The essay written by Joanna R. Smolko discusses the musician Stephen Foster, his songs and their roles in the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies from the 1930’s to the 1960’s. Also discusses the unison of Carl Stallings, the music director for Warner Bros. and Stephen Foster. Smolko argues that their music and cartoons influenced race and place in the United States. Smolko discusses three cartoons that best displayed cultural norms and stereotypes of their time period, “Confederate Honey”, “Mississippi Hare” and “Southern Fried Rabbit”. Stephen Foster is known as the “father of American music”. He lived from 1844 to 1864, he surprisingly never actually lived in the south; he lived in multiple northern states including New York, Pennsylvania …show more content…
In the cartoons that Foghorn Leghorn appear in, Foghorn is constantly humming “Camptown Races”. “Camptown Races” was commonly performed by blackface minstrels and is associated with the antebellum south. Also Foghorn would constantly use language that was historically used by slave owners like the repetition of the word “boy”. Some of Foster’s songs used lyrics that described life in the antebellum south. The text uses racist language that was common during the time of slavery. In one of his songs, “Lou’siana Belle” (1847) Foster writes lyrics that describe a slaves feelings after his love is sold on the slave market. “My masa took my lub one day, He put her up to sell, I thought I’s pine my life away, for de Lousiana belle.” Lyrics like these support the argument that Foster was writing songs that influenced race and place in …show more content…
First of all, he lived in the north his entire life and he wrote his songs to make money. He did not necessarily believe in minstrel shows, but he was a struggling artist in need of money. An article from PBS argues that Foster believed slavery was wrong …“though like many Northerners and Democrats he may have opposed slavery but still believed African Americans to be an inferior race” (PBS.org). This group of people is a minority but they put forward a strong argument. While Foster was alive there was great tension in The United States, a few abolitionists believed that Foster was on their side, while more southerners thought he was on their side. Noah Adams, a radio talk show host said this about Foster’s music …“who brought the rhetoric of the Abolitionists into America’s middle-class piano parlors” (Adams n.d)… Meaning that Adams believes Foster was an abolitionist and that he was creating music to support the movement by raising awareness on the living conditions of
As the United States entered the 1920's it was not as unified as one might think. Not one, but two societies existed. The Black society, whose ancestors had been oppressed throughout the ages, and the White society, the oppressors of these men and women. After emancipation the Whites no longer needed the Blacks, but were forced to live with them. The Blacks despised the Whites, but even so they became more like them in every way. Even though these two races had grown so similar over the past century and a half, they were still greatly diversified. One aspect of this great diversity was the difference in music trends. The White society was still in love with the European classical music. The Blacks on the other hand had created something all their own. Jazz, Blues, and Ragtime originated in New Orleans in the 19th century, but by the 1920's it had become famous throughout America. The Whites tried to suppress the Blacks with new laws, but the power of this strengthened race was too great. The Negro music of the 20th century had a huge affect ...
Steve Miller was born October 5, 1943 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Steve’s family was very involved with music. His mother was a jazz-influenced singer, and his father was a pathologist that very interested in the world of music. Dr. Miller was friends with many musicians which greatly aided in young Steve’s development in music. One of his father’s friends included Les Paul, who showed Steve some chords on a guitar at the age of five. Les Paul proved to be a very valuable mentor to Steve, and he became a good friend of the family. When Steve was seven his family moved to Dallas, where he was exposed to a different type of artists that usually did not visit Milwaukee. His father took him to see greats such as Hank Williams, Chuck Berry, and Carl Perkins. Steve was particularly drawn to T-Bone Walker, the father of Texas-style electric blues. This proved to be very influential in Steve’s life, and it is evident by the blues-sound that he exhibited in his guitar playing.
Nearly a century’s worth of compositions has earned Aaron Copland extensive recognition as the foremost American composer of his time. Ironically, Copland was raised the son of Russian Jewish immigrants and inhabitant of a colorless city environment, yet would become known for producing the music of “rugged-souled Americans” (Mellers 4). Unbounded by historical musical constraints such as those present in the culture of France, where Copland studied for many years, Copland found himself free to explore and experiment in pursuit of a unique, undoubtedly American sound.
Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit “is probably one of the greatest songs composed telling the chilling story about lynching. A little unknown fact is that it was written by a Jewish man by the name of Abel Meeropol. Initially “Strange Fruit” originated as a poem written by Abel Meeropol, as a protest against lynching of African Americans. Meeropol meet Holiday in a bar, where she read the poem, and decided to make the poem into a song. The record made it to No. 16 on the charts in July 1939. This song is probably Holiday’s most famous song she ever sung throughout her whole life. In the end Strange fruit forces listeners to relive the tragic horrors of living in America as an African American. The vivid lyrics paints a picture that causes a person
One man made his impression on the music world soon after he arrived to America. His
... Bohlman, Philip V. Music and the Racial Imagination. University Of Chicago Press, Chicago. 2001. Print.
In dealing with these issues, historians have neglected to examine the social implication of “race music” on a white audience, specifically teenagers. Historians most often explain the origins of the music as something of a legend; Afro-American music and culture is praised, and white American society is indebted to the cultural enrichment it has received from it. Afro-American music saved white society from being boring.[2] The social realities of the United States during that decade make this birth story seem hypocritical and condescending. The 1950s did not produce harmony between the black and white populations of the United States; racial tensions were enormous.
Music nurtured the African American tradition and their struggle towards equality in the same century.... ... middle of paper ... ... Greensboro, N.C.: Morgan Reynolds Pub. Carter, D. (2009).
In “Blame It On the Blues” the author Angela Davis, argues against critics, like Samuel Charters and Paul Oliver, who say that the Blues lacks social commentary or political protest, by saying that the Blues was a subtle protest against gender and racial inequality. Davis uses various songs from Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith to prove this.
African-American music is a vibrant art form that describes the difficult lives of African American people. This can be proven by examining slave music, which shows its listeners how the slaves felt when they were working, and gives us insight into the problems of slavery; the blues, which expresses the significant connection with American history, discusses what the American spirit looks like and teaches a great deal from the stories it tells; and hip-hop, which started on the streets and includes topics such as misogyny, sex, and black-on-black violence to reveal the reactions to the circumstances faced by modern African Americans. First is about the effect of slave music on American history and African American music. The slave music’s
"For the first time since the plantation days artists began to touch new material, to understand new tools and to accept eagerly the challenge of Black poetry, Black song and Black scholarship."1
According to Albert Murray, the African-American musical tradition is “fundamentally stoical yet affirmative in spirit” (Star 3). Through the medium of the blues, African-Americans expressed a resilience of spirit which refused to be crippled by either poverty or racism. It is through music that the energies and dexterities of black American life are sounded and expressed (39). For the black culture in this country, the music of Basie or Ellington expressed a “wideawake, forward-tending” rhythm that one can not only dance to but live by (Star 39).
Throughout early American history, musical repertories have shown traces of how painful and agonizing the experiences that African American’s had dealt with during the Slave era and how painful and tragic the transition was. This a moment in African American history in which developing a new culture was a difficult process, due to the fact that they were previously stripped away from their homeland and were forced to adapt a new way of life. Spirituals were introduced throughout the culture of African American Slaves as a new form of musical expression who had converted to New World
African-American slaves may not have had the formal education that many of their white slave owners possessed, but they intuitively knew that the labor they toiled through each and every day was unjust. This dynamic of unfairness brought about a mindset in which slaves would critique the workings of slavery. To many people’s understanding, slavery was an invasively oppressive institution; Levine however, noted, “for all its horrors, slavery was never so complete a system of psychic assault that it prevented the slaves from carving out independent cultural forms” . Slave spirituals were a part of the independent cultural form that enslaved African-Americans produced; these songs had numerous functions and critiquing slavery served as one of
Powell, A. (2007). The Music of African Americans and its Impact on the American Culture in the 1960’s and the 1970’s. Miller African Centered Academy, 1. Retrieved from http://www.chatham.edu/pti/curriculum/units/2007/Powell.pdf