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2
What the Popular Music Industry REALLY Is, and Where It Came From
2.0.1
A Bit of Helpful Pop Music History

All music is folk music; leastwise I ain’t never heard a horse sing.

—LOUIS ARMSTRONG

This book focuses on specific practical techniques you can use to create and perform emotionally evocative, memorable music and lyrics. As for popular music history and the history of particular genres, any good library or bookstore has hundreds of titles.

That said, this one chapter (out of 12), and one appendix, provide a bit of historical background on popular music of the West. Western popular music— especially African American popular music—is found practically everywhere in the world. Paradoxically, humans tend to resist attempts at so-called “cultural imperialism”—yet plunder each other’s cultures when they find something they like. Universal people, universal music.

This chapter briefly surveys more than a dozen major popular music genres that emerged throughout the 20th Century, mainly in America.

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