I tend to feel that “pop” music requires a method of mass transmission. I think sheet music would be the best fit.

I also think it needs to be “the people’s music”, not formal.

For the States I would go with Stephen Foster. I think he is the best fit.

Great list, gets you thinking.

Feel free to disagree, but I think anyone must reasonably admit that I am following a much more interesting line of analysis than simply dragging out 10 big-selling old chestnuts from the last millennium.

Arguing that ‘Pop Music’ is purely defined by actually popularity is like like saying that Michelangelo is a Modern Artist.

After all – he was modern in 1525 wasn’t he?

The first three examples seem to me more examples of light Academic (Classical) music because the people who could write music in those times were always very instructed and surely part of some sort of social elite. If the piece is a transcription of what they heard, than it is obviously Traditional. But the descriptions specifically mention how they were related to Kings’ courts.

Than from Home Sweet Home:

1) Home Sweet Homes originally comes from an opera, which is linked to Classical music. It was popularized later the same way that a Johan Strauss waltz was popularized (itself a transcription influenced from the Traditional).

2) O Suzanna seems to have been influenced heavily by Traditional music, and was associated with the Gold Rush, which to me sounds like a Traditional phenomenon for music. Oh, the USA! It’s about the american people. You’ll see why later I think it is not yet Popular Music.

3) Old Folks at Home: let’s face it, the “Ballad” is a Traditional music, and everything about this song seems like someone who knew how to write music getting influenced by those who can’t. And it’s again about the american people. It’s not about sex
or your personal problems. Also, not enough were sold.

I think After The Ball is the first Pop song because it sold over a million, and Popular music is first a phenomenon of mass music (in the beginning, and I’m talking of the word “popular”, not “pop”, it meant a song internationally known, not just locally, right at the time or not long after its original release). But Pop is also about style. The Tin Pan Alley and early modern Broadway Musical style (non-operatic, not linked with Classical) was quite fresh at the time, and it wasn’t music remote from technology and progress: popular music was an urban phenomenon, linked with the emergence of a “middle class”. And most of what we hear today comes from an influence of the recording industry which evolved hand in hand with Tin Pan Alley or the modern Chanson in France (post Aristide Bruant). After The Ball was also one of the early recording. So I would say that past 1880 you start to get more “modern” sounds (“Dans La Rue” by Aristide Bruant in 1886 France sounds the same as Jacque Brel). After The Ball was a huge huge hit and it is where the “new urban middle class” sound (the tune was from a New York Musical which was very urban, contemporary, and early Broadwayesque) reached a much wider mass as unconceivable before, and with popular music (before you get to the pop music genre), I think you need this awareness of a mass that they have a new music which is specific to a mass market. Once you have that general awareness, you can get more obscure pop songs, but they are always related to a mass market. HMV store music. That’s pop music. Even when you counterculture HMV.

Cedric Casp

Great piece, Mark.