REVOLUTIONS IN AMERICAN MUSIC

A study of three paradigm shifts in American pop and classical music.

Broyles, a professor of musicology at Florida State and former music critic for the Baltimore Sun, surmises that the 1840s, 1920s, and 1950s were significant decades, thanks in large part to the intersection of race, technology, and new ways of thinking about and performing music. The 1840s marked the rise of minstrelsy, a product of American racial tensions as well as “the first popular genre that was distinctly American.” That decade also saw the arrival of the first serious classical symphonies in a country whose public “did not consider music art.” In the 1920s, the explosion of phonograph recordings and commercial radio sparked the growth of jazz, blues, and country music. In the 1950s, the commingling of genres and the rise of car radios meant American teens were drawn to an ever widening crop of R&B and rock artists. In Broyles’ estimation, the decade’s key transformational rock figure wasn’t Elvis Presley but Johnnie Ray, a white crooner who cut his teeth in Black Detroit supper clubs and had a knack for country and R&B styles. In the classical realm, avant-garde works by Pierre Boulez and John Cage set the stage for decades of experiments to come. Though this is a scholarly work, it’s highly readable, with plenty of surprising detours. For example, the polka was an enormously influential genre in the 1840s, even if one nabob wished to find its inventor and “scrape him to death with [an] oyster shell.” Broyles is skilled at exploring the ways that, from the minstrelsy days on, racial lines often crossed despite labels’ and chart-makers’ attempts to separate them. Every decade likely could support the author’s argument, but these three make for engaging reading.

A well-researched and provocative look at the long-term, uneasy connections between race and music.