Framing Reading Cultural Roots and Traditions

There are different ways to teach the history of American popular music. You can teach it chronologically, decade by decade, watching styles emerge and fade. You can teach it genre by genre, tracing rock, country, hip hop, and pop as separate worlds. You can teach it through the industry that recorded it, the radio that broadcast it, the platforms that streamed it. Each of these approaches is legitimate. Each of them tells a real story. Each of them also leaves something out.

This course teaches American popular music through cultural roots and traditions. We are going to ask, of the music we listen to: where did it come from, who made it, what communities shaped it, what did it come out of and what is it carrying forward? This way of organizing the course is not the only way, but it is the way that lets us see what we most need to see, which is that American popular music has never been one thing. It has always been many traditions in conversation with each other, and the conversation itself is the music.

This reading explains why we are organizing the course this way, introduces the four traditions you will study in Modules 2 through 5, and names two important threads (Indigenous popular music and queer liberation) that run across the modules rather than living inside any one of them. It also asks you to think about how your own background shapes what you hear, because that is part of how listening works whether we acknowledge it or not.

Why this framing

Most of the music in this course came from somewhere specific before it became American popular music. Blues came out of African American communities in the rural South, with deep roots in West African musical traditions that survived the Middle Passage. Country music came largely from Scots-Irish immigrants who settled in the Appalachian Mountains, carrying ballad traditions that mixed with Black musical practice in the same region. Mambo came from Cuba, brought to New York and Miami by Cuban migrants. Hip hop came from Black, Puerto Rican, and Jamaican kids in the Bronx in the 1970s. Punk came from white working-class kids in New York and London, with Black art-school musicians like Pure Hell and Death playing similar music years before it had a name.

None of this is incidental. The communities the music came from shaped what the music is. The instruments people played, the rhythms they used, the lyrics they wrote, the venues they performed in, the audiences they imagined, all of these were shaped by community. When the music traveled (and it always traveled), it carried those communities with it. When it changed (and it always changed), the change was usually a meeting between communities.

This is why we organize the course around cultural traditions rather than around genres or decades. Genres are real, but they are downstream. They emerge from the communities that make music, and they make sense only when you know who was making them and why. Decades are useful, but they flatten the longer histories that explain why a song from 1968 sounds the way it does. The cultural traditions, the communities and their music-making practices, are upstream. They are where the music actually comes from.

There is one more reason for this framing, which is more political. The standard story of American popular music has often been told as a story of white innovation, with Black music as influence and other communities as flavor. That story is wrong. The history of American popular music in the 1940s forward is largely a history of music made by communities that were and are marginalized: by Black Americans, by Latin American immigrants, by Asian American immigrants, by working-class people of every background, by queer people, by Indigenous people. Telling the story through cultural roots and traditions makes that visible. It does not require us to argue about who deserves credit. It just shows you who was there.

Migration, displacement, and diaspora

Three words appear throughout this course, and it is worth defining them now.

Migration is when people move from one place to another. The reasons vary. People migrate for work, for safety, for family, for opportunity, for love. Migration in American popular music includes Mexican migration to the Southwest and Midwest, Cuban migration to Miami and New York, Filipino migration to California, Korean migration to Los Angeles, internal migration within the United States like the Dust Bowl movement from Oklahoma to California, and many more. Each migration brought music with it.

Displacement is when migration is not chosen. People are forced to move. The largest displacement in American history was the transatlantic slave trade, in which roughly twelve million Africans were kidnapped and trafficked across the Atlantic between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. Their descendants, after emancipation, faced a second displacement: the Great Migration of the early twentieth century, when roughly six million African Americans left the rural South to escape ongoing racial violence, economic exploitation, and segregation, settling in cities like Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and Los Angeles. Indigenous peoples in the Americas have lived through centuries of displacement that continue today. The displacement of Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian refugees after the wars in Southeast Asia is another major displacement story. Music in displaced communities often does double duty: it is a way to remember, and a way to live.

Diaspora is the word we use for a community that has spread out from a homeland, often through migration or displacement, but maintains cultural connections across that distance. The African diaspora includes Black communities throughout the Americas and the Caribbean, all of whom carry musical traditions whose roots predate their displacement. The Latin American diaspora in the United States is connected to Latin American countries through ongoing musical exchange. The Filipino diaspora maintains connections to the Philippines and to other Filipino communities globally. Diasporic music is music that lives in this in-between space: rooted somewhere else, growing here, in conversation with both.

The point of distinguishing migration, displacement, and diaspora is not to rank these experiences or to flatten the differences between them. The point is to be honest. The history of American popular music involves people who chose to come, people who were forced to come, and people whose ancestors were brought against their will and whose descendants made music in the country of their captors. Those are not the same story. Treating them all as one story does a disservice to all of them.

What follows is a thumbnail sketch of each of the four traditions you will study in detail in Modules 2 through 5, plus the two cross-cutting threads (Indigenous popular music and queer liberation) that run across the modules.

African American foundational traditions

Enslaved Africans brought to the Americas were not immigrants. They were trafficked. The Middle Passage was a four-hundred-year-long act of mass kidnapping in which families were torn apart, languages were suppressed, and entire ways of life were stolen. What survived, and what those communities built afterward, was preserved and developed in the face of constant violence: chattel slavery for centuries, then convict leasing and Jim Crow, then redlining and mass incarceration. Music was one of the things that survived and developed. The blues, gospel, jazz, R&B, soul, funk, hip hop, and contemporary R&B and pop are all part of this single tradition, evolving across generations and shaped by the conditions African Americans were living through.

This is why we do not categorize African American music as immigrant music in this course. The framing would be historically dishonest. African Americans did not arrive looking for opportunity. Their ancestors were brought in chains. The descendants then made, and continue to make, music in a country that has never fully reckoned with that history. Calling that music immigrant music would erase the violence at its origin and the ongoing struggle in its present.

At the same time, African American foundational traditions are foundational not only to African American culture but to American popular music broadly. The blues structure underlies rock and roll and country. The gospel-soul vocal tradition shapes pop singing across genres. The rhythmic innovations of funk and hip hop have changed how nearly all popular music is produced. When we talk about cultural roots and traditions in this course, African American music is not one tradition among four equals. It is the largest river running through the landscape, and the other traditions have been in continuous conversation with it for a hundred years.

Sam Cooke's "A Change Is Gonna Come," which we will listen to in the listening guide, is a small example of how this works. Cooke came out of gospel, then crossed over to pop. The song reaches back into gospel's emotional vocabulary while using the orchestral arrangement of mid-century pop. It was written in response to specific incidents of anti-Black racism, including Cooke being denied a room at a Holiday Inn in Shreveport, Louisiana, on the false claim that the motel was full. It was released in late 1964, just after his death. It became a civil rights anthem. It is a song that exists at the meeting point of multiple Black musical traditions and the political moment they were responding to. It is also a song that has been covered, sampled, and referenced by artists across many traditions in the years since. The river runs through everything.

Latin diasporic traditions

Latin American migration to the United States is older and more varied than it is often portrayed. Mexican communities have lived in what is now the American Southwest since before the Southwest was American. Puerto Ricans have been United States citizens since 1917 and have moved freely between the island and the mainland for over a century. Cubans came in waves, with major migrations after the 1959 revolution. Dominicans, Salvadorans, Colombians, and many others arrived in growing numbers across the late twentieth century. Each of these communities brought music with them, and that music kept developing on both sides of the migration.

Module 3 covers Latin diasporic traditions in American popular music: the mambo era of postwar New York, when Cuban music met big-band jazz and produced something new; Latin soul and boogaloo in the 1960s, where Puerto Rican and Black communities in New York made music together that was explicitly bicultural; and salsa in the 1970s, where the Fania label gathered musicians from across the Latin diaspora into a sound that became globally influential.

The thread continues across regions and into the streaming era. Tejano music along the Texas-Mexico border, where Mexican-American musicians like Selena built a tradition that connected to country, polka, pop, and traditional Mexican music. Reggaeton, which emerged in Panama and Puerto Rico from the meeting of Jamaican dancehall, hip hop, and Latin musical traditions. And Latin trap, the contemporary phase of all of this, which has become a globally influential popular music in the streaming era.

Throughout this thread, the central feature is dialogue with African American music. Latin soul and boogaloo are explicitly fusion musics. Salsa drew on jazz harmony and arranging. Reggaeton borrows directly from hip hop and dancehall, both of which are part of the African diaspora. To listen to Latin diasporic music in the United States is to hear that conversation in real time, often in the same song.

Celia Cruz on "Quimbara," which you will hear, is a piece of this story. The Fania All-Stars were a Pan-Latin ensemble: Cuban, Puerto Rican, Dominican, Panamanian, sometimes more. The dense texture and improvisational energy of the recording reflect a musical world built on collaboration across diasporic lines. Cruz herself was a Cuban exile who became a foundational figure in Latin music in the United States. Her career carried Cuban tradition forward, kept it alive in places where the Cuban government could not reach, and made it part of American popular music.

Asian American traditions

Asian American popular music is often left out of survey courses, which is one of the things this course is correcting. Asian American musicians have been part of American popular music for as long as there has been American popular music, but the contributions are scattered across many communities, periods, and genres, and they have rarely been taught as a tradition in their own right.

Module 4 covers Asian American traditions in American popular music: the long history of Filipino American musicians in West Coast jazz, soul, and R&B scenes, including Sugar Pie DeSanto (whom you will hear); Filipino American musicians on the East Coast like Joe Bataan, whose mixed Filipino and African American identity placed him at the heart of Latin soul in 1960s New York; Asian American jazz as a movement, with figures like Fred Ho, Jon Jang, and Anthony Brown using jazz to explore Asian American identity and history; and Filipino American DJs and turntablism, who in the 1990s became foundational to Bay Area hip hop and to the global art form of turntablism through groups like the Invisibl Skratch Piklz.

The thread continues into the present. The twenty-first century has seen a rise of Asian American hip hop, indie, and electronic music with artists like Mitski, Japanese Breakfast, and Yaeji, and platforms like 88rising bringing Asian and Asian American voices to global audiences. The global crossover of K-pop raises complicated questions about what Asian American identity is and is not in relation to Asian global popular music.

Sugar Pie DeSanto's "I Don't Wanna Fuss" is a thread you can pull on here. She was Filipino and African American, raised in San Francisco, recorded for Chess Records in Chicago, toured with James Brown. Her music sits at an intersection that the course will return to in many forms: of Filipino American identity, of Black musical tradition, of West Coast and Midwestern recording scenes, of women's voices in mid-century R&B. She is not famous in the way Aretha Franklin is famous. She should be.

European American immigrant and working-class traditions

European migration to the United States is the migration story most often told in American history textbooks, and it has shaped popular music in ways that are sometimes obvious and sometimes hidden. Module 5 covers this thread.

The Scots-Irish ballad tradition, brought by people who settled in the Appalachian Mountains in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, is at the root of country music. Italian American communities in the urban Northeast shaped doo-wop, the crooner traditions, and the street-corner musical culture that fed into early rock and roll. Jewish American songwriters dominated the Brill Building in midtown Manhattan in the late 1950s and 1960s, writing many of the songs that defined the era through artists like Aretha Franklin, the Drifters, and the Ronettes. The folk revival of the 1950s and 1960s drew on Anglo and Celtic traditions and connected them to the political movements of the era. Punk emerged from white working-class communities, primarily in New York, London, and the industrial Midwest.

Two important things about this thread. First, it has been in constant dialogue with Black music throughout. Country music has Black roots that have been systematically erased and are only now being reckoned with through artists like DeFord Bailey and Charley Pride and contemporary figures like Rhiannon Giddens and Beyoncé with the Cowboy Carter project. Doo-wop and rock and roll were always interracial musics that the music industry segregated commercially even as the actual music was integrated. The folk revival drew heavily on Black music and often did not credit it. Punk had Black originators who were written out of the story. The European American thread cannot be told honestly without naming the dialogue with Black music that runs through all of it.

Second, the European American thread is not just one thing. The Scots-Irish working-class tradition that produced country music is different from the Italian American urban tradition that produced doo-wop, which is different from the Jewish American songwriting tradition of the Brill Building. These communities had different relationships to American identity, different ways of being marked or unmarked as ethnic, and different paths through the music industry. We will treat the differences seriously.

Hank Williams's "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry," which you will hear, is one entry into this thread. Williams's musical inheritance came partly from Anglo-Celtic ballad tradition and partly from his apprenticeship with a Black street musician named Rufus Payne, called "Tee Tot," in Alabama. The blues phrasing in Williams's vocal and the melodic shape of his songs come from both. Williams himself was not shy about acknowledging this. The music history that came after him often was.

Threads that run across modules

Two important traditions are not their own modules but run through several of them, and we want to name them up front so you can listen for them as you go.

Indigenous popular music is the first. Indigenous peoples in what is now the United States have always made music, and Indigenous popular musicians have been making contributions to American popular music throughout the period we study, often without being recognized as such. Jim Pepper, a saxophonist of Kaw and Muscogee heritage, wrote and sang lead on Everything Is Everything's 1969 recording of "Witchi Tai To," a fusion of jazz with a peyote song he had learned from his grandfather. The single reached number 69 on the Billboard Hot 100, and is widely cited as the only Hot 100 hit built on an authentic Native American chant. Robbie Robertson of The Band, of Mohawk and Cayuga heritage on his mother's side, focused his solo work on Indigenous themes from the 1990s onward. Contemporary Indigenous artists like A Tribe Called Red, now The Halluci Nation, work in electronic dance and hip hop traditions while engaging directly with Indigenous activism and ceremony. The "what this module leaves out" section in each of Modules 2 through 5 names where this tradition touches the lineup, and Indigenous popular music is a defensible and rich subject for the final project.

Queer liberation in American popular music is the second. Queer artists have shaped this music throughout, often invisibly, often at great cost. The disco era was substantially Black and Latino and queer, and the AIDS crisis devastated communities that were central to dance music in the 1980s. Queer artists have been part of every tradition this course studies, and many continue to do political work through their music today, including Frank Ocean, Janelle Monáe, and Lil Nas X. Like the Indigenous thread, this one runs across modules rather than sitting inside any one of them, and the "what this module leaves out" sections name where it touches the lineup.

Naming these threads now means you can listen for them as you move through Modules 2 through 5. They will not be hidden. Many of the artists you encounter will be Indigenous or queer or both, and we will not pretend otherwise.

Intersections

One thing you may have noticed already is that artists rarely fit into one box. Sugar Pie DeSanto is Filipino and Black, raised in California, recording in Chicago, working in R&B traditions that came from the South. Joe Bataan is Filipino and Black, raised in Spanish Harlem, working in Latin soul. H.E.R. is Filipino and Black, contemporary, working at the intersection of R&B, pop, and political music. Frank Ocean is Black, queer, working across R&B and experimental pop. Jim Pepper was Kaw and Muscogee, working in jazz fusion that drew directly on Native American Church music.

This is not unusual. It is the rule, not the exception. People are made of many identities at once: race, ethnicity, national origin, language, class, gender, sexuality, religion, immigration status, ability, age. The way these identities overlap and combine, sometimes called intersectionality, is part of who people are and part of what their music carries.

In this course, we take intersectionality seriously by not flattening artists into single categories. When we talk about Sugar Pie DeSanto, we do not have to choose between her being Filipino American and her being a Black R&B singer. She is both. Her music carries both. The intersection is the point.

This matters for how we listen, because music that comes from intersectional identity often does intersectional work. It speaks across communities. It refuses to choose. It builds something new at the meeting points. A lot of the most important American popular music in the last fifty years has come from these meeting points.

Your own listening

There is one more piece of this framing that is harder to write about, but it matters.

You are not a neutral listener. None of us are. The communities you grew up in, the music your family played, the radio stations you heard as a kid, the friends whose tastes shaped you, the places you have lived, the people you have loved, all of these have shaped what you hear when you listen to a song. Some of this shaping is invisible to you until you encounter music from a tradition outside your experience and find yourself either drawn in or pushed away. The drawing in and the pushing away are themselves information.

This course asks you, gently, to be aware of your own starting point. Not because you should apologize for it, and not because some starting points are right and others are wrong, but because being aware of your starting point makes you a better listener. If you grew up with country music, you will hear country music differently than someone who did not. If you grew up with hip hop, the same. If you grew up with neither, you bring fresh ears to both, which is its own kind of starting point. The point is not to leave your starting point behind. The point is to know where you are listening from, so that when a song works on you or fails to work on you, you can ask why with some honesty about what you are bringing to it.

This is part of what it means to make an informed opinion. The methodology reading talked about evidence from the music. This is evidence from yourself. Both kinds matter.

You will not be required to disclose anything personal in discussion posts or in your project. The work is awareness, not confession. Bring your own ears. Notice when you are reaching for a song and notice when you are pulling back from one. Ask yourself why. The answers might surprise you.

What this means for the rest of the course

Modules 2 through 5 each take up one of the four traditions described above, in this order: Module 2 covers African American foundational traditions, Module 3 covers Latin diasporic traditions, Module 4 covers Asian American traditions, and Module 5 covers European American immigrant and working-class traditions. Module 2 comes first because it is the largest tradition in this course and the one most other modules connect to; the connections become clearer when you have it under your belt. The Indigenous and queer threads we just named run across these modules rather than sitting inside any one of them.

The order is fixed, with one module per week from June 1 through June 28. The week-long window is enough to read the framing material, work through the five listening guides, write your discussion initial post, and take the checkpoint quiz. The next module unlocks the following Sunday.

One thing worth thinking about as you go: notice how each tradition you encounter sits in relation to your own starting point. The tradition closest to your own experience will feel more immediately accessible, and your existing knowledge will become useful, but you may find yourself comparing other traditions to your own as the default frame. The traditions farther from your experience will be encountered with fresher ears, which is sometimes useful, though you may not know enough yet to know what you do not know. Both happen. Stay aware of which is happening when, and bring questions to the discussion threads about the moments when your starting point is doing visible work on what you hear.

The proposal and preliminary bibliography for your final research project are due Sunday, July 5, so as you read and listen, start thinking about a genre and an artist that matter to you. The final project landing page has full details on the project, the four checkpoints, and the rubric.

The next document in this module is the Listening Guide. We listen to the four anchor tracks, with specific things to notice in each. After that, you will be ready to write your first discussion post and take the checkpoint quiz.

Welcome to the work.