The Chi-Lites - A Letter To Myself

Americans have been singing since the first Europeans and Africans began arriving in North America in the sixteenth century. Work songs, hymns, love songs, dance tunes, humorous songs, and parodies, such songs provide a record of American history, serving both as historical sources and also as subjects of historical investigation. During the colonial, revolutionary, and federal periods, 1607-1820, most American songs were strongly tied to the musical traditions of the British isles. Hymn tunes, ballads, theater songs, and drinking songs were imported from England or based closely on English models. The main exceptions were the hymns of German speaking communities in Pennsylvania, the music of African American slave communities, and the songs of New Orleans, which were closely linked to the French West Indies and to France. Those exceptions aside, the most distinctively American songs were patriotic ones, like Yankee Doodle and the Star Spangled Banner, and even these were adaptations of English originals.

American song in the second half of the nineteenth century underwent a tremendous commercial expansion, which extended into the twentieth century and indeed has not abated today. Initially, sheet music and pocket songsters were the primary means of circulating songs, since many Americans played and sang music in their own homes. The music publishing industry was increasingly concentrated in New York City’s famous Tin Pan Alley by the 1880s. After that point, however, songs also came to be bought, sold, and preserved in a succession of new media, sound recordings and player pianos in the 1890s, radio in the 1920s, movie sound tracks in the late 1920s, television in the 1950s, cassette tapes in the early 1960s, CDs in the early 1980s, DVDs in the mid 1990s, and MP3s in the late 1990s. This commercial expansion meant that more songs were composed, performed, produced, and consumed in the United States, as well as exported to, and received from, the rest of the world.

Sources: Making Sense of American Popular Song by John Spitzer and Ronald G. Walters*

The Chi-Lites - A Letter To Myself

• Released in: March 1973
• Written by: Eugene Record
• Genre: Chicago Soul, Psychedelic Soul, Soul

"The group formed in the late 1950s when Eugene Record, Robert Lester, and Clarence Johnson, teamed up with Marshall Thompson and Creadel Jones to form The Hi-lites. They changed their name to the Chi-Lites in 1964  to add a tribute to their home town of Chicago."

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* Making Sense of American Popular Song by John Spitzer and Ronald G. Walters

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