Straddling genres from pop to rock, country to dance, novelty songs tell humorous stories using satire, wackiness or a topical link with television, film or a popular craze. Though often musically dubious, they have enjoyed massive, but generally fleeting, success in the modern era. Music and comedy have been bed fellows since the days ...
Jazz, blues, spirituals and gospel music, were rooted in the work songs of black labourers of the South. As Chet Williamson wrote ‘These were songs and chants that kept a people moving and advancing through dreadful oppression. These are the voices of those who harvested the fields, drove the mules, launched the boats, and hammered ...
To this day, many still contend that a written song is not a folk song. Purists claim that only a traditional song, shaped and honed by the environmental context that produced it and handed down by word of mouth through the generations, can justly claim to be true folk music. Indeed, the great Scots folklorist, writer ...
Rock, jazz, soul; each of these genres, while containing a multiplicity of various offshoots, is defined by some kind of unifying theme. But this miscellaneous section, as any record collector will know, is where everything else ends up. Most of the styles within this ‘genre’ have little in common save the fact that they do ...
A product of the spiritual searching of the 1960s, Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) has always been controversial. Combining rock’n’roll with a Bible-based message has seemed profane to some and artistically invalid to others. Despite such criticisms, CCM has attracted millions of loyal fans and given rise to a host of gold- and platinum-selling artists. There’s ambiguity as to what ...
During its golden years, music hall rivalled European cabaret and American vaudeville. But music hall performers were bawdier than their cabaret counterparts, indulging in more boisterous banter with audiences than their American cousins. It was singalong fun, sprinkled with lewd humour. The term first entered common usage in 1848, when the Surrey Music Hall opened in London. ...
Children’s songs have evolved from mothers’ lullabies to teachers’ nursery rhymes to the singalong numbers of TV and film. Through all of their incarnations, they have retained the same stylistic values: a melodic, upbeat mood; a catchy, easily repeatable chorus; and lyrics that tell a story. Many popular musicians have released child-friendly songs. The 1960s, in particular ...
Being perched at the top of the charts on 25 December has represented a prestigious achievement for musicians since the dawn of the pop era, while the shopping frenzy of the festive period makes it one of the most potentially profitable times to release a record. It wasn’t always that way: the original Yuletide songs were church carols that endure ...
Until it was reclaimed with an ironic wink by 1990s hipsters, easy listening had been hugely popular, but rarely cool. While the teenagers of the 1950s and 1960s were getting off on dangerous rock’n’roll and subversive R&B, their parents were sweetly cocooned in the music of Mantovani and Percy Faith. Easy listening music never launched any rebellions; no ...
Following on from the lush bombast of the swing era, and established by a colourful group of American artists in the 1950s and 1960s, lounge was easy listening’s quirky kid brother. It was more playful than its more populist relative and, when viewed retrospectively, had a high camp factor. Although ostensibly laid-back and mellow, lounge ...
Although it generally refers to music recorded up to the end of the Second World War, nostalgia is not a genre in the sense that the artists share inherent characteristics or sensibilities. Instead they have a special resonance, an ability to conjure up feelings and memories of a specific era. Some of them stood for harrowing times: Mae West ...
The relationship between politics and folk music has always been fuel for lively debate. Some argue that the two should not mix, and that aligning traditional song with politics demeans it. Front-line singers such as Dick Gaughan and Roy Bailey, however, argue that folk songs are inextricably linked with politics, and perform plenty of strident material to ...
‘Kung Fu Fighting’, 1974 Jamaican-born Carl Douglas had his finger on the pulse when he recorded ‘King Fu Fighting’, a mid-1970s novelty disco hit that reflected that era’s fascination with king fu movies and the martial arts. It reached No. 1 on both sides of the Atlantic, and is said to have been recorded in just 10 minutes, and ...
The first great Delta-blues singer, Charley Patton (c. 1887–1934) developed a raw, driving and percussive kind of guitar playing that was a seminal influence on the following generation of Mississippi blues singers, including Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and John Lee Hooker. All the elements that became integral to the Delta blues – different guitar ...
(Vocals, guitar, songwriter, actor, b. 1937) A dazzling guitar player, Atlanta, Georgia-born Jerry Reed Hubbard started out in Nashville in the mid-1960s, playing on recording sessions with artists such as Bobby Bare and Porter Wagoner. Later, Reed backed Elvis Presley on guitar when Presley recorded a pair of Reed’s original songs in 1968 ...
AUTHORITATIVE
An extensive music information resource, bringing together the talents and expertise of a wide range of editors and musicologists, including Stanley Sadie, Charles Wilson, Paul Du Noyer, Tony Byworth, Bob Allen, Howard Mandel, Cliff Douse, William Schafer, John Wilson...
CURATED
Classical, Rock, Blues, Jazz, Country and more. Flame Tree has been making encyclopaedias and guides about music for over 20 years. Now Flame Tree Pro brings together a huge canon of carefully curated information on genres, styles, artists and instruments. It's a perfect tool for study, and entertaining too, a great companion to our music books.
David Bowie
Fantastic new, unofficial biography covers
his life, music, art and movies, with a
sweep of incredible photographs.