6.1 The Great American Songbook (and the Rise of Swing)

What happens to American music in the 1930s? The 1920s were a decade of proliferating jazz and blues, thanks to urban prosperity a newly liberated recording industry; with an increasingly international profile for artists ranging from Billie Holiday and Bing Crosby to the Carter Family, and Duke Ellington. But aside from a few urban experiments, the popular music of the 1920s-world-wide-remained a matter of record collectors, syndicated radio shows, and a small range of parlor song performers (and really anyone from Stephen Foster to Ethel Waters can be put in that category).
From the last few years of of the 1920s, with musicals like Showboat galvanizing a nation, popular music began to feel more public, more central to everyday life. Just five years later-with the moral inspiration of musicians ranging from Woody Guthrie and Gene Autry, rallying us to collective strength-we had learned that music could represent the widest range of our struggles, and we knew that among them was the horror of the Great Depression.
With the films of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, the nationally syndicated "Let's Dance" radio show, and a highly visible conversation about the morality of "swing" dance crazes, it was clear that music had become a mode of expression with vast, Romantic, and almost mystical aspirations. This video is meant as an introduction to Tin Pan Alley, the popularization of swing (although this was covered in more detail in a previous lecture!), and the musical cultures of the 1930s.

[@lotusbuds2000]

I am in lifelong adoration of the American Songbook 👋✌️🇺🇸🌎🙏💚🌿🎵🐈☮️ " showboat " thank you 😊

[@imonthebox1148]

I began getting into the Great American songbook and the lives and works of these fantastic songwriters, composers and lyricists from the 20's, 30's and 40's America in my late teens. Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein 2nd, wanted to write musicals were the songs and the scenes were integrated with the story line line. This all began with a book by Author Lynn Riggs, and a story about cowboys and country folk that the two men originally called Green Grow The Lilacs, but they changed their titles to Oklahoma. The Great American songbook comprises of songs written by craftsmen and women. Irving Berlin, Rodgers and Hart, Cole Porter, Bernice Petker, Frank Loesser, Ann Ronell. Jerome Kern, George and Ira Gershwin, Harold Arlen, Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz. Today how little time and effort is spent on talking about these songwriters, yet their songs are sung and played daily somewhere in the free word. It is astonish that the majority of Americans know little or nothing about the songwriter or writers who wrote the song the average adult American got married to......

[@lotusbuds2000]

💚Paul Robeson 🌿