Roots Music
Many roots musicians do not consider themselves to be folk musicians; the main difference between the American folk music revival and American "roots music" is that roots music seems to cover a slightly broader range, including blues and country.
Roots music developed its most expressive and varied forms in the first three decades of the 20th century. The Great Depression and the Dust Bowl were extremely important in disseminating these musical styles to the rest of the country, as Delta blues masters, itinerant honky tonk singers, and Latino and Cajun musicians spread to cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. The growth of the recording industry in the same period was also important; higher potential profits from music placed pressure on artists, songwriters, and label executives to replicate previous hit songs. This meant that musical fads, such as Hawaiian slack-key guitar, never died out completely, since a broad range of rhythms, instruments, and vocal stylings were incorporated into disparate popular genres.
By the 1950s, all the forms of roots music had led to pop-oriented forms. Folk musicians like the Kingston Trio, pop-Tejano and Cuban-American fusions like boogaloo, chachacha and mambo, blues-derived rock and roll and rockabilly, pop-gospel, doo wop and R&B (later secularized further as soul music) and the Nashville sound in country music all modernized and expanded the musical palette of the country.
The roots approach to music emphasizes the diversity of American musical traditions, the genealogy of creative lineages and communities, and the innovative contributions of musicians working in these traditions today. In recent years roots music has been the focus of popular media programs such as Garrison Keillor's public radio program A Prairie Home Companion and the feature film by the same name.
Read more about this topic: American Folk Music
Famous quotes containing the words roots and/or music:
“What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish?”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“Ive come close to matching the feeling of that night in 1944 in music, when I first heard Diz and Bird, but Ive never got there.... Im always looking for it, listening and feeling for it, though, trying to always feel it in and through the music I play every day.”
—Miles Davis (19261991)