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                                                                                                               Cultural Links – Music.

Taking a leading role in popular music culture, Liverpool is acknowledged by the Guinness Book of Hit Singles as "World Capital of Pop" for producing more number one hit singles than any other city around the globe. The 1960s created a rich musical legacy for the city and popular music continues to thrive in Liverpool with an abundance of clubs featuring local bands and a wide variety of British and international imports. The alternative and club music scene is as active as ever while the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, one of the world's oldest concert-giving organisations and the second oldest in Britain, gives more than 60 concerts a year. LIPA (the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts), runs two seasons of public productions each year showcasing upcoming creative talent.

Liverpool annually hosts a number of music festivals including the Beatles Mathew Street Music Festival, Europe's largest annual free city centre music festival

Pop Music

The Beatles and Liverpool do not need any further linkage here. This is more about The Beatles and the United States.

Beatlemania exploded in the United States with three national television appearances by the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show on 9 February, 16 February and 23 February,1964. The pop-music band became a worldwide phenomenon with worshipful fans and angry denunciations by cultural observers and established performers such as Frank Sinatra, sometimes on grounds of the music (which was thought crude and unmusical) or their appearance (their hair was scandalously long)

Some commentators have speculated that after the assassination of John F. Kennedy a depressed America was searching for a way out of gloom and despair. So in effect, the Beatles were in the right place at the right time (with a unique combination of talent and stage presence) to provide an enthusiastic jolt to a saddened nation.

In 1964 they held the top five places on Billboard's Hot 100, a feat that has never been repeated.

The Beatles performed their last concert before paying fans in Candlestick Park in San Francisco on 29 August, 1966

Further information Click F  The_Beatles

JAZZ

  The authors own Jazz link is of the Louis Armstrong All-stars concert at the Old Liverpool Stadium behind Exchange Station. This was on Easter Sunday 1956 and due to a ban by the Musicians Union on visiting American Bands, which was lifted in 1956, Louis’s All-stars were the first American Musicians to play in Liverpool since before the War. Nothing since that performance has matched the excitement of that first live concert in Liverpool.

After that American Jazz stars performed in Liverpool regularly, Gerry Mulligan, Count Basie, The Modern Jazz Quartet, Ella Fitzgerald, and Sarah Vaughan all played at the Odeon in London Road, Liverpool.

Country & Western

  Live music has always been an important part of Liverpool culture and, over the years, the city has adopted Celtic, Welsh and American sounds into its musical style. The maritime connection brought a familiarity with the US and by the 1950s Liverpool was a stronghold for imported country and western, soul, jazz and rock and roll. It was this cultural interchange that allowed the city to take the lead in the development of British pop.

A commercial offshoot of the folk music of the rural South, country music is an American art form that gained worldwide appeal after World War II. Originally known as hillbilly or mountain music, country music grew from the folk music that was brought to North America by Anglo-Celtic settlers in the 1700s and 1800s. The music changed as it came in contact with ethnic music

 The Country & Western thing in Liverpool is quite interesting. If R&B supposedly started out being working class and Jazz was mainly for the middle classes, C&W occupied a curious middle ground because of the Irish connection. Since the middle of the 19th century, Liverpool had played host to a vast Irish immigrant population, both Catholic and Protestant.

The Irish folk music which had been exported to the United States by the brothers, sisters and cousins of the Liverpool settlers transformed into one strand of American country music, was electrified into country & western, and subsequently re-imported into Irish communities throughout Britain over a hundred years later. If you went into any Liverpool Irish pub in the late 50s, the songs of Hank Williams and Patsy Cline were being performed alongside the traditional jigs and reels.