Black culture and American music are inextricably linked, stretching back to the time when enslaved people were imported from the shores of Africa, bringing with them the roots of their music and culture. Those roots changed music history-for all of us-forever, and that influence continues today. Music and dance were an integral part of African life, and remained important to Blacks in America. Both slaves and free blacks used music as an accompaniment to work, worship, and celebration. Today, there’s virtually no music we listen to that hasn’t felt the effects and benefits of that African and Black heritage. It’s remarkable, and when you read the outline of genres and performers, you’ll surely agree.
The 1950s were one of the richest periods in all of American musical history. Not only were many major musical tendencies from the first half of the century still flourishing, but Afro-American musicians across the spectrum from blues to jazz were developing a variety of musical syntheses with which to give expression to the rapid changes in their lives and in American society as a whole during the post-World War II period.
Although most of the music under discussion here never reached the attention of white Americans and their mass media during the years of its currency in any term vaguely relating to "art", we have no reason today to continue to obscure the genius nature of the Great Black Music of the 50's just because our forebears were too racist and stupid to know what was going down.
African American singers and songwriters were the first to introduce the sound of Rock ‘n’ Roll.
Here are some of the most iconic genres and musicians of the time:
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Key Genres and Artists
- Blues: Influenced by work songs and spirituals from slaves in the deep South, Blues began in the 1860s after the Civil War. Key artists include Muddy Waters, B. B. King, and Ma Rainey.
- Jazz: Jazz music has roots in blues, ragtime, and spirituals. Jazz-world legends include Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Esperanza Spalding, Ray Charles, any of the Marsalis Brothers, and Nina Simone.
- R&B/Soul: Defined by its soulful singing and the strong bass and rhythm track behind the music, the genre was first established in the 1940s and continues to be a popular form of music to this day. Famous performers include Janelle Monae, Boyz II Men, Toni Braxton, Usher, Mary J. Blige, Alicia Keys, TLC, Destiny’s Child, and John Legend.
- Rock and Roll: Emerging in the mid 20th century, Rock was inspired by blues, boogie woogie, gospel, and rhythm music. Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Chuck Berry pioneered the creation of rock and roll music.
Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Chuck Berry: Pioneers of Rock and Roll
The Emergence of Rock and Roll
Originally called “race music” because of its African American origins, rock and roll is a form of popular music that emerged in the United States in the late 1940s and early ’50s.
The Rock ‘n’ Roll genre can American Rhythm and Blues, Swing, Boogie-Woogie, Urban Blues, Latin Rhythms, Country and Western, Rockabilly, and Tin Pan Ally with a more aggressive beat. Rock ‘n’ Roll songs typically include themes about love, racism, cultural influences, daily life, and segregation. Key instruments include the electric guitar, bass, drums, and piano.
The most widely held belief is that the first rock and roll single was 1951’s “Rocket 88,” written by Ike Turner and sung by Jackie Brenston (the saxophone player from Turner’s backing band, the Kings of Rhythm), though this is certainly debatable. Other artists with early rock and roll hits included Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley (Ellas McDaniel), Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Gene Vincent.
Chuck Berry’s 1955 classic “Maybellene,” in particular, features a distorted electric guitar solo with warm overtones created by his small valve amplifier. However, the use of distortion was predated by electric blues guitarists such as Joe Hill Louis, Guitar Slim (Eddie Jones), Willie Johnson of Howlin’ Wolf’s band, and Pat Hare. The latter two also made use of distorted power chords in the early 1950s.
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White Americans enjoyed the sounds of rhythm and blues, but the genre and its black artists were only played on “race music” stations. Gradually, it became evident to the music industry that not only blacks but also whites were also buying these records and listening to “race music” radio. Then, in 1954, a Cleveland disk jockey named Alan Freed decided to play black artists’ music on his radio station. By calling it rock and roll, Freed was able to get sponsors.
Because of this success, many artists-both black and white-used the phrase and developed singles considered rock and roll. This was the catalyst for the explosion that followed: black musical styles were taken up by white musicians.
Keith Richards proposes that Chuck Berry developed his brand of rock and roll by transposing the familiar two-note lead line of “jump blues” piano directly to the electric guitar, creating what is instantly recognizable as rock guitar.
Jimmy Preston’s “Rock the Joint” (1949), which was later covered by Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” (April 1954), is generally recognized as an important milestone, but it was preceded by many recordings. Fats Domino’s recording “The Fat Man” (1949), Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s “Strange Things Happening Everyday” (1944), Goree Carter’s “Rock Awhile” (1949), and Big Mama Thornton’s “Hound Dog” (1952) were early hits among Black Americans.
In 1954, rock and roll exploded around an image: that of a handsome white singer, Elvis Presley, who “sounded like a black man.” For decades, African Americans had used the term rock and roll as a euphemism for sex, and Presley’s music oozed sexuality.
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Presley was hardly the only artist who embodied this attitude, but he was clearly a catalyst in the merger of black and white culture.
During the 1960s, rock and roll was hit by a British invasion in the form of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones propelling the genre popularity with the general market.
The Civil Rights Movement and Music
As you’re listening to the songs I’ve selected, try to look through the lives of Black Americans through these musicians’ perspectives. This is especially important in the 1950s, a time when the Civil Rights movement started and there was growing fear of Communalism in America.
The Civil Rights movement was a “singing movement.” In the 1950s, African American churches hosted community groups that organized mass protest activities against racial segregation in the South. The tradition of congregational singing led by strong song leaders soon extended to choirs, small ensembles, and soloists who sang in mass meetings, marches, and in jails. Their repertoire was called Civil Rights freedom songs, also known as protest songs.
The modern Civil Rights and Black Power movements emerged from an era of social unrest in the mid-1950s when African Americans from the South mounted a series of grassroots activities to protest their social status as second-class citizens. These activities gained widespread momentum and spread to the North, attracting national attention in the 1960s.
Music was integral to both movements and served a multitude of functions. It galvanized African Americans into political action; provided strength and courage; united protesters as a cohesive group; and became a creative medium for mass communication.
Participation in the Civil Rights movement crossed generational, professional, and racial boundaries. The musical repertoire reflected this diversity, consisting of original versions and new interpretations of spirituals, hymns, ballads, gospel, rhythm and blues, and soul music, as well as original creations.
The themes of freedom and empowerment, and the rejection of second-class citizenship and cruel treatment by the police, dominate the texts of freedom songs. Few sights or sounds conjure up the passion and purposefulness of the Southern Civil Rights Movement as powerfully as the freedom songs that provided a stirring musical accompaniment to the campaign for racial justice and equality in the region during the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Whether sung at mass meetings, on marches and sit-ins, or en route to some of the Jim Crow South’s most forbidding jails, or whether performed on stage or record by one of the musical ensembles formed by civil rights activists, these songs conveyed the moral urgency of the freedom struggle, while expressing and helping to sustain the courage of the extraordinary ordinary people who were at the heart of it.
Perhaps the most celebrated of all the freedom songs is "We Shall Overcome."
While many classic freedom songs like "Keep Your Eyes on The Prize," "Oh Freedom," and "Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Us Around" were drenched in black sacred musical traditions, it is worth reiterating that many songs, like "We Shall Overcome," were forged in dialogue with, not in isolation from, white hymnal and folk-music influences.
At a time when integration and biracial cooperation were touchstones for the movement, this musical miscegenation -- also apparent in early rock-and-roll music, which boasted black and white artists and black and white fans, and which drew on both black rhythm-and-blues and white country influences -- symbolically reproduced the best hopes of many activists.
Moreover, as befitted songs created largely by young African Americans who spent much of what little leisure time they had listening and dancing to the latest jazz, R&B, and soul hits, many freedom songs bore the imprint of the most popular black commercial music of the day. "Get Your Rights, Jack," for example, cheerfully ripped off Ray Charles’s "Hit the Road, Jack," while "Sit-In Showdown: The A&P Song," created by Spellman University student Brenda Gibson, recreated the sounds of Charles’s "What D’I Say?" to commemorate the sit-in protests against the A&P store in Atlanta.
The freedom songs sung by activists on the frontlines of the civil rights struggle rightly hold an iconic place in any musical history of the Southern movement.
Nevertheless, the other forms of popular music with which the freedom songs often intersected-blues, gospel, folk, jazz, rhythm and blues, rock and roll, and soul-also offer useful insights into the entwined histories of the freedom struggle, black racial consciousness, and race relations.
Indeed, it is important to recognize that African Americans were not the only ones singing about the movement in the 1950s and early 1960s. Any comprehensive soundtrack to the era’s racial protests might also include songs by white folk artists like Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Janis Ian, and Phil Ochs, all of whom sang of the indignities of segregation and the shame of the racism that mocked America’s best democratic ideals, while saluting efforts to redress racial inequalities.
Folk songs and freedom songs tended to be fairly open in their commitment to the Civil Rights Movement.
In considering what music was most intimately connected to, or evocative of, the civil rights era, it is tempting to focus purely on the lyrics of particular songs.
Nevertheless, it is important to recognize that the changing sounds of black music during this period embodied the revitalized sense of black pride and raised racial consciousness upon which any organized struggle for racial justice built.
For example, the soul music pioneered by artists such as Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, and the Impressions in the late 1950s, and refined by the stars of Motown in Detroit and Stax in Memphis, among many others, in the 1960s, fused rhythm and blues, pop, and in the case of Southern soul, country music with the protean gospel influences that marked the style-irrespective of its lyrical content-as unmistakably and proudly African American.
Similarly, jazz saxophonist John Coltrane’s instrumental "Alabama," inspired by the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing that killed four black girls in Birmingham in September 1963, expressed a depth of grief and rage that no lyric could possibly intensify.
The whole of the avant-garde or free jazz movement that claimed Coltrane, along with other prodigiously gifted musicians such as Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler, Ornette Coleman, and Pharoah Sanders, as major influences was predicated on a self-conscious rejection of Western-interpreted as white-notions of musical correctness.
Many of these musicians hoped to escape what they saw as the tyranny of white cultural expectations and standards by substituting a black aesthetic, which would give precedence to a different, uniquely African American standard of musical excellence.
As such, their musical experimentation represented a more radical expression of the kind of discontent with the racial status quo that inspired the civil rights struggle, coupled with a determination to secure respect for distinctively African American values that would become a hallmark of the Black Power era in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Yet another way in which black music evoked civil rights themes was through lyrics that, in comparison to lyrics in freedom songs and to some folk music, were less explicit about the struggle itself.
In fact, lyrics about the civil rights struggle were relatively rare in commercially successful rhythm-and-blues and soul music until the second half of the 1960s.
One example of this kind of veiled commentary was Chuck Berry’s "The Promised Land." In this song, Berry offered a partial allegory of the 1961 freedom rides organized by CORE and continued by SNCC to protest the continued segregation of interstate transportation in the South.
In "The Promised Land"-which is chock-full of souped-up, quasi-biblical imagery relating to the Exodus story, that most potent of all tales of escape to a better place-Berry’s hero follows much the same route through the South as the freedom riders, though he sensibly bypasses Rock Hill in South Carolina, which is where the riders first encountered militant white resistance to their integrated bus journey.
While Berry chooses to nod in the direction of the movement through allegory and allusion, many of Curtis Mayfield’s hit songs for his group, the Impressions, explicitly praise the black community’s dogged determination to "Keep On Pushing" for their rights.
In the exquisite soul-spiritual, "People Get Ready" (another of the many rhythm-and-blues and soul songs that celebrated the freedom to travel or chronicled escape from some kind of oppressive situation), Mayfield urged his listeners to "get on board" the righteous struggle for racial justice.
Nina Simone, a versatile musical genius who defied easy stylistic categorization by straddling jazz, blues, pop, classical, and gospel styles, recorded a succession of songs-perhaps most famously, the rollicking, darkly humorous "Mississippi Goddamn"-that excoriated the Jim-Crow South and celebrated the strength of the black community as it struggled against discrimination.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, literally dozens upon dozens of rhythm-and-blues and soul songs like these spoke to the growth of black pride, the distinctiveness of the African American experience, and the beauties of black culture, as well as to the specifics of the civil rights struggle.
While the undeniable and hard-won successes of the Civil Rights Movement in ridding the South of statutory segregation and disenfranchisement did not create a society free of racism or racial discrimination in which genuine equality of opportunity could flourish, the movement nevertheless did go hand in hand with the rejuvenated sense of black pride and empowerment encapsulated in a freedom song like "Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Round."
It was certainly no coincidence that one of the most popular songs of the late 1960s was Aretha Franklin’s recording of Otis Redding’s "Respect." In her version of the song, the "Queen of Soul" transformed what might have been a less sweeping plea for personal domestic respect into a universal demand for respect for black rights, achievements, and aspirations. Such sentiments had always animated the Civil Rights Movement.
Aretha Franklin: The "Queen of Soul"
The Lasting Legacy
Today, rock music, which is a derivative (but distinctly separate) genre of rock and roll, is a global music phenomenon that fuses country, folk, and other ethnic musical elements with rock and roll. Blues music has given people a voice to tell stories, preserve traditions and express feelings about everyday life and it goes without saying that blues music has influenced much of the music that we all enjoy today.
