ant to popular contemporary music?

ITT Jorge

Reformulate this atrocity of a question please.

jazz?

Which music prior to 1950 - other than the blues - is relevant to popular contemporary music?

Thank you.

I think all music prior to 1950s is relevant to popular contemporary music, as it all had a part in shaping it. A lot of the note progressions and melodic turns that are so ubiquitous in modern pop songs, to the point of feeling cliché, are derived from classical compositions, particularly the Baroque period. Jazz instrumentation had an enormous effect on rock and roll, the Great American songbook standards influenced modern pop hits, etc. It's all connected and it's all distilled. Elvis Costello said "Music is more like water than a rhinoceros. It doesn't charge madly down one path. It runs away in every direction."

Wow, even I know how stupid of a question that was.

Big band music has had a hugely under rated influence on rock. They had the first singers that were frontmen. Drums mattered for once and soloing was sexy.

Bing Crosby makes my grandmother moist.

...

Great thread.

in the process of wrapping my mind around this thread, it was stretched so thin it can be said to have disappeared

I always thought traditional Celtic music was a much greater precursor to a lot of modern popular music than it gets credit for being. A lot of those melodies can be traced through various folk movements and into subsequent genres of music which use them for reference points.

Stephen Collins Foster, too. In a lot of respects he's considered the first professional popular songwriter, and a lot of his compositions--"Camptown Races," "Oh Susanna," "Jeanie With the Light Brown Hair"--are among the most famous in the entire American songbook. In 2004 a bunch of contemporary artists recorded a tribute record to him called "Beautiful Dreamer," and though the language in the songs is a little archaic, little else in the songcraft points to them being 150+ year old songs. There are still melodic ideas in there that are being used today.

despite comparatively narrow tastes I find music history really interesting

I'm sure that Douglas Adams wrote a sentence very similar to this at some point.

ive always kinda looked at bing band music as the sorta punk rock of the 1930s.

There are a lot of bands writing songs with a hymn-like structure at the moment. They always have, but songs like 'Winter Hymnal' by Fleet Foxes kind of started a recent trend.