Research

After researching the elements of 50's and 60's music I have managed to understand that the 60's were much more revolutionary as in the 50's rock and roll started to emerge from artists such as Elvis Presley but the overall music scene was pretty narrow and not very diverse whereas in the 60's many genre's have formed and evolved which then caused a lot more artists to develop their own style and not follow the commercial music industry. This also had given artists a lot more freedom as now they were exposed to a more diverse music industry allowing them to get different inspirations and merge them together. Lastly in the 1960's plenty of new genre's had formed as I said before which had highly impacted the consumers of music as people began to tie themselves with certain genre's meaning that on one hand there was a lot more music available but on the other not everyone wanted to experiment with listening to different music that wasn't on the radio.

From my research I have also found out that blues was a popular music style in the 50's, it was then carried on into the 60's by the likes of BB King, Elmore James, Big Joe Williams and many more who not only were already veterans of the genre but also kept the genre alive as many other genres were formed.

I have then decided to look for bands with elements of blues and I realised that one of the bands I listen to has highly been influenced by blues, the band was Black Sabbath which took elements of blues and hard rock in order to make heavy metal by making much darker and heavier music. This was also revolutionary then as no other band had decided to head down this musical path before and so this had made Black Sabbath very original and controversial.

Lastly, talking about the government and the influences outside of music. There was a lot happening in the 1960's as there were plenty of wars going on which influenced the society to make many protests against the government. Also in the 60's there was a massive race theme going on with racism finally being made illegal as well as having all these protests which were lead by Martin Luther King Jr such as the March on Washington. Another massive element of making racism illegal was the actual assassination of Martin Luther King which was believed to be planned by the American government. Moving onto other themes involving the American government, there also was the cold war which carried on as well as the Vietnam war. These events caused a lot of controversy and were mentioned a lot by musicians in their lyrics and activities. A example of this would be John Lennon staying in bed for 2 weeks to protest against the Vietnam war which had ended in 1975. A example of a song about the racism in America would be Mississippi Goddam (1964) by Nina Simone. This song was a response made by her to the murder of Medgar Evers.

To finish of, this research has helped me choose the element of 50's and 60's music that I was going to look for in bands which in this case was the blues as this genre had began before the 50's but has managed to survive the evolution of the music industry and has actually managed to get popular in the 50's and 60's.

My sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King_Jr.

https://www.slideshare.net/Micheledickinson/history-of-music-50s-60s-etc

https://www.thoughtco.com/music-60s-70s-and-80s-2456338

https://acerecords.co.uk/20-great-blues-recordings-of-the-50s-and-60s

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sabbath

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sabbath_discography

https://www.thetoptens.com/black-sabbath-songs/

https://theculturetrip.com/north-america/usa/articles/15-cold-war-era-protest-songs-that-made-a-difference/