Segregation is a topic that is usually thought of in visual terms. When I think of segregation, I imagine a United States history textbook with photographs showing the barriers between black and white bathrooms. Or, I flashback to a documentary on the Little Rock Nine. Yet, until reading chapter 9 of Dunar’s book and analyzing Halberstam’s article, I had not thought about the segregation of music that existed within the 1950s. <\/p>\n
Music can be a simple and extremely effective manner of stereotyping someone, because everything is split into categories. Genres, lyrics, melodies and album covers all contribute to how we view a song. And, quite frequently, people judge their peers based on musical tastes and the predisposed stereotypes that follow these tastes. <\/p>\n
All humans have emotion, therefore it is a connection that can exist in music. If you were to listen to a song in a foreign language, understanding may be found in the beat and vocal inflections rather than the spoken words. As in Halberstam’s article, Elvis Presley was intrigued by gospel and blues music because “it had a power of its own […] and that power seemed to come as much as anything else from the beat” (464). Despite the emotional quality of “black gospel music”, Presley’s parents viewed it as “sinful music” (Halberstam 464). Before the 1950s, many people had only considered rhythm and blues music to be “relegated [to] African-American performers” in the way “white singers controlled the Billboard pop charts” (Dunar 268). This barrier was broken by singers, such as Nat “King” Cole, who ultimately obtained success on the pop charts. Music before the fifties was not only segregated by color, but also by gender. <\/p>\n
Country music was an industry that “men had long dominated,” until the breakthroughs of artists such as Loretta Lynn and Kitty Wells (Dunar 269). It is amazing to think that the fifties, a time that is often stereotyped as being an age of conformity, actually brought about a great change in the music industry. Without the success of Nat “King” Cole and artists, such as Kitty Wells, we may be listening to the same, mainstream music that people were afraid to break away from prior to the 1950s. And, it is amazing to think that without the dramatic shift in musical culture, the radio could have continued discrimination on skin color and gender despite the fact music is a universal language. <\/p>\n
Music is a form of artistic expression and communication, and it’s changes suggest that the fifties is not as simple a time period as many people think it is. If it was so simple, Cole, Wells and Presley may not have had anything to sing about because when people have something to sing about it shows “so much more feeling and so much more love” (Halberstam 468). <\/p>\n
-Erin R.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Segregation is a topic that is usually thought of in visual terms. When I think of segregation, I imagine a United States history textbook with photographs showing the barriers between black and white bathrooms. Or, I flashback to a documentary on the Little Rock Nine. Yet, until reading chapter 9 of Dunar’s book and analyzing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[6],"class_list":["post-82","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-student-blogposts","tag-fa13"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsu.tonahangen.com\/fysfifties\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsu.tonahangen.com\/fysfifties\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsu.tonahangen.com\/fysfifties\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsu.tonahangen.com\/fysfifties\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsu.tonahangen.com\/fysfifties\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=82"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/wsu.tonahangen.com\/fysfifties\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":286,"href":"https:\/\/wsu.tonahangen.com\/fysfifties\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82\/revisions\/286"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsu.tonahangen.com\/fysfifties\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=82"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsu.tonahangen.com\/fysfifties\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=82"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsu.tonahangen.com\/fysfifties\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=82"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}