From Harlem Renaissance to “Hippies”

The 1960s

• In the early 1960s, protest music and folk music were popular and these genres rapidly evolved into acid rock. Soul turned into funk. Bob Dylan (The Times They Are A-Changin’, Subterranean Homesick Blues, It’s Alright, Ma), Peter Paul and Mary, The Byrds, Simon and Garfunkel, The Doors, Jefferson Airplane, The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Aretha Franklin, and James Brown all helped play a part in the 1960s music movement.

Andy Warhol's Marily Monroe

Music Integration

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-17440514

Alan Freed

• Musical integration helped open the door to legal integration.

• Once large numbers of average white kids started listening to popular black music and attending concerts featuring white and black acts it became harder for authorities to keep audiences racially separated. Before, audiences would be roped off, blacks in one section, whites in another.

The Great Depression

• In the 1930s, the U.S. entered The Great Depression.

• Woody Guthrie was an important artist at the time. He influenced Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and even Rage Against the Machine.

Rock 'n' Roll!

The Dust Bowl

• In the early 1950s, artists started combining black music (gospel, blues, swing, rhythm and blues/r&b) and white hillbilly music (country, western swing, bluegrass) to form rock ‘n’ roll. These artists included Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, and Bill Haley.

• Maybellene – Bob Willis and the Texas Playboys “Ida Reed” (traditional western swing tune from twenty years before)

• Chuck Berry was influenced by country music as well as the blues.

• Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” was one of the first rock ‘n’ roll records by a white artist. He borrowed from “Shake, Rattle and Roll” by Joe Turner, a jump blues tune sung by a much older black artist with roots in the swing era.

Chuck Berry

Early Rock 'n' Roll

• Rock ‘n’ roll exploded because of Elvis Presley’s first single. He performed, or covered, Bill Monroe’s “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” a bluegrass song. On the other side he covered Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup’s “That’s Alright, Mama,” a blues tune. His next song was “Good Rockin’ Tonight,” originally by Roy Brown. “Rockin” was a synonym for sex.

• Other teen idols from the time period included Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, Buddy Holly, and Frankie Lyman.

Buddy Holly

The Harlem Renaissance

• The Harlem Renaissance occurred in the 1920s in Harlem, NYC.

• Artists that lived in Harlem included Bessie Smith, Fletcher Henderson, Louis Armstrong, and Duke Ellington. They influenced poets like Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston.

• Rhapsodies in Black: Music and Words from the Harlem Renaissance is a modern recording that uses music from this time period with modern musicians.

http://www.history.com/topics/roaring-twenties/videos/the-harlem-renaissance

From Harlem Renaissance to “Hippies”