Almost all of the kinds of music America exports originated in black communities. This is a short walk through the artists who built the sound the rest of the world borrowed. American popular music, which in turn radiated outwards, is, to a remarkable degree, Black American music. Blues, jazz, gospel, R&B, rock and roll, soul, funk and hip hop, and much of country, is rooted in the creativity of Black people, often without audiences realizing where the sound is coming from.
W.C. Handy
The father of the blues, for being the one whom established a folk tradition in written form at the turn of the 20th century, making the twelve bar blues a written and sellable music. Nearly everything downstream, including rock, runs back through it.
Louis Armstrong
The most important person in early jazz, the man who was responsible for developing a collective New Orleans style into an art form of individual improvisation. He effectively invented the modern pop vocal phrase and the idea of the soloist.
Bessie Smith
Known as the Empress of the Blues, she recorded in the 1920s and became one of the most highly-paid black artists of the time and the prototype of the strong female singer that continues to emerge from soul music and beyond.
Duke Ellington
The composer who took jazz to the concert hall over a thousand compositions and paced a great jazz orchestra for decades. He used to regard the orchestra as an instrument he had written for himself.
Mahalia Jackson
A voice that brought gospel to the masses and moral energy to the civil rights movement, which played at the March on Washington just before Dr. King’s speech. She was the greatest voice of gospel and it is the fountain of soul.
Chuck Berry
One of the founders of rock and roll, and a pioneer of the blending of blues and country music, into a guitar-driven style of lyrics about teenage American life. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones essentially began as his students.
Little Richard
The wild, gospel-charged energy that gave birth to the music of rock and roll, influencing everyone from Elvis to Prince with her piano, scream and showmanship. He called himself the architect of rock and roll and had a strong claim to it.
Ray Charles
Fused gospel with blues and country to help invent soul music, then made a country album that outraged purists and sold enormously. He dissolved the boundary between sacred and secular music and never looked back.
Aretha Franklin
The Queen of Soul, gospel-trained and unmatched, who turned songs into demands and made Respect a cultural landmark. She is the reference point against whom vocalists are still measured.
James Brown
The rhythmic revolution. He shifted the focus to the downbeat and used every instrument as if it were a percussion instrument, and he provided funk with a lot of the material it used and for hip hop, he must have provided more sampled material than anyone.
