The Origins of Pop Music’s Racial Divide

Description

Please answer the following questions based on the article by William G. Roy. Post your answers on the Discussion Board titled Roy Questions Week #3.

1) In your own words please discuss the concept of homology.
a. In your discussion please consider the relationship between taste communities and social boundaries.
b. Also consider the relationship between musical taste and social groups. Do you think this relationship is sometimes overstated? To what degree do aesthetic and social boundaries coincide?
c. Give an example from your own life of the relationship between musical taste and social groups. This example can be one that shows that they are intertwined or one that shows that the relationship is perhaps more stereotype than reality — both points of view are potentially valid!
2) In your own words, please compare and contrast the concepts of borrowing versus appropriation.
a. Please consider the traits that make something borrowing versus appropriation, whether musical, functional, generic, or performative traits.
b. Give an example from American popular music of an artist that straddles the line between borrowing and appropriation. Which side of the line would you place them on and why?
3) When did record companies begin to envision a mass market for phonograph recordings?
4) Why did class dynamics figure more heavily in the marketing of records in the industry’s earliest days than did racial dynamics?
5) The mainstream record market was officially unmarked or uncategorized, but who really comprised the mainstream in terms of race, location, and class?

Please answer the following questions based on the Blues article linked to on our slides (an on Blackboard) “Hear the First Recorded Blues Song. . . . .”

1) According to this article, what is “the source of the Blues?”
2) What was the social status of early Blues musicians and listeners?