American Popular Music

American Popular music
American popular music: from minimal to MP3 books depict the evolution of
American music from the past to the present. First, Chapter 1 shows the table of
contents of the book.
American music is a product of American culture at that time, and helps to

understand identity of American. Through this book, we can learn that American
music reveal how each song represents a cultural aspect and how how technology
have contributed to kind of developing and to kind of elaborating each specific
American music.
1. Minstrel Show
The Minstrel show was one of the American entertainment shows that were
popular after the Civil War, with black-faced white people performing with a mix
of dances, music, and revues, especially staged by black-faced white people. The
Minstrel show satirized black people in a way that was funny and caricatured with
stereotypes about them. It is a form designed to enjoy American music from the
perspective of Europeans, and is mainly an audience of working class in the city.
Racism toward people of color, including black people and Indians, was legal in the
United States after the American Revolutionary War, but after a long battle against
racial discrimination, the Voting Rights Act came into force in 1964, resulting in
the Minstrel show losing popularity as it was perceived as promoting racial
discrimination, both legally and socially.
2. Jim Crow
"Jump Jim Crow", often shortened to just "Jim Crow", is a song and dance from
1828 that was done in black face by white minstrel performer Thomas Dartmouth
Rice. The song is speculated to have been taken from Jim Crow , a physically
disabled enslaved African-American, who is variously claimed to have lived in St.
Louis, Cincinnati, or Pittsburgh. The song became a 19th-century hit and Rice
performed it all over the United States as "Daddy Pops Jim Crow".
"Jump Jim Crow" was a key initial step in a tradition of popular music in the
United States that was based on the racist imitation of black people. The first song
sheet edition appeared in the early 1830s, published by E. Riley. A couple of
decades saw the mockery genre explode in popularity with the rise of the minstrel
show. As a result of Rice's fame, the term Jim Crow had become a pejorative term
for African Americans by 1838, and from this time onward, the laws of racial
segregation became known as Jim Crow laws.
3. Cakewalk
The cakewalk was a dance developed from the "prize walks" (dance contests with
a cake awarded as the prize) held in the mid-19th century, generally at
get-togethers on plantations where Black people had been enslaved, before and
after emancipation in the Southern United States. Alternative names for the
original form of the dance were "chalkline-walk", and the "walk-around". It was
originally a processional partner dance performed with comical formality, and may
have developed as a subtle mockery of the mannered dances of white slaveholders.
Following an exhibition of the cakewalk at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in
Philadelphia, the cakewalk was adopted by performers in minstrel shows, where it
was danced exclusively by men until the 1890s. At that point, Broadway shows
featuring women began to include cakewalks, and grotesque dances became very
popular across the country.
4. Why does American popular culture start with comic features on African
Americans, not white American culture?
Historian Dale Cockrell once noted that poor and working-class whites who felt
“squeezed politically, economically, and socially from the top, but also from the
bottom, invented minstrelsy” as a way of expressing the oppression that marked
being members of the majority, but outside of the white norm. Minstrelsy, comedic
performances of “blackness” by whites in exaggerated costumes and make-up,
cannot be separated fully from the racial derision and stereotyping at its core. By
distorting the features and culture of African Americans—including their looks,
language, dance, deportment, and character—white Americans were able to codify
whiteness across class and geopolitical lines as its antithesis.
5. How do you think of jim crow song?

After watching “The Cake Walk Dance”, I could feel that the cakewalk dance
revealed criticism of black people as the form of the dance was ridiculous.
6. What is the difference between American and Europe in regarding artists?

Artists as breadwinners vs artists as those making high culture.
American painting is about observation, European painting is about Xerxes. In
other words, a European painting refers to the cultural and art historical traditions
that preceded it. An American painting is concerned with seeing and accurately
rendering whatever is in front of the artist.
Europe tends to value tradition and high culture because it has a relatively
longer history than the United States, but on the contrary, the United States has
grown rapidly in a short history, so art as a livelihood appears because it values
economic development following capitalism.
7. Why have Stephen Collins Foster’s songs become the texts to American music?
What did Stephen Collins Foster say about American culture through his
composition?
Stephen Foster really did create popular music as we still recognize it today, and
he took together all these strands of the American experience. He consciously,
clearly or effectively merged other ethnic genres into a single music. And he
merged them in a way that appeals to the multicultural mongrel experience of
America in its history and culture.
Fosters' songs were the first genuinely American in theme, characterizing love of
home, American temperament, river life and work, politics, battlefields, slavery and
plantation life. A self-taught musician, his poems and melodies were written in a
simple manner with little musical embellishment or complexity.

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American Popular music

American music is a product of American culture at that time, and helps to

5. How do you think of jim crow song?

6. What is the difference between American and Europe in regarding artists?

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