Anomale Used Blog

While radio and television weren't exactly new to the American people, they became much more affordable and common in the 1950s. Hosts of music radio shows, called disk jockeys, became celebrities in their own right, and the spread of the popularity of rock n roll music is indebted to many disk jockeys that cropped up all over the country. The term rock n Roll came from Alan Freed, a disk jockey from Cleveland, Ohio, who hosted a rhythm and blues radio show. Freed's show The Moondog House was top rated and one of the first to play R&B records on air. Freed also hosted the first rock concert, the Moondog Coronation Ball, in Cleveland on March 21, 1952. The show lasted only 45 minutes and was oversold, causing a fittingly chaotic scene for the first rock n roll concert. Rock n roll transcended as a form of music and began to affect other areas of life. In addition to changing the audio landscape of music, it began to influence other areas of pop culture, including movies and ...

I had to laugh. Isn’t youth grand? The arrogance and ignorance of those who don’t have a clue. Most of whom, were not even born yet, or anywhere close to the time of when Rock music emerged with fire and brimstone. Well, I have news for you. There isn’t one rock musician alive, or dead, today who hasn’t taken something from the Blues at one time or another. That’s right! Not one! Have they also created new innovative riffs and progressions, absolutely... or any of the others who used and infused Blues into their music or showed respect to the artists before them, you are a bunch of Posers. That’s right, you heard me… Posers... because I bet if you do your homework, much of what you listen to, play and/or have written emanates from some musician in the past that did it before you or wrote it or played it. And most likely it is from the Blues or Jazz, or Folk or classical music. In the end, if the Blues and Jazz were the roots of Rock Music, then everything else in Rock that came after...

One conspicuous omission from a list of usual birthplace suspects would be Hattiesburg, Mississippi, due to the 1936 recordings of the Mississippi Jook Band. The band was founded by Blind Roosevelt Graves and his brother Uaroy, who were best known for gospel songs... These foundational gospel tunes were the kind of seminal songs that were in the DNA of all subsequent American music. Along with pianist Cooney Vaughn, the Graves brothers recorded as the Mississippi Jook Band, and in the more secular recordings... we hear the nascent sounds of Rock and Roll. Rock’s roots derived from the rocking and reeling style of ecstatic singing found in the maverick Sanctified and Holiness churches, where guitars, drums, and horns were as acceptable as the pianos and organ, and more easily afforded. According to Palmer, the Graves brothers... featured fully formed rock and roll guitar riffs and a stomping rock and roll beat... Rock and Roll as a genre arguably dates back almost a century, it might be...

Rock and roll has evolved since its inception in the 1950s. As the decades progressed, rock and roll began to incorporate elements of other genres, such as jazz, folk, and classical music. This evolution of styles led to the development of genres such as hard rock, heavy metal, punk rock, and alternative rock. As rock and roll continues to evolve, new genres and subgenres are constantly emerging, leading to an ever changing landscape of music. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is a museum and hall of fame located in Cleveland, Ohio, United States, dedicated to recording the history of some of the best known and most influential artists, producers, engineers, and other notable figures who have had some major influence in the development of rock and roll music. The Hall of Fame was established in 1983 by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Foundation, which is a non profit organization dedicated to preserving and honouring the history of rock and roll. The museum features a wide variety of artef...

Like all other musical genres, jazz can be characterized by wellndefined sub genres like swing or bebop, and by the musicians who dominated a particular period or collection of periods. But the creative output of jazz trumpeter Miles Davis quashed those norms. Davis charted an eclectic path where he didn’t settle on any one particular sound or playing style. When first introduced to popular culture, blues and jazz were branded by traditionalists as the devil’s music, yet both genres have endured the test of time and continue to maintain strong followings today through fans who crave classic recordings as well as those who seek out contemporary artists. Recent years have seen an increasing influence of R&B, hip hop and pop music on jazz in particular. Another internet aided trend of modern jazz is that of extreme reharmonization, performed by virtuosic players known for their speed and mastery of complex polyrhythms. Though their roots date back more than 150 years, blues and jazz a...

The term Rock & Roll is still popular to use, because that started it all, but If you say the Rock & Roll era… it’s the mid fifties to the early sixties. Rock, on the other hand, doesn’t refer to a specific era, and includes a wide variety of musical styles. It’s up for debate whether Rock’s broad sweep should include Pop, Hip Hop, and Rap. But let’s try to pinpoint the timeline a little more. Almost without fail, programmers of Classic Rock formats on radio stations, and now streaming services, start with the year 1967. The progression of Rock in the 1960’s, and the inspiration it gave young people to take up music, caused an explosion of Rock in the 1970’s. There have been many outstanding Rock musicians and songs in all of the decades after the ’70’s, but whether it’s called Rock & Roll or Rock, it’s currently taking a back seat to other types of music. Maybe there are young musicians practicing on their guitars, keyboards and drums, ready to return Rock back into wi...

There has always been an uncomfortable tension between rhythm and blues and rock and roll, a cyclical influence that vacillates between inspiration, appropriation and separation. Popular music has broken off into categories of rock, pop, country, and R&B, each with their own origin stories. But R&B and rock, usually codified as vastly different, Black and white styles, have long been intertwined in ways our historical memory may have us forget.  Despite the innovation that comes from separation, rock and R&B always find their way back to each other. In recent years, rock veterans have turned to the genre’s classics for inspiration. Queens of the Stone Age veered from their typical hard rock with 2017’s Villains, a dance y album inspired by frontman Josh Homme’s love of 1920s jazz and swing, other Black genres that laid the groundwork for the popular music of today. The whitewashing of rock’s history has oversimplified music’s malleability and silenced the voices of Amer...

As these events in the civil rights movement focused America’s attention on the moral contradictions and social inequity within society, R&B artists and songwriters increasingly began to address issues that went beyond interpersonal relations and group camaraderie... It was followed by songs that overtly related to the civil rights, ethnic consciousness, and anti war movements.  As R&B in this period was associated increasingly with the civil rights movement, record executives at both Motown and Stax would produce artists and undertake initiatives that explicitly reflected their commitment to African American community empowerment. In 1968, for example, Stax signed the Staple Singers, whose music grew out of performances in Chicago area churches and enjoyed crossover gospel to R&B success with their protest and message oriented repertoire... In 1970 Motown launched its spoken word Black Forum label... In 1972 Stax artists participated at an event in South Los Angeles, W...

Jump blues music was created by breakout stars from the 1930s and 1940s big bands... These breakout stars included sax players Louis Jordan, Bullmoose Jackson, Illinois Jacquet, and Big Jay McNeely. They also included singers Louis Prima, Big Joe Turner, Roy Milton, Amos Milburn, and Wynonie Harris. The stars of jump blues were schooled in jazz and big band music, and they found popular success when they streamlined their music. Most jump blues songs featured repeated riffs, boogie woogie bass lines, and shuffle drum patterns. This simplicity made them popular with the general public. The stars of jump blues directly inspired early R&B and rock 'n roll artists. Some... began their careers playing jump blues but became far more famous for R&B. Others composed songs that took off when covered by rock artists such as Roy Brown, author of Good Rockin' Tonight. By the 1950s, rock and R&B performers... had seized the popular music scene in cities like New York, Chicago, a...

Up until now we have been looking at the major and minor blues scales. A good solo probably will not be just made up of these. Although you can get away with using a minor blues scale to cover those 12 bars, and initially this may be your best way of overcoming the fear of jumping in there when suddenly you are confronted with a 12 bar solo to improvise, a good solo is often a bit more complex, but need not be too complex, this is rock & roll remember. You can combine all the elements we have looked at to create a melodically interesting and rocking solo. These elements can include just playing long notes with or without effects such as growling and note bending. The note bending is very useful when playing flattened blue notes as you can play slightly sharper or flatter than the actual pitch to get a much better blues feel... You can also use the good old major scale in places, sometimes with a flattened 3rd or 7th. At other times you can just play a phrase that makes sense musica...

Blues has also been part of this musical evolution. In fact, much of the modern music we know today has been highly influenced by the blues genre for its common AAB lyrical structure, the most common traditional song form for songwriters found in rock ‘n roll and blues music. The Nu in blues music, or any other genre, is referred to as a new take or a modern version of a particular musical style. This new take can include adding a mixture of new instruments like electric guitars and synthesizers, or infusing elements of other genres like rock, hip hop, folk and electronic music. Today, blues and gospel music have been catalysts in expressing our stand against injustices in the world. The power of music has helped shape our society, empower people and promote change. Source: Jazz, Soul, Rhythm and Blues: The Legacy of Diverity Buddy De Franco - Billie's Bounce Written by: Charlie Parker Released on: The Champs album Released in: 1999 "Buddy DeFranco is one of the great clarinet...

The coming of rock & roll in the mid Fifties was not merely a musical revolution but a social and generational upheaval of vast and unpredictable scope. It also represented a major reversal in the business of popular music. There were no pre rock & roll counterparts... who parlayed a tiny Memphis label with a staff of one into a company whose artists sold millions of records throughout the world. In record business terms, rock & roll meant that small, formerly specialized labels like Sun, Chess and Specialty were invading the upper reaches of the pop charts, long the exclusive domain of the major corporate record labels and old line Tin Pan Alley music publishing interests. Concentrating on high volume sales and bland, lowest common denominator pop disposables, the majors were caught napping by an unholy coalition of Southern renegade radio engineers, Philips, Jewish immigrant merchants, the Chess brothers,  black ex swing band musicians and raving hillbilly wild men. T...

The consequence of this historic dividing line is that, whereas today's teenagers born in the 1970s can recite Beatles and Dylan lyrics from memory, the great original rock 'n roll tunes are only vaguely familiar even to 35 year olds who grew up immediately in the wake of the rock 'n roll explosion. I have a lot of party tapes containing a broad mix of songs from different eras including the fifties that I will presumptuously install in the cassette deck at a gathering or on a long car ride. Invariably, I absorb awkward and disappointed stares and groans when... someone usually insists on fast forwarding past it. This is too bad, because the music from that time, especially from the epochal years of 1956 and 1957, is truly great music. Sure, it lacks any overriding social or political themes, there are no screaming guitar solos or overdubbed synthesizers, and the recordings are generally poor, and pre stereo. But the energy, vitality, and originality of breakthrough rock ...

Blues on the move even in the USA blues has travelled and morphed. Urban blues evolved from classic blues following the Great Migration, or the Great Northern Drive, to Chicago and Detroit and other industrial cities of the north from the 1920’s... and the advent of electric Chicago blues was born. B.B. King became one of the most important names in rhythm & blues music in the 1950s, introducing the big band sound with plenty of brass, but his electric guitar expertise was at the forefront. The blues was changing with the advent of jazz and rock & roll throughout the 1950’s, but Chicago blues was still being played. This is where the beginning of the British Blues movement started with UK bands... heroes were the likes of Howlin’ Wolf who recorded several songs that became his most famous tunes and were also played by the new British culture of blues artists. Blues has morphed in so many directions,  rhythm and blues, electric blues, acoustic blues, country blues, blues ro...

It all started with gospel music. After the American Civil War, in the mid 19th century, people moved north from the plantations to the cities, St Louis, Chicago and Memphis. By the end of the 19th century the syncopated rhythms of ragtime and the improvisational nature of jazz had arrived. Hard times in the great depression of the 1930s drove many swing jazz big bands out of business. Jump blues filled the gap. Patrons of dance halls needed small groups who could match the volume and atmosphere of the departed big bands. Singers would shout and saxophonists would honk. This gave performers names like shouters and honkers. Jump blues was an uptempo jazz tinged style of blues. Usually characterised by a vocalist in front of a large horn driven orchestra or medium sized combo with multiple horns. The style had a driving rhythm, intensely shouted vocal and honking tenor saxophone solos. There was also less reliance on the guitar as a lead instrument. It also had a hard, rhythmic drive and...

By the early 30s, folklorists John Lomax and his son Alan were capturing some of the songs mentioning rock... for the Library Of Congress. Run Old Jeremiah was based on American rural South rocking and reeling spirituals, which had originated, as so much of popular music did, in churches. That tradition later found expression in Rock ’n roll. The rise of the record industry in that decade accelerated the way different musical styles were spread and synthesized, at a time when the foundations of the sound of later rock records were being laid. Examples of this include Big Bill Broonzy’s work in Chicago, after he switched from singing acoustically to working with horns, piano, bass and drums. In Broonzy’s case this was to satisfy an urban audience that wanted to drink and dance to loud rhythmic music in crowded clubs. But the myriad influences included the close harmony work of the Boswell Sisters from New Orleans. Rock also had its origins in the jazz jump music and R&B of the 40s.....

At the turn of the twentieth century, with the newfound ability of song publishers to mass produce sheet music for a growing middle class, popular songs moved from being a novelty to being a major business enterprise. With the emergence of the phonograph, song publishers also discovered that recorded tunes boosted interest in and sales of sheet music. Thus, songwriting and Tin Pan Alley played a key role in transforming popular music into a mass medium. As sheet music grew in popularity, jazz developed in New Orleans. An improvisational and mostly instrumental musical form, jazz absorbed and integrated a diverse body of musical styles, including African rhythms, blues, and gospel. Jazz influenced many bandleaders throughout the 1930s and 1940s... among the most popular of the swing jazz bands... rhythmic music also dominated radio, recordings, and dance halls in their day. The first pop vocalists of the twentieth century were products of the vaudeville circuit, which radio, movies, and...

Vinyl Art and What It Is Deadwax art by Alex Vinyl records were mainly used for listening to music long before the digital era of Mp3 players and downloaded music. Today vinyl discs exist in forms of artwork. These artworks demonstrate that the recycled vinyl records do not need to go to waste. Russian painter Feliks Kaparchuk uses old vinyls to render his vivid landscape paintings. His unconventional choice of circular canvas creates the illusion of observing nature through a porthole window. What is vinyl art Vinyl art refers to creative pieces made from vinyl records. These include intricately cut records that showcase stunning designs that touch an important chord in every music lover’s heart. Instead of sending damaged vinyl to the landfill artist give it new life as vinyl art. Vinyl can create a design on a temporary surface before transferring this same design to a more permanent surface. These are an excellent example of how you can use vinyl in crafting. It’s just one use, how...

The blues had an illegitimate baby and we named it rock 'n roll... Having started as rhythm and blues music in the 1940s before gaining a foothold and evolving in the '50s, no one person can lay claim to inventing the rock 'n roll phenomenon. Rock 'n roll was influenced by a Deep South black music genre called the blues. It, rock 'n roll] started out as rhythm and blues... There wasn't nobody playing it at the time but black people... White kids started paying more attention to this music, white girls were going over to this music, they needed somebody to come in there, like Elvis. Many other artists rock and roll and otherwise have been greatly influenced by Little Richard... One of the greatest and most influential garage rock groups of all time, Tacoma, Washington’s Sonics might have looked pretty strait laced, but they owed a heavy debt indeed to Little Richard. Through all of this we can see how the black community invented rock and roll and how through tha...

Rock and roll was everything the suburban 1950s were not. While parents of the decade were listening to... big bands, their children were moving to a new beat. Rock and roll sent shockwaves across America. A generation of young teenagers collectively rebelled against the music their parents loved. In general, the older generation loathed rock and roll. Appalled by the new styles of dance the movement evoked, churches proclaimed it Satan's music. Because rock and roll originated among the lower classes and a segregated ethnic group, many middlenclass whites thought it was tasteless. Rock and roll records were banned from many radio stations and hundreds of schools. The commercial possibilities were limitless. As a generation of young adults finished military service, bought houses in suburbia, and longed for stability and conformity, their children seemed to take comfort for granted. They wanted to release the tensions that bubbled beneath the smooth surface of postwar America. Abov...

Advances in music technology are important in the early '50s as the solid body electric guitar becomes commercially available and is quickly adapted by R&B artists, and eventually Country and Pop artists. The 78 RPM record is replaced by the LP, long playing, vinyl album and the 45 RPM single is introduced, soon becoming the standard for jukeboxes. Although major record labels are slow to pick up on the trend, independent record labels such as Sun, Memphis, Ace, Jackson, MS,  Vee-Jay, Gary, IN, Chess, Chicago, Specialty Records, Los Angeles, Atlantic, New York, and other labels are quick to pick up on the opportunity and begin to release Rock & Roll records from newly signed artists.  In 1955 rock and roll has it's first nationwide number 1 hit... Rock's influence spreads quickly, impacting radio, movies, TV, fashion, attitudes and language worldwide. Initially dismissed as a fad, rock music proves its' staying power and teen culture drives the music industry, ...

The debate over what constitutes rock and roll has become a heated pastime with music fans. Merriam Webster defines rock and roll as popular music usually played on electronically amplified instruments and characterized by a persistent heavily accented beat, repetition of simple phrases, and often country, folk, and blues elements. You could probably pick and choose elements from that definition that benefit whatever side of the argument you sit on. To truly understand what rock and roll is, you need to examine how the art form began and how it has evolved. The origins of rock and roll date back to the late 1940s. The genre grew out of various other genres such as gospel, jazz, blues, boogie woogie, rhythm and blues and country music. The rock and roll pioneers of the 1950s took elements of other genres, especially blues, to create something refreshing and edgier, but still a lot of fun. The earliest image one might have of rock and roll is that of Chuck Berry and his guitar. With the ...

Rock 'n roll and rock music emerged in the 1950s and 1960s from roots in African American musical styles, such as jump blues, rhythm and blues, and electric blues, and in white styles, such as swing, western swing, and country music. The term rock 'n roll originated in certain US R&B songs of the late 1940s. In the early 1950s, white US disc jockey Alan Freed began to apply it more broadly to music for the newly established socio economic category, the teenager. The best known rock 'n roll stars of 1955-9 included Africann Americans... Rock 'n roll became an international phenomenon, including a substantial following in Canada, but until the 1960s and the development of rock music, nearly all of its stars were from the US. With the blues providing an important backdrop both to rock 'n roll and rock music, it is not surprising that many bands and solo artists pursued blues rock and similar types of fusions. Improvised solos, especially on the electric guitar, and...

Many jazz artists who were active in the 1950s will tell you that the rise of rock 'n roll marked the death of jazz as a form of popular music. While there might be truth in that observation, it seems equally true that, without jazz, rock 'n roll might never have happened, at least it wouldn't have happened as it did. And the connective tissue between jazz and rock 'n roll is the post WWII rhythm and blues performed by artists such as Louis Jordan, Roy Brown, Wynonie Harris and many others, most of whom came out of the Big Band Jazz Swing Era. Although many of the early rhythm and blues singers performed with big band accompaniment, the primary element that separated their music from other big band music at the time was this, The R&B artists were black and performing and recording for a predominantly black audience. But a lot of white music lovers were paying attention, as well, as were young musicians of all races. Pioneering rockers such as Elvis Presley and Chuck...