Concentrating on high-volume sales and bland, lowest-common-denominator pop disposables, the majors were caught napping by an unholy coalition of Southern renegade radio engineers Phillips , Jewish immigrant merchants the Chess brothers , black ex-swing-band musicians and raving hillbilly wild men. The ghetto-storefront, nickle-and-dime record operation of suddenly emerged an industry giant in , accounting for many and often most of the records at the top of the pop charts.
Meanwhile, many blacks growing up in isolated pockets of the rural South listened to and were influenced by the country music on radio programs like the Grand Ole Opry , from Nashville. Black performers like Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley found that when they performed a song that was vaguely hillbilly in style or derivation, black audiences went for it. Despite the still-rigid racial segregation of the Fifties, the white and black underclass of music fans and performers was finding more and more common ground.
With the flowering of the postwar baby boom, teenagers, especially white teenagers with money in their pockets, represented a potentially enormous and largely untapped consumer group. To succeed in the teen marketplace, the new music — new, at least, to the teenagers who embraced it — needed a name. Dave Bartholomew, the New Orleans trumpeter, bandleader, songwriter and record producer, whose musicians powered most of the hits by Fats Domino and Little Richard.
Sam Phillips was as significant for his ingenious engineering, his feel for echo and ambience, as for his talent spotting and genre mixing. What could be more outrageous, more threatening to the social and sexual order subsumed by the ingenuous phrase traditional American values , than a full-tilt Little Richard show?
There he was, camping it up androgynously one minute, then ripping off his clothes to display for a packed house of screaming teenage white girls his finely muscled black body. At the same time a combination of economic forces and the gradual takeover of record-distribution networks by major labels made running a small label more and more difficult.
The indie labels that had launched the music and sustained it during the two or three years when it ravaged the land either caved in to the pressure and quietly wound down their operations, like Sun and Specialty, or diversified and became corporate giants themselves, like Atlantic.
Elvis was more successful in this endeavor than any other artist of the time and he epitomized the Rock 'n' Roll style and teenage rebellion of the 's. One incident that best exemplifies these qualities in Elvis was his controversial performance with hip gyrations on the Milton Berle Show in , a performance that shocked the conservative sensibilities of adults during the time but drew in the youth as his performance on the Ed Sullivan Show only a few weeks later drew in nearly eighty-percent of the television viewing audience.
While Elvis is largely responsible for the popularization of rock music, it is important to remember the original African-American artists who created the genre and were pushed out of the rock scene like Little Richard, Chuck Berry, The Coasters, Chubby Checker, Fats Domino and the many others who were not afforded the opportunity to even record their music.
This is because that a majority of the popular and well-known artists were well versed in a number of genres and enjoyed great cross-over success during this decade.
We tried our best to break down these genres and the examples of artists for each were chosen on the basis of if you were to hear their most popular songs today, what genre would it most feel like. It is important to recognize that many of the musicians of the fifties focused on gaining mainstream recognition and to do so they needed to appeal to all audiences and therefore dabbled in many genres. It was also one of those perfect times in music history where a confluence of genres just happened to produce some of the most loved and well-known music of the past eighty years.
Traditional Pop music of the 's refers to the music that was popular before rock music came into the mainstream in the middle of the fifties, it also refers to music that was popular at the same time as the beginning of rock music during the rest of the decade but remained largely free of rock influences. Often the most popular musicians in this genre translated well onto television as they would sometimes have their own television variety shows or music specials.
Unchained Melody and Sleep Walk are also two of my personal favorites in this list. Thank you so much I am so glad that I found it. THis website was amazing. I had a project due the next day and this totally saved my life!!!!! Some rock-a-billy tracks aired on western country stations. And, sometimes a radio station would do a special after-school hour of Rock; however, that was only in cities, never on community radio.
As Anglo and Celtic immigrants began to move from the North into the Appalachian valleys, they picked up songs, rhythms and instrumentation from the African-American moving up from the South.
For instance, the banjo was originally an Arabian instrument that migrated to west Africa first and then to America with the slave trade. The slaves recreated the instrument, began playing for their masters and neighbors and eventually the mistral show was born. Country musicians recognized the percussive qualities of the banjo and adopted it to their genre. Eventually, this genre became known as "old-time music. Jabbour later became the founding director of the Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.
Repetitive farm tasks, like hoeing a field or chopping wood, were easier to accomplish and more enjoyable if a leader could get the others into the rhythm of the song. In the s, country music was on the verge of breaking through to wider appeal.
Nashville's Grand Ole Opry became a destination for country fans finally able to travel after wartime restrictions and millions tuned their radios to WSM radio every Saturday night.
Other rural radio stations across the country changed their formats and play lists to country songs. Hank Williams recorded his biggest hit, "Your Cheatin' Heart," in , only to die three months later on New Year's Eve of alcoholism and undiagnosed spina bifida. Kitty Wells was one of the first women to break the gender barrier in country music and to address the sexism inherent in the industry, in her own way.
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