African American Influences On American Popular Music Cultural Studies Essay

African American Influences On American Popular Music Cultural Studies Essay These days, it’s not uncommon to hear the fusion of different styles of music. In fact, American music is more integrated than before and showcases different music from around the world. Melding different styles of music was popularly done as early as the twentieth century with the growth of American popular music. One style of music that had major influence on popular music was African American music. At the time, American popular music was burgeoning with different styles of music; each style was distinct in its own right with different rhythms, melodies, textures, and performance styles. From 1930 to 1970, popular music can be traced to black music of the nineteenth and twentieth century as evidenced by the metric organization, scales, instruments, and performing styles that originated from African music. By recapitulating the influences of African American music on popular music, the impact that black music has had on various musical genres is shown. African American musi c was brought by slaves to the Americas and later adapted to European styles. Later, African American music would incorporate highly syncopated music and the features of ragtime. These features set the stage for more music to be created, and in time many of the characteristics of black music were embedded into other musical genres. In particular, the 1930’s-1940’s Big Band era; 1930’s country music; 1950’s-1960’s rock, used observable components of African American music. The music was not only influenced by the musical structure of black music, but by the performing styles of musicians. To adopt many of the African-American features, many musicians of the time had to re-invent or improvise the old with something new. These components lead up to the merging of different styles with African-American music. For many people, jazz is pleasant and enjoyable. One of the reasons it is because there are so many different sounds that come together to form t his music. In the Big Band era of the 1930’s, jazz, or swing, had become popular and incorporated the African elements of syncopation and riffs. Riffs, rhythms, and syncopations are just a few characteristics of African American influence on virtually all music, and jazz music in particular took this influence to a different level. (Campbell 70). What changed was that previously, in the early nineteenth century, ragtime was essentially syncopated music but was more in accordance with marching and piano music. Jazz is highly improvisational, which give way to more sounds and changes in rhythm, melody, and texture. The structure and metric organization of the jazz band was also influenced by African American music. In no other musical genre can one find the â€Å"call and response â€Å"style of music that was originated from African American music, and many genres have since borrowed from this method. Many jazz bands used â€Å"call and response† between the players a nd their instruments. This made the music much livelier, adding to the energy created by the fast- paced flow of jazz that appeared in the twentieth century. Four-beat counts were used in jazz music characteristic of black music in the earlier part of the twentieth century. This was the main foundation for jazz which also used percussions found in ragtime and African drum dance.