The+Expert

The Expert I found an expert who works for the U of M Music Department. Peter Mercer-Taylor is a professor of musicology. He has taught me many things that I have incorperated into this website. Below is what he actually wrote, and not tampered with at all. If you would want his exact words here they are. . .  “ First off, the real beginnings of "country" music as the radio-friendly thing we know really came into focus with Hank Williams, whose productive career ran from about 1947 to his death in 1953. He incorporated the kind of "western" style that had been growing up, since the late '20s, in the work of such people as Gene Autry, "The Singing Cowboy." The acoustic guitar was, of course, the main instrument (the portable, "cowboy"  instrument), but Hank Williams boiled the sound down into really great tunes, with a singing style that seemed plaintive and very personal, sometimes including the kind of yodeling that Jimmie Rodgers had popularized in the '20s and '30s. When we think of country music as being largely sad -- about love lost, remembering better times, and so on -- it really is Hank Williams' style we're talking about. From there, Loretta Lynn, Patsy Cline, and a bunch of other people ushered the style through the late '50s and early '60s, as the Nashville sound (twangy guitars, the "slide" sound of the pedal guitar, and so on) really solidified. Since roughly Garth Brooks's generation (he appeared in 1989, and dominated for a few years thereafter), country has become a much more mainstream phenomenon, still sounding like country in the "southern" accents and the twangy sound of the Telecaster guitar, but often sounding otherwise like mainstream pop. Artists like Taylor Swift can now cross over between country & pop with ease.

 "Pop" had, of course, been around since the beginning of time. There have been what we might call "pop" songs since the early 19th century. In modern times, though, we tend to think of "pop" as that thing that happens once rock & roll comes along, and something that's kind of defined by being mainstream popular music that is NOT "rock." The first time this starts to matter is in the late '50s and early '60s. Rock & Roll exploded into view in about 1955, with such acts as Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley, and Carl Perkins. For various reasons, these careers all kind of ended by 1959 (Elvis joined the army, Jerry Lee Lewis got in trouble for marrying his 13-year-old cousin, Little Richard found Jesus and quit "the devil's music", Chuck Berry got arrested for transporting a minor across state lines). What came next was the first great wave of rock-era "pop," a music found at its best in the "girl groups" (the Shirelles, the Crystals, the Ronettes, etc.). This music wasn't rock & roll in any way. It was music written by professional songwriters, put together by professional producers, arranged by professional arrangers, played (instrumentally) by professional studio musicians, with three or four young girls (usually in their late teens) brought in just to sing it, and to dance around on stage when it was done live. It was much "safer" than rock & roll as a rule, not about being rebellious, but about the virtues of love, romance, fidelity, and so on. Even after rock made its big comeback (around 1963, when the Beatles and the Beach Boys, then the Who, the Kinks, Led Zeppelin, and everyone else, appeared), pop remained an important force. In a sense, the whole Motown record company remained solidly in the "pop" business, its black artists (the Supremes & the Jackson 5, for instance) essentially continuing the "girl group" model (whether girls or boys) even as rock bands pounded away, doing their thing. In the early '70s, pop got another important boost as singer/songwriters like Joni Mitchell, Carole King, James Taylor, Neil Young and, eventually, Elton John & Billy Joel came on the scene, producing music that couldn't be called "rock" at all, but had a powerful, broad appeal. Acts like the Carpenters, Donny & Marie Osmond, then all of the disco acts that followed (Abba was the best), were peddling basically inoffensive music which, unlike rock, didn't seek to rock the boat -- it wasn't about macho posturing, but about relationships, love, and so on.

 Rap really came into view in the mid-'70s with Cool DJ Herc, a Jamaica-born turntablist who brought to parties (mostly in New York City parks) a whole new way of messing around with LP records on turntables -- cutting and scratching in the way we now know well. With the Sugarhill Gang's 1979 "Rapper's Delight," rap enjoyed its first big hit (though there was no turntable work to speak of, there was good honest rapping). In 1982, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five released the first rap song that really handled rap as a vessel for social commentary, "The Message," all about the hardships of life in urban New York. It was only in the late '80s, though, with work from Ice-T, NWA, and some other folks that "gangsta rap" really took off. Meanwhile, from about 1983-87, Run-DMC had pushed the genre into the limelight in a whole new way. With the new, incredibly fat Roland 808 drum machine behind them, Run-DMC produced a rap sound a lot heavier -- a lot more like rock, basically, whether it used guitars or not  -- than anyone had really tried before. Their 1983 "Rock Box" showed that rap could, in fact, cross over with rock, through the use of electric guitars and so on. Run-DMC's 1985 "King of Rock" would be the first rap video to go into heavy rotation on MTV. With their 1986 cover of Aerosmith's "Walk This Way," Run-DMC hit the bigtime in a way no previous rap act had.”

The History of Music

Musical Table of Contents