The Origin and Development of traditional Music in the Southeast of the United States

Abstract

What goes under the label of “American music” is a great variety of music styles, that goes from Country music to Noise, that developed during the last century. As a matter of fact, in a relatively recent and short period of time, a little bit more than a hundred years, America gave rise to an incredible variety of music styles. The southeast in particular, with its music capital in Atlanta, Georgia, is now a vibrant center for music such as Hip Hop and Rock & Roll. But what are the origins of music in this territory? How did it developed?Music in the southeast began to emerge little after the first Europeans and Africans arrived here. Nevertheless, as it often happens in counties dominated by colonial power, for a long time the arts were not taken into great consideration, because subjected to the motherland. Moreover, there was a tendency to regard popular music as something of minor value, since it was often related to the lower classes, such as peasants and slaves. Scholars believe that the first collection of ballads actually called A Collection of Ballads, was published in 1723 . This collection gained great success in the 1720s and appeared in multiple editions, but the editor sill remains anonymous. Even so, the interest generated by this book, led the English clergyman Thomas Percy to publish another collection of ballades in 1765 called Reliques of English Poetry . This book has been regarded as masterpiece for years. It was basically a collection of medieval English minstrel songs, which served as a reference for the study of the origin and relation of American songs and the British tradition. Percy claimed that the first edition of his book was based on an old manuscript he had rescued from a friend’s maid, who was about to use it to start a fire. The first American person to take notice and to realize the importance of folk ballads was Francis James Child, a philologist, folklorist and professor at Harvard University. He thought that ballads had lost their original value, because “tainted when educated classes had turned their attention to fine-art music” , he felt that their importance had to be restored before this tradition would disappear. Child, such as a great number of scholars interested in Southern music, was from the north. He was definitely one of the most important and influential collectors of songs in the United States, but his interest was primarily related to the lyrics of the songs rather than in the melody, so that many of the tunes of the songs collected in his research have been lost.