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[email protected] www.newworldrecords.org Let’s Get Loose: Folk and Popular Blues Styles from the Beginnings to the Early 1940s New World NW 290 lues began to be sung in the eighteen- Kentucky, and Maryland, and in the western Bnineties. By the nineteen-twenties they had states, where blacks were a fairly small minority, become the dominant folk- and popular-song and where there was a certain amount of social form among American blacks and had exerted mobility, ragtime became popular among the enormous influence on white popular and folk black working class in the cities and towns. music.At the time of their earliest development, Drawing about equally on black and white folk blues were part of an extraordinary ferment tak- and popular styles, ragtime quickly spread into ing place in black cultural circles. By the nineties the cities of the North and Deep South and a new generation had grown to maturity, born developed various folk offshoots.A kind of vocal out of slavery but still struggling to obtain the ragtime developed among quartets that got freedom and to chart the direction of their cul- together at barber shops and at social gatherings. ture in America. Some of the more fortunate Quartets also sang spirituals, reinjecting some of members of this generation graduated from the the syncopation, antiphonal style, and dis- many newly established black colleges and tinctively black approach to harmonizing that entered professions such as the ministry,the law, had been removed from these songs in the business, medicine, and education.