Athens Area School District

How did Sousa influence jazz?

Look and find out

Listen to the Maple Leaf Rag

How did Ragtime and Marches work together? What did they do to influence Jazz?

Hear music from and view pictures form the time of slavery.

Between years 1933-1959 Alan Lomax recorded black inmates singing on chaingang. There is a theory about these songs and calls that they were sung by the first slaves while they were working and in the prisons these songs continued living after slavery (Black man in a prison at the time was much the same as a slave) From these songs blues is believed to be formed and this is probably the reason why blues was called "devil's music" like rock-n-roll later was.

Great example of Blues music.

discription: done by men, guitar accomp., about depression, earth, hardship, musicians are untrained.

Listen to Huddie Ledbetter for and example

City Blues are done by both men and women. It is about mainly love. Many instruments accompanied it.

12 bar phrases are put to a rhythm

Listen to an example from Bessie Smith

Great example of city blues

Listen for the 12 bar phrases

Click on "timeline" to view a Jazz timeline in history

if you missed something in class, wish to learn more or would like to do an extra credit essay, click on "jazz-history-for-7th-grade" to download some facts.

(if you do an essay remember to do your sandwich)

BB King is a Blues and R/B performer of today listen to this example of him playing

The history of the Blues

Outstanding performances abound in this musical variety show filmed at Harlem's Apollo Theatre, New York City in 1954. It features a cast of popular African-American performers: Willie Bryant, Freddie Robinson, Lionel Hampton, Count Basie, Faye Adams, Bill Bailey, Herb Jeffries, Amos Milburn, Sarah Vaughan, Nipsey Russell, Big Joe Turner, Martha Davis, Little Buck, Nat 'King' Cole, Mantan Moreland, Cab Calloway and Ruth Brown. Presented in this clip is Hamp's  rocking set. You can download the entire movie here

Baby its hot outside!  If what you need is something cooooool to bring your core temperature down, weve got the goods for you!  From a series of early 1950s televised music broadcasts comes this collection of some of the best Jazz and Soul artists of the 20th century!  In part 1 check out performances from Lionel Hampton, Faye Adams, Bill Bailey, Herb Jeffries and Freddy & Flo!

Ragtime (alternatively spelled rag-time) is an original musical genre which enjoyed its peak popularity between 1897 and 1918. Its main characteristic trait is its syncopated, or "ragged," rhythm. It was published as popular sheet music for piano. It was a modification of the march made popular by John Philip Sousa, with additional polyrhythms coming from African music.

The ragtime composer Scott Joplin became famous through the publication in 1899 of the "Maple Leaf Rag" and a string of ragtime hits that followed, although he was later forgotten by all but a small, dedicated community of ragtime aficionados until the major ragtime revival in the early 1970s

Work songs African American work songs originally developed in the era of captivity, between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Because they were part of an almost entirely oral culture they had no fixed form and only began to be recorded as the era of slavery came to an end after 1865. The first collection of African American 'slave songs' was published in 1867 by William Francis Allen, Charles Pickard Ware, Lucy McKim Garrison. Many had their origins in African song traditions, and may have been sung to remind the Africans of home, while others were instituted by the captors to raise morale and keep Africans working in rhythm. They have also been seen as a means of withstanding hardship and expressing anger and frustration through creativity or covert verbal opposition. A common feature of African American songs was the call-and-response format, where a leader would sing a verse or verses and the others would respond with a chorus. This came from African traditions of agricultural work song and found its way into the spirituals that developed once Africans in bondage began to convert to Christianity and from there to both gospel music and the blues. Also evident were field hollers, shouts, and moans, which may have been originally designed for different bands or individuals to locate each other and narrative songs that used folk tales and folk motifs, often making use of homemade instruments. In early African captivity drums were used to provide rhythm, but they were banned in later years because of the fear that Africans would use them to communicate in a rebellion; nevertheless, Africans managed to generate percussion and percussive sounds, using other instruments or their own bodies. Perhaps surprisingly, there are very few examples of work songs linked to cotton picking.

The Blues - Blues is the name given to both a musical form and a music genre that originated in African-American communities of primarily the "Deep South" of the United States at the end of the 19th century from spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads. The blues form, ubiquitous in jazz, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll is characterized by specific chord progressions, of which the twelve-bar blues chord progression is the most common. The blue notes that, for expressive purposes are sung or played flattened or gradually bent (minor 3rd to major 3rd) in relation to the pitch of the major scale, are also an important part of the sound.

The blues genre is based on the blues form but possesses other characteristics such as specific lyrics, bass lines and instruments. Blues can be subdivided into several subgenres ranging from country to urban blues that were more or less popular during different periods of the 20th century. Best known are the Delta, Piedmont, Jump and Chicago blues styles. World War II marked the transition from acoustic to electric blues and the progressive opening of blues music to a wider audience, especially white listeners. In the 1960s and 1970s, a hybrid form called blues-rock evolved. The term "the blues" refers to the "blue devils", meaning melancholy and sadness; an early use of the term in this sense is found in George Colman's one-act farce Blue Devils (1798). Though the use of the phrase in African-American music may be older, it has been attested to since 1912, when Hart Wand's "Dallas Blues" became the first copyrighted blues composition. In lyrics the phrase is often used to describe a depressed mood.