Post by Admin on Jan 6, 2013 8:25:35 GMT -5
The Great Depression (1929-1939) is a period in history that was ironical in the way our music was affected.
Here's an interesting article that is worth reading:
How the Great Depression Gave America the Blues, by Heath Lowrance
This article originally appeared in the September, 2008 issue of History Magazine.
With the stock market crash of 1929, America’s musical trends went from “Happy Days are Here Again” to “Brother Can You Spare a Dime?” as rapidly as one of Gene Krupa’s syncopated percussion beats. Popular music, which had been overwhelmingly positive and free-spirited throughout the Jazz Age, with catchy ditties like “Ain’t We Got Fun” and “Makin’ Whoopee” topping the charts, gave way to earthier expressions of heartache and desperation. Regional folk and blues, and what was known at the time as “race records”, reached a new level of maturity.
Complex and invigorated forms of early jazz still thrived throughout the economic depression, championed by such seminal musicians as Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson, and Count Basie. But the period between 1930 and 1935 swept in a wave of somber blues and confessional ballads, a counterpoint that hadn’t existed in the popular consciousness before, forever changing the timbre of popular American music.
Folk and blues existed long before the Depression, and a handful of entrepreneuring producers had recorded regional artists throughout the first two decades of the century. The Okeh record label, which invented the term “race records”, had pioneered early field recording work in Atlanta, rural Texas, Kansas City and New Orleans, discovering such “hot jazz” performers as Memphis Slim and Lonnie Johnson. In August of 1920, they released the very first commercial recording of a black blues singer, with Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues”.
Other record labels sought similar success with records aimed exclusively at black audiences. Through the ‘20’s, Brunswick, Victor and Columbia all hit the road with mobile units to record blues performers in hotel rooms and public halls throughout the Southern states. Columbia had actually been releasing “hot jazz” records as far back as 1900, and by the mid-‘20’s were selling over two million a month. Clearly there was a market for “race records”.
The term “blues” was a fairly recent one in the burgeoning record industry. In 1912, the great black composer W.C. Handy wrote “Memphis Blues”, a tune that became hugely popular and influential, and “jazz” and “blues” became virtual synonyms for the same thing—black music for black people.
At the same time, other producers were scouring the Appalachians and other rural areas recording the simple, raw music of poor whites. If black folk music had its roots in African rhythms and the slave experience, white folk music was born of the ballads and story songs brought over by immigrants from Ireland, England, and northern Europe.
Using simple arrangements—and often homemade instruments—the poor farmers, sharecroppers and laborers of the American South kept their own musical traditions alive and gradually expanded upon them by virtue of their own personal experiences. The music was stripped down and heartfelt, generally using only a fiddle and a plucked instrument like guitar or banjo, and often used tight vocal harmonies. As with “race recordings”, the Okeh record label proved innovative, being among the first to record this music commercially in the ‘20’s with Fiddlin’ John Carson.
The Victor label, however, would have the credit for “discovering” Jimmie Rodgers, perhaps the most influential of the “hill-billy blues” or “old-timey” recording artists. As a wanderer through the American South, Rodgers, “The Singing Brakeman”, sang with poetry and dark humor of hardship on the road and bitter disillusionment, and popularized yodeling in folk music—something that would become a bluegrass staple.
The arc of Jimmie Rodgers recording career coincided with the economic depression. His first recording for Victor was in 1927, “Soldier’s Sweetheart”, and his final tracks were completed in New York City only six years later. He died in 1933, just hours after recording those last tracks.
His label mates, The Carter Family, enjoyed a much longer career. Like Rodgers, they began with Victor in 1927, with the double-sided 78 “Wandering Boy” and “Poor Orphan Child”, and through the turbulent 1930’s they toured extensively. The Carter Family sang of lost love, betrayal, and the ultimate comfort of simple faith. Their tight vocal harmonies and Maybelle Carter’s innovative style of guitar picking represented something completely new to most listeners outside the Appalachians, and “hill-billy” music found many new converts in their wake. The Carters are referred to now as the “First Family of Country Music”, and for good reason. Without their seminal recordings, the entire course of country music would have been altered.
But black or white, folk recordings went largely ignored by mainstream audiences throughout the first twenty years of the century. They were, in today’s terminology, ‘fringe markets’.
The Depression did very little to change this. In the short term, it nearly killed those markets: the recording industry as a whole was hit hard. In 1927, record sales across the board topped 104 million; by 1932 that number had plummeted to six million. Field recordings, the life blood of folk and blues, dried up almost entirely and the “race” market came very close to being wiped out.
But in falling back into the darkness they had emerged from, folk and blues grew stronger and more self-assured. The Great Depression forced rural music to sustain itself without outside influence and without the burden of having to sell to a wider audience.
From Country Blues to the Chicago Sound
Country blues emerged—again, out of the American South—in the 1920’s. A rougher, often raunchier musical form than its “hot jazz” contemporary, country blues musicians were primarily itinerant road men, hobo-ing from town to town with little more than a guitar and a suitcase, playing at random dances, barrelhouses, logging camps, and, if all else failed, on street corners. White audiences of the time turned away from country blues as being too harsh and primitive, and even during the great glut of “race records” in the Jazz Age, country bluesmen were rarely recorded.
And yet country blues, in the early ‘30’s, became the unofficial bard for the experience of poor blacks, the rude and brutally honest chronicler of life at the bottom of society, when society itself had bottomed out.
This was the dark musical underbelly of American experience that spawned the genius of Robert Johnson, perhaps the most infamous bluesman of the time. Many legends have been built around the mysterious Johnson, most notably the oft-told tale of how he sold his soul to the Devil at the crossroads for the privilege of becoming the greatest blues guitar player in the world.
Folk tales aside, Johnson’s influence was enormous. As one of the few country bluesmen recorded in his prime, his style of rough playing and gut-wrenching, howling vocals became a standard that many who followed would build upon.
But as influential as he was, Robert Johnson’s recordings barely caused a ripple on the stagnant waters of the record industry at the time. More successful initially was the great but now largely-ignored Charley Patton, whose record “34 Blues” sold well by the standards of the time. Patton died shortly afterward.
“Depression Blues”, recorded in 1931 by Tampa Red, is in many ways the ultimate example of Depression-era blues, and a lasting testament to the inspiring capacity many rural black musicians had for expressing their anguish with simple, brutal poetry:
“If I could tell my troubles, it may would give my poor heart ease
If I could tell my troubles, it may would give my poor heart ease
But depression’s got me, somebody help me please”
The Repeal of Prohibition
Two events helped keep blues music alive during this turbulent period—the first and most significant was the repeal, at long last, of Prohibition.
During the ‘20’s, the liquor laws did little to dissuade Americans from indulging in alcohol, but it did force taverns and clubs underground and made criminals out of ordinary people. Speakeasies abounded, and one odd side-effect of Prohibition was that anyone looking for a drink now had more choices than ever before of where to find one.
But for traveling musicians, especially blacks, Prohibition meant that venues were disappearing everywhere.
When Prohibition was repealed in 1933, a fresh wave of taverns and clubs opened up, many of them catering to black audiences, and suddenly black musicians had a place to play. The benefit of having a steady gig and an ever-expanding audience helped spur blues music along to even greater maturity.
The other event that helped save the development of blues came about out of necessity. The same year that Prohibition finally threw up its hands and surrendered, the Victor record label launched its Bluebird line. This was a series of budget recordings, sold at a lower price than their regular mainstream recordings, and aimed again at a black audience. The Bluebird records sold well for the time, kept fans happy, and fed more than a few otherwise starving musicians.
But unlike the old days, the producers and engineers remained in their studios and the musicians had to come to them. Victor/Bluebird was based in Chicago, and even though the performers who walked through the studio doors were as varied and different from each other as could be, a certain feel developed in all their recordings, a more sophisticated and urban feel that would come to be known as the “Chicago Sound”.
Because the performers rarely recorded in their own environment anymore, urbanization was becoming more and more apparent in blues music. St. Louis and New York, like Chicago, became centers of blues recording, and each city eventually spawned a “sound” that would come to be associated with it.
The common denominator always remained the same, however: blues music told the truth of its own experience, whether the truth was brutal and ugly, or joyous and hopeful.
Hollywood
Hollywood responded to the Great Depression with an explosion of good cheer that seems almost strained by today’s standards, but at the time proved to be an amazing tonic for keeping up morale in the bleakest of times. Musicals, comedies, and lavish productions featuring regular Joes making good in high society and getting the girl kept box office receipts high, even when saving enough money to buy food was a challenge for many Americans.
Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers made countless films during the ‘30’s, none of them with particularly memorable stories, but all with beautiful or exotic settings, spectacular dance numbers, and toe-tapping, feel-good music designed to take the film-goer away from his worries—at least for an hour and fifteen minutes or so.
The Marx Brothers had a different approach—direct attack on the institutions that many Americans already resented. High class society, universities, and politicians all came under satirical fire in the Marx Brothers comedies, much to the delight of audiences unsure of who to blame for their current predicament.
What these comedies, musicals and spectacles had in common was music—tender romantic ballads and upbeat, finger-snapping tunes with catchy lyrics and sassy instrumentation. The Depression rarely showed its face in America’s cinemas, and then only fleetingly.
The Golden Era of Swing
Chasing the Depression blues away with music was far more common than celebrating its woes. By 1935, a new form of jazz had assimilated itself into the popular culture, and as “race” and blues recordings declined, this new jazz prospered. It came from the same roots that blues and folk came from, “hot jazz”, but evolved along different lines.
In the 1920’s, “hot jazz” stretched the boundaries of what was musically possible. King Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton, Bix Beiderbecke and the phenomenon known as Louis Armstrong made music that fit the joyful, exuberant mood of the time. It was the music of bravado and unlimited human potential. Most importantly, it was music that had swing.
The musicians that followed in those giant footsteps continued to push the form forward, with bigger bands and more sophisticated arrangements. Louis Armstrong was the innovator of the solo instrumentalist, but musicians like Fletcher Henderson helped refine the concept, and the big bands of Benny Goodman and Count Basie soared to even greater heights. The emergence of Duke Ellington signaled a major turning point; more than any other band leader before him, he brought a new level of style, substance and musical insight to American music, an insight that may never have happened if it hadn’t been formed against the backdrop of the Great Depression.
Who would have thought that, in the end, a song by Bing Crosby would have summed it all up? “Brother Can You Spare a Dime?” was written in 1931 by E.Y. Harburg and Jay Gorney, initially for a Broadway musical called “New Americana”. It’s not a blues song or a “hot jazz” number or even a feel-good Hollywood musical tune, despite its origins on Broadway. But this song performed by an icon of popular music spoke every bit as poignantly and honestly about the Great Depression, and the disillusionment that followed in the hearts of Americans, as anything by Tampa Red or Charley Patton.
“They used to tell me I was building a dream, and so I followed the mob
When there was earth to plow or guns to bear, I was always there right on the job
They used to tell me I was building a dream, with peace and glory ahead
Why should I be standing in line, just waiting for bread?”
By the time the country had begun dragging itself laboriously out of the economic crisis, the musical landscape was unrecognizable from what it had been on October 24, 1929. An enormous shift had occurred, a seismic rumble with after-tremors that are still felt, even today. Different forms had found creative nourishment, and even though they had all drank from the same well, what each grew into couldn’t have been more diverse. There’s a huge aesthetic difference between the music of someone like Duke Ellington and someone like Robert Johnson—even more so, someone like Fred Astaire—but they all have a common trait, and taken together, they form one clear sound: the sound of a country that refused to let go of hope in the face of adversity.
You can contact Heath Lowrance at heathlowrance@gmail.com, or visit www.psychonoir.blogspot.com.
Here's an interesting article that is worth reading:
How the Great Depression Gave America the Blues, by Heath Lowrance
This article originally appeared in the September, 2008 issue of History Magazine.
With the stock market crash of 1929, America’s musical trends went from “Happy Days are Here Again” to “Brother Can You Spare a Dime?” as rapidly as one of Gene Krupa’s syncopated percussion beats. Popular music, which had been overwhelmingly positive and free-spirited throughout the Jazz Age, with catchy ditties like “Ain’t We Got Fun” and “Makin’ Whoopee” topping the charts, gave way to earthier expressions of heartache and desperation. Regional folk and blues, and what was known at the time as “race records”, reached a new level of maturity.
Complex and invigorated forms of early jazz still thrived throughout the economic depression, championed by such seminal musicians as Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson, and Count Basie. But the period between 1930 and 1935 swept in a wave of somber blues and confessional ballads, a counterpoint that hadn’t existed in the popular consciousness before, forever changing the timbre of popular American music.
Folk and blues existed long before the Depression, and a handful of entrepreneuring producers had recorded regional artists throughout the first two decades of the century. The Okeh record label, which invented the term “race records”, had pioneered early field recording work in Atlanta, rural Texas, Kansas City and New Orleans, discovering such “hot jazz” performers as Memphis Slim and Lonnie Johnson. In August of 1920, they released the very first commercial recording of a black blues singer, with Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues”.
Other record labels sought similar success with records aimed exclusively at black audiences. Through the ‘20’s, Brunswick, Victor and Columbia all hit the road with mobile units to record blues performers in hotel rooms and public halls throughout the Southern states. Columbia had actually been releasing “hot jazz” records as far back as 1900, and by the mid-‘20’s were selling over two million a month. Clearly there was a market for “race records”.
The term “blues” was a fairly recent one in the burgeoning record industry. In 1912, the great black composer W.C. Handy wrote “Memphis Blues”, a tune that became hugely popular and influential, and “jazz” and “blues” became virtual synonyms for the same thing—black music for black people.
At the same time, other producers were scouring the Appalachians and other rural areas recording the simple, raw music of poor whites. If black folk music had its roots in African rhythms and the slave experience, white folk music was born of the ballads and story songs brought over by immigrants from Ireland, England, and northern Europe.
Using simple arrangements—and often homemade instruments—the poor farmers, sharecroppers and laborers of the American South kept their own musical traditions alive and gradually expanded upon them by virtue of their own personal experiences. The music was stripped down and heartfelt, generally using only a fiddle and a plucked instrument like guitar or banjo, and often used tight vocal harmonies. As with “race recordings”, the Okeh record label proved innovative, being among the first to record this music commercially in the ‘20’s with Fiddlin’ John Carson.
The Victor label, however, would have the credit for “discovering” Jimmie Rodgers, perhaps the most influential of the “hill-billy blues” or “old-timey” recording artists. As a wanderer through the American South, Rodgers, “The Singing Brakeman”, sang with poetry and dark humor of hardship on the road and bitter disillusionment, and popularized yodeling in folk music—something that would become a bluegrass staple.
The arc of Jimmie Rodgers recording career coincided with the economic depression. His first recording for Victor was in 1927, “Soldier’s Sweetheart”, and his final tracks were completed in New York City only six years later. He died in 1933, just hours after recording those last tracks.
His label mates, The Carter Family, enjoyed a much longer career. Like Rodgers, they began with Victor in 1927, with the double-sided 78 “Wandering Boy” and “Poor Orphan Child”, and through the turbulent 1930’s they toured extensively. The Carter Family sang of lost love, betrayal, and the ultimate comfort of simple faith. Their tight vocal harmonies and Maybelle Carter’s innovative style of guitar picking represented something completely new to most listeners outside the Appalachians, and “hill-billy” music found many new converts in their wake. The Carters are referred to now as the “First Family of Country Music”, and for good reason. Without their seminal recordings, the entire course of country music would have been altered.
But black or white, folk recordings went largely ignored by mainstream audiences throughout the first twenty years of the century. They were, in today’s terminology, ‘fringe markets’.
The Depression did very little to change this. In the short term, it nearly killed those markets: the recording industry as a whole was hit hard. In 1927, record sales across the board topped 104 million; by 1932 that number had plummeted to six million. Field recordings, the life blood of folk and blues, dried up almost entirely and the “race” market came very close to being wiped out.
But in falling back into the darkness they had emerged from, folk and blues grew stronger and more self-assured. The Great Depression forced rural music to sustain itself without outside influence and without the burden of having to sell to a wider audience.
From Country Blues to the Chicago Sound
Country blues emerged—again, out of the American South—in the 1920’s. A rougher, often raunchier musical form than its “hot jazz” contemporary, country blues musicians were primarily itinerant road men, hobo-ing from town to town with little more than a guitar and a suitcase, playing at random dances, barrelhouses, logging camps, and, if all else failed, on street corners. White audiences of the time turned away from country blues as being too harsh and primitive, and even during the great glut of “race records” in the Jazz Age, country bluesmen were rarely recorded.
And yet country blues, in the early ‘30’s, became the unofficial bard for the experience of poor blacks, the rude and brutally honest chronicler of life at the bottom of society, when society itself had bottomed out.
This was the dark musical underbelly of American experience that spawned the genius of Robert Johnson, perhaps the most infamous bluesman of the time. Many legends have been built around the mysterious Johnson, most notably the oft-told tale of how he sold his soul to the Devil at the crossroads for the privilege of becoming the greatest blues guitar player in the world.
Folk tales aside, Johnson’s influence was enormous. As one of the few country bluesmen recorded in his prime, his style of rough playing and gut-wrenching, howling vocals became a standard that many who followed would build upon.
But as influential as he was, Robert Johnson’s recordings barely caused a ripple on the stagnant waters of the record industry at the time. More successful initially was the great but now largely-ignored Charley Patton, whose record “34 Blues” sold well by the standards of the time. Patton died shortly afterward.
“Depression Blues”, recorded in 1931 by Tampa Red, is in many ways the ultimate example of Depression-era blues, and a lasting testament to the inspiring capacity many rural black musicians had for expressing their anguish with simple, brutal poetry:
“If I could tell my troubles, it may would give my poor heart ease
If I could tell my troubles, it may would give my poor heart ease
But depression’s got me, somebody help me please”
The Repeal of Prohibition
Two events helped keep blues music alive during this turbulent period—the first and most significant was the repeal, at long last, of Prohibition.
During the ‘20’s, the liquor laws did little to dissuade Americans from indulging in alcohol, but it did force taverns and clubs underground and made criminals out of ordinary people. Speakeasies abounded, and one odd side-effect of Prohibition was that anyone looking for a drink now had more choices than ever before of where to find one.
But for traveling musicians, especially blacks, Prohibition meant that venues were disappearing everywhere.
When Prohibition was repealed in 1933, a fresh wave of taverns and clubs opened up, many of them catering to black audiences, and suddenly black musicians had a place to play. The benefit of having a steady gig and an ever-expanding audience helped spur blues music along to even greater maturity.
The other event that helped save the development of blues came about out of necessity. The same year that Prohibition finally threw up its hands and surrendered, the Victor record label launched its Bluebird line. This was a series of budget recordings, sold at a lower price than their regular mainstream recordings, and aimed again at a black audience. The Bluebird records sold well for the time, kept fans happy, and fed more than a few otherwise starving musicians.
But unlike the old days, the producers and engineers remained in their studios and the musicians had to come to them. Victor/Bluebird was based in Chicago, and even though the performers who walked through the studio doors were as varied and different from each other as could be, a certain feel developed in all their recordings, a more sophisticated and urban feel that would come to be known as the “Chicago Sound”.
Because the performers rarely recorded in their own environment anymore, urbanization was becoming more and more apparent in blues music. St. Louis and New York, like Chicago, became centers of blues recording, and each city eventually spawned a “sound” that would come to be associated with it.
The common denominator always remained the same, however: blues music told the truth of its own experience, whether the truth was brutal and ugly, or joyous and hopeful.
Hollywood
Hollywood responded to the Great Depression with an explosion of good cheer that seems almost strained by today’s standards, but at the time proved to be an amazing tonic for keeping up morale in the bleakest of times. Musicals, comedies, and lavish productions featuring regular Joes making good in high society and getting the girl kept box office receipts high, even when saving enough money to buy food was a challenge for many Americans.
Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers made countless films during the ‘30’s, none of them with particularly memorable stories, but all with beautiful or exotic settings, spectacular dance numbers, and toe-tapping, feel-good music designed to take the film-goer away from his worries—at least for an hour and fifteen minutes or so.
The Marx Brothers had a different approach—direct attack on the institutions that many Americans already resented. High class society, universities, and politicians all came under satirical fire in the Marx Brothers comedies, much to the delight of audiences unsure of who to blame for their current predicament.
What these comedies, musicals and spectacles had in common was music—tender romantic ballads and upbeat, finger-snapping tunes with catchy lyrics and sassy instrumentation. The Depression rarely showed its face in America’s cinemas, and then only fleetingly.
The Golden Era of Swing
Chasing the Depression blues away with music was far more common than celebrating its woes. By 1935, a new form of jazz had assimilated itself into the popular culture, and as “race” and blues recordings declined, this new jazz prospered. It came from the same roots that blues and folk came from, “hot jazz”, but evolved along different lines.
In the 1920’s, “hot jazz” stretched the boundaries of what was musically possible. King Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton, Bix Beiderbecke and the phenomenon known as Louis Armstrong made music that fit the joyful, exuberant mood of the time. It was the music of bravado and unlimited human potential. Most importantly, it was music that had swing.
The musicians that followed in those giant footsteps continued to push the form forward, with bigger bands and more sophisticated arrangements. Louis Armstrong was the innovator of the solo instrumentalist, but musicians like Fletcher Henderson helped refine the concept, and the big bands of Benny Goodman and Count Basie soared to even greater heights. The emergence of Duke Ellington signaled a major turning point; more than any other band leader before him, he brought a new level of style, substance and musical insight to American music, an insight that may never have happened if it hadn’t been formed against the backdrop of the Great Depression.
Who would have thought that, in the end, a song by Bing Crosby would have summed it all up? “Brother Can You Spare a Dime?” was written in 1931 by E.Y. Harburg and Jay Gorney, initially for a Broadway musical called “New Americana”. It’s not a blues song or a “hot jazz” number or even a feel-good Hollywood musical tune, despite its origins on Broadway. But this song performed by an icon of popular music spoke every bit as poignantly and honestly about the Great Depression, and the disillusionment that followed in the hearts of Americans, as anything by Tampa Red or Charley Patton.
“They used to tell me I was building a dream, and so I followed the mob
When there was earth to plow or guns to bear, I was always there right on the job
They used to tell me I was building a dream, with peace and glory ahead
Why should I be standing in line, just waiting for bread?”
By the time the country had begun dragging itself laboriously out of the economic crisis, the musical landscape was unrecognizable from what it had been on October 24, 1929. An enormous shift had occurred, a seismic rumble with after-tremors that are still felt, even today. Different forms had found creative nourishment, and even though they had all drank from the same well, what each grew into couldn’t have been more diverse. There’s a huge aesthetic difference between the music of someone like Duke Ellington and someone like Robert Johnson—even more so, someone like Fred Astaire—but they all have a common trait, and taken together, they form one clear sound: the sound of a country that refused to let go of hope in the face of adversity.
You can contact Heath Lowrance at heathlowrance@gmail.com, or visit www.psychonoir.blogspot.com.