Singing

Singing
Jonathan Greenberg

https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.A2258282
Published in print: 26 November 2013
Published online: 31 January 2014

Singing has been important to musical practice in almost all communities across every period of American
history. The following descriptions account for two major aspects of singing in the United States: its place
within particular cultures and periods, and the singing styles used in those cultures. Most of American
music history lacks detailed scholarship devoted to singing, and singing styles are not yet well understood,
but the first decade of the 21st century has sparked new interest in singing within academic music studies.

For further treatment of singing practices, see broader entries on African american music and Native
american music and articles dedicated to practices such as Art music , Barbershop quartet singing , Blues,
Crooning , Gospel music , Hymnody , Jazz , Minstrelsy , Musical , Musical theater , New wave , Opera , Pop ,
Psalmody , Punk , Rap , Rhythm-and-blues , Rock , Shape-note hymnody , and Work songs .

1. 18th century.

Among free colonists, the primary locus of singing was in the church. Calvinist New England churches
discouraged musical instruments in services; psalms were usually learned by rote and were performed
using a technique called Lining out , in which tunes were sung first by a one singer and then repeated by
the congregation—a practice begun in 16th-century England that soon spread to its American colonies.
Unaccompanied song singing usually went together with slow performances full of embellishments.
Starting in the early 18th century in New England (earlier in England), reformers challenged this “Old way
of singing ,” creating singing-schools and campaigning for Regular singing . These schools taught
students to read music and familiarized them with a particular repertoire. Proponents of regular singing
heard the Old Way as unmusical and harsh-sounding. Instructions in tunebooks reveal elements of vocal
style, such as singing louder and fuller in the lower parts of singers’ ranges, but no full-fledged method.
Singing held a different place in other religious communities—Anglicans on the East Coast outside of New
England had long abandoned the Old Way; Catholics in French and Spanish settlements in Canada and the
West were influenced more directly by central authorities in Europe.

Reformers were successful at instituting regular singing in New England, but the basic features of the Old
Way survived in the South through the 19th and 20th centuries. Communities in Appalachia, most notably
the Old Regular Baptists, line out slow, unaccompanied hymns in a fashion consistent with descriptions of
early American Old Way singing. Old Regular Baptist singing is homophonic but has no strict meter, so
singers move from one note to the next at slightly varying moments. After a single participant lines out a
line of a hymn, the congregation repeats the text of that line on a different melody, at a slower pace with
frequent ornaments. Voice quality is one of the more striking elements of this singing: Old Regular Baptists
tend to sing in a nasal tone that produces a loud, piercing sound with a minimum of effort. This voice
quality closely resembles that of shape-note singers, whose nonliturgical singing tradition has survived in

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the same region. Some African American churches also continue to line out hymns, a practice often called
“Dr. Watts singing” after the English hymn composer Isaac Watts, who composed many of the works that
would become traditional in many communities whose singing still features lining out.

2. 19th century.

European opera became an increasingly popular form of entertainment in 19th-century America. Operas
were most often performed in English; original-language productions gained some traction after 1825,
when Manuel del Pópulo García [Sr.] and his company staged a season of opera in Italian in New York City.
European singers and opera troupes became major attractions in the 1840s and 1850s. The soprano Jenny
Lind toured the country singing concerts under the management of P.T. Barnum, who capitalized on the
popularity of European operatic singing at the time. Classical singing style had been undergoing a
substantial shift since the late 18th century as singers began to emphasize higher registers through an
expanded use of the chest voice. These newer techniques developed alongside newer styles of composition.
García and Lind used a technique suited to the operas of Rossini and Meyerbeer, which required both the
projection of a higher register and the performance of intricate florid passages; later operatic singers, who
sang works by Verdi and Wagner, often learned heavier, less agile styles necessary for those roles. These
heavier techniques emphasized homogeneity of timbre throughout a singers’ range.

Starting in the 1840s and 1850s, García’s son Manuel Patricio García began serious scientific research on
the voice. His laryngoscope, invented in 1855, allowed examination of the human vocal apparatus in action
in live subjects. The singing voice became associated with human physiology, and voice scientists and
teachers began to argue for particular methods as correct and healthy according to scientific data and
images. This scientific approach to singing was especially important in the establishment of American
conservatories, as classical musical training (including operatic singing) became more institutionalized. In
the 20th-century discipline of vocology, which has furthered the kind of work García began, it became
common for those involved with operatic voices to think in terms of larynx height, types of phonation, and
vocal tract resonance.

The mid-19th century saw a vogue for singing families, whose performances exhibited important
characteristics of singing in the United States at that time. Sparked by the Tyrolean Rainer family and other
European groups who toured the United States in the 1830s, singing families presented popular fare in a
style that contrasted clearly (and purposefully) with that of the opera companies who had only recently
found their place in American concert life. The best known of these groups, the Hutchinson family, strove
to sound “natural” in their singing, explicitly contrasting their style with the “mechanical” styles of
Europeans.

Descriptions of early African American performance exist only in fragmentary sources from white
observers. Those observers were particularly struck by the singing of slaves, which was portrayed as taking
places during all activities in slaves’ lives: working in fields and factories, at camp meetings and other
religious functions, and during times of leisure. The voices of slaves—and later, those of free African
Americans—were heard as powerful, improvisational, and varied in vocal quality. Observers paid close
attention to the alien qualities of black singing, such as its “irregular” rhythmic effects and intervals

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(Allen 1867, Slave Songs, vi). These descriptions came from empirical observations—and although certain
recent African American singing styles bear similar characteristics—these descriptions also served to
establish racial difference, essentializing the musical practices of African Americans.

Further complicating the reception of African American singing, minstrels from the 1830s well into the
20th century appropriated black styles in parodied performances of African Americans. These exaggerated
enactments—which supported a range of political and ideological positions during the 19th century—
influenced Americans’ perceptions of black musicality and blackness more generally. Complicating our
understanding of minstrel singing styles, blacks performed in minstrel shows from the 1840s, and
professional black minstrel troupes began to appear after the Civil War. While sentimental songs and
material from opera and concert traditions, which appeared frequently in minstrel shows, were not
generally performed in black style, songs depicting African American life were sung in African American
dialect and (what came to be) an African American singing style. While many Americans found these
performances degrading, minstrelsy found considerable commercial success among black and white
audiences alike through the 1870s. While only secondary accounts of the singing style of 19th-century
minstrels remain, popular singing styles of the 20th century clearly inherited many features from
blackface minstrelsy.

3. 20th and 21st centuries.

The arrival of mechanical sound reproduction toward the end of the 19th century altered both the place of
singing within many musical cultures and the style of that singing. Acoustical recording captured only
certain types and combinations of sounds, and could record a limited range of frequencies (see Recorded
sound ). After focusing on recording vaudeville singers in the 1890s, record companies pushed increasingly
for highbrow music, which most often meant vocal music sung in a classical style. John McCormack,
Geraldine Farrar, and Enrico Caruso became stars throughout the country singing a mix of popular and
operatic material on records. In part because of record companies’ marketing practices, many heard
classical singing to be a standard regardless of the material being sung.

Recording also has had a significant effect on later generations’ perception of singing in US history, for we
have sonic evidence starting around 1890 of how (at least some) singers sounded. In many cases,
recordings provide access to aspects of performance that were not documented in print. As texts
themselves, recordings allow for re-hearings and interpretations to fit (and inspire) new understandings
of history. However, recordings must not be heard as unfiltered reproductions of historical performances.
Listening to acoustical recordings can thus provide clues—but not a full account—of how the same singers
would have sounded outside of the demanding constraints of the recording studio. Moreover, records
never accurately represented the full makeup of musical life in the United States as record companies
carefully chose particular genres and material for their products. Indeed, in the 1890s, most popular
recordings were made by recording specialists rather than popular stage artists.

Two developments in the 1920s dramatically changed the dominant styles of singing in the United States.
First, as record companies recorded African American blues singers starting in 1919, audiences around the
country began to hear black voices that were increasingly removed from minstrel traditions. These singers

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—Ma Rainey, Ethel Waters, Bessie Smith, and many others—had tremendous influence on popular stage
and recording artists, both black and white. While many of the popular stars of the 1910s such as Al Jolson
and Nora Bayes continued to have success in the 1920s, their style—the timbres, dialects, and mannerisms
they used—gradually receded from the mainstream over the next two decades. English dialect plays a
particularly important role in this transition. Early blues singers’ repertoire consisted largely of blues
songs, a genre widely seen as directly descendent from African American vernacular practices. Rather than
the stylized African American English of earlier coon songs and rags, blues singers generally sang in
dialect close to spoken African American English. For black singers who made use of other English accents,
African American English remained a touchstone, a marker of race and class that would spread to become a
part of much of 20th-century American jazz and popular singing. Despite his singular vocal quality, Louis
Armstrong further developed a popular black singing style that was a model for singers for decades. His
improvisatory interpretations of popular songs and the vocable singing known as scat formed the basic
approach to jazz singing, and his singing continued to produce hits into the 1960s.

The second major development to affect singing in the 1920s was a group of technologies that mediated
singing voices in new ways. Radio became a mass medium in 1924, the same year electrical recording was
introduced; movie studios would begin making sound films two years later. The singers most closely
identified with these technologies were called crooners; their soft singing created a new sense of intimacy
that was broadcast and projected, and played back to fans across the country. Many of the first crooners—
singers such as Rudy Vallee, Nick Lucas, and Bing Crosby—were also among the first stars of radio and
sound film. But their singing style was the subject of controversy, as critics perceived their delicate,
emotional singing as a violation of contemporary notions of white masculinity that privileged strength and
reserve.

For many who criticized crooning, operatic bel canto was the model of “good” or “correct” singing. Where
1920s crooners’ soft, nasal style traded on a marked effortlessness, voice teachers and conservative
cultural critics valued strength, power, and the darker timbres required of the Italianate chiaroscuro. This
conflict in taste was not limited to forms of culture separated by a highbrow/lowbrow divide; indeed,
crooners and operatic singers often competed against one another, singing the same popular songs on the
radio, records, or movies. A mix of European and American opera singers still held celebrity status in the
United States, and Hollywood studios employed Grace Moore, Lawrence Tibbett, Nelson Eddy, and Jeanette
MacDonald to star in musicals in the 1920s and 1930s. The confluence of contrasting singing styles in
Hollywood highlights the transition in popular vocal aesthetics in this period.

If listeners in the 1920s and 1930s accepted a range of singing styles as conveyors of popular song, the
aesthetics of bel canto still held sway over music in the European classical tradition. While composers
consciously broke with the harmonic, rhythmic, and generic conventions of the common-practice period,
the singing styles used to perform these works only gradually broke the conventions that had become
accepted over the previous hundred years. By the late 1940s and 1950s, composers and singers were
explicitly questioning traditional practice by employing extended vocal techniques—that is, techniques
specifically outside the conventional bounds of bel canto singing. John Cage’s 1958 Aria allows the solo
performers to assign a vocal timbre to each of ten colors that mark a score of fragmented curved lines. The
singer Cathy Berberian, its first interpreter, chose to assign the colors to names such as “dramatic,”

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“alto,” “jazz,” “Marlene Dietrich,” and “nasal.” In contrast to earlier Cage pieces such as A Flower (1950),
which called for a simple, folk-like singing style, Berberian was able to use styles that were part of the bel
canto tradition in Aria, putting greatly varied modes of vocal expression on provisionally equal footing.

Cage, Luciano Berio, and other composers of the mid-20th century expanded the repertoire of styles and
sounds that professional concert singers would need to master. Instead of words, singers were to perform
individual phonemes or paralinguistic sounds; pitch was varied far beyond the conventional 12 divisions of
most conventional Western music, and stable pitch was sometimes forsaken, building on Schoenberg’s
introduction of Sprechstimme into the Western art music scene. Through close miking and manipulation
through various electronic media, sound technology has also had an effect on singing in postwar American
art music; like popular singers, art-music singers such as Berberian, Joan La Barbara, and Meredith Monk
have had to learn techniques for producing sounds that are highly mediated through these technologies.

Postwar popular singing was also the site of significant change in singing style. Mainstream popular
singing in the 1930s and 1940s was dominated by a form of crooning somewhat removed from that of the
first crooners. That style, broadly exemplified by Bing Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald, and Peggy Lee, displayed a
fuller sound that sometimes bore traces of the equalized registers and legato phrasing of bel canto singing.
With rock and roll, Little Richard and Elvis Presley popularized styles that had been previously limited to
performers in the African American rhythm-and-blues market. Presley’s and Little Richard’s singing
styles—which featured voice qualities closer to everyday speech, but varied in affect from whispers to
ecstatic gospel-inflected shouts—had precedents in the 1940s singing of rhythm-and-blues singers such
as Louis Jordan and Wynonie Harris and country-and-western singers including Hank Williams, but rock
and roll became a mainstream genre, listened to by many millions of American fans, across racial lines,
and reported (and argued about) in magazines and newspapers.

The stylistic encroachment of rock and roll singers on the crooning sound led to a proliferation of singing
styles in popular music in the second half of the 20th century. To cite a few examples: African American
vocal groups of the 1950s adapted techniques developed by gospel groups in the 1930s and 1940s. Folk and
rock singers of the 1960s adopted elements of earlier blues singing styles, further breaking away from the
crooning sound and once again accessing tropes of blackness that now signified authenticity (in differing
ways) around the world. James Brown’s paralinguistic vocal gestures removed his music even further from
both white mainstream conventions and the florid melodic singing of black gospel music and its popular
offshoots. His vocal style played with vocal sounds in ways that are closely identified with African
American practices of signifyin(g); those sounds included percussive grunts and shrieks that were
sometimes repeated as part of a layered groove. These bold contributed to the assertive racialized politics
of funk. Far from being replaced, what had been called crooning maintained a stable place in the new
stylistic landscape. Sinatra, Lee, and others continued to make hit records through the 1960s; some
younger singers, such as Barbra Streisand, whose style had roots in both crooning and musical theater, had
significant success well after that time.

The same features that propelled developments in singing style in the first decades of the rock era have
continued to alter practices in popular singing to the present. Genres characterized by raw, unpracticed-
sounding singing have defined themselves against more stylized, skill-based singing styles. Punk and new
wave musicians used working-class British accents, rough voice qualities, and lack of ornament to break

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with other popular styles of the 1970s. Within the historical context of popular music in the United States,
rap can be seen as an alternative to singing that could connect directly with stylistic speech practices in
African American English.

Like contemporary art-music practitioners, those who have made popular music have made thorough use
of new technologies to alter the sound of singing, especially after the World War II. From the fabrication of
space in recording studios to electronic “staging” through tape manipulation or vocoders, performers and
producers have filtered the sounds of human singing using machines. Sometimes, these technologies have
created the impression of warmth and intimacy, in effect hiding the use of technology; in other, more
overt cases, singing has been made to sound machine-like, detaching the sound from human qualities,
such as emotion, gender, and sexuality, that singing has historically expressed.

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