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Hearing the Americas
  • Spins
    • What was the dance craze that inspired W.C. Handy’s legendary “St. Louis Blues” (1914)?
    • What was the most popular kind of band in America and worldwide in 1900?
    • How did recording transform music listening?
    • What role did Black people from the British Caribbean play in the Jazz Age?
    • Did jazz come from Latin America?
    • Who was the first African American recording star?
    • Was the United States the only country where the racist tradition of blackface performance was popular?
    • What musical instrument was invented for use in early recordings?
    • Who was the King of Ragtime?
    • What city was home to two record factories pressing more than 4 million discs per year by 1926?
    • What Appalachian folk instrument came from Africa?
    • Jazz, son, samba, and tango songs all became musical symbols of their nations; when were they first recorded?
    • Why did James Reese Europe forbid his musicians to bring sheet music to gigs?
    • Who was the first country singer?
    • What surprised record companies most about the music consumers wanted to hear?
    • Why does the music recorded before 1920 all sound alike?
    • Where do the blues come from?
    • Who made sexy ragtime dances safe for the general public?
    • How did samba, an Afro-Brazilian genre, come to be celebrated as the national music of Brazil?
    • Why wasn’t Jamaican music recorded before the 1950s?
    • What did Memphis politician Edward Crump have to do with the blues?
    • How did the bolero move from Cuba to Mexico?
    • Who was the first black artist to record the blues?
  • Styles
    • Ethnic Humor
    • Ragtime
    • Vaudeville
    • Minstrelsy
    • Tango
    • Hawaiian Music
    • Classical Music
  • Notes
    • Recording Technologies
    • Race Records
    • Habanera
    • Music Publishing
    • Twelve-bar Blues
    • Syncopation
    • African-American Theater Circuits
  • Artists
  • About
    • Further Reading
    • Content Notice

Hearing the Americas is a project of the George Mason University with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

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