Music history of the United States in the late 19th century
Encyclopedia
The latter part of the 19th century saw the increased popularization of African American music
and the growth and maturity of folk styles like the blues
.
, more sophisticated African-American styles of the cakewalk
and then ragtime
music started to become popular. Originally associated primarily with poor African American
s, ragtime was quickly denounced as degenerate by conservatives and the classically trained establishment. In spite of the denigration, however, the style continued to gain widespread popularity and became mainstream; it was adopted by Tin Pan Alley
at the start of the 20th century.
Ragtime shared similarities with both blues and jazz
, the two rival forms of African American music at the time. It was primarily piano
-based, and could be performed by a single person (more like the blues) or by an entire orchestra
(more like jazz). Scott Joplin
was the most famous ragtime musician.
, Thomas Rice
and George Washington Dixon
. Rice remains perhaps the best known, chiefly through the historical importance of his "Jump Jim Crow
". The first minstrel group was probably the Virginia Minstrels
, who performing in 1843 in New York City (Chase, 232), though E. P. Christy's four-man show in Buffalo, New York
the year before is another contender. Many other groups soon followed, usually using a banjo, violin, castanets and tambourine. Thomas Rice and other blackface entertainers adapted to minstrelsy; Rice wrote operas like Bone Squash Diavolo before his popularity declined in the 1850s. Another minstrel opera group was the Kneass Opera Troupe, which did blackface parodies of Rossini
's La Cenerentola
, Balfe
's The Bohemian Girl
and Auber
's Fra Diavolo
. These parodies were given titles like Son-Am-Bull-Ole for a parody of Bellini
's La somnambula, the invented title being a humorous reference to the violinist Ole Bull
. Minstrel shows spread to London by 1846m and remained a major fixture in London until at least the 1880s.
. Composers included E. P. Christy, Daniel Decatur Emmett and Thomas Rice
; the latter's "Jump Jim Crow
" was an immensely popular song, so well-known and widely-played that foreign leaders mistook it for the American national anthem. Other songs typically performed in blackface included "Camptown Races
", "Old Dan Tucker
", "Dixie
", "Old Folks at Home
", "Old Black Joe
", "Turkey in the Straw
" and "O Dem Golden Slippers
".
, Henry Fillmore
, and Karl King
.
, or musicians who played "Klezmer music" at weddings and other community events. Soon, the United States became the international center for klezmer music, and it became a major influence on jazz
and other genres.
Into the 20th century, immigration from Italy, Ireland, Armenia, China, Germany, Finland and elsewhere was widespread. Most of these immigrant communities kept their folk traditions alive. Some produced musicians of great stature, such as Ukrainian
fiddler
Pawlo Humeniuk
in the 1920s and 30s. Much later, Armenia
n oud
player Richard Hagopian
also became popular at home and abroad. The Slovenian polka
master, Frankie Yankovic
, has had perhaps more crossover success than these other stars; his period of greatest popularity was in the 1940s.
. Tin Pan Alley's representatives spread throughout the country, buying local hits for their publishers and pushing their publisher's latest songs. Song demonstrators were fixtures at department stores and music stores across the country, and traveling song demonstrators made circuits of rural areas. The industry was driven by the profits from the sales of sheet music
. A piano
was considered a must in any middle-class or higher home. Major 19th century Tin Pan Alley hits included "Only a Bird in a Guilded Cage" and "After the Ball Is Over".
African American music
African-American music is an umbrella term given to a range of musics and musical genres emerging from or influenced by the culture of African Americans, who have long constituted a large and significant ethnic minority of the population of the United States...
and the growth and maturity of folk styles like the blues
Blues
Blues is the name given to both a musical form and a music genre that originated in African-American communities of primarily the "Deep South" of the United States at the end of the 19th century from spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads...
.
Rag
In the 1890s1890s
The 1890s were sometimes referred to as the "Mauve Decade" - because William Henry Perkin's aniline dye allowed the widespread use of that colour in fashion - and also as the "Gay Nineties", under the then-current usage of the word "gay" which referred simply to merriment and frivolity, with no...
, more sophisticated African-American styles of the cakewalk
Cakewalk
The Cakewalk dance was developed from a "Prize Walk" done in the days of slavery, generally at get-togethers on plantations in the Southern United States. Alternative names for the original form of the dance were "chalkline-walk", and the "walk-around"...
and then ragtime
Ragtime
Ragtime is an original musical genre which enjoyed its peak popularity between 1897 and 1918. Its main characteristic trait is its syncopated, or "ragged," rhythm. It began as dance music in the red-light districts of American cities such as St. Louis and New Orleans years before being published...
music started to become popular. Originally associated primarily with poor African American
African American
African Americans are citizens or residents of the United States who have at least partial ancestry from any of the native populations of Sub-Saharan Africa and are the direct descendants of enslaved Africans within the boundaries of the present United States...
s, ragtime was quickly denounced as degenerate by conservatives and the classically trained establishment. In spite of the denigration, however, the style continued to gain widespread popularity and became mainstream; it was adopted by Tin Pan Alley
Tin Pan Alley
Tin Pan Alley is the name given to the collection of New York City music publishers and songwriters who dominated the popular music of the United States in the late 19th century and early 20th century...
at the start of the 20th century.
Ragtime shared similarities with both blues and jazz
Jazz
Jazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States. It was born out of a mix of African and European music traditions. From its early development until the present, jazz has incorporated music from 19th and 20th...
, the two rival forms of African American music at the time. It was primarily piano
Piano
The piano is a musical instrument played by means of a keyboard. It is one of the most popular instruments in the world. Widely used in classical and jazz music for solo performances, ensemble use, chamber music and accompaniment, the piano is also very popular as an aid to composing and rehearsal...
-based, and could be performed by a single person (more like the blues) or by an entire orchestra
Orchestra
An orchestra is a sizable instrumental ensemble that contains sections of string, brass, woodwind, and percussion instruments. The term orchestra derives from the Greek ορχήστρα, the name for the area in front of an ancient Greek stage reserved for the Greek chorus...
(more like jazz). Scott Joplin
Scott Joplin
Scott Joplin was an American composer and pianist. Joplin achieved fame for his ragtime compositions, and was later dubbed "The King of Ragtime". During his brief career, Joplin wrote 44 original ragtime pieces, one ragtime ballet, and two operas...
was the most famous ragtime musician.
Minstrelsy
Solo performers in blackface were well-known by the middle of the 19th century. Similar parodies of Africans had been popular during the late 18th century in England, and they spread across the Atlantic through the efforts of comedians like Charles MathewsCharles Mathews
Charles Mathews was an English theatre manager and comic actor, well-known during his time for his gift of impersonation and skill at table entertainment...
, Thomas Rice
Thomas D. Rice
Thomas Dartmouth Rice was a white performer and playwright who used African American vernacular speech, song, and dance to become one of the most popular minstrel show entertainers of his time.-Background:...
and George Washington Dixon
George Washington Dixon
George Washington Dixon was an American singer, stage actor, and newspaper editor. He rose to prominence as a blackface performer after performing "Coal Black Rose", "Zip Coon", and similar songs...
. Rice remains perhaps the best known, chiefly through the historical importance of his "Jump Jim Crow
Jump Jim Crow
Jump Jim Crow is a song and dance from 1828 that was done in blackface by white comedian Thomas Dartmouth "Daddy" Rice. The first song sheet edition appeared in the early 1830s, published by E. Riley. The number was supposedly inspired by the song and dance of a crippled African slave called Jim...
". The first minstrel group was probably the Virginia Minstrels
Virginia Minstrels
The Virginia Minstrels or Virginia Serenaders was a group of 19th century American entertainers known for helping to invent the entertainment form known as the minstrel show...
, who performing in 1843 in New York City (Chase, 232), though E. P. Christy's four-man show in Buffalo, New York
Buffalo, New York
Buffalo is the second most populous city in the state of New York, after New York City. Located in Western New York on the eastern shores of Lake Erie and at the head of the Niagara River across from Fort Erie, Ontario, Buffalo is the seat of Erie County and the principal city of the...
the year before is another contender. Many other groups soon followed, usually using a banjo, violin, castanets and tambourine. Thomas Rice and other blackface entertainers adapted to minstrelsy; Rice wrote operas like Bone Squash Diavolo before his popularity declined in the 1850s. Another minstrel opera group was the Kneass Opera Troupe, which did blackface parodies of Rossini
Gioacchino Rossini
Gioachino Antonio Rossini was an Italian composer who wrote 39 operas as well as sacred music, chamber music, songs, and some instrumental and piano pieces...
's La Cenerentola
La Cenerentola
La Cenerentola, ossia La bontà in trionfo is an operatic dramma giocoso in two acts by Gioachino Rossini. The libretto was written by Jacopo Ferretti, based on the fairy tale Cinderella...
, Balfe
Michael William Balfe
Michael William Balfe was an Irish composer, best-remembered for his opera The Bohemian Girl.After a short career as a violinist, Balfe pursued an operatic singing career, while he began to compose. In a career spanning more than 40 years, he composed 38 operas, almost 250 songs and other works...
's The Bohemian Girl
The Bohemian Girl
The Bohemian Girl is an opera composed by Michael William Balfe with a libretto by Alfred Bunn. The plot is loosely based on a Cervantes tale, La Gitanilla.The opera was first produced in London at the Drury Lane Theatre on November 27, 1843...
and Auber
Daniel Auber
Daniel François Esprit Auber was a French composer.-Biography:The son of a Paris print-seller, Auber was born in Caen in Normandy. Though his father expected him to continue in the print-selling business, he also allowed his son to learn how to play several musical instruments...
's Fra Diavolo
Fra Diavolo (opera)
Fra Diavolo, ou L'hôtellerie de Terracine is an opéra comique in three acts by the French composer Daniel Auber, from a libretto by Auber's regular collaborator Eugène Scribe...
. These parodies were given titles like Son-Am-Bull-Ole for a parody of Bellini
Vincenzo Bellini
Vincenzo Salvatore Carmelo Francesco Bellini was an Italian opera composer. His greatest works are I Capuleti ed i Montecchi , La sonnambula , Norma , Beatrice di Tenda , and I puritani...
's La somnambula, the invented title being a humorous reference to the violinist Ole Bull
Ole Bull
Ole Bornemann Bull was a Norwegian violinist and composer.-Background:Bull was born in Bergen. He was the eldest of ten children of Johan Storm Bull and Anna Dorothea Borse Geelmuyden . His brother, Georg Andreas Bull became a noted Norwegian architect...
. Minstrel shows spread to London by 1846m and remained a major fixture in London until at least the 1880s.
Black minstrels
By the end of the civil war, minstrel groups had appeared featuring actual black performers. Though their styles were no more similar to actual slave practices than those of the white minstrels, these groups billed themselves as more "authentic" and grew popular. Since many of the performers were light-skinned, black performers still rubbed their faces in cork, and entertained in blackface. This practice peaked in about 1872, having produced such stars as banjoist Horace Weston and comedian Billy Kersand.Blackface
A component of minstrel shows, blackface performances included white (or, more rarely, African American) singers dressed in bizarre costumes, their faces marked black with burnt cork, singing in a caricature of African American Vernacular EnglishAfrican American Vernacular English
African American Vernacular English —also called African American English; less precisely Black English, Black Vernacular, Black English Vernacular , or Black Vernacular English —is an African American variety of American English...
. Composers included E. P. Christy, Daniel Decatur Emmett and Thomas Rice
Thomas D. Rice
Thomas Dartmouth Rice was a white performer and playwright who used African American vernacular speech, song, and dance to become one of the most popular minstrel show entertainers of his time.-Background:...
; the latter's "Jump Jim Crow
Jump Jim Crow
Jump Jim Crow is a song and dance from 1828 that was done in blackface by white comedian Thomas Dartmouth "Daddy" Rice. The first song sheet edition appeared in the early 1830s, published by E. Riley. The number was supposedly inspired by the song and dance of a crippled African slave called Jim...
" was an immensely popular song, so well-known and widely-played that foreign leaders mistook it for the American national anthem. Other songs typically performed in blackface included "Camptown Races
Camptown Races
Gwine to Run All Night, or De Camptown Races is a minstrel song by Stephen Foster . It was probably composed in Cincinnati in 1849, according to Richard Jackson, and published by F. D. Benteen of Baltimore, Maryland, in February 1850...
", "Old Dan Tucker
Old Dan Tucker
"Old Dan Tucker", also known as "Ole Dan Tucker", "Dan Tucker", and other variants, is a popular American song. Its origins remain obscure; the tune may have come from oral tradition, and the words may have been written by songwriter and performer Dan Emmett...
", "Dixie
Dixie (song)
Countless lyrical variants of "Dixie" exist, but the version attributed to Dan Emmett and its variations are the most popular. Emmett's lyrics as they were originally intended reflect the mood of the United States in the late 1850s toward growing abolitionist sentiment. The song presented the point...
", "Old Folks at Home
Old Folks at Home
"Old Folks at Home" is a minstrel song written by Stephen Foster in 1851. It was intended to be performed by the New York blackface troupe Christy's Minstrels. E. P. Christy, the troupe's leader, appears on early printings of the sheet music as the song's creator...
", "Old Black Joe
Old Black Joe
"Old Black Joe" is a parlor song by Stephen Foster . It was published by Firth, Pond & Co. of New York in 1853. Ken Emerson, author of Doo-Dah!, indicates that Foster's fictional Joe was inspired by a servant in the home of his father-in-law, Dr. McDowell of Pittsburgh...
", "Turkey in the Straw
Turkey in the Straw
"Turkey in the Straw" is a well-known American folk song dating from the early 19th century.The song's tune was first popularized in the late 1820s and early 1830s by blackface performers, notably George Washington Dixon, Bob Farrell and George Nichols. Another song, "Zip Coon", was sung to the...
" and "O Dem Golden Slippers
O Dem Golden Slippers
"Oh, Dem Golden Slippers" is a popular song commonly sung by blackface performers in the 19th century. The song, penned by African-American James A. Bland in 1879, is considered an American standard today...
".
Military marches
Military style March music enjoyed great popularity, and most towns had brass bands that performed them. The most popular of the US march composers were John Philip SousaJohn Philip Sousa
John Philip Sousa was an American composer and conductor of the late Romantic era, known particularly for American military and patriotic marches. Because of his mastery of march composition, he is known as "The March King" or the "American March King" due to his British counterpart Kenneth J....
, Henry Fillmore
Henry Fillmore
Henry Fillmore was an American musician, composer, publisher, and bandleader, best-known for his many marches and screamers.-Biography:James Henry Fillmore Jr. was born in Cincinnati, Ohio as the eldest of five children...
, and Karl King
Karl King
Karl L. King was a United States march music bandmaster and composer. He is best known as the composer of Barnum and Bailey's Favorite.-Biography:...
.
Eastern European immigrants
Starting in the 1880s, Eastern Europe;an Jews immigrated to the US in large numbers. They brought with them klezmorimKlezmer
Klezmer is a musical tradition of the Ashkenazic Jews of Eastern Europe. Played by professional musicians called klezmorim, the genre originally consisted largely of dance tunes and instrumental display pieces for weddings and other celebrations...
, or musicians who played "Klezmer music" at weddings and other community events. Soon, the United States became the international center for klezmer music, and it became a major influence on jazz
Jazz
Jazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States. It was born out of a mix of African and European music traditions. From its early development until the present, jazz has incorporated music from 19th and 20th...
and other genres.
Into the 20th century, immigration from Italy, Ireland, Armenia, China, Germany, Finland and elsewhere was widespread. Most of these immigrant communities kept their folk traditions alive. Some produced musicians of great stature, such as Ukrainian
Ukraine
Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It has an area of 603,628 km², making it the second largest contiguous country on the European continent, after Russia...
fiddler
Fiddler
A fiddler is a person who plays a fiddle or violin.Fiddler may also refer to:*Fabrangen Fiddlers, an American musical group founded in 1971*Tupolev Tu-28 "Fiddler", a fighter aircraft*Fiddler , a DC Comics villain...
Pawlo Humeniuk
Pawlo Humeniuk
Pawlo Humeniuk was a Ukrainian-American fiddler from the early 20th century, one of the biggest stars of the era's ethnic music.-Biography:...
in the 1920s and 30s. Much later, Armenia
Armenia
Armenia , officially the Republic of Armenia , is a landlocked mountainous country in the Caucasus region of Eurasia...
n oud
Oud
The oud is a pear-shaped stringed instrument commonly used in North African and Middle Eastern music. The modern oud and the European lute both descend from a common ancestor via diverging paths...
player Richard Hagopian
Richard Hagopian
Richard Avedis Hagopian is an American Oriental-style oud player and traditional Armenian musician.Hagopian was born in Fowler, California. He has been a musician since childhood, learning to play the violin and clarinet at nine years old. He started playing the oud at age of 11...
also became popular at home and abroad. The Slovenian polka
Polka
The polka is a Central European dance and also a genre of dance music familiar throughout Europe and the Americas. It originated in the middle of the 19th century in Bohemia...
master, Frankie Yankovic
Frankie Yankovic
Frankie Yankovic was a Grammy Award-winning polka musician. Known as "America's Polka King," Yankovic was the premier artist to play in the Slovenian style during a long and successful career.-Background:Of Slovene descent, he was raised in South Euclid, Ohio...
, has had perhaps more crossover success than these other stars; his period of greatest popularity was in the 1940s.
Tin Pan Alley
In the later decades of the 19th century, the music industry became dominated by a group of publishers and song-writers in New York City that came to be known as Tin Pan AlleyTin Pan Alley
Tin Pan Alley is the name given to the collection of New York City music publishers and songwriters who dominated the popular music of the United States in the late 19th century and early 20th century...
. Tin Pan Alley's representatives spread throughout the country, buying local hits for their publishers and pushing their publisher's latest songs. Song demonstrators were fixtures at department stores and music stores across the country, and traveling song demonstrators made circuits of rural areas. The industry was driven by the profits from the sales of sheet music
Sheet music
Sheet music is a hand-written or printed form of music notation that uses modern musical symbols; like its analogs—books, pamphlets, etc.—the medium of sheet music typically is paper , although the access to musical notation in recent years includes also presentation on computer screens...
. A piano
Piano
The piano is a musical instrument played by means of a keyboard. It is one of the most popular instruments in the world. Widely used in classical and jazz music for solo performances, ensemble use, chamber music and accompaniment, the piano is also very popular as an aid to composing and rehearsal...
was considered a must in any middle-class or higher home. Major 19th century Tin Pan Alley hits included "Only a Bird in a Guilded Cage" and "After the Ball Is Over".