Country music originated from blacks?

[IllmaticDelta]

Oddly enough it was a gospel musician (Sister Rosetta Tharp) that White American Rock musicians and Country musicians (Johnny Cash, Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis) emulated. The White British Rock musicians seemed to stay along the line of Delta Blues musicians like Muddy Waters and Howling Wolf.

Jump blues - Wikipedia
https://www.theroot.com/sister-rosetta-tharpe-the-queer-black-woman-who-invent-1823198999
NPR Choice page

facts

 

[Blessings]

subssssssssss

 

[ShaDynasty]

Maybe the context wasn't clear there. It should be obvious that the popularity of Elvis makes him an important figure in the evolution of modern music. Whatever came before was what it was, but after Elvis there was a big shift regardless of whether he gets credit for doing the bulk of the work. He definitely incorporated country and blues into that shyt and hes one of the biggest ever. Him, The Beatles and Michael Jackson I think inarguably had the most influence since.

 

[Samori Toure]

Maybe the context wasn't clear there. It should be obvious that the popularity of Elvis makes him an important figure in the evolution of modern music. Whatever came before was what it was, but after Elvis there was a big shift regardless of whether he gets credit for doing the bulk of the work. He definitely incorporated country and blues into that shyt and hes one of the biggest ever. Him, The Beatles and Michael Jackson I think inarguably had the most influence since.

Biggest influence for who? White people? Because he did not incorporate any Country and Blues. He was mimicking Black Blues and Pop artists of his era, specifically Jackie Wilson.

Jackie Wilson and Elvis Presley | Elvis Articles
NPR Choice page

The only place that I saw a convergence of Country, Blues and for that matter Gospel music in the modern era was in Soul music. There is a reason that Soul music and performers like Al Green, Aretha Franklin, Joe Simon, Staple Singers, Johnny Taylor, Sam Cooke and Otis Redding were so beloved by most Americans, which was because they were playing music that most people were instinctively familiar with. They all were Country people playing music that everybody knew. Sam Cooke even remade a country song called Tennessee Waltz that was very popular among all the genres.

 

[ShaDynasty]

Elvis is obviously pop, and I'm not even an Elvis fan like that. But I can definitely hear the blues on many songs and I can hear his influence on later Rock and Country artists. A lot of the Rock artists of the 60's cite him as an influence.

 

[IllmaticDelta]

Maybe the context wasn't clear there. It should be obvious that the popularity of Elvis makes him an important figure in the evolution of modern music. Whatever came before was what it was, but after Elvis there was a big shift regardless of whether he gets credit for doing the bulk of the work. He definitely incorporated country and blues into that shyt and hes one of the biggest ever. Him, The Beatles and Michael Jackson I think inarguably had the most influence since.

His music though wasn't ground breaking in any way. As I said before.white people had been mixing country & western with black music since the 1920's. While Chuck Berry was ground breaking because he created/crafted a style that was specifically for teenagers to go along with the guitar style and showmanship that was always a part of the world of black music. Chuck single handily is the one that made rock, guitar-centric

Spoiler

A pioneer of rock and roll, Berry was a significant influence on the development of both the music and the attitude associated with the rock music lifestyle. With songs such as "Maybellene" (1955), "Roll Over Beethoven" (1956), "Rock and Roll Music" (1957) and "Johnny B. Goode" (1958), Berry refined and developed rhythm and blues into the major elements that made rock and roll distinctive, with lyrics successfully aimed to appeal to the early teenage market by using graphic and humorous descriptions of teen dances, fast cars, high school life, and consumer culture,[2] and utilizing guitar solos and showmanship that would be a major influence on subsequent rock music.[1] Thus Berry, the songwriter, according to critic Jon Pareles, invented rock as "a music of teenage wishes fulfilled and good times (even with cops in pursuit)."[81] Berry contributed three things to rock music: an irresistible swagger, a focus on the guitar riff as the primary melodic element and an emphasis on songwriting as storytelling.[82] His records are a rich storehouse of the essential lyrical, showmanship and musical components of rock and roll. In addition to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, a large number of significant popular-music performers have recorded Berry's songs

The rock critic Robert Christgau considers Berry "the greatest of the rock and rollers",[90] while John Lennon said, "if you tried to give rock and roll another name, you might call it 'Chuck Berry'."[91] Ted Nugent said, "If you don't know every Chuck Berry lick, you can't play rock guitar."[92] Bob Dylan called Berry "the Shakespeare of rock 'n' roll".[93]Springsteen tweeted, "Chuck Berry was rock's greatest practitioner, guitarist, and the greatest pure rock 'n' roll writer who ever lived."[94]

The journalist Chuck Klosterman has argued that in 300 years Berry will still be remembered as the rock musician who most closely captured the essence of rock and roll.[106] Time magazine stated, "There was no one like Elvis. But there was 'definitely' no one like Chuck Berry."[107]Rolling Stone magazine called him "the father of rock & roll" who "gave the music its sound and its attitude, even as he battled racism - and his own misdeeds - all the way," reporting that Leonard Cohen said, "All of us are footnotes to the words of Chuck Berry."[108] Kevin Strait, curator of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC, said that Berry is "one of the primary sonic architects of rock and roll."

 

[ShaDynasty]

Yeah I think now you're willfully misinterpreting my posts even as you quote me.

 

[GoAggieGo.]

Love these threads. I learn something new about my people and the musical influence they have not only statewide but worldwide, and it exposes those that don’t know what they talmbout

 

[GPBear]

His music though wasn't ground breaking in any way. As I said before.white people had been mixing country & western with black music since the 1920's. While Chuck Berry was ground breaking because he created/crafted a style that was specifically for teenagers to go along with the guitar style and showmanship that was always a part of the world of black music. Chuck single handily is the one that made rock, guitar-centric

Just let them cook thinking Elvis invented rock'n'roll, breh

If you're buying into Elvis propaganda in 2019, I got a couple bridges I've been meaning to sell





so much better it's not even funny

 

[GPBear]

If you brehs really want to get deep, look up Charley Patton and other OG bluesmen to get a feel for where country, folk, jazz, and the blues all came from. And as other pointed out before, African musical traditions are replete with banjos, loras, diddley bos, and harps that influenced the fingerpicking style of guitar playing throughout American music. The name "blues" refers most specifically to the "blue notes" (roughly flatted 3rd, 5th, and 7th) which are prevalent in West African traditions, and are the common feature between blues, jazz, and African musical traditions.

A lot of the blues acts like Robert Johnson were actually late adopters, they were a few generations deep and able to travel the deep south assimilating all the different styles together to form a whole new form, that today people assume has been around hundreds of years, but at the time was actually 'new' music. All the deep gruff Leadbelly baritone kind of stuff has its origins more in the 1920s when there were juke joints all around the South that necessitated having a voice that could cut through audience, or prisons/traintracks where the singer had to bellow across a field to workers; and the eerie high falsetto Skip James and Robert Johnson stuff with intricate guitar picking only came about once vinyl records became popular, because it allowed them to play their more delicate stuff on wax - because they couldn't be heard in the loud juke joints. In fact, some of the high-falsetto singing associated with the old blues styles today are thought to be due to imperfect recording techniques which sped the tracks up and raised the singer's voices.

Meanwhile, this is what the original stuff sounded like.

It's ragtime-y, country, blues, folk, etc. Basically everything "Americana."

And this is Sam Chatmon, who played with Chatman and was allegedly his half-brother.

He's talking to folkologist Alan Lomax, I think, and as you can hear the interview starts off "It's a blues type, but it ain't a blues." "It kinda came before the blues."

Interesting note, it's the same melody and pattern as "Freight Train" by Elizabeth Cotton. Specifically the turnaround.

 

[Tflasha]

E-VER-RY-THING GOOD ORIGNATED FROM BLACKS

 

[IllmaticDelta]

Meanwhile, this is what the original stuff sounded like.

It's ragtime-y, country, blues, folk, etc. Basically everything "Americana."

And this is Sam Chatmon, who played with Chatman and was allegedly his half-brother.

He's talking to folkologist Alan Lomax, I think, and as you can hear the interview starts off "It's a blues type, but it ain't a blues." "It kinda came before the blues."

Interesting note, it's the same melody and pattern as "Freight Train" by Elizabeth Cotton. Specifically the turnaround.

What kind of music did the songster perform?



The songster had a repertoire that may have included blues songs, but also contained the spectrum of songs African Americans would’ve been singing at the time. [They performed] anything from reels to breakdowns—songs associated with square dance tradition—to vaudeville hits from around the turn of the century.


A lot of “songsters” featured on Classic African American Songsters are also famous blues musicians. Is there a distinction between the two?



In the late 1950s a new term was introduced—“the blues man.” A new focus turned towards blues as the primary form of African-American expression. The songster began to lose out as kind of either an ancestor figure or maybe even sort of like a musical bookmark—before there was the blues man, there was the songster.



One could say the songster’s always been the songster, and for some reason people started focusing more so on their blues repertoire. For example, Robert Johnson, for most of his musical career, sang blues. But when he was out performing, he sang everything. John Jackson is another example; he sang blues, and was discovered when people were looking for blues musicians. They were really glad to find him, and then people found out that he knew all these other songs. The same thing happened with Lead Belly.



So it became more of a tendency for music fans—record collectors in particular—to invent this new character, the bluesman, who sings all blues songs. This also coincided with the recording industry having a preference for blues musicians. This was because when you went to record someone, you could not claim copyright for it if they had a song that somebody had previously written. But blues musicians tended to have their own materials, whether it was their own version of the blues song or something that they’d actually written. They could claim it as a new song and avoid any copyright problems. It doesn’t mean, however, that people stopped singing these others songs. It just meant that blues became the new most popular form of secular party/dance music within the black community.



The term “songster” seems to have fallen out of use in today’s modern music climate. Do you see it making a comeback?



It’s strange. It never died out completely; it was also used for a while to describe older banjo players, particularly black banjo players, because they also had this mixed repertoire of songs that weren’t blues, but came right before blues. It stayed in that community’s parlance.



The term songster is coming back in the hands of younger black musicians, who are consciously [embracing] this broad repertoire of songs that they created and performed—the pre-blues materials we were mentioning earlier. You have groups like the Carolina Chocolate Drops out there; you might have people that are doing songs from the turn of the century, and you have people re-learning the banjo and the fiddle. It’s a revival of sorts. They are performing this part of their cultural heritage, which for many years seems to have been overlooked by younger musicians. It’s part of a broader historical reclamation process. I’m very proud to be a part of it.

Before There was the Blues Man, There Was the Songster | At the Smithsonian | Smithsonian

people like leabelly and henry thomas played material that was older in style than what people like charlie patton recorded

 

[Paper Boi]

country music started in the bay



e-40 was the original country artist.

 

[GPBear]

Before There was the Blues Man, There Was the Songster | At the Smithsonian | Smithsonian

people like leabelly and henry thomas played material that was older in style than what people like charlie patton recorded

Never heard of songsters

Right, I mean Leadbelly would play everything, Pete Seeger basically ripped his style and helped spawn the folk wave. And a lot of those work songs date from the 1800s and the ballads from probably even earlier.

"Goodnight Irene" came from Gussie Davis, one of the first black songwriters in the 1880s tinpan alley, which is another nearly forgotten period in musical history.

 

[FeverPitch2]

Country is NOTHING but cac's attempt at the Blues.
It's the Blues ironed flat
Same lyrical themes unless they're signing about farms and horses and shyt
You take the rhythmic complexity out of Blues, give it a straight up and down rhythm
Or make it waltz time and there you have it
The same principle applies to boogie woogie (aka rock and roll), they mutated it to their skill level and turned it into rock
Disco became EDM, the lists goes on.