publishes Jazz, Hot and Hybrid, a book that demonstrates increasing academic acceptance of jazz, demonstrating "through musical analysis that jazz repaid close listening, especially its rhythm".[257]
Roy Harris' Symphony No. 3 is an influential work that uses a number of techniques that become common in subsequent American classical music, including "massive but spacious textures; a new emphasis on vital, syncopated rhythms... and a rich harmonic palette".[85]
Roy Harris composes his Third Symphony in One Movement, a self-consciously American piece that drew upon his perception of American music as focused on rhythm, especially the "asymmetrical balancing of rhythmic phrases".[385]
Trombonist Glenn Miller leads a band to a "pinnacle of popular success beyond that of any other group of the time".[386]
The first Evenings on the Roof concert is held in Los Angeles; this series of concerts, eventually known as the Monday Evening Concerts, filled an unotherwise empty niche in Los Angeles, "programming modern works in a city whose musical institutions generally ignored such works".[388]
ASCAP announces new demands for the licensing of popular music for radio airplay, doubling fees;[389] in response, the broadcasting networks form Broadcast Music Incorporated (BMI), which begins licensing music ignored by ASCAP. ASCAP focused on mainstream pop and the music of Broadway and Hollywood, while BMI worked in black and white gospel music, rhythm and blues, blues and eventually, rock and roll.[8][390][391]
Glenn Miller, a swing bandleader, begins a run of seventy top ten hits over the next four years, making his one of the best-selling bands of the era.[394]
Popular actor Paul Robeson releases his composition "Ballad for Americans", which sold 30,000 copies and is considered (at the time) to be a curious "hybrid between art and popular folk".[398]
The Dixie Hummingbirds' "Soon Will Be Done With This World" is an innovative recording, featuring the sustained use of falsetto, one of the hallmarks that separates true gospel music from jubilee.[375]
John Cage's Imaginary Landscape No. 1, a composition for piano, Chinese cymbal and two phonograph turntables, is among the earliest live electronic works.[253]
Adelina García begins recording and performing on the radio, soon becoming the most popular American singer of the Mexican bolero song.[117]
Lawrence Welk records his first polka; his earlier recordings had little German influence, but by the early 1950s, he will become known for polkas and other German-influenced pop music.[13][400]
Duke Ellington innovates the "use of the extended form" in jazz with Concerto for Cootie.[225]Jimmy Blanton joins Ellington's band this year, going on to innovate the use of his instrument, the "string bass from an instrument that played chiefly notes on the four beats of a measure to a solo instrument that played fluent melodies, with fast running notes, sharply defined phrases, and ingenious melodic turns".[401]
A period of jazz innovation begins to evolve in Harlem, led by a group of performers who clustered around Minton's Playhouse,[403] where they "experimented with new techniques and approaches, trading ideas with others of an innovative bent", "rooted in Swing Era practice but pushing beyond its norms of tonality and velocity".[404] This is an important part of the origin of bebop.[56]
Large record companies begin abandoning the "ethnic music" market, leading to the formation of many small labels targeting a specific ethnicity, such as Slavic Americans.[365]
Frank Sinatra becomes the first popular musician with a recognizable fanbase devoted to him specifically – the bobby soxers.[405]
Jazz audiences become increasingly interested in the history of jazz, as well as a "new field called discography (which dealt with jazz's) recorded 'documents', and a few European and American writers were reviewing jazz records critically in print".[257]
Billboard magazine begins publishing music charts, documenting the best-selling recordings of various categories.[406] The first song at number one is Tommy Dorsey and Frank Sinatra's "I'll Never Smile Again".[407]
Woody Guthrie first performs in New York City, his subsequent fame will help to inspire the American folk revival of the 1950s, 60s and 70s.[307] Guthrie records Dust Bowl Ballads this year; though the album is a commercial failure, it radically alters "how guitar pickers, record buyers and college professors approached folk music".[408] The album, recorded for Victor Records, is based on Guthrie's own experiences in the Dust Bowl.[190]
Machito, a Cuban-American bandleader, forms an orchestra (Machito & His AfroCubans) that will mix jazz with elements of Cuban folk music; the orchestra's arrangements, by Mario Bauzá are a particularly important key to its success.[184][362]
Gustave Reese's Music in the Middle Ages is the first well-received, major scholarly work on early music published in the United States.[147]
New York City police begin fingerprinting all employees of every club where music is performed; identification cards are given to musicians and are required for them to legally perform in any club. Many musicians are refused cards due to alleged dubious character, most often past narcotics charges.[412]
W. C. Handy becomes the subject of a radio show on NBC, the first such program completely devoted to the work of an African-American composer.[213]
The first jukeboxes with photos are introduced by Mills to show soundies, short films mixed with music performances and vaudeville or gymnastics acts.[303]
Within a few days of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, two anti-Japanese songs are published by Tin Pan Alley: "You're a Sap, Mister Jap" and "The Sun Will Soon Be Setting for the Land of the Rising Sun".[414]
The Army, having had no music school since 1928, creates one in a hurry, settling on Fort Myer, Virginia as its homebase.[223]
Alan Lomax brings out an album featuring field recordings of black convicts singing a work song and a field holler, the first commercially released field recording.[417]
Anita O'Day joins the band of Gene Krupa. She will be the first of a wave of "hip white jazz musicians".[418]
Bernard Hermann's score for Citizen Kane refines the "practices of the (1930s) through more careful, more limited, and more unusual instrumentations".[295]
Popular gospel group the Golden Gate Quartet moves to OKeh Records and releases two of their biggest hits, "Coming in on a Wing and a Prayer" and "Stalin Wasn't Stallin'".[375]
Radio Belgrade begins playing a recording of "Lili Marleen" by Lale Andersen. It is a hit among German troops, and spreads to British and American soldiers, in a version by Marlene Dietrich soon after. It is one of the most popular songs of the war.[422]
Roy Eldridge joined Gene Krupa, making him among the first African Americans to be a permanent member of the brass section of a white jazz big band.[427]
Billboard publishes the "Harlem Hit Parade", the first black music chart.[429]
With the addition of new publishing companies to BMI, rural country and African-American musics become more prominently associated with BMI, rather than ASCAP.[430]
Singer and saxophonist Louis Jordan begins a series of hit releases that popularize a style known as jump, a "propulsive, boogie-woogie-based style of swing".[431]
Acuff-Rose, a publishing form headquartered in Nashville, is founded; it will become the first nationally successful country music publishing company and the first in Nashville.[49][121][432]
The Koussevitzky Music Foundation is established to "support the production (of American classical music) through its commissioning program".[85]
The American Federation of Musicians institutes a "300-mile jump limit", in response to gas rationing, forbidding performers from traveling more than 300 miles between performance sites.[433]
Billy Eckstine performs "Skylark" on network radio, becoming the first African-American vocalist to do so.[435]
Haprischordist Putnam Aldrich's Harvard dissertation on French Baroque ornamentation is "one of the earliest American studies on performance practice". Aldrich will also, as a member of the Stanford University faculty, develop the first graduate program in early music in the country.[147]
RCA-Victor releases a recording of the score to the film The Jungle Book, a set of three records with music by Miklós Rósza and narration from the film's star, Sabu. This is the first album of a film score.[151]
The American Forces Network begins broadcasting. The Network will introduce country, jazz and other styles of American music to many parts of Europe[428]
Regimental bands in the U.S. Army are consolidated into division bands.[437]
The U.S. Army Band embarks on a European tour which will last two years. They will be the "only special band in Washington, D.C." to perform in a foreign theater of combat operations.[437]
Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II's Oklahoma! premiers; its reception "surpassed by far anything previously achieved by a Broadway musical play". The musical's success inspires composers to generally agree that "shows emphasizing songs, dances, and high-spirited romance lacked the impact of integrated shows whose musical numbers were rooted in the drama".[439][440]
Two band training facilities are open for the U.S. Army, one at Camp Crowder and one at Camp Lee in Virginia. The former will close the following year.[437]
Esquire begins a poll of jazz critics, a practice that becomes widespread among music periodicals. The results are controversial due to the success of several African Americans in some categories.[442]
The Music Section of the Special Services Division of the American army and navy begin distributing recordings, V-discs, to military personnel abroad.[443]
A. Schwab's Dry Goods Store sponsors Bluestown, a radio program, possibly becoming the first business to sponsor a blues radio program.[444]
John Lee Hooker arrives in Detroit and begins playing at Brown's Bar. He will soon become the city's most famous bluesman.[445]
Sydney Nathan founds King Records, "arguably the most important independent label in the years before" rock and roll.[446]
The American Federation of Musicians recording ban ends,[404] and the union becomes an integral part of the American music industry.[364] One of the concessions is the end of tracking, in which bits of old film music were re-used; the union succeeded in banning this practice.[187]
With audiences having been unable to acquire new jazz records under the recording ban, many fans were unaware of the shift from the popular swing era to what would eventually be known as bebop. The reaction was hostile to the new style.[56] The first bebop recordings are made this year, after the ban ends,[404] by a band founded by Billy Eckstine.[448]
Billboard launches specialist music charts, in addition to the long-standing general chart, to identify the most-played "hillbilly" and "race" songs on jukeboxes.[407]Louis Jordan's "G.I. Jive" becomes the first song to simultaneously top all three Billboard charts: "pop", "race" and "folk".[449] The first country music chart ever is "Most Played Juke Box Folk Records".[450]
The Dance Collection of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts is formed; it will be the "largest and most comprehensive archive in the world devoted to the documentation of dance".[451]
Richard Dyer-Bennet is the first American folksinger to sell out the Town Hall in New York City. He specializes in "arty folk songs".[452]
The Roberta Martin Singers adds two female performers, making it the "first combination of male and female voices in one ensemble". The Singers were performing and recording in New York, working with independent labels that focused on jazz and rhythm and blues.[454]
The end of the creative peak of jazz in Manhattan.[21]
A thirty-one-treble-button accordion with triple rows becomes the dominant form of the instrument used in the Tejanocorrido; specifically the Hohner Corona II and Gabbanelli are popular kinds of accordion.[199]
Walter Solek introduces English language polkas to the Polish American repertoire.[13]
The approximate end of the period of greatest mainstream popularity for swing music.[386]
The Dew Drop Inn in New Orleans opens. It will quickly become the most prominent venue in the city, especially known for a roster of influential rhythm and blues acts.[457]
Miklós Rózsa's score for Spellbound is an acclaimed composition by a European composer working in Hollywood.[295]
Bunk Johnson, a Louisianan trumpeter, is brought to New York City with a band from New Orleans to perform, as a revival of interest in old-time New Orleans-style jazz begins to peak.[458]
Eugene Smith becomes the first of many to launch a successful solo career after leaving the Roberta Martin Singers, with his early gospel blues hit "I Know the Lord Will Make a Way, Oh Yes, He Will".[459]
A recording of Oklahoma! becomes the first musical show recording to become a modern hit.[460]
Johnny Moore's Three Blazers' "Blues at Sunrise" is the first major hit single for the group, who will popularize a bluesy trio style.[371]
Many American soldiers, having been exposed to Polynesian music during World War 2, leads to nostalgic interest in Hawaiian music and a strengthened Polynesian American performance tradition.[287]
The Magnetophon tape recording technology, created in Germany, is brought to the United States following World War 2. The United States will become the home of tape technology.[465]
Approximate: Charles and William Brown form Brown Radio Productions, one of the first commercial recording and radio broadcasting companies in Nashville, soon to be the home for the American country music industry.[466]
The composer Elliott Carter publishes a piano sonata, a "daring advance in his development as a composer", establishing his reputation for working towards "more and more complex atonal musical (styles) while steering clear of musical systems".[469]
Henry Glover, talent scout for King, becomes one of the "first black men in the postwar record business to be given any creative clout". He originally worked in the white folk or hillbilly field, then branched into "race music" with Bull Moose Jackson, a popular singer of "naughty novelties and lugubrious ballads".[470]
Louis Jordan's "Let the Good Times Roll" becomes a symbol of "economic prosperity and a new era in (the United States') social history" for all Americans, while for many blacks, the song signified an "end to racial inequalities" due to the cross-cultural mixing that became common during the recently ended World War 2.[371]
Armen Carapetyan's Institute of Renaissance and Baroque Music becomes the American Institute of Musicology, whose publications will develop "into one of the most important musicological publishing ventures of the 20th century".[147]
Willi Apel and Archibald T. Davison begin publishing the Historical Anthology of Music, which has remained one of the standard pedagogical works on early music since its publication.[147]
Arthur Godfrey Time, a television show that presents amateur entertainers, begins broadcasting. It is the most popular and influential amateur performance show of the era.[327]
Metro-Goldwyn Mayer begins a recording subsidiary, the first major involvement of Hollywood with the recording industry.[151]
Late 1940s music trends
Record companies begin more fiercely competing for radio airtime.[406]
The first radio stations aimed exclusively at black listeners begin in the South, especially Atlanta, Louisville, Memphis, Los Angeles, St. Louis, New Orleans, Nashville and Miami.[474]
Paul Bigsby creates an electric guitar for Merle Travis, a country singer. Though the exact date is not known, it may be among the earliest solid body electric guitars.[261]
Eddie Jefferson becomes the first prominent performer of vocalese, songs in which new vocal tracks are set to instrumental jazz recordings.[475][476][477]
The "idea that music could have an essence separate from the way it sounded in performance", an idea long seen as exclusive to Western classical music, comes to be applied to jazz through performers like Charlie Parker, focusing on "creation and performance, in the manner of classical musicians letting reception take care of itself"[21]
Many country performers begin experimenting with a pedal steel, a steel guitar on a stand set up so that the guitarist can change pitches and chords.[49]
The Old Regular Baptists of Jesus Christ, a small sect in eastern Kentucky, move in large numbers to Indiana, Michigan and Ohio. They preserve traditional Christian music techniques derived from 18th century New England, such as the heterophonic performance of monophonic tunes and the lining out of hymns.[478]
Inspired by pioneer Bill Monroe and his band, a generation of younger prformers, many of them working-class and frequently migrants from rural areas to cities, form a number of important proto-bluegrass bands.[479]
The technology behind electric loudspeakers and amplifiers begins progressing rapidly.[60]
Gospel jubilee singing groups end their last period of great popularity within the field of African-American Christian music.[480]
The genre now known as rock and roll begins to reach its breakthrough form.[481]
The guitar becomes the most prominent instrument in the blues.[10]
The nascent bebop jazz scene comes to include a number of defining cultural characteristics, including the "unfortunate fashionability of heroin", which was inspired, in large part, by the success of addict Charlie Parker, the use of African-American vernacular-derived slang, and criticism of the racial politics of the era.[124]
The independent record labels that dominate the African-American music industry begin targeting the growing teenage demographic by signing performers from that age group. Jesse Stone and Dave Bartholomew are among the legendary talent scouts from this era.[371]
Tony de la Rosa adds the drum set to the Tejanoconjunto style, forever changing the genre's sound; he will later add amplification and the bass to the field.[199]
German American bands begin performing in a manner influenced by swing and jazz.[13]
Slovenian American dance bands, until now dominated entirely by the accordion, come to include banjo, string bass and drum set.[13]
The accordion polka craze in the United States peaks.[13]
The Holocaust has several effects on Jewish music in the United States, namely leading to a decline in Yiddish language music and a rise in cantors being trained at home rather than in Europe.[299]
Turkish Armenian 'ud player Oudi Harrant moves to the United States, becoming one of the most popular Middle Eastern musicians in the country.[98]
The Yale Collegium, though not the first of its kind, is the most influential in beginning the American collegium movement, and is an important early institution in American early music.[147]
When the major radio networks, CBS, NBC and Mutual, begin focusing more on television than radio, they cease pressuring the FCC to limit the number of radio stations in each market. The result is more fragmentation in the radio industry, and stations that target niche markets, such as African Americans.[481]
The Ravens become one of the first African-American groups to reach the pop charts.[481]
Jazz musician and composer Thelonious Monk makes a number of famous recordings, making him a favorite among many other jazz artists at the time, but he will not receive mainstream accolades until the late 1950s.[124]
Tito Puente and Tito Rodríguez form the own bands, an important milestone in the early evolution of mambo, a Cuban-derived dance music.[184]
One of the most successful performers of Afro-Cuban music is Miguelito Valdez, who forms his own band this year.[362]
Three hundred Indonesian seamen desert their ship in New York, seeking residence in the United States; though it requires a court battle, they are successful, marking the beginning of Indonesian immigration.[487]
Al Hurricane begins performing at the age of twelve; he will go on to become the most influential New Mexican Hispano musician of the late 20th century.[500]
Frankie Yankovic's "Just Because" becomes his first major hit, establishing him as a polka star and an important figure in the Slovenian American music scene.[13]
African-American entertainers begin regularly appearing on television shows, particularly The Ed Sullivan Show.[14]
Billy Eckstine signs with MGM, soon becoming the first African-American male to become a pop idol. He will be the "first black ballad singer to succeed as a soloist independently of a dance band".[501]
Nat King Cole's group becomes the first jazz combo to have a sponsored radio show.[502]
Sophie Drinker's Music and Women is the "first extensive exploration in feminist musical scholarship".[505]
The Women's Army Corps is merged into the regular army, and the Corps' band becomes the 14th Army Band, the only such band open to women in the country.[506]
The earliest American experiments in musique concrète are conducted by Louis and Bebe Barron, though they do not produce any complete compositions.[253]
Billboard magazine begins using the term rhythm and blues to describe African-American popular music, formerly race music, and country and western to describe what was formerly folk music.[371][509][510] This is the first usage of the term rhythm and blues in the popular music industry.[14]
The Clara Ward Singers release "Surely God Is Able", a popular song that was one of the first in gospel to be in three-quarter, or waltz-time.[438]
Dave Carey and Albert McCarthy begin publishing the Jazz Directory, the first published discography to organize entries by matrix-number. The work was intended to be comprehensive, but will never be published beyond the letter "L", because the rise of the LP led to a proliferation of a recorded music, making a comprehensive directory impractical.[353]
The federal government begins to offer incentives to Native Americans to move to urban areas; the policy promotes the intertribal mixing, stimulating the growth of the powwow.[512]
William Grant Still's Troubled Island is the first "full-length opera by a black composer mounted by a major American company", premiering with the New York City Opera this year.[14][38]
Miles Davis' Birth of the Cool launches his solo career, creating a new style with a number of like-minded musicians, characterized by an emphasis on "coloristic timbral effects achieved through unusual pairings of instruments..., no vibrato, and a seamless integration of written and improvised music".[124] This is the beginning of cool jazz and chamber jazz.[513]
Lionel "Chica" Sesma is hired by KOWL in Los Angeles to host a bilingual program that will soon switch to focus exclusively on Latin music; Sesma will become "synonymous with Latin dance music throughout" the 1950s and 60s.[117]
The band of Tito Rodríguez achieves great success, with Rodriguez becoming one of the first major Puerto Rican stars in the New York Latin music scene and his band becoming a leader of the Palladium Dance Hall era and an important group in the international popularization of Caribbean-derived dance music.[362]
Tito Puente's band, the Mambo Boys, has their first hit with "Abanico", establishing Puente's career; he is known for having brought his groups percussion section to the forefront, which will become the standard for Cuban dance bands in the United States until the 1990s.[362]
The family of Walter Raudkivi-Stein settles in Baltimore, soon establishing themselves as the giants of the American kannel-manufacturing industry.[96]
The establishment of the People's Republic of China leads to a schism between Chinese Americans and Chinese in China, with many Chinese intellectuals stranded in the United States. The Chinese American music community becomes polarized as a result, with separate communities of upper-class intellectuals, working classes and various linguistic or ethnic groups, each developing distinct musical traditions.[246]
Leo Ornstein's Living Music of the Americas is the "first publication to cover the entire spectrum of musical composition in the Western Hermisphere".[515]
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^Barnard, Stephen; Donna Halper and Dave Laing. "Radio". The Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World. pp. 451–461. Barnard, Halper and Laing question KDKA's claim, pointing to 8MK in Detroit and 1XE in Medford Hillside as possible precursors in the United States.
^ abcWolfe, Charles K. and Jacqueline Cogdell DjeDje, "Snapshot: Two Views of Music, Race, Ethnicity, and Nationhood", pp. 76–86, in the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music.
^ abcdefghijkPreston, Katherine K.; Susan Key, Judith Tick, Frank J. Cipolla and Raoul F. Camus. "Snapshot: Four Views of Music in the United States". The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music. pp. 554–569.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
^ abcdSeeger, Anthony and Paul Théberg, "Technology and Media", pp. 235–249, in the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music
^Laing, Dave. "Agent". The Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World. pp. 532–533.
^Levine, Victoria Lindsay. "Northeast". The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music. pp. 461–465.Morgan, Henry Louis (1962) [1852]. League of the Ho-dé-no-sau-nee or Iroquois. Secaucus, New Jersey: Citadel Press.
^ abcdefgLevy, Mark; Carl Rahkonen and Ain Haas. "Scandinavian and Baltic Music". The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music. pp. 866–881.
^ abAsai, Susan M. "Japanese Music". The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music. pp. 967–974.
^ abRasmussen, Anne K. "Middle Eastern Music". The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music. pp. 1028–1041.
^Horn, David; David Sanjek. "Victor". The Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World. pp. 768–769. ... during three days that would become legendary in country music, he recorded the first recordings of the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers
^Sanjek, David. "Southern Music (including Peermusic)". The Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music. pp. 592–593–594.
^Crawford, p. 621; Crawford quotes from Dodge, Roger Pryor (1995). Hot Jazz and Jazz Dance: Collected Writings, 1929–1964. New York: Oxford University Press.
^Keeling, Richard. "California". The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music. pp. 412–419.Herzog, George (1928). "The Yuman Musical Style". Journal of American Folklore. 41 (160): 183–231. doi:10.2307/534896. JSTOR534896. Nettl, Bruno (1954). North American Indian Musical Styles. Philadelphia: American Folklore Society. ISBN9780292735248.
^Reyes, Adelaida. "IDentity, Diversity, and Interaction". The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music. pp. 504–518.Baker, Theodore (1881). Uber die Musik der nordamerikanischen Wilden. Leipzig: Breitkopf u. Härtel.
^Sanjek, David; David Horn. "Vocalion Records". The Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World. pp. 772–773.
^José Angel Gutiérrez. "Chapter 7, Chicano Music: Evolution and Politics to 1950", The Roots of Texas Music (Centennial Series of the Association of Former Students, Texas A&M University; No. 93), edited by Lawrence Clayton and Joe W. Specht, College Station, Texas: Texas A&M University Press, 2003, pp. 161–163.
^Rahkonen, Carl. "French Music". The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music. pp. 854–859.
^Oliver, Paul. "Nostalgia". Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World. pp. 292–294. Oliver notes that two million copies were sold, and that it was recording in forty languages, forty-six arrangements, and a total of more than five hundred times.
^Cornelius, Steven, Charlotte J. Frisbie and John Shepherd, "Snapshot: Four Views of Music, Government, and Politics", pp. 304–319, in the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music
^Jones, p. 183; Jones notes that, while the dominant saxophonist of the day, Coleman Hawkins, was an impressive virtuoso, it was Young who first innovated a saxophone style.
^ abLaing, Dave. "Jukebox". The Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World. pp. 513–515.
^Crawford, pp. 592–593; The quote is from Harris himself, which Crawford quotes from the 1955 third edition of Gilbert Chase's America's Music, from the Pilgrims to the Present
^Oliver, Paul. "Bluebird". The Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World. pp. 691–692. In the fall of 1939, Bluebird had a major success with Muggy Spanier and His Ragtime Band, arguably the first band of the 'trad jazz revival'.
^Horn, David; David Buckley. "War and Armed Conflict". Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World. pp. 389–395. Horn and Buckley note that the song was also popular among the French and Italians.
^Sanjek, David. "Acuff-Rose Music". The Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music. p. 583. Sanjek calls Acuff-Rose the "first successful publishing company to specialize in country music".
^Street, John. "Politics". Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World. pp. 299–294. Street notes that Davis emulated Wilbert Lee O'Daniel, a Texan who came to fame with his band, the Hillbilly Boys, and became a U.S. Senator in 1941
^Miller, Terry, "Religion", pp. 116–128, in the Garland Encyclopedia of Music.
^Post, Jennifer C., Neil V. Rosenberg and Holly Kruse, "Snapshot: How Music and Place Intertwine", pp. 153–172, in the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music.
^ abcdHo, Fred, Jeremy Wallach, Beverly Diamond, Ron Pen, Rob Bowman and Sara Nicholson, "Snapshot: Five Fusions", pp. 334–361, in the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music
^Cogan, Jim; Clark, William (2003). Temples of Sound: Inside the Great Recording Studios. San Francisco, California, USA: Chronicle Books. pp. 14–29. ISBN0-8118-3394-1.
^Levine, Victoria Lindsay; Judith A. Gray. "Musical Interactions". The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music.Howard, James H. (1955). "The Pan-Indian Culture of Oklahoma". Scientific Monthly. 18 (5): 215–220. Bibcode:1955SciMo..81..215H.
Lomax, Alan (1949). Mister Jelly Roll: The Fortunes of Jelly Roll Morton, New Orleans Creole and 'Inventor of Jazz'. New York: Pantheon Books/Duell, Sloan and Pearce.
Frederic Ramsey Jr.; Charles Edward Smith, eds. (1939). Jazzmen. Harcourt Brace.
Rust, Brian. Jazz Records, A-Z, 1932–1942. Hatch End, Middlesex: The author.
Schleman, Hilton (1936). Rhythm on Record: Who's Who and Register of Recorded Dance Music, 1906–1936. London: Melody Maker.
