Folk Music Saved Popular Music and Created Rock

In the mid-fifties, electric blues and country music converged to create a danceable form of popular music that was dubbed "rock and roll". Throughout the rest of the fifties this new hybrid form of music remained quite vigorous and inspired under the likes of such African American artists as Little Richard, Chuck Berry and Jimmy Reed, and such white artists as Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis Presley. With many artists it was a toss-up as to whether they should be defined as country or blues or rock and roll, and none of them stuck by hard genre rules in their repertoire. Suffice it to say, these rock and rollers not only blended earlier styles of popular music but sped them up and played them louder. Many blues artists that emerged in the fifties should probably also be classed as rock and roll musicians, at least with regard to many of their successful songs, but if their audiences at the time were mostly African American, then record companies marketed them as blues musicians, and rock historians then later interpreted them as such. Never mind this, the British rock and rollers that emerged in the sixties did not pay attention to American marketing. They recognized the rock and roll qualities of Big Mama Thornton, Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Elmore James, T-Bone Walker, Lightning Hopkins, Bo Diddley and John Lee Hooker. Those Brits used the influence of hard-driving electric blues to create their own genre of popular music, called "rhythm and blues" or "R & B". But just as the British baby-boomers were cooking up a new era in rock and roll in the sixties musical underground, America's Cold War tensions were having a negative impact on popular culture. Rock and roll was getting smothered by record companies that were heeding the admonishments of political, media and religious authorities to tone down the music they were pressing to vinyl. Rock and roll seemed fated to fade away like previous popular musical crazes like swing, jump-blues, calypso, and bossa nova. Popular music became a tame, whoozy, adolescent-crush thing with good-looking crooners, and the wildest things got was California-style surf music which celebrated hot rods and the adolescent social freedom of the warm beach setting, utilizing harmonic singing and jangling/gurgling tidal-wave guitar riffs. Consequently, young Americans who were interested in music that expressed any inspired feeling outside these two aforementioned forms had to find it in folk music (not to be confused with traditional forms of pre-commercial ethnic music, though these were inspirations for this modern form). Folk music (as a popular genre) was talking about more serious matters in its lyrics, insisted on using acoustic instruments, and utilized solo and/or harmonic singing, and had a broader and more varied emotional palette. Some of its practitioners of lasting merit were Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Peter Paul and Mary, and Pete Seeger. And then came the British Invasion in the mid sixties. America was re-introduced to "unsafe" popular music again from an outside source, replete with all the musical energy and wildness of the rock and roll they had known in the 1950s, some of it strongly infused with blues sensibilities that had a wry British spin. Of course the most talented and influential exponents of the British invasion were the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, The Kinks, The Animals and The Who. The American crooners that had been ruling the roost of American popular music tucked tail and ran, and the imagination of many folkies caught fire under the influence of these British bands. Many of the more dynamic folk artists adapted the more aggressive energy of R & B and added electric instrumentation. British rhythm and blues musicians in their turn fell in love with American popular folk music. At the moment folk and R & B fused, rock was born! Out of this new genre emerged such former folkies now rockers as Bob Dylan (now branded a musical heretic by folk purists), The Byrds, The Mamas and The Papas, The Lovin' Spoonful, Simon and Garfunkel, Buffalo Springfield and Moby Grape. Then there were the British musicians who incorporate American folk music ideas into their compositions, like the Beatles (a la Help!, Rubber Soul, Revolver, etc), and Donovan. Folk music gave popular music a sustaining strength in the form of rock, by endowing it with more reflective sensibilities, sociopolitical concerns, acoustic textures and musical idioms, and greater lyrical possibilities in terms of subject matter and forms of vocal and verbal expression. Those who felt the folk influence more pronouncedly formed the singer/songwriter genre of popular music that emerged in the late sixties and flourished in the seventies under the leadership of such varied British and American artists as Joni Mitchell, Cat Stevens, Nick Drake, James Taylor, Jackson Browne, Jim Croce, John Denver, Glen Campbell, Neil Diamond, Judy Collins and Carol King. Other folk-influenced rockers began to think more deeply about the roots of folk and began exploring alternative ethnic forms such as Cajun/Creole music (Little Feat), swamp-style rockabilly (Creedence Clearwater Revival), countrified rock (The Band, Poco, The Flying Burrito Brothers, The Eagles), and even Creole/American Indian (Redbone -- not to be confused with Leon Redbone). On the British side of the Atlantic there were rockers that incorporated into their style distinctively British forms of traditional music (these were sometimes called "trad bands" if that became the predominating feature of their repertoire), and this movement was exemplified by such groups and solo artists as Fairport Convention, Jethro Tull, Sandy Denny, The Strawbs, Richard Thompson, and Steeleye Span. And then came Punk in the mid seventies, and it blew popular music back to the Stone Age. Oh well...