The Sixties

Was soul/funk or Motown music at first more popular with a particular group of people (white or black), Karen? I can imagine if so it would initially have been more popular with the afro americans. It seems to me that most american whites in the 50's/60's either first had to get really used to a such a new sound from another kind of people/subculture or adopt it and turn it into something 'of their own' like they did with blues rock and rock 'n roll.

About Bob Marley and his kind of music: rasta music often has a message that is more specific ment for or about black people. I guess there are examples of that in 60's soul and funk too but in rasta reggae it is more explicit/frequent.

 

The weekly TV show Soul Train was all black, including the host, all the performers, and all the dancers. I think its playlist is a good indication of what was going on in the black community, nationally. They played the widest possible variety of black pop artists, but there was a consistent bias in favor of the funkier, more upbeat sounds. Smoother groups like the Supremes and Four Tops got played more on Dick Clark's American Bandstand, which came on right before Soul Train.

I suspect that a lot of this talk about black musicians only trying to please white people, just to make money, can be traced back to comments Chuck Berry made in a documentary movie about his life. I think he was speaking for himself, and his words have been projected onto other artists, maybe quite unfairly. He had a lot of personal racial animosity, having had to sit in the balcony for all concerts when he was growing up in the Saint Louis area. Throughout his career, he sought a form of revenge through sleeping with as many white women as possible. He admits to this in the biographical film.

In the sixties, America's musical landscape was still somewhat fragmented, with several major urban areas being significantly different from the mainstream. You had audiences with very different musical backgrounds, and therefore different tastes. If you wanted to hear a super-smooth R&B act like the Stylistics, you could find that almost any night of the week in Philadelphia. Most blacks had abandoned jazz after mainstream white America co-opted it into Swing in the late forties, but jazz remained strong in New Orleans, New York, and Chicago. Folk music was mostly out west, and classical was mainly in the northeast. The most diverse musical wonderlands at that time were the cities of Memphis and Detroit.

A young, unknown black singer could walk in off the street, cut a demo single at Motown Records for a nominal fee, and it could be on the radio in a couple of weeks. It was almost like YouTube, except that you had to be in Detroit.

As I explored the FM dial on my first radio, I first discovered reggae on local black stations in the seventies. Marley never did get played on any other local stations, and still gets no love from oldies FM in the South.

 

I think some people say that stuff about Bob Marley because he changed his sound at first when he went to the UK. I don't dig this change at all myself either. It does seem to be made in order to target a broader international audience by adding popular elements and style characteristics (of the new pop music at the time) which were predominately 'white'.

 

they were a growing up movement of humanity. something it often takes youth to make happen.