What would be "rebellious teen" music in the 1910's?

by LovelyCryptids

This is such an odd question I know but you know how today there's alot of rap and hip hop songs that older people usually consider part of teen culture? Was there anything like that in say, the 1910's?

EDIT: the answer to this turned out alot more interesting than I thought it would be. Thank you!

hillsonghoods

In 1910, the word 'adolescent' was not much older than the adolescents of the era, and the idea of the 'teenager' was still a few decades in the future. The term 'adolescence' was most associated with G. Stanley Hall, one of the first American psychologists (he founded the American Journal of Psychology, and basically invented developmental psychology). In 1894, Hall had announced he was going to study not children but 'adolescence', and a decade later published the book Adolescence: its psychology and its relations to physiology, anthropology, sociology, sex, crime, religion and education. Hall was sort of more of a prophet of adolescence rather than a describer of adolescence; he argued that adolescence was a specific stage in life that people should be paying more attention to, rather than it being one people were paying attention to.

After all, adolescence is not only about being a certain age with a certain set of hormonal changes etc, but in a certain stage of life, something which is dependent on the society and how it structures itself. In 1910, only about two-fifths of students went onto high school in the USA, which was itself a massive increase in the amount of high school students compared to a few decades previous. By 1940, three-quarters of children would go onto high school. So what did the other three-fifths of students in 1910 do? Well, they were working.

To truly have 'teen culture', you need to have shared experiences between teens, and until high school became de rigueur, this wasn't the case - the lives of teens working in factories at the age of 14 were very different to the lives of upper middle class children aiming to go onto further education. It's not until high school becomes the done thing that teens really start to take their cues not from the adults they looked up to, but instead their peer group.

In terms of music, it's also important to remember that the record player and recording technology was very much in its infancy in the 1910s. Similarly, radio was around in the 1910s, but it was in the 1920s that radio really exploded as popular home entertainment. Instead, this was an age of sheet music, a music culture where people see live music and/or play it at home to make their own entertainment. This means, effectively, that you don't quite get the kind of mass cults you get around individual artists - Elvis, or the Beatles, for example. Instead, culture was by necessity much more local (though not as local as it once had been, because record players were nonetheless able to spread sounds).

With those caveats in mind, the dominant music likely to appeal to youth who were wanting to break free of society's constraints, in the (early) 1910s, was ragtime. This style of music had been around for some time in the black community - Scott Joplin's 'The Entertainer', probably the best known ragtime thanks to the 1970s movie The Sting, was 1902 - but it first made a big impression in white America in the 1910s, with the success of the Irving Berlin song 'Alexander's Ragtime Band' and the musical Hullo Rag-Time.

Music magazines were kind of horrified by the music; the Musical American thought it was like an addictive drug, while the Musical Courier thought that America was "falling prey to the collective soul of the Negro through the influence of what is popularly known as 'rag time' music". The Musical Courier considered this "a national disaster [because the music was] symbolic of the primitive morality and perceptible moral limitations of the Negro type. With the latter sexual restraint is almost unknown, and the wildest latitude of moral uncertainty is conceded." Along with ragtime went a popular form of dance, the various 'animal dances', like the turkey trot, the bunny hug and the kangaroo dip, all of which were danced in pairs, and where the dancers touched more parts of their body together than in the more decorous dances of tradition, like the waltz.

In the closing years of the 1910s, ragtime began to be replaced in popularity by bands like the Original Dixieland Jass Band (whose Dixie Jass Band One-Step you can hear here), who had sold a million copies of their record in 1917, and who had gone international in 1919 with a London residence - if ragtime had seemed hypnotically rhythmic to observers like J.B. Priestley, the jazz genre given birth by people of colour in New Orleans that the ODJB brought to America's consciousness would take that to another level entirely.

However, generally, this music isn't the music of teen rebellion in quite the same way that The Who ('I hope I die before I get old') might have been in the 1960s, or punk was in the 1970s, or grunge was in the 1990s - this isn't teen rebellion marketed as teen rebellion. The rebellion inherent in the music is the act of breaking free from the categories and constraints of an age perceived as dominated by stuffy Victorians; the rebellion is in the desire to lose yourself in music and dance - it's more Footloose than Blackboard Jungle.

But the word 'teenage' is a product of the 1930s, and the word 'teenager' came to prominence in 1944; it was in the 1940s that 'teen culture' genuinely starts to become a thing. In contrast, the ragtime and jazz of the 1910s was perhaps seen as music for 'youth'. But 'youth', even at the time, was a broadly defined term; many of the 'youth' dancing to ragtime weren't teens at all but were in fact young adults, people not yet settled down as adults with a marriage and kids. And to some extent, during the period, you could be reasonably old and still fit the idea of 'youth', because in some ways the term 'youth' was more about a sense of freedom and breaking free of the era's perception of Victorian stuffiness.

Source:

Jon Savage, Teenage: The Creation Of Youth 1875-1945

cheapwowgold4u

This post is longer than it probably needs to be, but TL;DR: Dance crazes.

First, let's examine how your typical listener consumed popular music in the 1910s. In the United States, at least, there were a number of different channels for the consumption of popular music. One is stage performance, which would have reached American audiences through touring vaudeville shows (usually at archetypal music halls, but also at respectable early American cabarets, such as the Folies-Bergères, which opened in New York in 1911) featuring various songs pulled from popular Broadway musicals, alongside comedy skits, burlesque acts, and so on. The songs for these musicals, in turn, often came from the hard-working songwriters of Tin Pan Alley, which had coalesced in the late 19th century in response to improved musical copyright enforcement and the resulting potential for profit. Another important avenue for these songs to be heard was by being licensed as background music for movie theaters, which employed around 22,000 musicians nationwide by 1926, to say nothing of the widespread use of player pianos. These songs also competed with each other for sheet music sales (usually for home performance on the piano) and record sales, recorded on wax disc rather than the older wax cylinder format, which was beginning to die out by the beginning of the 1910s. Billboard's first music chart, entitled "Popular Songs Heard in Vaudeville Theaters Last Week," dates from 1913, and sheet music sales persevered as a major element of the American popular music industry until the 1929 Wall Street crash.

None of the methods of music consumption I've mentioned, however, were particularly well-suited to fostering a distinctive "teen culture" centering around music. The household piano and phonograph, if a given household was wealthy enough to have them at all, belonged foremost to the parents, who had veto power over what was played on them; the music industry therefore didn't really bother producing much material for home consumption that might have offended the average American parent's sensibilities. To simplify tremendously, the development of any distinctive teen culture was hampered by social constraints around how young people were expected to behave in this time period, and the ways that commercial society reinforced those expectations in a structural manner. This didn't really start to change until, at the earliest, the end of World War I, when soldiers came home with a disillusioned, devil-may-care attitude that contributed to a reevaluation of all the fine upstanding traditions that had failed to stop so much senseless death. (See also: modernism.) Later on, the spread of portable radios in the late 1940s and early 1950s allowed teenagers to consume music at will, on their own terms, and led to further cultural shockwaves as teenagers began to flex their own power as consumers.

But back to the 1910s. Among the ways in which popular music was consumed, a major exception to some of the social constraints I've mentioned was dance. There are all kinds of reasons why dance was the site of important social change in this era and in many others: it is deeply interactive and performative; it is often the province of the young and fit; it can be presented/promoted as traditional and stabilizing while actually being subversive and transgressive. The advent of the waltz in the 19th century, for example, with its "closed hold" between a male and female dancer, was at first considered shockingly improper. In 1912, Vernon and Irene Castle, a married white couple of professional dancers, returned to New York from a successful tour in France where, to great acclaim, they had adapted African-American dances (most famously the foxtrot) to the tailcoat milieu of the Parisian café; one of their numbers was set to "Alexander's Ragtime Band," a hit song from Tin Pan Alley written by a very young Irving Berlin. They quickly became the toast of New York's cabaret scene, starring in Broadway shows, opening a dance school, and making films. They also hired African-American musicians such as James Reese Europe, and made great strides in making black dance music more "palatable" to a mainstream white audience. Along the way, they started a series of dance crazes that swept the nation, leading to the establishment of numerous dancing halls and thereby helping to bring social dance out of the formal, private ballroom and into the public sphere. (A lot of other people were involved in this process, of course, but the Castles were two of the most famous.)

The 1910s are hardly the only time in the United States when popular dancing has been criticized as immoral, but the preeminence of dance in the popular culture of the time, and the emergence of the public dance hall (often serving alcohol, or connected to an establishment that did) meant that the pushback was strong as well. A Christian periodical wrote of "the modern dance" in 1914: "It is a war on physical health; a menace to men's moral nature; the avenue through which thousands pass into brothels. The dance hall is the nursery of the divorce courts, the training-ship of prostitution, and the graduation school of infamy." Well, I never! (And there was a racial aspect as well to these responses, connoting the African-American origins of some of the dances with lewdness and moral laxity. One author wrote that the dance hall was "the beginning of the white slave traffic in many instances.") The hysteria in opposition did not outstrip the hysteria in favor, but it certainly affected the reaction of many people, and especially many parents. It is worth adding the caveat here that the dance crazes of the 1910s were not exclusively teenage music, as they were widely popular, but they were particularly popular among young people and the paranoia around potential moral turpitude was centered on young people as well.

"What about jazz?" I hear you ask. During most of the 1910s, jazz (or proto-jazz, depending on who you ask) was largely restricted to New Orleans, until the government's closure of the famous Storyville red-light district in 1917 (for fear of distracting the troops stationed in New Orleans) caused a diaspora of jazz musicians to spread to Chicago and elsewhere, making jazz into a national music. Also in 1917, the Original Dixieland Jass Band recorded their first few records in New York and initiated a relatively minor jazz craze at the end of the 1910s. But I would argue that this pales in comparison to the national and international influence that jazz had later on, from about 1920 onwards—you know, the Jazz Age—and that the dance crazes such as the foxtrot are thus a better candidate for answering this question.

Sources: The Seventh Stream by Philip H. Ennis; The Wicked Waltz and Other Scandalous Dances by Mark Knowles.

vaipandotcom

The capitalisation of music, as we know it, hadn't occured quite yet as records and record players were yet to be as mass produced and affordable for the general public as they are now. Additionally, the "rebellious teen" trope can't apply to the period because, as a teenager in the 1910s, you had the choice of working on the farm, working in the city, or, later, going to war. Rebellion in music did occur, but not in the way you think.

Recordings in the US were made and historians have recently helped make many of them available through anthologies (cf. Anthology of American Folk Music, Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry (1890-1919), and the American Primitive series). Much of this music is 'rebellious' in that it criticizes society: it details lynchings, imprisonment, physical brutality, segregation, and the class system. However, the music was sung and played by the people, for the people, so everyone in the community, not just teenagers, 'rebelled' through the blues. Jazz began to form in the later parts of this period and, even in its early forms, it too was a rebellion, but also a form of folk embellishment, on what was considered the tradition.

However, the biggest place to hear music in this period was from the orchestras in the concert halls, and there was no greater rebellion in music than in classical music. Classical music in this period would be closest to the 'rebellious teen music' trope that we have now. The modern period shook music in ways the punk and grunge and metal movements wish they could.

Around this time, some of the most famed composers of the previous period were getting old or dying, like Strauss and Mahler. They produced work that startled (e.g. Salome), but it wasn't quite at punk-rock levels of rebellious. Their deaths and the hangers-on of the tradition left the concert halls open to just playing the old canonical music and the vast majority was happy to hear minor rebellions and Beethoven concertos. But by the 1910s, the avant-garde was exploding and challenging the traditional in ways that shook the world: Matisse shocked people with his Fauvism; Duchamp made his famous Fountain; Picasso had moved past Les Demoiselles and was fully into some of his greatest cubist works.

A stem of the early artistic expressionist movement had to do with rebellion against photography. And composers took on recordings in much the same way.

If I had to name just one Sid Vicious or Kurt Cobain of this period, it would be Arnold Schoenberg. We've all heard about harmony and melody; what he invented was atonality and the twelve-tone technique, both are incredibly punk. By just 1912, he premiered Pierrot Lunaire, which used a technique called sprechgesang ("spoken singing". An analog in modern music would be rap. So yeah, Schoenberg pretty much invented rap). At some of the premieres of his compositions during this period, the audience would go insane. As in they'd shout the music down, demand it stop, the critics hated it, say he'd gone crazy. Strauss wrote to a friend that Schoenberg "would be better off shoveling snow than scribbling music on paper." But Schoenberg very quickly rose to fame and formed the Second Viennese School, with members like Berg and Webern, that continued to shake the music scene for decades.

But there were a lot more punk composers. Stravinsky didn't care about twelve-tone, he loved folk music, especially from his native Russia. So he wrote that into The Rite (1913) and that premiere started a riot and a scandal, much the way some of Schoenberg's music did. And by riot, I mean, in a concert hall full of gents in tuxedos and monocles, the cops had to be called in to break up fights. The work didn't even have a chance to finish before the lights were turned on and the musicians and dancers had to rush backstage.

I really love Satie and he premiered a radical work in this period that also caused a near-riot. It was a rather short ballet, titled Parade (1917), using the same dancers as Stravinsky used in The Rite, Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. But Picasso designed the costumes, Massine choreographed, and Cocteau wrote the scenario, so everyone knew it was going to be wild. Parade, like The Rite, also used folk music, but it added literal guns being shot, police sirens, the clacking of typewriters, and much more to the score (actually to Satie's chagrin). No joke, Satie was sentenced to jail as a result of Parade. A critic wrote a bad review and Satie sent him a postcard calling him rather banal obscenities, but that was enough for the Parisian courts to convict him for 'public indecency'.

And all of this music and the avant-garde was steeped in radical political movements of the time, like communism and anarchism, which added to the rebellious nature of it.

There's so much more in this period, but the music itself too was in its own rebellious teenage form and each composer would grow a bit and make incredibly excellent work (except for Stravinsky, he returned to the traditional and made boring music until he died).

Brewer_Matt

This is a great question -- thanks for asking it! This isn't my area of expertise as such, but I can definitely point you in the right direction(s). For the purposes of this question, I'm going to run with the youth counterculture of basically-middle-class white Americans.

A couple of major things to remember about 1910: sourcing and listening to "counter-cultural" music was a lot different than tuning into the radio (not really a commercial mainstay until the 1920s) or buying a record. Records had just beat out cylinders as the primary recording medium, but most people didn't buy the records to hit songs: they bought the sheet music and played (or sang) it at home. This was the height of the collection of music publishing houses we now know as Tin Pan Alley, and the sales of the sheet music itself were a far greater indicator of a "hit" than the number of recordings it sold -- music stores paid songwriters to come up with new works, piano players to demonstrate new songs to customers (for sampling before they purchased one), and theater and vaudeville shows popularized the newest hits (which, of course, you'd want to buy the music for to play on your own at home). Oftentimes, traveling salesmen were the ones writing the songs as a bit of a side gig, and they didn't stand on ceremony when it came time to find venues to perform music with the purpose of getting potential customers to buy the sheet music -- bars, brothels, and restaurants were all fair game. I would love to get into this more for my own edification, but the introduction to Tin Pan Alley: An Encyclopedia of the Golden Age of American Song by David Jasen does a nice job of providing a baseline introduction to the culture of the music industry in the early 1900s and how new songs were created and disseminated to the public at a time when recordings didn't drive the music industry.

All of that is to say that, in 1910, you're not going to see a group of young counter-cultural types sitting around listening to edgy music; they're either playing it in their own homes or going out to see it performed live, and the peak of rebellious teenager music was going to a music house or club and doing the any of the "animal dances" like the turkey trot, a dance that induced a bit of a moral panic in more polite corners of American society (that it was widely condemned by moral authorities at the time only made it more popular among young Americans). You wouldn't be seen doing this in genteel venues -- there was a racial element to many of these dances, based as they were on ragtime (a distinctly Black American musical art form that helped lead to the development of jazz), that would have deeply concerned more conservative Americans (not unlike, I suppose, your example of rap in the modern era).

This is about the extent of what I know of this -- the 1920s gets far more attention, so your question is pretty awesome in that regard. Hope this helps!

Sussex631

Note: Remove if not suitably sourced.

Likely this won't meet the standards of the sub, not an historian but a record collector. A few things stand out from observation. Thus please remove it if it does not meet the standards as it's hastily knocked out and I have not referenced more than a few records. Thought it was an interesting question, could have a book-length answer heading off on multiple tangents of a chapter each. Many factors are involved.

It might be assumed that as the precursor to Jazz, Ragtime is the likely answer. However that is only partly the case. Ignoring the fact that the 'teenager' wasn't really a concept then as more recently this is a very interesting question. Popularly the 20's and upwards are more likely to be noted as having young vs older tastes (jazzy dance bands as opposed to staid parlour music etc). Radio was not in the picture at this point, films were silent. Theatre organs were in the process of being invented. (Robert Hope Jones eventually selling the design to Wurlitzer). Mass access to affordable music was less common.

However, among those who could get to Broadway, or afford a phonograph or gramophone there were distinctly different kinds of musical style appearing. Ragtime was around, jazz (as jass originally) began to be recorded (its origins are earlier - photograph exist of Buddy Bolden's band c.1900 or so, it's one of the sources which supports the argument that the banjo took off in jazz and popular music due to the recording technology (acoustic) of the time and its lack of frequency response. Boldens band appear to have been using a guitar.

As for acoustic recording, by its end (1925 for most major labels) it was incredibly able and in some cases hard to distinguish from early electric records. It did force a series of techniques in the studio (placement of instruments, such as the piano up and close to the recording horn. Singers had to move toward and away from the opening with volume changes) and of singing styles. There was a 'recording voice' much as there was a stage voice and later on a radio voice.

During the 1910-1920 period 'modern' music ranged from brass bands playing up-tempo music through popular vocal duets and solos and instrumentals. The most likely to fit the question would be ex Music Hall (UK) and Vaudeville (US) songs and music, a lot of the singers of the era tried to emulate what was popular.

The unfortunately titled Coon Song was (usually white people singing in 'blackvoice' and when done badly a lot of 'massa' and 'yahs bahs sho' nuff' type stuff - I often wonder how many songs rhyme moon with coon for no apparent reason other than to fit the category).

It is not all early Cantor and Jolson that would fit your question though, a lot of the bigger sellers were session musicians (Billy Murray the obvious example, but also Jones and Hare, Harlan and Stanley, Kirkby and Hudson, Will Thompson and Harry Cove, - these last two are examples (Cove and Thompson usually as Hayes and Croft, but like most studio artists they had multiple other names) are good examples of British singers doing an 'american sound' which to me sounds like british singers on old records occasionally adding in a 'black' accent, and often singing those tunes not bothering with the accent at all.

These were popular records and despite their fragile nature copies are not uncommon today. Evidence of their sales volume at least.

From old sheet music sales volumes it is clear that people bought tin pan alley type tunes (really a precursor at this point, but Walter Donaldson and the like were off to a running start before 1920).

Jazz. (Jass). A number of black musicians did not record for a fair time, and accessibility to live performances was not what it might be today. (Also segregation plays a part in all of this). The Original Dixie Jazz Band was not particularly notable as jazz, and not at all black. They did, however bring the stylings of it to popular consciousness (it was called all sorts of names and criticised as are all 'new' forms of popular music - think Johnnie Ray, then Rock and Roll, Metal, now Rap).

A large part of popularity of new music has (subjective opinion) been white performers using 'black styles' and thus A: getting contracts, B: selling records and spreading the consciousness. Much as people talk of cultural appropriation, without it, without white performers singing tunes by (often Jewish - see demographics of tin pan alley writers) composers, and these records sneaking into households there would be less to listen to now. It would be of no consolation to the black originators at the time of course. I am not going into blackface and its (everything really) at this point. Divisive topic.

As for what rebellious music of say, 1915 might have been, it'd likely be a popular duet of a 'black styled' vocal arrangement of a jaunty song about the usual love and so on. This is such a cursory description and merely skirting the surface of an enormous and fascinating topic. I haven't touched on piano rolls, actual ragtime, or many many other factors and examples.

The music itself, it's a good way to get an idea of the point:

All popular sellers, dates on videos,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8Pr52Te9kU Collins and Harlan typical 'Coon Song'.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0efQMirDSY British Duet Stanley Kirkby, Harry Hudson.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqUG_QqqaBA British Duet Cove & Thompson.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqsW-M0CHqg Music hall song, British.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnvoPyjX29w Banjo Instrumental.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAMXhoSbcK0 Almost Jazzy in spirit rather than style from Edison and Billy Murray/Premier Quartet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgkrIB8epRw Comic novelty song, heading for modern.

The best quick way to look up what was rebellious is to look up what didn't the establishment like. Music hall was seen as crude, black or fake black was seen as primitive (parallels with Rock and Roll, the 'lack of restraint' -or showmanship, depends how you look at it- of the likes of Johnnie Ray, the uproar in things like the daily mail over rap lyrics etc).

The recordings which sold well and are thus usually still available are another good example.

mimicofmodes

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