Music Part II

Question 1

What is Memphis defined by?

Answer 1

1. Geographic location
2. Material form
3. Investment with cultural meaning and value

Question 2

Why does Memphis matter?(It’s not the capital of Tennessee).

Answer 2

1. It is a regional center for the production, processing and distribution of cotton and agricultural products
2. It is a massive distribution center (FedEx)
3. Crucial location for the NAFTA superhighway
4. An Iconic American Place (Martin Luther King’s Assassination, the 1968 Sanitation Workers Strike, and a music hotbed_
5. A social and cultural crossroads.

Question 3

Why did many African American’s move to Chicago?

Answer 3

1. The terminus of the Illinois Central Railroad
2. A black newspaper in Chicago (the Defender) encouraged them do to so.
3. Illinois Central Railroad links to Chicago

Question 4

What was Chicago like before the 1940s?

Answer 4

1. Prior to 1900 there were a few thousand African Americans in Chicago (they were geographically scattered but highly concentrated)
2. Between 1910 and 1920 Chicago’s African American population increased nearly 250%. (First Wave of the ‘Great Migration’)
3. An atmosphere of tension/mistrust (occupation, residential, recreation segregation).
4. New musical forms – ragtime, blues, jazz from the rural country side and southern cities such as New Orleans
5. Middleclass reformers, offended by the style of music and behavior and the raw sexuality of jazz sought to eliminate this scene and sound.
6. Meanwhile, white men often went “slumming” into Chicago’s red light area “channeling [their] sexual energies away from the privatized Victorian domestic sphere…”

Question 5

What did radio do to Chicago in the 1920s?

Answer 5

1. Broadcasting promoted face-to-face community life
2. Encouraged listeners to participate in programs as talent of guests
3. Support ethnic institutions
4. Attend church
5. Attend sporting events
6. Vote for local politicians
7. Patronize local businesses
8. Support organized labor
9. Attend neighborhood dance halls
10. Induced listeners to physically traverse the metropolitan landscape to attend performances live

Question 6

How did radio spatially influence Chicago?

Answer 6

1. Radio allowed listeners to aurally ‘visit’ parts of the city they had never seen
2. Radio made certain that such ‘visits’ were at “minimal risk to their persons or reputations”
3. “listeners could sample ‘forbidden’ urban spaces and sounds and could skirt fears associated with the nocturnal city”
4. You could avoid a face-to-face encounter with strangers
5. Radio listening provided a measure of anonymity – you did have to worry about your ‘participatory presence’, if you didn’t like the sound you simply turned the dial
6. Radio made understandings of the ‘local’ important. The air waves were a fresh way to “mentally and physically locate [oneself] within the neighborhood, the metropolis, and the nation itself.”
7. Listeners ‘swelled with pride’ at hearing music/cultural programs that acknowledged/validated their particular languages, histories and cultural backgrounds
8. Listening to the radio helped listeners consolidate common interests across cultural divides
9. The spreading of community without propinquity

Question 7

Airwaves embody obvious and less-obvious forms of power and privilege. What does this mean?

Answer 7

`1. Self generated broadcasts allowed certain groups “a respite from subordinate status” that they experienced in other public settings (streets, parks, etc.)

2. At the same time, radio exposed subordinate status
3. While some groups were empowered, others were excluded from this electronic public culture
4. For example, African Americans were barred from the broadcast room control room prior to 1928
5. The physical absence of African Americans confirmed “their marginal social and cultural status elsewhere in the city”
6. Representations of ‘blackness’ were produced through a “sound of whiteness”
7. White studio bands, whites in blackface, syncopated dance music
8. The result was a racialized distortion of African Americans

Question 8

“Even as it collapsed urban space and changed the symbolic status of African Americans as cultural producers, broadcasting _____________ of African American musical culture from a material base…”

Answer 8

Disconnected aural representations

Question 9

Local radio remapped the symbolic geographies of class and race by bringing African American music to a wider audience. Broadcasting afforded African American Jazz and Blues artists a new level of_______.

Answer 9

Exposure, bringing aspects of a culture on the margins to the attention of the mainstream.

Question 10

Memphis in the 1950’s was perhaps…..

Answer 10

The only place in the south before the civil liberties movement transformed the region, where black and white folk traditions - African American blues and white country music- could meld to produce rock ‘n’ roll.

Question 11

Why Memphis?

Answer 11

1. The conditions were right
   -Memphis was a junction point
   of different traditions,
   different migration streams
2. The timing was right
   -Racial barriers were coming
   down in both northern and southern cities
   -Technological breakthroughs (FM transitor radio, long playing records, recording)
   -A generation of new entrepreneurs

Question 12

What did Rock n Roll do to the future of the music industry?

Answer 12

It challenged it.

1. Up until that point popular music in America was largely synonymous with New York’s Tin Pan Alley
   Songwriters
   -Major radio stations
   -Trade publications
2. Tin pan alley basically manufactured songs the same way that Detroit made cars
   - Songs, sheet music
   - Peddled to vaudeville theatres
   - This was the music of Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra, Patti Page (a small bit of influence form Sammy Davis Jr. and Ella Fitzgerald)
3. In rather simple terms, Tin Pan Alley was interested in producing and marketing older, middle class music/ it controlled the production of the old of white music
   - A small group of publishers determined what was offered (guiding subject matter, vocabulary and emotion of songs)

Question 13

So in 1950’s the dam burst. What three notable things happened during this time?

Answer 13

1. Rise of Independent labels
2. Rise of the disc jockey
   - Mixed black talent and white entrepreneurship
   - In Memphis the rise of WDIA (the “Mother Station of Negroes”
   - Memphis became the black broadcasting center of America
   - It soon became “impossible to segregate the airwaves”
   - The disc jockey destroyed Tin Pan Alley
3. New independent radio stations helped produce new independent record labels (i.e. Sun Records)

Question 14

What were the reactions to Rock and Roll?

Answer 14

1. Parents
   -Organizational man
   Military
   -Hierarchical structure of workplace and home
   -Rock was: Bestial, Subhuman, “animalistic, nigger bop”, Immoral/Sinful, Unnerving, Frighteningly spontaneous, A corrupting influence

Question 15

How did Tin Pan Alley respond to these reactions?

Answer 15

1. A sanitization of rock music
2. Dick Clark’s American Bandstand played on 105 TV stations
3. Real rock and roll suffered some important set backs as well.
   -Jerry Lee Lewis’s marriage to his 13 year old cousin didn’t go over too well
4. Many independent labels formed chains
   -hence we get TOP 40 formulas – and a degree of homogeneity complete with station identifications, jingles, newscasts, promotional gimmicks
   the disc jockey’s creative role was diminished and the playing of R &B and other minority music suffered.

Question 16

What are the three explanations why the 1950’s were the time for this?

Answer 16

1. presence of creative individuals
2. composition of the audience (a massive number of young people, link to the baby boom following WWII
3. transformation of the commercial culture industry (phonograph record industry, radio and television broadcasting)

Question 17

Why was the presence of creative individuals important?

Answer 17

1. it is always difficult to explain the rise of a creative person and why certain people have influence
2. we must understand that there are always more creative people than the recognition of their genius (one Nobel Prize per category per year, one person at the top of the pop charts per week etc.)
3. these individuals take ‘advantage of the opportunities that become available to them
4. “If I could find a white man who sings like a black man, I could make a fortune” (Sam Phillips)

Question 18

In the music industry during this time we need to at minimum pay attention to the following factors:

Answer 18

1. Law/legal requirements
2. technology
3. industry structure
4. organization structure
5. occupational career
6. market

Question 19

Explain technology and markets for the music industry.

Answer 19

1. R & R was the first music to be distributed in mass quantities on record
2. R & R was the first whose development was linked to radio, film and television
3. Recording studios became central
4. Sound engineers, producers, song writers
5. The whole process of making a record became more complex
6. The live performance was joined by studio time
7. It wasn’t even necessary for musicians to be physically present together in the studio – hence the entire creative process changed

Question 20

What kind of audience did Rock n Roll attract?

Answer 20

Rock and roll in the 1950s attacked, often indirectly, many of the institutions that helped control young people…During the otherwise silent years of the Eisenhower administration’s authoritarian attitudes, rock and roll’s suggestive stage manner, guttural vocals, double entendre lyrics were seen as attackers of sexual decency and the stable family. Rock and roll fostered the separation of youth from parental control.

Question 21

What was the composition of the audience?

Answer 21

1. World War II put an end to the Great Depression
2. Post World War II the American economy boomed
3. Economic growth meant more disposable income
4. A sizable increase in entertainment spending (teenagers became a market)
5. The new prosperity trickled down to a newly enfranchised segment of society, the teenager.
6. Teens defined themselves socially, economically (they put their money where their taste was), and musically (many had a taste for rock and roll)
7. Restlessness/alienation/ violence
8. The modern family was “subdividing”
9. An expression of rebellion and of a growing uneasiness of the rigidity and conservatism of the era
10. Rock and Roll was exciting and liberating it spoke to their own condition: It was about cars, clothes, parents, high school, sex, breaking loose, getting rich and so on
11. Older white music was ageing, married, corny, square, and deeply boring

Question 22

Summation: Why the 1950s?

Answer 22

1. Rock and roll broke into the mass market when the music industry became “no longer blind” to the growing demand for different types of music
2. The development of the transistor radio, television programming, jukeboxes, meant that a larger number and wider range of music could be exposed.
3. Durable 45rpm records, a rise in independent record distributors, numerous independent record companies all lead to experimentation.
4. Under solid entrepreneurship the cauldron of creative talent was exploited and represented like never before