United States

Armstrong’s own career is a good model of the nature and evolution of American popular music at its best. Beginning in impossibly hard circumstances, he took up the trumpet at a time when it was the military instrument, filled with the marching sounds of another American original, John Phillip Sousa. On the riverboats and in the brothels of New Orleans, as the protégé of King Oliver, Armstrong learned to play a new kind of syncopated ensemble music, decorated with solos. By the time he traveled to Chicago in the mid-1920s, his jazz had become a full-fledged art music, “full of a melancholy and majesty that were new to American music,” as Whitney Balliett has written. The duets he played with the renowned pianist Earl Hines, such as the 1928 version of “Weather Bird,” have never been equaled in surprise and authority. This art music in turn became a kind of commercial or popular music, commercialized by the swing bands that dominated American popular music in the 1930s, one of which Armstrong fronted himself, becoming a popular vocalist, who in turn influenced such white pop vocalists as Bing Crosby. The decline of the big bands led Armstrong back to a revival of his own earlier style, and, at the end, when he was no longer able to play the trumpet, he became, ironically, a still more celebrated straight “pop” performer, making hits out of Broadway tunes, among them the German-born Kurt Weill’s “Mack the Knife” and Jerry Herman’s “Hello, Dolly.” Throughout his career, Armstrong engaged in a constant cycling of creative crossbreeding—Sousa and the blues and Broadway each adding its own element to the mix.

King Oliver (standing, trumpet) and his Creole Jazz Band, Chicago, 1923.Frank Driggs Collection/Archive Photos

By the 1940s, the craze for jazz as a popular music had begun to recede, and it began to become an art music. Duke Ellington, considered by many as the greatest American composer, assembled a matchless band to play his ambitious and inimitable compositions, and by the 1950s jazz had become dominated by such formidable and uncompromising creators as Miles Davis and John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet.

John (Aaron) Lewis with the Modern Jazz Quartet.Frank Driggs Collection

Beginning in the 1940s, it was the singers whom jazz had helped spawn—those who used microphones in place of pure lung power and who adapted the Viennese operetta-inspired songs of the great Broadway composers (who had, in turn, already been changed by jazz)—who became the bearers of the next dominant American style. Simply to list their names is to evoke a social history of the United States since World War II: Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Mel Tormé, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Doris Day, Sarah Vaughan, Peggy Lee, Joe Williams, Judy Garland, Patsy Cline, Willie Nelson, Tony Bennett, and many others. More than any other single form or sound, it was their voices that created a national soundtrack of longing, fulfillment, and forever-renewed hope that sounded like America to Americans, and then sounded like America to the world.

Doris Day.Hulton Archive/Getty Images

September 1954 is generally credited as the next watershed in the evolution of American popular music, when a recent high-school graduate and truck driver named Elvis Presley went into the Memphis Recording Service and recorded a series of songs for a small label called Sun Records. An easy, swinging mixture of country music, rhythm and blues, and pop ballad singing, these were, if not the first, then the seminal recordings of a new music that, it is hardly an exaggeration to say, would make all other kinds of music in the world a minority taste: rock and roll. What is impressive in retrospect is that, like Armstrong’s leap a quarter century before, this was less the sudden shout of a new generation coming into being than, once again, the self-consciously eclectic manufacture of a hybrid thing. According to Presley’s biographer Peter Guralnick, Presley and Sam Phillips, Sun’s owner, knew exactly what they were doing when they blended country style, white pop singing, and African American rhythm and blues. What was new was the mixture, not the act of mixing.

Sun Records label.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.