American Music

I

Introduction

American Music, the folk, popular, and classical music of the United States—created by American-born or American-trained composers, or originating in American culture—and possessing a distinctively American character.

II

c. 1630-1820

The colonial roots of American music are English. The first book printed in the English colonies was the Bay Psalm Book. Its ninth edition (1698) contained 13 psalm tunes, all of them from Europe; some, including “Old Hundredth”, are still sung. After 1750 native-born composers in New England established a distinctive religious music. Spread through “singing schools” (informal courses of musical instruction), Yankee hymnody—with its angular melodies and open-fifth chords—was unconventional by European standards. A favourite form was the fuguing tune, a four-part piece that began like a hymn and ended like a round. The most famous of the New England “tunesmiths” was William Billings, whose collection The New England Psalm Singer (1770) marked the appearance of the new style.

III

Early 19th Century

After the American War of Independence (1775-1783), European taste reasserted itself in church music. The music of the New England tunesmiths was scorned as “unscientific” by such composers as Thomas Hastings and William Batchelder Bradbury. The dominant figure was Lowell Mason, who had a profound influence on 19th-century musical life in America. Besides introducing music into the Boston schools in 1838, he composed more than 1,200 hymns and compiled five major collections of church music, the most important and most successful being The Boston Handel and Haydn Society Collection of Church Music (1822).

Traditional New England religious music migrated to the South, where a new kind of folk hymnody emerged from the camp meetings of the religious revival movement. Close to modern gospel tunes in their repetitious, catchy refrains, the revival hymns and spirituals include such well-known examples as “Amazing Grace” and “Wayfaring Stranger”. Southern folk hymns were typically printed in “shape notes”, an easy-to-read system of notation in which the notes had different shapes to represent the seven syllables of the scale. The shape-note collection of greatest and most lasting popularity was The Sacred Harp (1844) of Benjamin Franklin White and E. J. King.

IV

Mid-19th Century to the American Civil War

The presence of the African in America surfaced in popular music in the blackface minstrel show. Its characteristic white, four-man troupe was defined by the Virginia Minstrels in the 1840s, performing on banjo, tambourine, bone castanets, and fiddle. The banjo virtuoso Daniel Decatur Emmett was the outstanding composer of minstrel songs; his best-known work is “Dixie” (1859). By mid-century the first blacks began to perform in minstrel shows.

Genuine African-American music was already established in oral tradition at the beginning of the 19th century. The first published collection of it, Slave Songs of the United States, appeared in 1867. Among the famous tunes the collection contains are “Michael, Row Your Boat Ashore” and “Roll, Jordan, Roll”. After the Civil War (1861-1865), the fund-raising concerts of the Fisk University Jubilee Singers made such spirituals the first Afro-American folk music to reach a national and international audience.

The greatest songwriter of the period, and perhaps of the century, was Stephen Collins Foster, who composed songs for the famous Christy Minstrels, such as “Oh, Susanna” (1848) and “Camptown Races” (1850), and parlour songs, such as “I Dream of Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair” (1854) and “Beautiful Dreamer” (1864). Foster was immortalized by his folklike melodies and his ability to combine Anglo-Irish and Afro-American idioms with those of Italian operatic song. Notable composers after Foster were Henry Clay Work, George Root, and James Bland.