History 390 blog

Any talk about music this semester peaked my interest. I’m someone who has a big interest in music, and am always interested in learning about the origins of music. We had a lot of discussion about the genres of early America, but the one thing in particular I’m going to talk about is black people, and race records. Of all my years of listening to R&B music I never knew that the genre was first called race records. That was crazy to find out. It makes sense because of the social climate of that time, but I would’ve never guessed that R&B records were called race records. Of course the music stores were segregated just like everything at that time due to Jim Crow laws, and they would have race records separate from the other records. If you think about it has much really changed today? What I mean by that is when you go into a store like best buy, it might not necessarily be segregated, but in a way it is because Hip Hop, and R&B are always near each other then Pop, alternative rock are near each other, and then any other genre they may carry. Still today the dominant race doing R&B and Hip Hop are black people, and any other genre is still dominated by white people. Of course there are a few anomalies, but overall this is how it is. Unlike back in those days of course people of all races go to any section they want, and some of the biggest consumers of hip hop are white people. In those times you would be looked at sideways if you didn’t go to the section that had the “music of your people”.

In Miller’s book he talks about how the mistral music is found deep in Americas roots. That was on display through all types of music at that time from folk to race records. It was interesting to find out that the great Louis Armstrong would perform some of the songs, but what he did was deconstruct them and make the songs his own. Dina of course being one of his famous examples of this. One last thing that peaked my interest was the conversation about King Records which was the label of labels back in the day. It was ran by a jewish man in Syd Nathan, and sold music for everybody as it had a department for hillbilly folk type of music, and then had a division for race records. The couple of things that peaked my interest the most about King was that the legendary James Brown was apart of it, and this is something that I may have heard of before as I’ve seen the movie Get On Up, but I guess it was something I didn’t pay attention to too hard. The other thing that peaked my interest was the fact that King Records would put out the same song they released to one target market to the other target market so that everybody could enjoy the song even though it was sung by two different artist. They definitely were about making money with a move like that, in those times it was very smart to do that.