Revolutions in American Music by Michael Broyles
The subtitle should be “Three Decades that Changed the World and its Sounds.” With the exception of Jamaican reggae, American music reshaped the planet more than the sonic contributions of any nation in the 20th century.
Author Michael Broyles, Florida State professor of musicology, traces America’s development from a British cultural outpost into a new world of music. The transformation was audible in the 1840s with the birth of minstrelsy, with its odious depictions of African Americans, and the lone “minstrel” who transcended the genre, Stephen Foster. Broyles covers territory usually ignored by music historians such as polka. Many readers will be surprised to learn that “the polka provided the musical template for American dance music for the next hundred years” after arriving on our shores in the 1840s. It began as a fad among the cultural elite before becoming the proletarian music of the ethnic heartland.
Broyles doesn’t neglect classical music, which didn’t find distinct American voices until the 1920s, but he focuses on the dazzling array of American vernacular music often produced in conjunction with a recording industry abetted by new technology. He writes succinctly and perceptively, choosing overlooked anecdotes on evolution (revolution?) of blues, jazz, swing, crooning, rhythm and blues and rock and roll. Perhaps oddly, Broyles cuts his history short at the end of the 1950s, on the eve of further musical revolutions to come.
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