Category: Uncategorized

  • Wild Style

    A bankrupt New York was the incubator for rap in the early 1970s. The ethnic demographics of the formerly predominantly Jewish and Irish South Bronx had changed, in part due to the construction of the Cross-Bronx Expressway in the 1960s, which displaced thousands of people from their homes and destroyed many Bronx neighborhoods. Steeply declining…

  • Soul and Funk: Some Historical Background

    Kitchenette buildings on Chicago’s South Side, 1950. The turbulence of the 1960s was as much a response to the domestic situation in the urban United States as it was to Vietnam. One of the effects of the Great Migration was to turn northern cities into unofficially segregated spaces — segregated in fact, if not by…

  • Soul as Protest

    Content/Trigger Warning: Racist language in original sources. Soul was a stream of rhythm and blues that engaged overtly with social issues. Where 1950s and early 1960s R&B was primarily dance music, in the mid-60s, certain artists began marrying the R&B musical sensibility to lyrics that dealt with pressing political topics. In the Civil Rights Movement,…

  • Freedom Now?

    The “Greensboro Four” sitting in at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro, NC, 1960. Read about the protests here. The cover of drummer Max Roach’s 1961 album We Insist! was an explicit reference to the Greensboro protests. We Insist! drew analogies between social and political freedom, and the aesthetic freedom of Roach’s music. The Max Roach Quintet performing “Driva…

  • R&B, Rock & Roll, and Integration

    As Little Richard’s drummer, Charles Connor, who later played with James Brown, put it, rock and roll is really just “rhythm and blues played with a fast beat.” Now, however, black artists were sharing spaces formerly reserved for white artists, and were at the forefront of American popular culture. In spite of the efforts of…

  • A First-Stream Rhythm and Blues Primer

    Handbill distributed by the Citizens’ Council of New Orleans, one of many such groups opposed to integration. Early rhythm and blues was essentially what its name says: an uptempo version of the blues, with a strong emphasis on the kind of driving, propulsive beat popularized by jazz. It was marketed to black urban record-buyers as…

  • Soul and Sacrament

    (Pentecostal church service.) According to Peter Guralnick: Southern soul music developed out of a time and a set of social circumstances that are unlikely to be repeated. . . when I speak of soul music, I am not referring to Motown, a phenomenon almost exactly contemporaneous but appealing far more to a pop, white, and…

  • Godfather of Soul vs. Bad Boys of Rock

    The T.A.M.I. (Teenage Awards Music Intenational) Show was a concert documentary that combined footage from two concerts held in Santa Monica, California in October 1964. The concerts were attended mostly by local high school students, who had been given free tickets to the show, and were headlined by a mix of white pop and rock-and-roll…

  • We Shall Overcome

    The Library of Congress describes the famous Civil Rights Movement song, “We Shall Overcome”: It was the most powerful song of the 20th century. It started out in church pews and picket lines, inspired one of the greatest freedom movements in U.S. history, and went on to topple governments and bring about reform all over…

  • How Billie Sang

    Billie Holiday began singing in Harlem jazz clubs at sixteen, and made her first recordings in 1933, at the age of eighteen. By the time she returned to the studio in 1935, she was a revelation — neither the white balladeers who dominated the Hit Parade nor the black blues queens from whose ranks she…