Nineteenth-century songwriters in the United States combined elements of European art song and opera with other traditions to create commercially successful "popular" music

Songs often were popularized through minstrel shows, which were racially charged theatrical variety shows

The minstrel and parlor songs of Stephen Foster (including Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair) were very successful during his lifetime and remain so today.

"Weep no more my lady, Oh! Weep no more today; We will sing one song for the old Kentucky home, For the old Kentucky home far away." -Stephen Foster

Some melodies become so beloved and familiar that we no longer associate them with an individual composer.

Connects to the idea of success; some music has brought great financial profit, partly because it has been carefully marketed

European immigrants to the Americas brought with them cultivated repertories such as operas, chamber music, and symphonies. Along with this imported "high art," they also began to develop traditions of lighter music - for dancing, singing at home, and public events such as parades.

Stephen Foster blended the two traditions of vernacular American spirit and the European art tradition in his parlor songs, which are often sweet, sentimental, and nostalgic.

Minstrelsy can be unpleasant for modern audiences to face; the shows featured white performers in blackface, acting out idealized "scenes from the plantation" that were vastly different from the realities of slave life.

Posters advertising minstrel shows often used images of performers both in blackface costume and in more formal poses, perhaps to reassure audiences of the "proper" nature of the show.

Many of Stephen Foster's early songs were for the blackface minstrel shows that were popular in this era. From 1847 on, he was under contract with the Christy Minstrels, who specialized in performing blackface shows.

Songs from minstrel shows published later as love songs and ballads

He was perhaps the first American to make a living as a professional songwriter

Ragtime was an African American piano style characterized by syncopated rhythms and sectional forms, made famous by Scott Joplin, the "King of Ragtime."

Joplin's "Maple Leaf Rag" is made up of four repeated strains in a form that resembles the marches of Sousa, whose band often played arrangements of Joplin's rags.

The great bandmaster and composer John Philip Sousa fostered the American wind band tradition, an outgrowth of the British military band.

The piano roll was an early form of musical playback technology.

Both marching and dancing rely on music to structure their regular patterns of moving, and in late nineteenth-century America those patterns overlapped and reinforced each other in two very popular traditions: the ragtime piano dance and the win-and-brass-band march.

In addition to parlor ballads and piano music, nineteenth-century America's vernacular traditions also encompassed music for brass bands. An outgrowth of the British military band, wind groups thrived throughout the United States, beginning with the regimental bands that played during the Revolutionary War.

By the Civil War era, both Northern and Southern regiments marched to the sound of bands that included brass instruments as well as woodwinds, thanks to the pioneering efforts of such designers as the Belgain Adolphe Sax.

America's most famous bandmaster was John Philip Sousa, who conducted the US Marine Band from 1880 to 1892, after which he formed his own group

In the last decades of the 1800s, ragtime developed primarily among African American performers that took Euro-American traditions and modified them through rhythmic and melodic variation

Quite simply, the Maple Leaf Rag dance presents four sixteen-measure sections, called strains, in a moderated duple meter; each strain is repeated before the next one begins

Left home at age fourteen; played in honky-tonks and piano bars

Notice - Performed ragtime at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893

Balanced phrasing and key structures with highly syncopated melodies

Shifts to a new key in C section (the trio); decorative rolled chords

Dance made up of four section (strains), each 16 measures and repeated