'Funky Drummer': New Orleans, James Brown and the rhythmic transformation of American popular music

2017 ◽  
pp. 123-148
Author(s):  
Alexander Stewart
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
American Popular Music

‘Funky Drummer’: New Orleans, James Brown and the rhythmic transformation of American popular music

Popular Music ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 293-318 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Stewart
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
World War ◽  
Related Development ◽  
American Popular Music ◽  
Rock N Roll ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Reverse Development

The singular style of rhythm & blues (R&B) that emerged from New Orleans in the years after World War II played an important role in the development of funk. In a related development, the underlying rhythms of American popular music underwent a basic, yet generally unacknowledged transition from triplet or shuffle feel (12/8) to even or straight eighth notes (8/8). Many jazz historians have shown interest in the process whereby jazz musicians learned to swing (for example, the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra through Louis Armstrong's 1924 arrival in New York), but there has been little analysis of the reverse development – the change back to ‘straighter’ rhythms. The earliest forms of rock 'n' roll, such as the R&B songs that first acquired this label and styles like rockabilly that soon followed, continued to be predominantly in shuffle rhythms. By the 1960s, division of the beat into equal halves had become common practice in the new driving style of rock, and the occurrence of 12/8 metre relatively scarce. Although the move from triplets to even eighths might be seen as a simplification of metre, this shift supported further subdivision to sixteenth-note rhythms that were exploited in New Orleans R&B and funk.

The origins of syncopation in American popular music

Popular Music ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-41
Author(s):  
David Temperley
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Vocal Music ◽  
Piano Music ◽  
Historical Process ◽  
American Popular Music ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Fourth Position

AbstractThe origins of syncopation in 20th-century American popular music have been a source of controversy. I offer a new account of this historical process. I distinguish between second-position syncopation, an accent on the second quarter of a half-note or quarter-note unit, and fourth-position syncopation, an accent on the fourth quarter of such a unit. Unlike second-position syncopation, fourth-position syncopation tends to have an anticipatory character. In an earlier study I presented evidence suggesting British roots for second-position syncopation. in contrast, fourth-position syncopation – the focus of the current study – seems to have had no presence in published 19th-century vocal music, British or American. It first appears in notation in ragtime songs and piano music at the very end of the 19th century; it was also used in recordings by African-American singers before it was widely notated.

Step It Up and Go

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Menconi
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
The State ◽  
College Town ◽  
American Idol ◽  
Recorded Music ◽  
American Popular Music ◽  
The Many ◽  
Nina Simone

This book is a love letter to the artists, scenes, and sounds defining North Carolina’s extraordinary contributions to American popular music. David Menconi spent three decades immersed in the state’s music, where traditions run deep but the energy expands in countless directions. Menconi shows how working-class roots and rebellion tie North Carolina’s Piedmont blues, jazz, and bluegrass to beach music, rock, hip-hop, and more. From mill towns and mountain coves to college-town clubs and the stage of American Idol, Blind Boy Fuller and Doc Watson to Nina Simone and Superchunk, Step It Up and Go celebrates homegrown music just as essential to the state as barbecue and basketball. Spanning a century of history from the dawn of recorded music to the present, and with sidebars and photos that help reveal the many-splendored glory of North Carolina’s sonic landscape, this is a must-read for every music lover.

“All That You Can’t Leave Behind”

Meridians ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (S1) ◽  
pp. 255-278
Author(s):  
Daphne A. Brooks
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Hurricane Katrina ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Black Female ◽  
First Century ◽  
Global Level ◽  
Original Title ◽  
Early Twenty

Abstract As numerous scholars have shown, Hurricane Katrina exacerbated the already-ongoing precarity of African American communities in New Orleans. The crisis demanded a reckoning with the afterlives of slavery at the national and global level. This article focuses on the work of Black women popular music artists whose early twenty-first century recordings and stirring performances addressed the traumas, the challenges, and the spectacular subjugation of Black women who fell victim to brutal disenfranchisement in the midst of the disaster. Beyonce’s B-Day album and Mary J. Blige’s history-making Katrina telethon performance are central to this discussion. The original title of this article was “‘All That You Can’t Leave Behind’: Black Female Soul Singing and the Politics of Surrogation in the Age of Catastrophe.”

Introduction

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeanne Pitre Soileau
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Public Schools ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
The Internet ◽  
White Children ◽  
Play Elements ◽  
Jump Rope ◽  
South Louisiana ◽  
Changing Society

This chapter covers the timeline from 1960 when New Orleans integrated its public schools, to 2011, the age of computers and the Internet. Integration had an immediate impact on children and their folklore – African American and white children began to communicate on the playground, sharing chants, jokes, jump rope rhymes, taunts, teases, and stories. Through the next forty-four years, schoolchildren of South Louisiana were able to conserve much traditional schoolyard lore while adapting to tremendous social and material changes and incorporating into play elements from media, computers, smartphones, and the Internet. As time passed African American vernacular became trendy among teenage whites. Black popular music became the music of choice for many worldwide. This is a story about how children, African American and “other” have learned to fit play into their rapidly changing society.

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