History 390 blog

To start out I would like to say that this week of class was very interesting. What made it so interesting is that not only did I learn a little more about the origins of music, but also how I learned that something that I thought was a joke for the longest was reality, and that is the 1,3 and 2,4 cadence. All my life me, and my family have joked about numerous white people not having any rhythm whatsoever. I really wondered why exactly was this the case. I felt as though these select white people were overthinking the beats that they were listening to because it wasn’t that hard to be on-beat. With all of that said, to find out that European culture claps on the 1,3 cadence was an interesting discovery. I never really realized that even living in Germany for a few years, but thinking back to how their music was crafted in Europe, it made all of the sense in the world. It was also interesting to learn about the African influence behind Latin music i which I’m not totally shocked because it’s something that I believe I heard of before, but to go deeper into it in our discussion in class, it was interesting to find out how much influence African music had overall.

R&B was the other big discussion in class. I’ll say that i did know about the great migration of Black people from the south going to the North as I’ve learned about it through my years in school growing up, but what I didn’t know was that R&B was initially called Race records, At least I didn’t pay too much attention to it in the past.White people owning the record labels at that time wasn’t surprising at all, and wasn’t new information, what I didn’t know was that there was a black owned record label during that time called Black Swan. That’s something that was never mentioned to me growing up. It’s amazing how far the music industry has come looking back at it. Not even 100 years ago did record labels not allow for mixed records, but of course some bands did it anyways, and got away with . An example of this is Eddie Lang who was with the brothas in a band. The last topic of interest from this week was Muddy Waters who of course was a black man who grew up on a plantation in Mississippi in the early 20th century. I  heard briefly about him, and Chess records before, and just looking back and seeing the impact that he had not only in America, but beyond in a place like England was absolutely incredible especially for a man that was illiterate in Muddy.