The first major composer of popular music with a uniquely American style was Stephen Foster (1826-1864). He established a pattern that has shaped American music ever since -- combining elements of the European musical tradition with African-American rhythms and themes. Of Irish ancestry, Foster grew up in the South, where he heard slave music and saw minstrel shows, which featured white performers in black make-up performing African-American songs and dances. Such material inspired some of Foster's best songs, which many Americans still know by heart: "Oh! Susanna," "Camptown Races," "Ring the Banjo," "Old Folks at Home" (better known by its opening line: "Way down upon the Swanee River").

Before the movies and radio, most Americans had to entertain themselves or wait for the arrival in town of lecturers, circuses, or the traveling stage revues known as vaudeville. Dozens of prominent American entertainers got their starts in vaudeville -- W.C. Fields, Jack Benny, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Buster Keaton, Sophie Tucker, Fanny Brice, Al Jolson, and the Three Stooges, to name just a few -- and the medium demanded a steady supply of new songs. Late in the 19th century, music publishing became a big business in the United States, with many firms clustered in New York City, on a street that became known as Tin Pan Alley.

Vaudeville and the European genre of operetta spawned the Broadway musical, which integrates songs and dancing into a continuous story with spoken dialogue. The first successful example of the new genre -- and still one of the best -- was Jerome Kern's Showboat, which premiered in 1927. Interestingly, Showboat pays tribute to the black influence on mainstream American music with a story centered on miscegenation and, as its most poignant song, the slave lament "Ol' Man River."

Songwriter Irving Berlin (1888-1989) made a smooth transition from Tin Pan Alley to Broadway. An immigrant of Russian-Jewish extraction, he wrote some of the most popular American songs: "God Bless America," "Easter Parade," "White Christmas," "There's No Business Like Show Business," and "Cheek to Cheek." Cole Porter (1891-1964) took the Broadway show song to new heights of sophistication with his witty lyrics and rousing melodies, combined in such songs as "Anything Goes," "My Heart Belongs to Daddy," "You're the Top," "I Get a Kick Out of You," and "It's De-Lovely."

Black composers such as Scott Joplin (1868-1917) and Eubie Blake (1883-1983) drew on their own heritage to compose songs, ragtime pieces for piano, and, in Joplin's case, an opera. Joplin was all but forgotten after his death, but his music made a comeback starting in the 1970s. Blake wrote the music for Shuffle Along, the first Broadway musical by and about blacks, and continued to perform well into his 90s. Blues songs, which had evolved from slaves' work songs, became the rage in New York City and elsewhere during the 1920s and 1930s; two of the blues' finest practitioners were Ma Rainey (1886-1939) and Bessie Smith (c.1898-1937).