AMS Lecture Series: David Brackett -- "Popular Music in the 1920s"
2,513 views · Published 28 February 2013 · 1:30:33 · Indexed 14 October 2026
Channel: Rock & Roll Hall of Fame · 2013 · Education
Brackett is the author of "Interpreting Popular Music and editor of The Rock, Pop, and Soul Reader," two significant works of popular music study. His 2012 lecture -- "Fox-Trots, Hillbillies, and the Classic Blues: Categorizing Popular Music in the 1920s" -- at the Rock Hall explored the relationship between categories of music and people in popular music by focusing on the 1920s, the period that saw the establishment of the three main categories for popular music that have subsequently dominated the U.S. popular music industry in one form or another. These categories, known as 'popular,' 'race,' and 'old time tunes' at the time, implied a connection between an audience and a type of music: middle-class, bourgeois, urban, northern and white for popular; African American for race; and southern, rural, working-class, white for hillbilly. Yet the use of these categories, then and now, highlights numerous contradictions, foremost of which is their inconsistency in musical terms, as many recordings/songs that are similar musically are classified differently.
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