I agree that the author's "most important musical form" assertion is made silly by his total lack of evidence. The many complicated inter-relationships between blues, jazz (and gospel, folk, country-western, Vaudeville/Broadway, etc.), and rock make it pretty hard to talk about what's important, what's not, or who's responsible for what. I'm not sure I could make a well-supported "most important musical form of the 20th century" argument at all, for any style of music, at least not with only 16 years remove from the century.
That said, other than its popularity in the first half of the century (My quibble with your 'mid-60s' birthdate for rock: Elvis, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis and others were all big stars before 1960), what's your case for jazz being the most important musical form of the 20th century?
I see. I'm sorry I misunderstood. I didn't mean to sound confrontational, just curious to hear more about your line of thinking. I have heard and enjoyed some very spirited defenses of jazz as the one and only important musical form of the 20th century and just wondered if you had one too.
I also play some jazz (very poorly), and I do think that in purely musical terms -- that is, not commercial or cultural -- it isn't too hard to argue that jazz and blues were more important or foundational to the music of the 20th century than rock later was. But IMHO such comparative arguments fall down when they try to address anything beyond the innovative ways that melody, harmony, and rhythm were reimagined in jazz, and to a slightly lesser extent, blues. It's hard enough to compartmentalize and quantify different musical genres, let alone find a yardstick that can measure them all over the course of 100 years. That's really all I wanted to suggest in my above comment, not that you should defend your statement.
Apropos of nothing other than the fact that I think it's interesting, I just found this list of Billboard's best-selling music in the U.S. from 1900-1910. It has links to specific years and other decades too. There's no blues in the 1900-1910 chart, and very little that we would call jazz now, other than the rags that hindsight allows us to see as a parent to jazz. But we now know that early jazz and blues were already very popular in the bars, homes, and streets of the African-American world by 1910. I haven't been able to find a source to confirm this yet, but I'm fairly sure that music marketed as for/by African-Americans ("race music") was not included in Billboard charts in the first decades of the 20th century. So it's interesting to see the commercial rise of early jazz and blues and their influence on "white" music, and vice versa, through this segregated commercial lens - especially if you look at the 1920s and 1930s charts too. /geekout
Fascinating. Thanks! Makes me wonder how far back we could locate the emergence of the blues (or jazz) if it weren't for the racial barriers and scarcity or lack of recording tech back then. Crazy Blues has always sounded like a New Orleans-style blues to me, but I now realize that assumes that such a thing existed in 1920. I'm always inclined to assume that the earliest recorded examples of jazz and blues were preceded by at least a decade or two of similar work by influential but unknown or unrecorded musicians. For example, I know some guitarists who became well known later for playing blues, like Blind Lemon Jefferson and Lead Belly, were performing in the mid 1910s, and I figure they had teachers/influences who may have brought much of the later "blues" form (flatted 5th, AAB structure, secular/risque lyrics, etc.) from the 1890s or earlier. Sure wish we could hear them now, or hear New Orleans music (Conga Square, funereal march/parades, Mardi Gras) from the decades before the first "jass" bands began to emerge there. Guess I'll just have to add some histories of turn of the century African-American music to my already too-long reading list instead!
BTW, I think your English is great. I'm just hypersensitive to the possibility that I've offended or angered someone without meaning to. Always have been, especially online, without the benefit of vocal inflections, eye contact, and body language. It's something I need to work on.
Great point about the protest/work song roots of what came to be called blues. I hadn't thought of that as an influence that was made more explicit in later years. I associate songs like "Strange Fruit" with the influence of the Harlem Renaissance on later songwriters and poets, but of course those kinds of sentiments are much older than that.
It wasn't bad at all! But if it took some special skill to read it, it was a skill you probably have earned too, by reading lots of first-year student essays. Your comment was far easier to make sense of than some of those! As I recently wrote in the margins of a particularly garbled student paper: "I have no idea what this sentence means, but I know what you're trying to say."
I agree that the author's "most important musical form" assertion is made silly by his total lack of evidence. The many complicated inter-relationships between blues, jazz (and gospel, folk, country-western, Vaudeville/Broadway, etc.), and rock make it pretty hard to talk about what's important, what's not, or who's responsible for what. I'm not sure I could make a well-supported "most important musical form of the 20th century" argument at all, for any style of music, at least not with only 16 years remove from the century.
That said, other than its popularity in the first half of the century (My quibble with your 'mid-60s' birthdate for rock: Elvis, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis and others were all big stars before 1960), what's your case for jazz being the most important musical form of the 20th century?
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