Bruce

NOTE: This is a blog you can not only read, but hear. Simply click on the link following the name of a song, and you will immediately hear a clip of it without leaving the page.

You may or may not heard of the “Great American Songbook.” It is a body of music that includes many of the greatest songsters, tunesmiths and lyricists of all time, such as Cole Porter, Hoagy Charmicheal, George and Ira Gershwin, Jerome Kern, and number of others, including the cream of the classic Broadway writers (Richard Rogers, Oscar Hammerstien, Lorenz Hart). This catalog of music leads up to (and pretty much ends at) the mid-fifties when rock and roll came along and swept up the airwaves.

I’m certainly not knocking this group of songwriting gods—I’d probably sell my soul to be able to write a single song as good as “Body and Soul” Body and Soul or “Summertime” Summertime. But the focus of major media attention throughout this period—and in many respects, up until fairly recently—left out many of the very artists and elements that made that “Great American Songbook” so American.

It took a fairly extensive conversation with a good friend of mine in the UK to make me fully realize how deep and how beautifully rich original American music really runs. From the wilderness of the Appalachian mountains to the Mississippi Delta, from the wondrous sounds issuing forth on the streets of New Orleans to those that once drifted out onto the steamy nights from clubs on Memphis’s legendary Beale Street, from the hot, sweaty crying blues of the taverns in the South Side of Chicago to the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, America has given the world sounds that quite literally could have come from nowhere else.

Much of the reason for the uniqueness of American music has to do with the melting pot that it is. Traditional American folk music can trace its roots to Ireland and England and those that braved the stormy Atlantic to find new hope in a savage new land. The blues that grew out of the horribly desperate conditions in the plantation fields of the south can be traced back to African tribal music. Country music traces back to both the Appalachian folk music and the blues, as well as both black and white gospel music. The smoking hot Cajun music of Louisiana has its roots in the traditional songs brought to that part of the world by expelled French Canadians in the eighteenth century.

And from blues came rock and roll, R&B, funk and, ultimately, hip-hop. From the original country music, blended with the songs and ballads that grew up on the plains and outlaw wilderness of the Old West, eventually evolved modern country music. From the wild and crazy players in New Orleans came a form of music that was originally known as “shit”—and later, jazz. And pop music is rooted in every one of these forms, and many more.

But enough dry history. Let’s have fun—let’s look and listen to the music itself, both in its original and modern forms. Let’s travel the trails that many of the formal historians completely missed, and see where they have led us. For even today, the unmistakable trademark of American music is to be found everywhere—and wherever it is found, it will go straight to your heart and make you move, laugh, cry or at the very least, smile.

- Bruce Boyers

Songs:

“Body and Soul” performed by Ella Fitzgerald. From the album, “Something to Live For“

“Summertime” performed by Herbie Hancock, with vocal by Joni Mitchell. From the album “Gershwin’s World.”