"MUSIC MATTERS"
Thank you for your interest and for supporting the Southern Museum of Music.
The Genre Legacy Fund accepts donations of $250.00 or more and supports genre specific rotating exhibitions, unique educational programming, and the vital preservation initiatives that are so important to our mission. We invite you to join these efforts by making a tax-deductible gift today in support of the genre of your choice.
When you choose to make a gift in honor or in support of a specific genre, your name will be featured on the Southern Museum of Music Digital Media and you will recieve a collectable inaugural "genre specific" VIP PASS and Southern Museum of Music lanyard that is also your ticket for a behind the scene tour during our grand opening celebration.
The featured genres selections are:.
GENRE'S OF THE SOUTH:
BLUGRASS
Is a form of American roots music, and a related genre of country music. Influenced by the music of Appalachia, Bluegrass has mixed roots in Irish, Scottish, Welsh, and English traditional music, and was also later influenced by the music of African-Americans through incorporation of jazz elements.
BLUES
Is a genre and musical form originated by African Americans in the Deep South of the United States around the end of the 19th century. The genre developed from roots in African-American work songs and European-American folk music. Blues incorporated spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts, chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads.
CAROLINA BEACH
Also known as Beach Music, and to a lesser extent, Beach Pop, is a regional genre which developed from various rock/R&B/pop music of the 1950s and 1960s. Beach music is most closely associated with the style of swing dance known as the shag, or the Carolina shag, which is also the official state dance of both North Carolina and South Carolina.
COUNTRY
A genre of United States popular music that originated in the Southern United States in the 1920s. It takes its roots from the southeastern genre of United States such as folk music, Blues music, and Western music. Blues modes have been used extensively throughout its recorded history. Country music often consists of ballads and dance tunes with generally simple forms and harmonies.
FOLK
Folk music may tend to have certain characteristics but it cannot clearly be differentiated in purely musical terms. One meaning often given is that of "old songs, with no known composers", another is that of music that has been submitted to an evolutionary "process of oral transmission.... the fashioning and re-fashioning of the music by the community that give it its folk character.
FUNK
A music genre that originated in the mid-to-late 1960s when African American musicians created a rhythmic, danceable new form of music through a mixture of soul music, jazz, and rhythm and blues (R&B). Funk de-emphasizes melody and chord progressions used in other related genres and brings a strong rhythmic groove of a bass line played by an electric bassist and a drum part played by a drummer to the foreground.
GOSPEL
The creation, performance, significance, and even the definition of gospel music varies according to culture and social context. Gospel music is composed and performed for many purposes, including aesthetic pleasure, religious or ceremonial purposes, and as an entertainment product for the marketplace. Gospel music usually has dominant vocals (often with strong use of harmony) with Christian lyrics. Gospel music can be traced to the early 17th century, with roots in the black oral tradition.
JAZZ
Originating from African American communities of New Orleans during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Jazz spans a period of over a hundred years, encompassing a very wide range of music, making it difficult to define. Jazz makes heavy use of improvisation, polyrhythms, syncopation and the swing note, as well as aspects of European harmony, American popular music, the brass band tradition, and African musical elements such as blue notes and African-American styles such as ragtime.
NATIVE AMERICAN
Native Americans were the earliest inhabitants of the United States and played its first music. Songs are rhythmically complex, characterized by frequent metric changes and a close relationship to ritual dance. Flutes and whistles are solo instruments, and a wide variety of drums, rattles and striking sticks are played.
RAGTIME
Originated in the late 19th century descending from the jigs and march music played by African American bands, referred to as "jig piano" or "piano thumping". By the start of the 20th century, it became widely popular throughout North America and was listened and danced to, performed, and written by people of many different subcultures. A distinctly American musical style, ragtime may be considered a synthesis of African syncopation and European classical music, especially the marches made popular by John Philip Sousa.
RHYTHM & BLUES
Often abbreviated as R&B or RnB, is a genre of popular African-American music that originated in the 1940s. The term was originally used by record companies to describe recordings marketed predominantly to urban Americans, at a time when "urbane, rocking, jazz based music with a heavy, insistent beat" was becoming more popular. In the commercial rhythm and blues music typical of the 1950s through the 1970s, the bands usually consisted of piano, one or two guitars, bass, drums, saxophone, and sometimes background vocalists.
ROCKABILLY
One of the earliest styles of rock and roll music, dating back to the early 1950s in the Southern United States. As a genre it blends the sound of country with that of rhythm and blues, leading to what is considered "classic" rock and roll. Some have also described it as a blend of bluegrass with rock and roll. The term "rockabilly" itself is a portmanteau of "rock" (from "rock 'n' roll") and "hillbilly", the latter a reference to the country music (often called "hillbilly music" in the 1940s and 1950s) that contributed strongly to the style. Other important influences on rockabilly include western swing, boogie woogie, jump blues, and electric blues.
SOUL
Soul music was the result of the urbanization and commercialization of rhythm and blues in the 1960s. The phrase "soul music" itself, referring to gospel-style music with secular lyrics, is first attested in 1961. The term 'soul' in African-American parlance has connotations of African-American pride and culture. Gospel groups in the 1940s and 1950s occasionally used the term as part of their name. The jazz style that derived from gospel came to be called soul jazz.
SOUTHERN HIP-HOP
Also known as Southern rap, South Coast hip hop, or Dirty South, is a blanket term for a subgenre of American hip hop music that emerged in the Southern United States, especially in Atlanta, New Orleans, Houston, Memphis, and Miami.
SOUTHERN ROCK
Rock music's origins lie mostly in the music of the American South, and many stars from the first wave of 1950s rock and roll such as Bo Diddley, Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Buddy Holly, Fats Domino, and Jerry Lee Lewis hailed from the Deep South. However, the British Invasion and the rise of folk rock and psychedelic rock in the middle 1960s shifted the focus of new rock music away from the rural south and to large cities like Liverpool, London, Los Angeles, New York City, and San Francisco. But Sir Douglas Quintet, Tony Joe White and Dale Hawkins issued nice albums. In the early 1960s, the recordings of early blues-rocker Lonnie Mack seamlessly blended the blues and country musical genres within the framework of rock.
SPIRITUALS
Spirituals (or Negro spirituals) are generally Christian songs that were created by African slaves in the United States. Spirituals were originally an oral tradition that imparted Christian values while also describing the hardships of slavery. Although spirituals were originally unaccompanied monophonic (unison) songs, they are best known today in harmonized choral arrangements. This historic group of uniquely American songs is now recognized as a distinct genre of music.
ZYDECO
A musical genre evolved in southwest Louisiana by French Creole speakers which blends blues, rhythm and blues, and music indigenous to the Louisiana Creoles and the Native people of Louisiana. Usually fast tempo and dominated by the button or piano accordion and a form of a washboard known as a "rub-board," "scrub-board," "wash-board," or frottoir, zydeco music was originally created at house dances, where families and friends gathered for socializing.
As a result, the music integrated waltz, shuffles, two-steps, blues, rock and roll, and other dance music forms of the era. Today, zydeco integrates genres such as R&B, soul, brass band, reggae, hip hop, ska, rock, Afro-Caribbean and other styles, in addition to the traditional forms.
Donations can be mailed to the following address:
Southern Museum of Music Inc.
P.O. Box 3146
Atlanta, GA 30302
or click the button below or option menu on left to make a scure online contribution.
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