Discover American Studies

American Popular Music

Author: Will Kaufman

When the young Oklahoman, Woody Guthrie, strapped a guitar to his back and hit the road to chronicle the lives of the poor and dispossessed in Depression-era America, he didn’t stand on a soap box to spread the word—he wrote songs and sang them wherever he could. Those songs resonate—and you can hear that resonance in the music of Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and U2. So, if you want to learn about that critical period in American history—and the strength of the people who lived through it—you can read about it in a history book, but also in John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath. You can visualise it through the photographs of Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans; and you can hear it in the songs of Woody Guthrie.

In certain parts of Guthrie’s American South, where African-American adults and even children could be lynched by white racist mobs, the blues singer Billie Holiday came across a poem about it—a poem called ‘Strange Fruit’, inspired by a photograph of a lynched man hanging from a tree. She and some musician friends worked it up into a song. ‘The first time I sang it, I thought it was a mistake’, said Holiday. ‘There wasn’t even a patter of applause when I finished. Then a lone person began to clap nervously. Then suddenly everyone was clapping’. If you want to learn about that dreadful phase in American history, again, you can read about it in a history book; but you can also read the poetry of Claude McKay and listen to the music of Billie Holiday.

The young man who became Bob Dylan absorbed the music of both Woody Guthrie and Billie Holiday. He also absorbed the apocalyptic verses of the Bible as well as the writings of Shakespeare, Melville, Rimbaud, Eliot and Kerouac. When we listen to Dylan we hear the 1960s protests against segregation and the war in Vietnam and the 1980s plight of the small American farmer up against the corporate machine of agribusiness; but we also hear the strains of Western literary history filtered through the notes and the rhythm. If you want to study Bob Dylan as an important observer with his finger on the pulse of American life and politics, that’s fine. If you want to study him as a literary figure, go for it—a number of Oxford dons have done it already!

Why did the FBI target John Lennon in the 1960s? Why was Jack Kerouac so entranced by jazz in the 1940s, and what was its impact on American fiction? The Dixie Chicks damned George Bush in 2003 for being a Texan like them—what did that have to do with the Iraq War? What happened in 1992 when the shareholders of Time Warner learned that one of their own bands, Body Count, had issued a song called ‘CopKiller’ in the wake of the Los Angeles riots? In seeking the answers to these questions, you’ll find out significant things about the relationship between music, politics and society—no matter whether it’s rock, jazz, country or hip-hop. It’s all social, it’s all political, and it’s all worthy of your study.

The best of America and the worst of America; American music, American literature and American history—they can walk separately, and often do; but they can also can walk together. American Studies encourages you to explore the latter possibilities, to link music with other modes of cultural expression, with politics, with history (after all, that’s what happens outside of the classroom). There are some wonderful resources out there, besides your library, your music shop, your iPod and YouTube. Many universities have popular music collections and archives that are accessible to you as well as to music students, and a number of on-line resources—like the Library of Congress’s American Memory project—can bring the entire history of American music to your fingertips.

Popular music is one of the most fertile, exciting and vibrant subjects in all of American Studies—study it and see!