Tuesday, 10 June 2008

50's rock n roll

Rock ‘n’ Roll

Genre Information
http://42explore.com/rocnroll.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_and_roll
http://www.history-of-rock.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Freed
http://daily.stanford.edu/article/2003/10/3/rockNRollFashionRetrospective
http://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&id=lMyC2FndXwkC&dq=rock+and+roll&printsec=frontcover&source=web&ots=bCAKnLhVMa&sig=yhqpJiLQ7PGEJE-MUwdVemtYJtU#PPP1,M1

Important Bands
http://www.history-of-rock.com/elvis_presley.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Berry
http://www.history-of-rock.com/buddy_holly.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Richard
http://www.rockhall.com/inductee/bo-diddley
http://www.rockhall.com/inductee/jerry-lee-lewis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Haley_and_His_Comets
http://www.everlybrothers.com/html/bio.html


Little Richard - Tutti Fruity - 1955
Bo Diddley - Bo Diddley - 1955
Elvis Presley - Hound Dog - 1956
Elvis Presley - Heart break hotel - 1956
Bill Hailey and his comets - Rock around the clock - 1956
Buddy Holly - Peggy Sue - 1957
Jerry Lee Lewis - Great Balls Of Fire - 1957
The Everly Brothers - Bye Bye Love - 1957
Chuck Berry - Johnny B Goode - 1958
Buddy Holly - Maybe Baby - 1958

Monday, 2 June 2008

1960's Motown

Racial attitudes were not as much of an issue any more in the early 1960’s and this gave way to a whole new genre in music. Black musicians were now allowed to have unlimited radio play and could express their music to the world freely.
The main people that are behind Motown are a group called ‘The Funk Brothers’. These were a pool of session musicians from around the city of Detroit that played jazz and blues. It was always the singers that they played for that got noticed and became famous. They played for artists like Marvin Gaye, Diana Ross, James Brown and Stevie Wonder and many, many more.
It was also a time when producing and writing music was very different to how it is done today. The Funk Brothers used a basement as their studio and only had three hour sessions at a time in which they often wrote and recorded around two to four songs each time which is amazing to how it can take a full day in a studio now to get two tracks done. Motown was very often just like a big jam session when they were writing their music, someone started off with a rhythm or beat and then the other musicians join adding their own little bits to it.
I choose to write my 1960’s blog on Motown because I thought that it would be interesting to write about it with having the racial background with it being around the time when racial attitudes were becoming much more relaxed. Also because I liked the idea of having a lot of musicians on stage all having small parts but creating some incredible and very influential music and it was a genre that I wanted to learn more about.