roots

POPULAR MUSIC ROOTS

Popular music is music belonging to any of a number of musical styles that are broadly popular or intended for mass consumption and wide commercial distribution, in other words, music that forms part of popular culture.

XIX CENTURY
THE ROOTS

The origins of popular music back to the beginning of the XVI Century, when Europeans, after discovering America, set out colonize it.
To extract the natural resources of this new world, they had to import African slaves
after almost finished with the American Indian population.
Both Europeans and Africans came to America with their musical traditions.
From Europe were imported: ballroom dancing, military marches and classical music.
From Africa tribal songs and dances.
Over the next four centuries, European and African musical traditions evolve in the hands of African slaves, to create in the XIX Century two types of American music:
1.- EUROPEAN MUSIC EVOLUTION
Afroamericans, imitating the marches bands on the piano and
adapting the African syncopated rhythms, created the RAGTIME.
2.- AFRICAN MUSIC EVOLUTION
African music traditions, under the dominant European culture, resulted in:

SPIRITUAL: religious song.

WORKSONG: song they sung while they were working.

BLUES: song of lament accompanied by instruments expresing their problems.

In the beginning of the XX Century, in the suburbs of New Orleans, two musics were mixed:
- the syncopated rhythm of the ragtime
- the notes, structure and feeling of the blues
and as a result JAZZ was born.
Jazz became the most important root of the modern popular music; it is the "Grandfather".

RAGTIME	BLUES	JAZZ