The History Of Music - Review

This blog is a review of my topic: Music.

Rock and roll’s most distinctive element is rhythm, and nearly every musical style that helped spawn rock music has a powerful beat that makes people want to dance. The roots of rock rhythm were born centuries ago in African tribal music, with its strong drumbeats that highlighted the second and fourth beats, or “back beats,” in each four-beat measure. Also known as syncopation, when the back-beat is emphasized, this type of rhythm makes people want to clap their hands, tap their feet, and dance. In a very real sense, this syncopation is the heartbeat of rock and roll.

Another aspect of tribal music that found its way into rock and roll was the traditional vocal style known as call and response, in which a song leader sings a line and group of singers repeats it. This singing techinique was brought to American shores by black slaves who modified it for use in Christian gospel singing. The call and response style was also used in work songs, known as field hollers.

By the end of the nineteenth century, African American musicians were using modified call and response, syncopation, and field hollers in a new style of music called blues. Blues songs took as their subject matter the appalling prejudice, discrimination, and poverty under which most African Americans survived at the time. The lyrics gave musical expression to the broken hearts, loneliness, homelessness, and intolerance that people routinely faced. These songs, which incorporated three basic chords with their flexible gliding melodies, or “blue notes,” lie at the roots of rock.

At the beginning of the 1960s, rock-and-roll music was in sorry shape. The founding fathers of rock had been silenced: Elvis was drafted into the army in 1858, and that same year Little Richard found religion, renouned his rock-and-roll lifestyle, and quit the entertainment business to preach the gospel (Kallen, 2003). The Beatles, and its members John Lennon, guitarist, Bassist, Paul McCartney, Lead guitar, George Harrison, and drummer Ringo Starr took the world by storm in 1960, and rock-and-roll as we knew it, has been changed into what we know and love now.