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American Decades

MUSIC

A Dynamic Decade

An explosive growth in the variety of musical styles marked American music during the 1940s. Electric blues, hard bop, serial music, folk opera, country swing, and show jazz were all innovations of the decade. Technology was in some way the catalyst of this growth, as a host of advances in musical media brought heretofore neglected styles to a broader audience, or, as in the case of the increased use of electric guitar, changed the instrumental presentation of existing musical styles. The boundaries between musical genres was fluid, and musicians swapped and fused styles. Musical experiments begun in the previous decade—especially in classical music—were completed in the 1940s. The impact of World War II on music was significant: classical music blossomed, infused with a host of expatriate European talent; swing became the soundtrack of the war; Broadway expanded to meet the demands of an enormous off-duty GI audience; jazz, swing, and country suffered from the impact of the draft; and great talent, such as Glenn Miller's, was lost in the war. The postwar consumer boom also transformed American music. Prosperity brought firmer backing to classical music and a tonier audience to jazz; consumer buying fueled rhythm and blues and country and western. Music's first teen idol, Frank Sinatra, set bobby-soxers swooning during the war; nightclub singers such as Billie Holiday thrilled thousands. The 1940s were the heyday of swing and the crucible of bop and country. It was a dynamic, exciting decade for American music.

WAR SONGS

After Pearl Harbor, Rep. J. Parnell Thomas, hearkening back to World War I, urged songwriters to pen stirring anthems to the war effort. "What America needs today is a good five cent war song," he declared. America's songwriters did not waste time answering his call. Musician Burt Wheeler debuted his tune "We'll Knock the Japs Right into the Laps of the Nazis" at a nightclub on the evening of the Pearl Harbor attack; by next morning songwriter Max Lerner had finished "The Sun Will Soon Be Setting on the Land of the Rising Sun." The soon-to-be-popular "You're a Sap, Mr. Jap" was copyrighted three hours before Congress declared war.

As is obvious from the titles of these tunes, early war songs were usually chauvinistic and antagonistic toward the enemy, perhaps a natural response after the surprise attack on Hawaii. But anti-Japanese songs also tended toward racism in songs such as "When Those Little Yellow Bellies Meet the Cohens and the Kelleys" and "Slap the Jap Right Off the Map." Anti-German songs focused on Nazi leaders, such as "Lets Knock the Hit out of Hitler" and "Der Fuehrer's Face," originally sung by Donald Duck and featuring a tongue-sputtering raspberry. Later tunes tended to be more rousing and upbeat, especially "We Did It Before and We Can Do It Again" and "Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition." Patriotic standards made a comeback, especially Kate Smith's recording of "God Bless America," a prewar hit that made a timely comeback. Perhaps the most popular war tunes were hot swing numbers such as "GI Jive" and "The Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B," infectious enough to get soldiers and nonsoldiers alike jitterbugging.

Source:

Richard R. Lingeman, Don't You Know There's A War On?: The American Home Front, 1941-1945 (New York: Putnam, 1970).

Swing and Pop

As the 1940s began, the most popular music in the United States was played by large swing-jazz orchestras. Swing was a style of blues and jazz orchestration, developed in the 1930s, that was bold, exciting, and danceable. Swing could be found on three-to four-minute 78-rpm records, in the dance-hall, on the radio, and in the movies. Commercial recordings by swing bands were big sellers, and swing groups led by men such as Tommy Dorsey, Earl Hines, Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway, Harry James, Les Brown, and Benny Good-man (featuring the terrific arrangements of Fletcher Henderson and Eddie Sauter) crisscrossed America on successful tours. Big-band swing featured highly structured, rhythmically dynamic compositions with solo improvisation often by acclaimed musicians such as saxophonists Lester Young and Coleman Hawkins, vibra-harpist Lionel Hampton, guitarist Charlie Christian, and trumpeter Cootie Williams. Blues and pop singers such as Billie Holiday, Helen Forrest, the Andrews Sisters, Bing Crosby, Dinah Shore, and Frank Sinatra were associated with swing bands and were frequently accompanied by them in live performance and on record. After the decline of swing following World War II, such singers and lesser lights such as Perry Como, Rosemary Clooney, Dick Haymes, and Vaughn Monroe became the staple of pop music—usually with the punch and rhythm of swing replaced by string orchestration.

Jazz Composition

In the 1940s many swing musicians who had formerly considered themselves entertainers began to take their music seriously and ventured into less-than-commercial territory, experimenting with composition and solos. Jazz pianist Art Tatum blended blues and swing to classical music. Count Basie took the jazz convention of the riff and placed it into a structured, orchestral setting. Gil Evans explored jazz orchestration with classical instruments. Jazz composer Duke Ellington produced some of the more radical departures of the era. Such Ellington pieces as Harlem Airshaft (1940) and Jack the Bear (1940) featured a remarkable mixture of melody and rhythmic texture that in their depth and complexity were the equal of classical composition. Classical composers worked in the opposite direction. In 1946 Igor Stravinsky acknowledged the depth and richness of jazz by composing his Ebony Concerto for Woody Herman's band; Aaron Copland did the same with his Concerto for Clarinet and String Orchestra (1948) for Benny Goodman; Marc Blitzstein by composing a "jazz opera," Regina (1949).

Bebop

At the same time jazz was conquering audiences in the concert hall, jazz in the nightclubs was undergoing a revolution called bebop. Unlike swing, bebop was played in stripped down, five-and four-man combos and featured fast, shimmering, undanceable rhythms and dynamic, riffing horn solos. Developed by a host of creative, uncommercial musicians who gathered at Manhattan nightclubs such Minton's Playhouse, The Spotlite, Birdland, and Monroe's Uptown House, the style was widely scorned when it debuted around 1944-1945. Gradually, however, bebop became acclaimed. Bebop's players were undeniably talented and led jazz into a more improvisational, visceral direction. Led by soloists such as Lester Young, Theodore "Fats" Navarro, and Charlie Parker, bebop owed a debt to tough, urban, Kansas City blues. Parker's unpredictable saxophone improvisations in masterpieces such as "Cherokee," "Ko Ko," "Scrapple from the Apple," and "Ornithology" became hallmarks of the genre. The explosive, snare-punctuated drumming of players such as Kenny Clarke, Jo Jones, Art Blakey, and Max Roach also defined the style. Bebop featured propulsive string bass playing by pioneers such as Jimmy Blanton and Oscar Pettiford, and bebop quintets often highlighted cascading piano playing from pacesetters such as Earl "Bud" Powell and Thelonious Monk. In 1945 Parker joined a South Carolina trumpet player, John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie, to form the All Star Quintet, which was instrumental in demonstrating the new style nationwide, Parker also played in his own quintet, which in 1947 featured the trumpet playing of a young Julliard student, Miles Davis. Davis went on to lead a revolution against the frenetic rhythms of bebop, ushering in the dominant jazz style of the 1950s: cool jazz.

Blues

Like jazz, blues was also undergoing a transformation in the 1940s, expanding a host of changes that began the decade before. The most profound of these changes was the reworking of rural and delta blues into an urban format. As African Americans migrated from the rural South into the urban, industrial centers of the North (at the turn of the century nine out of ten blacks lived in the country; at the end of World War II over half of all blacks lived in cities), rural forms of the blues fused with big-band jazz. Boogie-woogie—a musical fad of the late 1930s and early 1940s—-was the best example of this fusion, a combination of barrelhouse-piano blues and swing jazz. Following such precedents, musicians added horns and drums for punch or a percussive piano to delta blues to make them tough and urban. Chicago blues shouters such as John Lee "Sonny Boy" Williamson, Big Bill Broonzy, Muddy Waters, and Big Joe Turner of Kansas City developed a raucous style of singing capable of being heard over a loud (and increasingly electrified) band. Such innovations were picked up and advanced by other blues stylists in the 1940s, especially "jive" artists such as saxophonist Louis Jordan or white pianist Harry "the Hipster" Gibson. Jive artists specialized in outrageously flamboyant recordings such as Jordan's The Chick's Too Young to Fry (1945) or Gibson's Who Put the Benzedrine in Mrs. Murphy's Ovattine? (1944). The volume and flamboyance of the blues shouters and jive artists anticipated the rock 'n' roll of the next decade, as did the increasingly prominent electric blues guitarist, such as T-Bone Walker, Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown, or Sam "Lightin'" Hopkins.

Rhythm and Blues

The most important aspect in the transition from delta blues to urban blues to rock 'n' roll was a change in the business setting of the blues. The popularity of urban blues among African Americans caused many record labels to issue records by bluesmen. Before the Depression record manufacturers had sold "race" records to the black community, but with the Depression and the subsequent popularity of white swing bands, most companies dropped their race labels. In the 1940s the blues were back on wax, now in the form of so-called rhythm and blues (R & B) records, often produced by specialty labels such as Chess or Bluebird in Chicago, and Savoy or Atlantic in New York A change in Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rules for radio, resulted in an expansion of stations willing to play R & B records, now in the new, disc jockey-dominated radio format. The development of the magnetic tape recorder meant that companies could now easily and cheaply record new talent. Thus a tremendous increase in the numbers and quality of records being released made the differences between musical genres increasingly blurry. Blues musicians heard jazz musicians, who heard country musicians and vice-versa. By the late 1940s there were several R&B, boogie-woogie, or "jump blues" records issued which fused these different influences into something like rock 'n' roll: Arthur Crudup's "That's All Right" (1946), Amos Milburn's "Down the Road Apiece" (1946), Roy Brown's "Good Rockin Tonight" (1947), Stick McGhee's "Drinkin' Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee" (1949), or the Delmore Brothers' "Hillbilly Boogie" (1945).

Country

The Delmore Brothers' "Hillbilly Boogie," along with other protorock-country records such as Freddie Slack and Ella Mae Morse's "House of Blue Lights" (1946) or Tennessee Ernie Ford's "Smokey Mountain Boogie" (1949), evidences the degree to which country music in the 1940s paralleled the blues. Both musical styles were evolving toward rock 'n' roll. Like blues musicians, country players borrowed from swing, and country-swing bands such as Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, Ray Whitley's Rhythm Wranglers, Spade Cooley, Tex Williams, and Jimmy Wakely's Cowboy Band proved popular. Both blues and country were for the most part ignored by major record companies until they proved commercially successful at the end of the 1940s. Both musicals forms benefited from the expansion of radio in the 1940s and the emergence of the upstart music-licensing agency, Broadcast Music Incorporated (BMI). Most important, both musical styles reflected the experiences and ambitions of rural people migrating to cities. (Chicago had been as important to country in the 1930s as it was to blues in the 1940s.) Country particularly expressed the feelings of Southern and Appalachian whites who migrated to defense centers during the war, especially in such cities as Los Angeles, Baltimore, Cincinnati, and Mobile. "Hillbilly" (as country was often called) songs by Jimmie Davis, Ernest Tubb, and others could be found on jukeboxes in many bars in these cities. Northern, working-class soldiers, on the other hand, developed a taste for country during their basic training, which often took place in the South. Responding to the demand for country music, the Special Services Division of the European Theater of Operations sent hillbilly bands abroad to entertain the troops, and one of the most popular country radio programs, Grand Ole Opry, sent a tour around the country to military bases in 1941-1942. By the end of the war country star Roy Acuff was as popular among service-men as Frank Sinatra.

Honky-Tonk

After the war the lines between pop music and the heretofore marginalized hillbilly music began to blur. Pop star Bing Crosby recorded songs by country songwriters, such as Dick Thomas's "Sioux City Sue" (1946), and country singer Eddy Arnold set aside his drawl and in songs like "Bouquet of Roses" (1947) began to croon like Crosby. Like the blues, however, the sound of country was getting tougher. Electric guitars and pedal steel guitars became featured instruments on many country records, including hits such as Arthur Smith's "Guitar Boogie" (1947). Bluegrass music experienced a resurgence, and like bebop it highlighted the improvisational solos of superb musicians such as guitarist Lester Flatt and banjoist Earl Scruggs. Most important, however, the themes in country music got gritty and hard, perhaps reflecting the difficulties many rural folk experienced adjusting to their new urban environment or to postwar suburban success. Gone were the days when country focused on optimistic sing-a-longs such as "You Are My Sunshine" or "San Antonio Rose," In its place came honky-tonk songs filled with themes of betrayal and anxiety. Hank Thompson's 1947 hit "Whoa Sailor," a song about a fickle bar girl who wants an off-duty sailor for his money, exemplified the genre. It was based on Thompson's own experience, but that was not necessarily the case with other honky-tonk hits: "Pistol Packin' Mama," by Al Dexter (1943), or "One Has My Name, the Other Has My Heart," a 1948 hit for Jimmy Wakely. Perhaps the best of the honky-tonk tunes was written by Los Angeles songwriter Cindy Walker. Bob Wills, moving away from country swing, had a hit with her tune, "Bubbles in My Beer" in 1948. The song addressed the heretofore rarely addressed (or often censored) theme of drunkenness and marital discord with poignant regret, anticipating the classics of the genre that would appear in the 1950s. The greatest of all country singers, Hank Williams, would achieve fame with such themes in songs such as "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry," "Honky Tonk Blues," "Cold, Cold Heart," and "Your Cheatin' Heart" in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Williams's tremendous skill as a songwriter easily transcends the honky-tonk genre; his short life (1923-1953), alcoholic, violent, and lonely, did not. In the 1940s, however, Williams's star was on the rise. Ironically, his first national hit, "Lovesick Blues" (1949), was a cover (a recording in a different musical style than the original) of a forty-year-old Tin Pan Alley song. Its tremendous success inspired non-country covers of his tunes, such as Tony Bennett's version of "Cold, Cold Heart" (1950). In the 1950). such covers would become commonplace, but Williams demonstrated that country music had arrived commercially and could become "popular music" on its own terms.

Folk and Gospel

Folk music in the 1940s was at a low point, midway between the rousing protest songs of the 1930s and the resurgence of folk in the later 1950s. Folk, in fact, seemed out of date by the 1940s. Much of the initial impetus of folk had been oriented toward documenting and preserving indigenous local musics of Americans, a goal that had seen folklorists such as Howard W. Odum, Lawrence Geliert, Robert W. Gordon, and John A. Lomax combing the American heartland for musical traditions. Another impetus to folk had been political: Communists and socialists in the 1930s sought out "authentic" popular musics that reflected and advanced social struggle. In the 1940s neither goal made much sense. Much folklorist documentation had already been accomplished; and folk musicians, exposed to a variety of music on the radio, were quickly developing new musical styles, none of which had the "pure" or "uncontaminated" qualities sought by folklorists. Even gospel music, as a folk style derived from spirituals and committed to tradition, changed in the 1940s. Popular gospel singers such as Rosetta Tharpe or the Staples Sisters were influenced by blues singers such as Bessie Smith. The increasing availability of gospel records made stars such as Mahalia Jackson ("Move On Up a Little Higher," 1945) million-sellers and thus commercial prospects. Politically, the beginning of the decade saw left-wingers and their protest songs enlisting in the war effort (even Pete Seeger's Almanac Singers, a labor-song troupe, broadcast for the Office of War Information); at the end of the decade protest singers were marginalized as part of the anti-Communist hysteria. Thus, what folk there was in the 1940s was a style of relatively primitive or simple music which was characterized as "folk" and was, when present in the culture, another commercial genre of American music—indistinguishable, really, from blues, country, or even pop, as in the case of the Mills Brothers or the Ink Spots. Billboard magazine's chart of hit folk songs was in fact dropped in 1949, replaced by its country and western chart. Huddie "Leadbelly" Ledbetter, acclaimed as a folk "discovery" in the 1930s, achieved popular acclaim with his "Goodnight, Irene" (1943). A similar popularization visited Woody Guthrie, the best known of the leftist singers, whose "This Land Is Your Land" (1944) was a patriotic anthem rather than a protest song during World War II. After the support of some protest singers for Henry Wallace's 1948 presidential bid and a brief period of commercial success for the Weavers, folk music virtually disappeared until the early 1960s, when it would be resurrected as a commercial genre by the Kingston Trio, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and Peter, Paul and Mary.

Folk Takes the Stage I

Where folk music made an impact in the 1940s was on the Broadway stage and within the symphonic concert hall. In the 1930s, classically trained composers began experiments integrating classical music with folk hymns, work songs, and jazz and blues. The experiments were motivated in part by New Deal funding, which financed many such endeavors, and by the excursions of European composers into their own national folk heritage—folk/classical fusions, in other words, were increasingly prominent expressions of nationalism during an extremely nationalistic era. Broadway, keyed to the commercial possibilities of such experiments, had already produced composers such as George Gershwin who recognized the popular potential in integrating blues, country, and jazz figures into a classical format. The great Broadway hits of the 1940s all repeated this fusion—usually with the addition of a libretto or plot derived from a folk source. Such was the key to Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein's 1943 smash, Oklahoma!, based on the Americana play Green Grow the Lilacs, by Lynn Riggs; Rodgers and Lorenz Hart's Pal Joey (1940), based on urban short stories by John O'Hara; and Irving Berlin's Annie Get Your Gun (1946), based on Annie Oakley, the sharpshooting star of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. Such syntheses of Broadway and folk proved enormously popular, especially with the wartime audiences filled with off-duty servicemen, and they established many conventions in Broadway musicals for the next several decades.

Folk Takes the Stage II

Folk music proved alluring to classical composers as well as to Broadway showmen. Composers such as Aaron Copland had long been concerned with establishing American classical music in a fashion that he termed not "too European in derivation." Working on the problem in the 1930s, Copland's solution was to integrate American popular music and culture into a classical setting. His 1938 score for the ballet Billy the Kid began a period wherein Copland accomplished his goals in spectacular fashion. Rodeo (1942) freely adapted American folksongs such as "If He'd Be A Buckaroo by His Trade," "Sis Joe," and "Old Paint." Copland returned to the formula with a piece commissioned by Martha Graham for her dance Appalachian Spring (1944), which integrated the Shaker hymnal "Tis the Gift to Be Simple." In these works and others Copland brilliantly demonstrated what he called his "accessible style"—open textures, sweeping orchestration, elegance, and melodiousness, deeply evocative of prairie skies and pioneer vistas. An approach similar to that taken by Copland was pursued by Roy Harris with his Symphony no. 4, subtitled the Folksong Symphony (1940; 1942). It featured interludes of folk songs common since the Civil War. Harris returned to the Civil War for his Symphony no. 6, subtitled Gettysburg (1944), in which he hoped to recapture the spirit of America contained in the Gettysburg Address. Samuel Barber also hoped to revive the spirit of the past in his work Knoxville: Summer of 1915 (1948), based on James Agee's novel A Death in the Family. Opera composer Virgil Thomson explored American history too, interweaving gospel hymns and popular songs into his opera The Mother of Us All (1947), whose cast of characters includes historical figures such as Susan B. Anthony, Ulysses S. Grant, and Lillian Russell.

THE NIGHTCLUB CRACKDOWN

Nightclubs were big business during World War II, especially in New York. Manhattan nightspots such as the Copacabana, the Latin Quarter, the Diamond Horseshoe, and the Zanzibar earned roughly $50,000 per week each. Fueled by high war wages and lack of consumer products, night-club patrons had more than enough cash to spend—even with the federal government's 20 percent cabaret tax and $1.75 drinks. Nightclubbers went to hear swing bands, to see famous crooners such as Frank Sinatra, to dance, or to hold last minute farewell sprees for departing GIs. In 1945, attempting to hold down heating-fuel use and to stop worker absenteeism, War Mobilization director James Byrnes ordered midnight curfews for all nightclubs and places of entertainment. Mayor Fiorello La Guardia of New York, out for reelection, imposed his own curfew of 1:00 A.M., and a host of after-hours speakeasies developed. Late-night entertainment continued, underground, until the end of the war. Restaurateur Toots Shor cracked, "Any crum-bum what can't get plastered by midnight just ain't tryin'."

Source:

Richard R. Lingeman, Don't You Know There's A War On? The American Home Front, l94l-1945 (New York: Putnam, 1970).

Exiles

Copland, Barber, and Harris were committed in their folkish compositions and their other works to tonality and conventional restrictions of counterpoint and melody. A similar commitment was typical of several other American composers of the period, including Paul Creston, William Schuman, Howard Hanson, Walter Piston, and Roger Sessions. During World War II, however, atonal European composers found refuge in the United States and disseminated the innovations in compositions they pioneered on the Continent. Foremost among them was Arnold Schoenberg, the Viennese modernist who originated the twelve-tone composition system. His method, which he developed in the first decade of this century, was dissonant, unsettling, and, to more conservative ears, unmusical. It was, nonetheless, rigorous, intellectually challenging, and in some ways perfectly keyed to unsettled times. By the 1920s Schoenberg was an acknowledged master of composition and was appointed to the Prussian Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin. Dismissed by the Nazis for his Jewish background, Schoenberg made his way to Paris, then to Los Angeles, where he taught, first at the University of Southern California then at the University of California, Los Angeles. Other European exiles included Russian composer Igor Stravinsky; Italian maestro Arturo Toscanini; pianists Arthur Rubinstein and Artur Schnabel; German composer Paul Hindemith; Hungarian composer Béla Bartók; German composer and songwriter Kurt Weill; the Parisian teacher of composition Nadia Boulanger; violinist Adolf Busch; harpsichordist Wanda Landowska; musicologists Alfred Einstein, Hugo Leichtentritt, Curt Sachs, and Karl Geiringer; conductors Bruno Walter, William Steinberg, George Szell, and Erich Leinsdorf; the composers Hans Eisler, Ernst Toch, Erich Korngold, Ernst Krenek, Darius Milhaud, and Bohuslav Martinu. Many of these people were forced to flee Europe because of their Jewish lineage or their political beliefs. Many, including Stravinsky, Hindemith, and Bartók, left because their art itself was too radical for the Nazis. These men were especially influential with American composers, but none more than Schoenberg, whose work is apparent in several classical American compositions, such as Wallingford Riegger's Symphony no. 3 (1948), and a host of serial music pieces composed by a variety of artists during the 1950s and 1960s.

Experiments

Schoenberg's most important student was the Californian John Cage. An unschooled pianist with a brilliant mind and a rebellious attitude, Cage began composing with Schoenberg's disciples Richard Buhlig and Adolf Weiss. In 1935 he began classes with the master himself but soon quit. Schoenberg's emphasis was on musical tradition—counterpoint, harmony—no matter that his approach was radical. Cage was interested in percussion, noise, space. He was inspired by the non-traditional activities of West Coast composers such as Harry Partch, experimenting with percussion on pieces of junkyard scrap. Cage also believed that noise and music should integrate this worldly experiences rather than lead to otherworldly escape. His abusive compositions, based on percussion, were designed to direct the listener into a confrontation with fundamental musical and existential assumptions. By 1940 Cage had established a reputation as a master of percussive composition and had advanced the use of prepared piano (introduced by Henry Cowell), altering the sound quality of a piano by affixing bolts, nuts, and wires to the piano strings. He perfected this technique in 1943 with a compelling six-movement suite for piano that inspired many New York artists, The Perilous Night. Cage's compositions during the 1940s, The Unavailable Memory 0/(1944), The Seasons (1947), Suite for Toy Piano (1948), and Sonatas and Interludes (1949), are similarly experimental, a fusion of noise and music, often reflecting Cage's interest in Eastern thought. Cage also began to consider the randomness with which he prepared his pianos—leading him to the experiments in time and silence (4' 33 ", 1952) that made him famous.

ARISTOCRAT'S FIRST SINGLE

In 1947 two white bar owners, Leonard and Phil Chess, decided to start their own record label, Aristocrat, specializing in the type of urban blues popular in their clubs. Their first single, by a black singer named Andrew Tibbs, almost wrecked the new label. The A side was "Bilbo's Dead," a tune mocking the recent death of arch-segregationist senator Theodore G. Bilbo. The song was immediately banned in much of the South, Aristocrat's intended market. To make matters worst, the B side, "Union Man Blues," a song protesting black exclusion from labor unions, so incensed truckers that they refused to ship the record. The Chess brothers, however, would have later luck with less political songs, and their label, Chess, would become famous for records by artists such as Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry.

Source:

Francis Davis, The History of the Blues (New York: Hyperion, 1995).

New York

With John Cage's excursions into silence, American music in the 1940s expressed almost every shade of the aural spectrum. Silence, harmony, noise, percussion, color, melody, timbre, syncopation, riff, improvisation, texture, phrasing—few sounds existed that were not being expressed by Cage, Copland, Rodgers, Acuff, Williams, Waters, Parker, Ellington, Holiday, Sinatra, Crosby, or Goodman. New York during the 1940s became the world's capital of music, much as Paris or Berlin had been before, except that in New York not only was the grand tradition of classical music subverted by noisy revolutionaries like Cage, it was expanded by the presence of American musical traditions derived from the heartland. In New York, moreover, there existed a communications and distribution infrastructure for music like none previous in world history. Gigantic media and music corporations, such as RCA, CBS, ASCAP, and BMI, spread American music from New York to every point on the globe. Transient musical expressions which were basically unpublishable in standard classical scorings—like Billie Holiday's phrasing—could be recorded and, in a sense, immortalized using the new recording technology. Perhaps most exciting was the fact that despite the richness of American music in the 1940s, there were musical horizons anticipated yet unexplored. Rock 'n' roll, perhaps the most popular form of music ever created, was yet to be born. Cage's random experiments anticipated the serial innovations and electronic music of subsequent decades. The folk-music research and collection techniques which promoted (and exploited) so much country and blues would later bring global folk expressions such as calypso, bossa nova, juju, reggae, flamenco, Balinese, Indian, Yemenite, and African music to light. Most important, the spirit of innovation, cross-fertilization, and defiance of musical genre would continue, producing wonderful new styles of music. It was the spirit of New York in the 1940s; perhaps the spirit of American music anywhere, anytime.

Sources:

Patrick Carr, ed., The Illustrated History of Country Music (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1980);

Gilbert Chase, America's Music: From the Pilgrims to the Presenti revised, third edition (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987);

Francis Davis, The History of the Blues (New York: Hyperion, 1995);

Bill C. Malone, Country Music, U.S.A. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985);

Paul Oliver, Max Harrison, and William Bolcom, The New Grove Gospel, Blues and Jazz (New York: Norton, 1986);

David Revill, The Roaring Silence: John Cage: A Life (New York: Arcade, 1992).

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