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Genres
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West African Roots
genreThe musical traditions carried by enslaved Africans — call and response, polyrhythm, bent notes, the banjo — that became the foundation of nearly all American vernacular music.
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Spirituals
genreSacred songs created by enslaved African Americans — sorrow songs and ring shouts that fused Christian texts with African musical practice, later carried to the world by the Fisk Jubilee Singers.
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Proto-Blues
genreField hollers, work songs, and songster ballads of the post-Emancipation rural South — the unrecorded matrix out of which the blues crystallized around 1900.
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Jazz
genreBorn in New Orleans from brass bands, ragtime and the blues: collective improvisation that became America's art music and the blues' worldly cousin.
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Delta Blues
genreIntense, guitar-driven blues of the Mississippi Delta plantations — slide guitar, moaned vocals, and the songbook that Chicago would later electrify.
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Country
genreWhite Southern vernacular music — British ballads on an African banjo — recorded from 1922 and sold as 'hillbilly', the blues' estranged sibling.
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Gospel
genreThe modern Black sacred music built by Thomas A. Dorsey from spirituals and blues technique — the training ground for soul and for half the great voices of American popular music.
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Swing
genreJazz as America's pop music: big bands, arranged riffs and dance floors — Ellington, Basie and Goodman at the center of the swing era.
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Gypsy Jazz
genreDjango Reinhardt's Paris invention: American swing played on Romani strings — Europe's first original jazz dialect, alive in campsites and clubs to this day.
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Honky Tonk
genreCountry music moves to the barroom: electric guitars, steel, and Hank Williams's songs of drinking, divorce and damnation.
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Bebop
genreJazz's modernist revolt: small combos, racing tempos and advanced harmony — Parker and Gillespie turned a dance music into an art music.
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Bluegrass
genreBill Monroe's high-velocity string-band modernism: banjo rolls, close harmony and the 'high lonesome sound' — old-time music rebuilt as virtuoso art.
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Chicago Blues
genreThe Delta blues plugged in: amplified guitar, harmonica, drums and bass, forged in South Side clubs and pressed by Chess Records into the blueprint for rock.
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Rhythm and Blues
genrePostwar Black popular music: jump-blues shouters, honking saxophones and vocal groups — the commercial engine that carried the blues to rock 'n' roll and soul.
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Cool Jazz
genreBebop with the temperature lowered: lyrical, spacious, often modal — 'Birth of the Cool' to 'Kind of Blue', and the bridge to bossa nova.
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Rock 'n' Roll
genreBlues rhythm and form aimed at teenagers: Chuck Berry's guitar stories and Elvis Presley's Sun sessions turned Black rhythm and blues into a national youth music.
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Rockabilly
genreThe hillbilly side of rock 'n' roll: blues drive and country twang slapped together at Sun Records — Elvis, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis.
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Soul
genreGospel fervor with worldly words: Ray Charles lit the fuse, Stax and Motown built the factories, and soul became the sound of the civil rights era.
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British Blues
genreLondon art students learned Chess Records by heart and sold the blues back to America — the Stones, the Yardbirds, Mayall's Bluesbreakers, Cream.
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Funk
genreJames Brown's rhythmic revolution: every instrument a drum, everything on the One — the groove that became the DNA of hip-hop and modern dance music.
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Jazz Fusion
genreJazz plugged into funk and rock: Miles Davis's electric bands and their alumni — Weather Report, Mahavishnu, Head Hunters — rewired improvisation for the amplifier age.
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Hip-Hop
genreBorn at a Bronx rec-room party from looped funk breaks: DJing, MCing, breaking and graffiti — the culture that became the dominant popular music on Earth.
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Electro
genre'Planet Rock' fused Bronx hip-hop with Kraftwerk's machine-funk: drum machines and vocoders that seeded Miami bass, Detroit techno — and, abroad, funk carioca.
Artists
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Charley Patton
artistThe first great star of the Delta blues — a gravel-voiced showman at Dockery Plantation whose rhythm and repertoire taught the entire next generation.
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Duke Ellington
artistComposer at the piano: half a century of writing for his own orchestra, from the Cotton Club to the concert hall — swing's deepest catalog.
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Louis Armstrong
artistThe first great soloist: his 1920s Hot Five records moved jazz's center from the ensemble to the improviser, and his phrasing taught American music how to swing.
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Son House
artistPreacher turned bluesman whose slide guitar and testifying voice defined Delta intensity — recorded in 1930, rediscovered in 1964.
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Django Reinhardt
artistTwo working fingers and a new genre: the Romani guitarist who answered American swing with Europe's first original jazz voice.
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Howlin' Wolf
artistChester Burnett, Charley Patton's most formidable student: three hundred pounds of voice that made 'Smokestack Lightnin'' and gave the Chicago blues its thunder.
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Mahalia Jackson
artistGospel's greatest voice: a New Orleans contralto who refused to sing secular music and made 'Move On Up a Little Higher' a million-seller from the church.
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Robert Johnson
artistDelta blues' posthumous king: twenty-nine songs recorded in 1936–37 that became the canon of the blues — wrapped in a crossroads legend the historical record does not support.
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Muddy Waters
artistMcKinley Morganfield: recorded by Lomax on a Mississippi plantation in 1941, king of the Chicago blues by 1950 — the single clearest bridge from Delta to electric blues.
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Charlie Parker
artist'Bird': the alto saxophonist whose harmonic imagination and velocity defined bebop — modern jazz's founding genius and first martyr.
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Chuck Berry
artistRock 'n' roll's chief architect: a Chess Records bluesman who aimed blues guitar and country storytelling at teenagers and wrote the genre's foundational songbook.
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Miles Davis
artistJazz's serial revolutionary: from Parker's bandstand to 'Birth of the Cool', 'Kind of Blue' and 'Bitches Brew' — he re-angled the music at least four times.
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The Carter Family
artistCountry music's founding act: A.P.'s collected songs, Sara's stark lead, and Maybelle's 'Carter scratch' guitar, first recorded at the 1927 Bristol sessions.
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Ray Charles
artist'The Genius' who fused church and barroom: 'I Got a Woman' (1954) invented soul by singing gospel with worldly words — then he claimed country too.
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James Brown
artistThe Godfather of Soul and architect of funk: the hardest-working show in music, the rhythm revolution of the One, and the most sampled catalog on Earth.
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Elvis Presley
artistThe Sun Records sessions of 1954–55 fused blues, gospel and hillbilly in one voice — and showed the industry that the fusion, sung by a white Southerner, could sell to everyone.
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Afrika Bambaataa
artistThe Master of Records: ex-gang leader who framed hip-hop as a culture, and whose 'Planet Rock' wired the Bronx to Kraftwerk and invented electro.
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Grandmaster Flash
artistThe engineer of the turntable: quick-mix theory, scratching and cutting on time — and, with the Furious Five, 'The Message', rap's first masterpiece of reportage.
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The Rolling Stones
artistLondon's Chess Records disciples — named from a Muddy Waters song — who carried Chicago blues to the world's biggest stages and never stopped crediting the source.
Events
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The Great Migration
eventSix million Black Americans left the South between 1910 and 1970 — and carried the blues, gospel and jazz to the cities that electrified them.
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The Race Records Boom
eventAfter Mamie Smith's 'Crazy Blues' (1920) proved Black audiences bought records, the industry built a segregated 'race records' market — preserving the blues and dividing American music in the same gesture.