Popular Genres of Music

  • Blues

    Blues is a music genre and musical form that originated in the Deep South of the United States around the 1860s. It is characterised by the call-and-response pattern, the blues scale, and specific chord progressions, such as the twelve-bar blues.
  • Jazz

    Jazz music began in the early 1900's. it was originated from blues and ragtime music that was popular in the late 1800's.
  • Ragtime

    “Ragtime” was born in the African-American communities of St. Louis in the 1890’s. Ragtime was very popular dance music, that later evolved into Jazz.
  • Broadway/Musicals

    The 1920s were Broadways prime years where it really began bring in more money - people paid up to $3.50 a seat. Before the creation of talking films, musicals were originated in the theatrical Broadway area of New York City. George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, and Irving Berlin were very successful composers and a lot of their work was turned into the first musical films.
  • Swing

    Swing gained popularity around 1935 and begun "the Swing Era" which lasted about 10 years. Swing music is a sub genre of jazz, but its easier to dance to swing which is why it gained so much popularity. Because of WWII swing musics popularity took a decline, as it was hard to have such large bands in venues.
  • Folk

    Folk music predates many genres, and songs were brought over from people immigrating to America. During the Great Depression era of the 1930s, America experienced a folk revival. Pressure placed on the growing recording industry to generate profit inspired artists to begin recording folk songs as a way of replicating already famous songs.
  • Big Band

    A big band or jazz orchestra is a type of musical ensemble of jazz music that usually consists of ten or more musicians with four sections: saxophones, trumpets, trombones, and a rhythm section. Big bands originated during the early 1910s and dominated jazz in the early 1940s when swing was most popular.
  • Country

    Country (also called country and western) is a music genre originating in the Southern and Southwestern United States. First produced in the 1920s, country music primarily focuses on working class Americans.
  • R&B

    Rhythm and Blues is a popular genre of African-American music that originated in the 1940s. The term was originally used by record companies to describe music being marketed toward urban African Americans, at a time when "urbane, rocking, jazz based music with a heavy, insistent beat" was becoming growing popularity. The bands usually consisted of a piano, one or more guitars, bass, drums, saxophone, and possibly backing vocalists.
  • Latin

    Latin music is a term used by the music industry as a catch-all category for various styles of music from Ibero-America, which encompasses Latin America, Spain, Portugal, and the Latino population in Canada and the United States, as well as music that is sung in either Spanish and/or Portuguese