The music of the United States reflects its diverse population and includes genres such as blues, jazz, country, rock and roll that have gained global popularity. American music evolved from Native American folk music and work songs brought by African slaves and European styles, developing in the 20th century into major genres like hip hop, pop, and R&B through the blending of diverse influences. The United States now has one of the largest music industries in the world and its music continues to blend styles from around the world into new forms.

2. • The music of the
United States
reflects the
country’s multi-
ethnical
population
through a diverse Among the country's
array of styles. most internationally-
renowned genres are
hip
hop, blues, country, jaz
z, barbershop, pop, tec
hno and rock and roll.

3. • After Japan, the United States
has the world's second largest
music market with a total retail
value of 3,635.2 million dollars
in 2010 and its music is heard
around the world.
Since the beginning of the 20th
century, some forms of
American popular music have
gained a near global audience.

5. • Native Americans
were the earliest
inhabitants of
the land that is
today known as
the United
States and
played its first
music. The
Native Americans
played the first
folk music in
what is now the
United States,
using a wide
variety of styles
and techniques.

6. • Some commonalities are
near universal among
American traditional
music, especially the lack
of harmony and
polyphony, and the use of
vocables and descending
melodic figures.
Traditional instrumentations
uses the flute and many kinds
of percussion instruments, like
drums, rattles and shakers.

7. • Since European and
African contact was
established, Native
American folk music has
grown in new directions,
into fusions with
disparate styles like
European folk dances
and Tejano music.
Modern Native American
music may be best
known for powwow
gatherings, pan-tribal
gatherings at which
traditionally styled
dances and music are
performed.

9. • Blues is a
combination of
African work
songs, field
hollers and
shouts. It
developed in
the rural South
in the first
decade of the
20th century.

10. • The most important characteristics of the
blues is its use of the blue scale, as well as
the typically lamenting lyrics.

11. Blues became a part of
American popular music
in the 1920s, when classic
female blues singers like
Bessie Smith grew
popular.
• delta blues artist Robert
Johnson and piedmont
blues artist Blind Willie
McTell.
• A bluesy style of gospel
also became popular in the
1950s, led by singer
Mahalia Jackson.

12. Classical
Music

13. • The
European
classical
music
tradition
was brought
to the
United
States with
some of the
first
colonists.
The central
norms of

14. • By the beginning of the 20th
century, many American
composers were incorporating
disparate elements into their
work, ranging from jazz and blues
to Native American music.

15.  Many of the
20th-century
composers, suc
h as John
Cage, John
Corigliano and
Steve
Reich, used
modernist and
minimalist
techniques.
Recent composers and performers are
strongly influenced by the minimalist works
of Philip Glass, a Baltimore native based
out of New York, Meredith Monk and others.

17. • The United
States has
produced many
popular
musicians and
composers in
the modern
world. Beginning
with the birth of
recorded music,
American
performers have
continued to
lead the field of
popular music.

18. Most histories
of popular
music start
with American
ragtime or Tin others, however, trace
Pan Alley; popular music back to
the European
Renaissance and
through • Other authors
broadsheets, ballads typically look at
popular music,
and other popular tracing American
traditions. popular music to
spirituals,
minstrel shows
and vaudeville, or
the patriotic
songs of the Civil
War.

19. The patriotic songs of the
American Revolution
constituted the first kind of
mainstream popular music.
How did it all
These included "The Liberty
Tree", by Thomas Paine.
started?
Patriotic songs were mostly
based on:
• English melodies, with new
lyrics;
•others, however, used tunes
from Ireland, Scotland etc;
•did not use a familiar
melody.
The song “Hail Columbia"
was a major work that
remained an unofficial
national anthem until the
adoption of “The Star-
Spangled Banner".

20. • Following the Civil War,
minstrel shows became the first
distinctively American form of music
expression. The minstrel show was a
form of American entertainment
consisting of comic skits, variety
acts, dancing, and music, usually
performed by white people in
blackface.

21. The minstrel show was
invented by Dan
Emmett and the
Virginia Minstrels.
• Minstrel shows produced
the first well-remembered
popular songwriters in
American music history:
Thomas D. Rice, Dan
Emmett, and, most
famously, Stephen Foster.

22. • In the early 20th century, American musical theatre was a
major source for popular songs. The center of development for
this style was in New York City, where the Broadway
theatres appeared. Theatrical composers and lyricists like the
brothers George and Ira Gershwin created a uniquely American
theatrical style that used American vernacular speech and
music. Musicals featured popular songs and fast-paced plots
that often revolved around love and romance.

25.  Though jazz had long
since achieved some
limited popularity, it
was Louis Armstrong
who became one of
the first popular stars
and a major force in
the development of
jazz, along with his
friend pianist Earl
Hines. Armstrong,
Hines and their
colleagues were
improvisers, capable
of creating numerous
variations on a single
melody.
Armstrong also popularized scat singing, an improvisational
vocal technique in which nonsensical syllables are sung.
Armstrong and Hines were influential in the rise of a kind of
pop big band jazz called swing.

26.  The later 20th century American jazz scene
produced some popular crossover
stars, such as Miles Davis.
 In the middle of the 20th century, jazz
evolved into a variety of
subgenres, beginning with bebop.
 Bebop was developed in the early and mid-
1940s, later evolving into styles like hard
bop and free jazz.
 Innovators of the style included Charlie
Parker and Dizzy Gillespie.

28. Country music is a fusion of African American blues and
spirituals with Appalachian folk music, adapted for pop
audiences and popularized beginning in the 1920s.
Anglo-Celtic tunes,
dance music, and
balladry were the
earliest
predecessors of
modern country,
then known as
hillbilly music.
• The origins of country are in rural Southern folk
music, which was primarily Irish and British, with
African and continental European musics.

29. • The earliest country
instrumentation
revolved around the
European-derived
fiddle and the African-
derived banjo, with the
guitar later added.
String instruments like
the ukulele and steel
guitar became
commonplace due to
the popularity of
Hawaiian musical
groups in the early 20th
century.

30. •Ralph Peer
•Chet Atkins
•Hank Williams
•Johnny Cash

32. • R&B, an abbreviation for rhythm and
blues, is a style that arose in the 1930s
and 1940s.
• Bandleaders like Louis Jordan innovated the
sound of early R&B. (w. Harris, J. L. Hooker)

33. Tina Turner
Michael Jackson
Prince
Whitney Houston

35. Rock and roll
developed out of
country, blues, and
R&B. Though
squarely in the blues
tradition, rock took
elements from Afro-
Caribbean and Latin
musical techniques.
 Rock and roll first entered popular music through a
style called rockabilly. Black-performed rock and
roll had previously had limited mainstream
success, but it was the white performer Elvis
Presley who first appealed to mainstream
audiences with a black style of music.

36. • In the 1960s and early 1970s,
rock music diversified. What
was formerly a discrete genre
known as rock and roll
evolved into a catchall
category called simply rock
music, which came to include
diverse styles like heavy metal
and punk rock.
Punk was a form of rebellious
rock, that was loud, aggressive
and often very simple.
American bands in the field
included, most famously, The
Ramones and Talking Heads.

37. • Hardcore, punk, and garage
rock were the roots of
alternative rock.
• Nirvana
• Pearl Jam
• Green Day
• The Offspring
• Rancid
• Bad Religion
• NOFX

38. • Heavy metal is characterized
by aggressive, driving
rhythms, amplified and
distorted guitars, grandiose
lyrics and virtuosic
instrumentation.
• Blue Öyster Cult
• KISS
• Aerosmith.
The United States was especially
known for one of these
subgenres, thrash metal, which
was innovated by bands like:
Anthrax
Metallica
Megadeth
Slayer.

39. • So, American music is
a “fusion vat” while it
unites different styles
and techniques, bears
new directions and
develops into an
extremely diverse and
colourful phenomena.
It can always provide
something for a person
with the most fastidious
and unpredictable
taste.