Women in American Popular Music

By S. Kay Hoke

A concise collection exploring women in rock, rap, folk, and other contemporary genres.

Women in American Popular Music features composers, performers, patrons, musical contexts, and an expanded view of women in music in America.

Touching on genres such as Tin Pan Alley, rock, rap, country, gospel, and soul, this enlightening collection is a good source of programming ideas for performers and a handy resource for music lovers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Dec 13, 2012
• ISBN: 9780253010124

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Since the end of World War I the history of popular music in America has been one of interplay between musical styles and technological advances in sound reproduction. Of the many influences affecting the popular music scene, two are especially noteworthy: the introduction of microphones and amplifiers, allowing performers to project their sound without mastering the same techniques used by performers of art music; and the movement of mainstream popular music from a European-inspired written tradition to a vernacular style derived from oral tradition.

Until the 1920s the primary consumers of popular music were the literate middle and working classes, who had both the ability to read music and the means to buy a piano on which to reproduce it in the home. The emergence of affordable electronic sound reproduction made popular music accessible to a broad audience unconstrained by geography or the necessity for formal musical training. By 1925, control of the popular music industry had begun to shift from publishing houses to radio stations, record companies, and manufacturers of sound reproduction equipment. Popular music in the United States has always been dominated by styles directed toward and listened to by the so-called mainstream audience: urban, middle-class whites. In the first half of the century that music was the product of Tin Pan Alley; in the second half it has been rock. But styles particular to other groups in the population have sometimes attracted broad-based audiences as well—for example, the music of rural whites, first known as hillbilly and later as country, and the music of African Americans, which includes blues, jazz, and gospel.

The study of popular music, whatever its style, provides a rich source of information about women. They have excelled mainly as compelling singers, but have also made significant contributions as instrumentalists and composers. Unlike art music, which is known primarily through its composers, popular music is known primarily through its performers; therefore, the number of preeminent women in the field has been exceptionally large.

TIN PAN ALLEY

What music historian Charles Hamm identifies as the golden years of Tin Pan Alley are those bounded by the United States’s participation in the two world wars. The songs of Tin Pan Alley, written primarily by Jewish Americans living in New York City and grounded in the European classical tradition, maintain important links with European art music. Some of the people who composed these songs—Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, George Gershwin, Harold Arlen, Kay Swift—continue to be revered. Throughout the Big Band Era, many bands featured female singers who performed the best of this repertoire. One classic type of singer, referred to as a canary, was a consummate stylist, cultivating a distinctive stage persona. Beautifully coifed and made-up, costumed in an elegant gown, she performed in clubs, lounges, and, at the peak of her career, in concert halls. The heyday of the canary was ca. 1940–1955; among the many songbirds achieving commercial and artistic success were Jo Stafford (b. 1920), Patti Page (b. 1922), Dinah Shore (1917–1994), Kay Starr (b. 1922), Rosemary Clooney (b. 1928), Margaret Whiting (b. 1924), and Peggy Lee (b. 1920).

Peggy Lee

Dubbed America’s "premiere chanteuse by Peter Reilly and the Queen by Duke Ellington, Peggy Lee is unarguably the most successful popular singer of her generation. Born Norma Dolores Engstrom on May 26, 1920, in Jamestown, North Dakota, she was encouraged by church choir directors and high school teachers to pursue a career in music. When she began to work as a radio singer, the station manager of WDAY in Fargo gave her the stage name Peggy Lee. Lee went on to perform in Minneapolis, St. Louis, Palm Springs, and Chicago, where Benny Goodman offered her a job as vocalist with his band. In 1942, still with Goodman’s band, she recorded Why Don’t You Do Right?" a song