Great Rock Musicians Their Achievements And Effect

Great Rock Musicians: Their Achievements And Effect On Music Essay, Research Paper

Great Rock Musicians: Their Achievements and Effect on Rock and Roll

The blues are undeniably the roots of early rock and roll. Rock today has mutated so much that the basic blues patterns have been all but lost. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the birth of, and evolution of rock and roll by focusing on three of the arguably greatest rock musicians of the sixties and seventies.

The origin of the blues can be traced to the emancipation of the slaves in the rural black areas of the south, where most of the people worked on share-cropping farms. Musically the blues are defined as a 12-bar chord progression, harmonized with the corresponding scales and patterns. The chord progression pattern is four measures of tonic chords followed by two measures of sub-dominate chords, two more measures of tonic chords, one measure of dominate chords, one measure of sub dominate chords, and finally two

measures of tonic chords.

Blues performers would travel around the south singing about their loss of love and family, and the pains they were forced to endure. The music became popular because nearly every one who heard it could identify with its message. This type of Blues later became known as country blues because it was rooted in rural areas. The Blues became more main stream and popular in the 1920’s because of the recording industry coming into existence. More instruments were added such as pianos, organs, and wind instruments.

Big Band and Rhythm and Blues stemmed from City Blues.

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Rock and Roll then stemmed from Rhythm and Blues, in fact, many of the first recorded “Rock” songs where simply white musicians re-recording Rhythm and Blues songs originally written by black artists.

It took Bob Dylan 23 years to realize that he wanted to become a rock musician. Bob Dylan, whose birth name was Robert Allen Zimmerman, had a relatively uneventful childhood in a Minnesota mining town. He adopted his pseudonym when he went to the University of Minnesota. “Dylan” came from the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, with whom Zimmerman was frequently compared in the University folk circles. After leaving the University, Dylan moved to New York’s Greenwich Village to follow his folk hero, Woodie Gunthrie. In fact, his main goal of moving to the Village was simply to meet his hero. He not only met the folk guru, but became a member of his group of followers, or groupies. They also became good friends.

Gunthrie got him a couple of gigs at various nightclubs around the Village. Dylan got enough attention at his nightly gigs to be noticed by the Columbia Record Company, specifically the producer John Hammond. His first record, Bob Dylan, was just his renditions of previously recorded songs, but it was popular enough to gain him a long term contract. The recording was so bare bones that the record cost only $402 dollars to make, not including production.

The songs Bob Dylan wrote weren’t used by him exclusively,. He actually got his first important recognition when a song he wrote was used by the Byrds. The song was “Mr. Tambourine Man” and it went to number 1 on the charts. The introduction into the mainstream or pop arena was extremely important to folk-rock, giving it the recognition it desperately needed. Before this song was released the Folk-Rock genre was hardly viewable in the public eye, and was only popular in small folk circles.

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Bringing the American folk scene mainstream did gain Dylan a lot of popularity, but it also got him some unwanted criticism from folk musicians across the Atlantic. In particular from a big name in British folk music , Ewan MacColl. “I have watched with fascination the meteoric rise of the American idol and I am still unable to see him as anything more than a youth of mediocre talent. Only a completely non-critical audience nourished on the watery pap of pop music could have fallen for such tenth-rate drivel. ‘But the poetry!’ they say, what poetry. The cultivated illiteracy of his (Bob Dylan’s) topical songs, are the embarrassing fourth grade schoolboy attempts at free verse.” MacColl failed to see that American youth were not as interested in an idol following literary protocol as they were in the message and the overall sound.

Despite the criticism, Dylan produced many more incredibly successful songs for himself and others including: Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You Babe”, the immortal “All Along the Watchtower” performed by Jimi Hendrix, and the eerily infectious “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” By Guns n’ Roses.

His first musical stance was as a war protest folk singer. . During the Cuban missile crisis he wrote “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” It was a warning and a portrait of what a nuclear war would be. Dylan gained the title of spokesman for his generation when he switched from folk to rock with Highway 61 Revisited.

In 1966 he [reportedly] broke his neck in a motorcycle accident. Whether he did or didn’t, he got a chance to escape from the spotlight He did make several albums privately after that but many said that he had lost his musical power, and the accident had broken his spirit as well as his neck. If he had broken his neck in the accident he would have achieved “mythical status.”

He made a musical comeback in 197

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