A land of immigrants is the perfect musical laboratory

Popular music, like so much of American culture, reflects a kaleidoscope of contributions, a cross-fertilization of styles, and a blending of dreams. It could hardly be otherwise in this nation of immigrants. Arguably the United States is a perfect musical laboratory: take people from every corner of the globe, give them freedom to create. Distribute their effort: by sheet music, phonograph, radio – or, for the younger reader: by Blu-ray Disc, mp3, Internet stream.

And what results! European ballads recast with African poly-rhythmic textures or blended with a Cuban-flavored habanera or a more “refined” rumba. “Cold” bop. “Hot” jazz. “Acid” rock. “Gangsta” rap. We might speak less of a singular American popular music than of a constellation of mutually- enriching American popular “musics.” Elvis Presley borrows from African-American blues, and black Motown stars recast “white” pop. Ask Khmer-American rapper Prach Ly, also known as “praCh,” about American popular music and he’ll speak of growing up with Snoop Dog, Dr. Dre, Run DMC, and Public Enemy on the radio and of cutting his first album in his parents’ garage. Lacking a mixing board, Prach used a karaoke machine and sampled old Khmer Rouge propaganda speeches for his powerful musical condemnation of the Cambodian genocide.

We hope the pages that follow convey a sense of creative ferment, of artistic drive, and of how Americans, borrowing from diverse musical traditions, have made their own original contributions to humanity’s truly universal language. The reader will encounter here crooners and rappers, folkies and rockers, the “King,” a Prince, and the “Queen of Soul.” Explained here is the latest in musical technology, from the solid- body electric guitar to the lossless compression digital file. And readers will learn about the people who make the music, truly American in their stunning diversity. Theirs are perhaps the most wonderful stories of all.

 
A couple whirls across the floor of Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom, 1953.Consider the African-American child, born in 1901 and living in a poor New Orleans neighborhood. At the age of seven, with his mother and sister in poverty, he found work with a family of junk dealers – Russian Jewish immigrants nearly as poor as his own family. “They were always warm and kind to me,” he later would write – indeed, as one scholar later put it, they “virtually adopted him.” The boy would ride the junk wagon and blow a small tin horn to attract potential customers.

As he later wrote:

One day when I was on the wagon with Morris Karnovsky … we passed a pawn shop which had in its window – an old tarnished beat up “B” Flat cornet. It cost only $5. Morris advanced me $2 on my salary. Then I put aside 50 cents each week from my small pay – finally the cornet was paid in full. Boy, was I a happy kid.

That boy’s name was Louis Armstrong. He would give the world jazz.

American popular music is the sound of countless Louis Armstrongs sharing the music in their souls. It spans a matchless range of human experience, from matters of the heart – Sinatra bemoaning a lost love “in the wee small hours of the morning” – to the political protest of Country Joe and the Fish performing the “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag.” Some tunes propel couples to the dance floor, there to twist or jitterbug, hustle or tango. Songwriters depict their muses so vividly we can almost believe them real: the Beach Boys’ Caroline perhaps, Chuck Berry’s Maybellene, Bob Dylan’s “Absolutely Sweet Marie,” or Rickie Lee Jones’s “Chuck E.” And sometimes what resonates is not the girl in the song, but the one with whom you first heard it, a long time ago.

“Without music, life would be a mistake,” the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote. Here you will meet many visionaries who would agree.
 

Musicians gather around Louis Armstrong, seated at piano. Armstrong gave the world a lasting legacy — jazz.