The Origins of Swing Music

Video Transcript

"I want to talk to you a little bit about where swing came from. It's very American style of music - one of the most American styles of music that we have. It's very rooted in the blues and the blues came over - it was created by the slaves in America and made from field songs that they would sing out while working and that developed into the blues form. And then they started bringing musicians in to play the blues along with it and so it started becoming a musical form too not just a singing thing and then that developed into other things one of them things being ragtime and out of ragtime came swing. And that's where you get this syncopated swing pattern from. (drumming). The thing about swing - it's very syncopated - that's what the basis of it is it's just syncopated everywhere and that comes directly out of ragtime and early swing about like uh, the 30's - late 20's/30's is when you start really hearing people swinging so check out some records from them to get the early things - there's big bands there's small groups and then swing developed into jazz and jazz developed into every other type of music there is today - so check it out."