Popular Music

Popular music describes music intended for consumption by a mass public, containing imagery and voicing feelings, needs, and desires of ordinary people, mostly about interpersonal love or loss. It also comments on, or protests, aspects of personal existence or public policy (or its lack). Most commonly, the term refers to music as a cultural commodity, created by professional musicians, recorded by and marketed by media corporations, to be sold to the mass public. Originally, the term denoted an authentic expressive creation by nonprofessional musicians, now sometimes called folk music (or related categories of country or blues or ethnic music), opposed to studio, professional, high, classical, or art music. Rarely in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries does popular music occur in an unmediated form. All popular music is influenced by earlier models. As early as the sixteenth century, sheet music for sale existed in the form of “broadside” cheap printed songs on single sheets of paper, designed to be sung by anyone, some selling as many as 2.5 million copies.

Before the twentieth century, a supposed “traditional culture” served as background for a musical culture in which authentic traditional music was transmitted via oral means, without writing or mechanical/electronic recording. In the regional folk, country, and blues traditions in the United States, such oral transmissions occurred in the nine-teenth and early twentieth centuries, but since the spread of recordings for home use and advent of radio in the 1920s, most “popular” music has reflected their influences. Instead of gathering to hear songs played or sung by family members, learned via oral transmission (or from printed sheet music), people listened to radio broadcasts of singers, such as Bing Crosby, or the Grand Ol' Opry. The latter radio program began on radio station WSM, Nashville, Tennessee, in 1925, representing an idealized, nostalgic public notion of a southern and rural American regional culture, itself in the process of erosion and change.

Erosion of U.S. regional musical culture was a complex process. Phonograph records in the South, from the beginning of recording, sold to markets wanting to hear their own kinds of music. As early as 1923, U.S. record companies sent talent scouts to comb the South for local musicians, who were recorded and sold to black and white populations in those areas and marketed to other areas of the country. The complex process of mediation of allegedly natural or authentic or folk forms of popular music is illustrated by the primitive black bluesman Howlin Wolf (Chester Burnett), born in the Mississippi Delta region in 1910, becoming known during the 1940s in Memphis for his distinctive falsetto moan, once thought to have been acquired via the oral transmission process in his original home, the Delta. Yet Wolf said he developed his style through emulating the blue yodel on records of white singer Jimmy Rodgers, known as the singing brakeman, who dominated the popular music industry in the years 1927 to his death in 1933, virtually creating a national style of popular country music, recorded in north-eastern studios by RCA Victor and sold across the nation on Victor 78 RPM records. Rodgers was the first major country music performer to use unidentified sidemen in the studio, including jazz great Louis Armstrong, establishing the common pattern in popular music of “the star” and anonymous accompaniment. Rodgers's career illustrates the complex process of mediation of “natural” and “folk” forms of popular music, providing an example of ethnic cross-influence and interaction, all based on a process of oral and aural transmission, combining personal appearances in local settings with the individualized listening via phonograph records and radio (and, later, from the 1940s on, via television) that continue into the twenty-first century on HBO and MTV.

...