Music history of the United States

With the colonization of America from European countries like France, Spain, Scotland, England, Ireland, and Wales came Christian choirs, musical notation, broadsides, as well as West African slaves.

In the 1970s, urban African Americans in New York City began performing spoken lyrics over a beat provided by an emcee; this became known as hip hop music.

In minstrel shows, performers imitated slaves in crude caricatures, singing and dancing to what was called "Negro music", though it had little in common with authentic African American folk styles.

In the early 20th century, many of these ethnic groups supported niche record industries and produced minor folk stars like Pawlo Humeniuk, the "King of the Ukrainian Fiddlers" (Kochan and Kytasty, 308).

It was here that techniques and traditions like shape note, lined-out hymnody and Sacred Harp were created, gradually spreading south and becoming an integral part of the Great Awakening.

The Great Awakening of the 1730s and ’40s was a period of religious fervor, among whites and blacks (both slave and free), that saw passionate, evangelical "Negro spirituals" grow in popularity (Ferris, 98).

During the 19th century, it was not spirituals that gained truly widespread acclaim, but rather peppy comic songs performed by minstrels in blackface, and written by legendary songwriters like Stephen Foster and Daniel Emmett.

The first few decades of the 20th century also saw the rise of popular, comic musical theater, such as the vaudeville tradition and composers and writers like Oscar Hammerstein II, Jerome Kern and Ira Gershwin.

The first teen stars arose, beginning with the bobby soxer idol Frank Sinatra; this opened up new audiences for popular music, which had been primarily an adult phenomenon prior to the 1940s.

Some of soul's biggest stars began performing in the 1950s gospel scene, including Sam Cooke, Dinah Washington, Dionne Warwick and Aretha Franklin.

The genre's exact origins are debatable, but it drew on groups like the Mills Brothers and The Ink Spots, who played a kind of R&B with smooth, alternating lead vocals.

With the addition of gospel inflections, doo wop's polished sound and romantic ballads made it a major part of the 1950s music scene, beginning in 1951.

Later, Tony de la Rosa modernized the conjunto big bands by adding electric guitars, amplified bajo sexto and a drum kit and slowing down the frenetic dance rhythms of the style.

He took authentic Cajun and Creole music and added more elements of rock and roll: a rollicking beat, frenetic vocals and a dance-able rhythm; the result was a style called zydeco.

An American roots revival occurred simultaneously as a period of sexual liberation and racial conflict, leading to growth in the lyrical maturity and complexity of popular music as songwriters wrote about the changes the country was going through.

Girl groups, surf and hot rod, and the Nashville Sound were popular, while an Appalachian folk and African American blues roots revival became dominant among a smaller portion of the listening audience.

It became associated with hippies and the anti-war movement, civil rights, feminism and environmentalism, paralleling the similar rise of Afrocentric Black Power in soul and funk.

It was in this context, of album-oriented soul and funk, influenced by Black Power and the civil rights movement, that African Americans in Harlem invented hip hop music.

The early 1970s saw popular music being dominated by folk-based singer-songwriters like John Denver, Carole King and James Taylor, followed by the rise of heavy metal subgenres, glam, country rock and later, disco.

Beginning in the early 1970s, hip hop arose in New York City, drawing on diverse influences from both white and black folk music, Jamaican toasting and the performance poetry of Gil Scott-Heron.

Later in the decade and into the next, these both mixed with other genres in the form of heartland rockers like Bruce Springsteen, while a honky tonk revival hit the country charts, led by Dwight Yoakam.

Puerto Rican plena and bomba and Cuban chachacha, son montuno and mambo were the biggest influences, alongside Jamaican, Mexican, Dominican, Trinidadian, Argentinian, Colombian and Brazilian sources.

It arose in London and New York, with numerous regional centers by the end of the decade when acts like Ramones and Patti Smith saw unprecedented success for their defiantly anti-mainstream genre.

Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back and N.W.A's Straight Outta Compton broke through with highly controversial and sometimes violent lyrics.

Drawing inspiration from the rebellious attitudes of the Civil Rights Movement and groups like Public Enemy, many intelligent and politically minded rappers began what is known as underground hip-hop with artists like Boots Riley from The Coup leading the way.

[18][21][22] The murders might have also been related to the decades-long Crips—Bloods gang war which has majorly taken place in L.A.[23][24] Hip hop became an essential element of nearly all popular music during this period, resulting in new fusions like nu metal.

Politically minded hip hop in the tradition of Public Enemy and Boogie Down Productions has also diversified since the early 1990s with groups like The Coup, Sweatshop Union, Mr. Lif, Paris, Immortal Technique and many others.

[25] Mariah Carey is credited for introducing R&B and hip hop collaboration into mainstream pop culture, and for popularizing rap as a featuring act through her post-1995 songs.

West became a major rapper with his debut album The College Dropout (2004), which, Britannica writes, had "sonic sophistication and clever wordplay, which blended humor, faith, insight, and political awareness".

This was viewed as "career suicide" for West, but he "shift[ed] the narrative" with the release of his album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (2010), which received "near-unanimous critical acclaim".