Great Rock Musicians: Their Achievements And Effect On Rock And Roll Es

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. 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 fo... ... Lady Land, which contained his most successful single: Dylan's "All along the Watchtower". Hendrix's most memorable performance was in 1969, at Woodstock, where he played his immortal "Star-spangled Banner", however it is still unclear if he played the song in such an unpatriotic, angry style in protest of the war, or from the pressure from black militant groups. In 1970 Hendrix died from inhaling his own vomit after an intoxication of barbiturates. The debate has never been put to rest over whether it was suicide or carelessness. "Jimi Henrix was and original, and, unlike most great rock musicians suffered no imitators" (Rock Giants). Rock and roll has become one of America's greatest musical culture contributions. Indeed, America would not be the same if it did not have rock and roll. One of the reasons rock has become so great is that rock groups in more present time have tried to follow the highly creative musical standards set by the musicians in this paper. If rock continues to follow the trends set fourth by the greats, Neil Young's lyrics may prove true, "Hey, hey, my, my, rock and roll will never die."