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What is the Blues?- Walk through Blue Music History

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The Blues is a music form which shaped the landscape of sound in the United States. It also helped create many other musical genres both in the U.S. and across the globe. The Blues is a global treasure. This video takes a walk through Blues music history, in two and a half minutes, telling the story of the music.

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A Short History of the Blues: Emerging Music of the 20th Century

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The Blues for Kids -- 12 Bar Blues -- All Around This World

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Please enable JavaScript to experience Vimeo in all of its glory. Did you know you can take All Around This World classes online? Hurray! Sign up for courses at exploreeverywhere.com. You can even "come to class" -- sing and dance with me in my livecasts. I can be your family's music teacher!

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BB King Was Afraid To Perform At Sing Sing Prison But Called It His Best Performance Ever

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Stevie Ray Vaughan (great keyboard solo!)

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Stevie Ray Vaughan (great keyboard solo!)

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Stevie Ray Vaughan - Mary Had A Little Lamb (Live)

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Great website all about musical elements!

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Great website all about musical elements!

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Dynamics in music refers to how loud or soft is the music. It is that simple! But, because musicians and composers like to make things interesting, and sometimes difficult, there are lots of different musical terms that can be used to describe what the dynamics are in a piece of music. Usually, the music terms used to describe dynamics are called "Italian terms".

Many, many years ago, when music in the Western European tradition started to become systematized, it was decided that all musical information written on the musical score would be in a common language - Italian.

If you would like a copy of the Elements of Music Mind Maps used in this blog post, click here for your FREE download.

Dynamics in Music Definitions

In the chart you can see all the basic dynamics terms commonly used in music today. Essentially, dynamics fall into two main categories - loud or soft. The dynamic music definitions will go from the softest to the loudest Italian terms.

In real life, music that is performed very, very soft or "pianississimo" would be almost at a whisper. Whereas music performed very, very loudly or "fortississimo" would be music that is deafening and as loud as possible for the instrument or ensemble as a whole.

Pianississimo - very, very soft

Pianissimo - very soft

Piano - soft

Mezzo piano - a little soft

Mezzo forte - a little loud

Forte - loud

Fortissimo - very loud

Fortisissimo - very, very loud

Changes in Dynamics

In the Baroque musical era, the dynamics performed in a piece of music used "Terraced Dynamics". This means that in the music, a section would be played at certain volume level, then the next section at another volume, without any graduations or subtle changes in between. A great example of this is in Vivaldi's "Spring" from the Four Seasons. Watch the video and listen to how the composer has used "Terraced Dynamics" in this piece.

Over time, composers and technology developed so that changes in dynamics were used in pieces of music.

There are two main changes in dynamics terms - crescendo and decrescendo. A crescendo is when the music becomes gradually louder. A decrescendo, or diminuendo, is the opposite and is when the music becomes gradually softer in volume.

The theme music to the movie - 2001 A Space Odyssey, composed by Strauss is a perfect example of changing dynamics used for a very dramatic effect. The music also uses another common dynamic technique called "sforzando". A sforzando is a sudden emphasis or accent. In this music, just before when the timpani sounds like they are marching really loudly, the orchestra suddenly gets very loud at the end of a slow crescendo, this is a good example of a sforzando!

Watch the video below and to listen to the constant changes in dynamics from very, very soft to very, very loud, plus a few sforzandos thrown in for good measure.

Why are Dynamics Important?

Dynamics in music are very important because they can add a lot of emotion to a piece of music. When a piece of music performed very softly, it evokes emotions that are in stark contrast to music that is performed very loudly. Let's face it, heavy metal music is not meant to be listened to quietly, and a lullaby that is sweetly sung to help a baby or young child sleep is not meant to be screeched as loudly as humanly possible!

The dynamics of a piece of music can help to wake you up, can help to put you to sleep, can help to motivate you to get dancing, or even help you to concentrate and study.

Next time you listen to a piece of music, try taking note of the different dynamics being used in the performance. You could even try mapping out the dynamics on a piece of paper. Even better, try changing and adding some dynamics to your next performance to help improve the experience for yourself and the audience.
Learn about the 8 Elements of Music here.
Watch a video explanation of this blog post below
If you would like a copy of the Elements of Music Mind Maps used in this blog post, click here her for your FREE download.
Until next time

Julia from Jooya

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What are Dynamics in Music? - Jooya Teaching Resources

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Read on to learn about what dynamics in music are. Learn all about the dynamics terms, symbols and their definitions.

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What is Structure in Music - Jooya Teaching Resources

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Find out what is structure in music and how form and music have the same definition. Learn all about the different types of music structure.

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Hound Dog Sheet Music Elvis Presley (SheetMusic-Free.com)

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The definition for what is harmony in music is in its simplest form, the succession of chords, or chordal progressions made by two or more parts, or voices, playing and/or singing together. Harmony is an important part of the Elements of Music. The use of harmony in a piece of music, and understanding it, will help your music appreciation journey to becoming a better musician.

Another way to put it would be to say that what is harmony in music is that it comes from any pitched instrument that performs with and supports the melody. In the Western Music tradition, there are many music theory rules and regulations that composers and musicians follow when creating or performing a harmonic musical line in a piece of music. For many music creators, melody, harmony and tonality are all intertwined, and each musical element depends on the other to create the whole.

There are several musical terms that can help you to appreciate and describe the harmony in a piece of music. These come under the broader headings of chords, harmonic rate of change, harmonic role, cadence, key signature, overall sound, and modulation. These terms will all be explained in further detail in this article.
If you would like a copy of the Elements of Music Mind Maps used in this blog post, click here her for your FREE download.
What is Harmony in Music Definitions

To be able to appreciate the music you listen to, and to learn about what is harmony in music, read the information below. Here you will discover what makes up the different aspects of harmony in music.

Chords

A chord in its simplest form, is a group of two or more notes performed together. Many chords are based on a triad. A triad is a group of three notes performed together to form a chord. Usually a triad is made up of the first, third and fifth note of any given scale.

A chord can be played by an individual instrument like the guitar, ukulele, piano and banjo, or it can be created by several instrument performing together like a choir, or a brass band, or any other type of ensemble with pitched instruments.

Depending on the instrument, chords can be played in a few different ways. On instruments like the guitar, banjo and ukulele, chords are often strummed. The action of strumming is to move across the strings quickly in an upward or downward direction. Another way that a chord can be played on most instruments that can play more than one note at a time is as a block chord. A block chord is when all the notes of the chord are played simultaneously. The arpeggio is another way of playing a chord. An arpeggio is playing each of the notes of the chord in a repeated melodic pattern. On the piano, this technique is usually performed in the left hand.

Harmonic Rate of Change

The Harmonic Rate of Change is the distance between chord changes. This could be described as quick or slow and is counted in the number of bars or beats. This is linked to the chord progression or the chord pattern in the music. In a lot of popular music the chords change every bar, sometimes every two bars.

There are many common chord progressions that have been used in many different genres and songs. One of the most common chord progressions is the 12 Bar Blues. This chord progression was featured as the basis of many Blues and Jazz songs from the early 1900's. In the 1950's, when Rock 'n' Roll was in its infancy, many rock songs were also based around the 12 Bar Blues. The chord pattern is below, it is often played with a four-bar phrasing.

I I I I

IV IV I I

V IV I I

In the clips below you will see some examples of music using the 12 Bar Blues
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=go6TiLIeVZA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_l6A7krjrQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bm5HKlQ6nGM
Another popular chord progression is the Ice Cream Chord Change. This chord pattern became popular from the end of the 1950's and was used in a lot of songs. It is still used today, in many, many songs!

This chord progression, which is often played with the chords changing every bar or 4 beats is - I VI IV V. In the clips below there are some examples of this chord progression. Please note, in the Axis of Awesome Four Chord Song, there are some lyrics that may not be appropriate for younger students!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQnfooEED8Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwZNL7QVJjE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwajTekSAcM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOlDewpCfZQ
Harmonic Role

There are two main harmonic roles that support the melody - melodic accompaniment and the bass line. For each of these roles, their performance is based around the chord pattern or progression that is accompanying the melody.

Any pitched instrument can perform the melodic accompaniment or the bass line. Usually, the bass line is performed by instruments in a low bass register. The instruments performing the melodic accompaniment, in any given piece of music, will depend on the ensemble. For example, in a choir, the melody might be sung by the soprano section, and the rest of the choir is singing in harmony as the melodic accompaniment. Whereas, in a rock band, the melody is often sung by the lead vocalist, while two electric guitars are performing the melodic accompaniment and the bass guitar playing the bass line.

There are two other harmonic roles that can be used, although it is not as common as the two previous roles. A pedal point is the playing of a single, repeated pitch to maintain a tonal center. This was a common harmonic technique used in the Baroque Period. Another harmonic role is that of a drone. A drone is a long continuous note that is played to also maintain a tonal center. Instruments such as the bagpipes and didgeridoo naturally do this, but, this harmonic role can be performed by any pitched instrument.

Cadence

A cadence is two chords performed at the end of a phrase or section of music. Below there is a list of the most common cadences and their definitions. In music, chords are often written as roman numerals, and these are based on the eight notes of the scale. This means that I=one/first, II=two/second, III=three/third, IV=four/fourth, V=five/fifth, VI=six/sixth, VII=-seven/seventh, the eighth note is the first note an octave higher.

Perfect Cadence - a cadence that is made up of chords V-I

Plagal Cadence - a cadence made up of chords IV-I

Imperfect Cadence - a cadence that is made up chords I-V

Interrupted Cadence - a cadence that is made up of chords V-VI

Key Signature

A key signature is the combination of sharps or flats that is written on the staff at the beginning of each line of the score after the clef. The key signature, and the number of sharps or flats, determines the key that the music is composed in. In traditional Western music, there are two main types of key signatures - Major and Minor. Each major key signature has a related and similar minor key. Without going into too much detail, there is a lot of musical theory with rules to work out the given key of any piece of music. In simple terms, a major key will sound brighter and happier in mood, and the minor key sounds more mellow and sad in mood.

Overall Sound

The overall sound of the music will depend on the tonality used. The tonality and sound is connected to the key that the music is played in, as well as the instrumentation used. As well as describing the music in a major or minor key, the music can be described as consonant or dissonant.

The definition of consonant music is "pleasant sounding", and dissonant is the opposite and "unpleasant sounding". Of course, this can subject to musical preference and opinion, but, generally people can agree on the overall sound of a piece of music.

Composers will use this "sound" to make the music pleasing, or even creepy/scary, depending on the key signature or tonality used. Using clashing notes to form unusual chords, can make the listener uneasy, and this is perfect for use in horror films!

Other types of sounds can be created when the music is written using different scales like the medieval church modes, pentatonic scales, blues scales and even world music scales from different parts of the globe.

Modulation

Modulation in music is simply a change away from the home key. In a lot of modern music, composers use modulation to create a "lift". This is done when the music goes up a semitone into another key, for example from the key of E major to F major. A great example of this is the rock classic "Joy to the World" performed by Three Dog Night, near the end of the song, the chorus is repeated a semitone higher. In this video, the key change is at 1:59.

Not all modulation is the simple upward motion of a semitone, some modulation is to relative keys of the original key signature. Sometimes the modulation is to the relative minor/major key, or more often it is to the dominant (fifth) key. This modulation is a common feature to a lot of classical compositions.

Why is Harmony Important in Music?

In Western music tradition, most people would agree that the melody is the most important part of the music. The melody, and the series of pitches that it consists of, determines the overall sound and harmony in the music. But, what is harmony in music, and how else can it be described?

If you think of the melody as being the main part of the meal, then the harmony will be the parts of the meal that accompany the main. For example, if you order a steak at a restaurant, you normally don't just get steak. The meal comes with other things like a salad, some mashed potato and even a yummy sauce. Together, on the plate they make a perfect and enjoyable meal. The accompanying food is not in competition with the steak, but rather there to make the meal more enjoyable.

Harmony is what supports and accompanies the melody. The different parts of the harmony make the melody more enjoyable and interesting. To learn more about the Element of Music - Melody, click here for more information.

Music Appreciation and Harmony

When appreciating a piece of music, most people concentrate on the melody. Next time try going beyond the melody and listen for the accompanying instruments and what they are doing. Are they playing chords? How are they playing the chords? What instrument is playing the bass line? What instruments are performing the melodic accompaniment? Does this change between sections of the music? How quickly do the chords change? Is there a chord progression being repeated?

Even better, next time you are performing as part of an ensemble, switch up the harmonic roles! You might like what you hear, and even better yet, you will have improved your skills as a musician.
If you would like a copy of the Elements of Music Mind Maps used in this blog post, click here her for your FREE download.
Watch the Video of this article here

Until next time

Julia from Jooya

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What is Harmony in Music? - Jooya Teaching Resources

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Find out what harmony in music is and the musical terminology used to describe hramony in music and increase your music appreciation skills.

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In the 1950s, rock & roll meant disruption: It was the clamor of young people, kicking hard against the Eisenhower era's ethos of vapid repression. By the onset of the 1960s, that spirit had been largely tamed or simply impeded by numerous misfortunes, including the film and army careers of Elvis Presley, the death of Buddy Holly, the blacklisting of Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry and the persecution of DJ Alan Freed, who had been stigmatized by payola charges by Tin Pan Alley interests and politicians angered with his championing of R&B and rock & roll. In 1960, the music of Frankie Avalon, Paul Anka, Connie Francis and Mitch Miller (an avowed enemy of rock & roll) ruled the airwaves and the record charts, giving some observers the notion that decency and order had returned to the popular mainstream. But within a few years, rock would regain its disruptive power with a joyful vengeance until, by the decade's end, it would be seen as a genuine force of cultural and political consequence. For a long and unforgettable season, it was a truism - or threat, depending on your point of view - that rock & roll could (and should) make a difference: that it was eloquent and inspiring and principled enough to change the world - maybe even to save it.

How did such a dramatic development take place? How did rock & roll come to be seen as such a potent voice for cultural revolution?

In part, of course, it was simply a confluence of auspicious conditions and ambitious prodigies that broke things open. Or, if you prefer a more romantic and mythic view, you could say that rock & roll set something loose in the 1950s - a spirit of cultural abandon - that could not be stopped or refused, and you might even be right. Certainly, rock & roll had demonstrated that it was capable of inspiring massive generational and social ferment and that its rise could even have far-reaching political consequences. This isn't to say that enjoying Presley or rock & roll was the same as subscribing to liberal politics, nor is it to suggest that the heroism of R&B and rock musicians was equal to that of civil-rights campaigners like Martin Luther King Jr., Medgar Evers and Rosa Parks, who paid through pain, humiliation and blood for their courage. But rock & roll did present black musical forms - and consequently, black sensibilities and black causes - to a wider (and whiter) audience than ever before, and as a result, it drove a fierce, threatening wedge into the heart of the American musical mainstream.

By the 1960s - as the sapless Eisenhower years were ending and the brief, lusty Kennedy era was forming - a new generation was coming of age. The parents of this generation had worked and fought for ideals of peace, security and affluence, and they expected their children not only to appreciate and benefit from this bequest but also to affirm and extend their prosperous new world. But the older generation was also passing on legacies of fear and some unpaid debts - anxieties about nuclear obliteration and leftist ideologies and sins of racial violence - and in the push to stability, priceless ideals of equality and justice had been compromised, even lost. Consequently, the children of this age - who would forever be dubbed the baby-boom generation - were beginning to question the morality and politics of postwar America, and some of their musical tastes began to reflect this unrest. In particular, folk music (which had been driven underground in the 1950s by conservative forces) was now enjoying a popular resurgence. Under the influence of Joan Baez and Peter, Paul and Mary, folk was turning more politically explicit, becoming increasingly identified with civil rights and pacifism, among other causes. But it was in the nasal-toned, rail-thin young Bob Dylan - who had moved from Minnesota to New York to assume the legacy of Woody Guthrie - that folk found its greatest hope: a remarkably prolific songwriter who was giving a forceful and articulate voice to the apprehensions and ideals of the emerging restless generation. With "Blowin' in the Wind" and "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall" in 1963, Dylan penned songs about racial suffering and the threat of nuclear apocalypse that immediately acquired the status of anthems, and with "The Times They Are a-Changin' " in early 1964, he wrote an apt and chilling decree of the rising tensions of the coming era. "Come mothers and fathers/Throughout the land," he sang in a voice young with anger and old with knowledge. "And don't criticize/What you can't understand/ Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command/Your old road is/Rapidly agin'/Please get out of the new one/If you can't lend your hand/For the times they are a-changin'."

But for all its egalitarian ideals, folk was a music of past and largely spent traditions. As such, it was also the medium for an alliance of politicos and intelligentsia that viewed a teen-rooted mass-entertainment form like rock & roll with derision. The new generation had not yet found a style or a standard-bearer that could tap the temper of the times in the same way that Presley and rockabilly had in the 1950s.

When rock & roll's rejuvenation came, it was from a place small, unlikely and far away. Indeed, in the early 1960s, Liverpool, England, was a fading port town that had slid from grandeur to dilapidation during the postwar era, and it was viewed by snobbish Londoners as a demeaned place of outsiders. But one thing Liverpool had was a brimming pop scene, made up of bands playing tough and exuberant blues-and R&B-informed rock & roll, and in December 1962, the city's most popular group, a four-piece ensemble called the Beatles, broke into Britain's Top Forty with a folkish rock song, "Love Me Do." There was little about the single that heralded greatness - the group's leaders, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, weren't yet distinguished songwriters - but nonetheless the song began a momentum that would forever shatter the American grip on the U.K. pop charts.

In many ways, Britain was as ripe for a pop cataclysm as America had been for Presley during the ennui after world war. In England - catching the reverberations of not just Presley but of the jazz milieu of Miles Davis and Jack Kerouac - the youth scene had acquired the status of a mammoth subcultural class, which was the byproduct of a postwar population top-heavy with people under the age of eighteen. For those people, pop music denoted more than preferred entertainment or even stylistic rebellion, it signified the idea of autonomous society. British teenagers weren't just rejecting their parents' values - they were superseding them, though they were also acting out their eminence in American terms - in the music of Presley and rockabilly, in blues and jazz tradition.

But when Brian Epstein - a Liverpool record-store manager who was aspiring to a more eventful life - first saw the Beatles at one of the city's cellar jazz clubs, the Cavern, he saw a band that not only delivered its American obsessions with infectious verve but also reflected British youth's joyful sense of being cultural outsiders, ready to seize everything that it had been refused. What's more, Epstein figured that the British pop scene would recognize and seize on this kinship. As the group's manager, Epstein cleaned up the Beatles' punkness considerably, but he didn't deny the group its spirit or its musical instincts, and in a markedly short time, his faith paid off. A year after "Love Me Do" peaked at Number Seventeen in the New Musical Express charts, the Beatles had six singles active in the Top Twenty in the same week, including the three top positions - an unprecedented and still unduplicated feat. In the process, Lennon and McCartney had grown enormously as writers - in fact, they were already one of the best composing teams in pop history - and the group itself had upended the local pop scene, establishing a hierarchy of long-haired male ensembles playing a popwise but hard-bashing update of 1950s-style rock & roll. But there was more to it than mere pop success. In less than a year, the Beatles had transformed British pop culture - had redefined not just its intensities and possibilities but had turned it into a matter of nationalistic impetus.
100 Greatest Artists of All Time: The Beatles
Then, on February 9th, 1964, following close on the frenzied breakthrough of "I Want to Hold Your Hand" and "She Loves You," the TV variety-show kingpin Ed Sullivan presented the Beatles for the first time to a mass American audience, and it proved to be an epochal moment. The Sullivan appearance drew more than 70 million viewers - the largest TV audience ever, at that time - an event that cut across divisions of style and region and drew new divisions of era and age; an event that, like Presley's TV appearances, made rock & roll seem an irrefutable opportunity. Within days it was apparent that a genuine upheaval was underway, offering a frenetic distraction to the dread that had set into America after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and a renewal of the brutally wounded ideal that youthfulness carried our national hope. Elvis Presley had shown us how rebellion could be fashioned into eye-opening style; the Beatles were showing us how style could have the impact of cultural revelation - or at least how a pop vision might be forged into an unimpeachable consensus. Virtually overnight, the Beatles' arrival in the American consciousness announced not only that the music and times were changing but also that we were changing. Everything about the band - its look, sound, style and abandon - made it plain that we were entering a different age, that young people were free to redefine themselves in completely new terms.

All of which raises an interesting question: Would the decade's pop and youth scenes have been substantially different without the Beatles? Or were the conditions such that, given the right catalyst, an ongoing pop explosion was inevitable? Certainly other bands (including the Dave Clark Five, the Searchers, Gerry and the Pacemakers, the Zombies and Manfred Mann) contributed to the sense of an emerging scene, and still others (among them the Kinks, the Who, the Animals and the Rolling Stones) would make music just as vital and more aggressive (and sometimes smarter and more revealing). Yet the Beatles had a singular gift that transcended even their malleable sense of style, or John Lennon and Paul McCartney 's genius as songwriters and arrangers, or Brian Epstein and producer George Martin's unerring stewardship as devoted mentors. Namely, the Beatles possessed an almost impeccable flair for rising to the occasion of their own moment in history, for honoring the promise of their own talents, and this knack turned out to be the essence of their artistry. The thrill and momentum wouldn't fade for several years. The music remained a constant surprise and delight; it continually transfixed and influenced us, as the Beatles' work and presence intensified our lives.

In short, the Beatles were a rupture - they changed modern history, and no less a craftsman than Bob Dylan understood the meaning of their advent. "They were doing things nobody else was doing," he later told his biographer Anthony Scaduto. "But I just kept it to myself that I really dug them. Everybody else thought they were just for the teenyboppers, that they were gonna pass right away. But it was obvious to me that they had staying power. I knew they were pointing the direction that music had to go. . . . It seemed to me a definite line was being drawn. This was something that never happened before."

Coming from Dylan, this was considerable praise. In his stint as a folk eminence, he had been writing vastly influential songs that held a brave and glaring mirror up to the face of cultural corruption - and he did it all with unequaled poetic grace. But Dylan - who, like the Beatles, had grown up on the music of Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Buddy Holly - was feeling confined by the limited interests of the folk audience and by the narrow stylistic range of folk music itself. After witnessing the breakthrough of the Beatles and after hearing the rawer blues-based rock being made by the Animals and the Rolling Stones, Dylan realized it was possible to transform and enliven his music, connecting with a broader and more vital audience in the process. (When the Byrds scored a June 1965 Number One hit with their chiming folk-rock cover of "Mr. Tambourine Man," it only further convinced him.)

On July 25th, 1965, Dylan took the stage with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band at the Newport Folk Festival and played a brief, howling set of the new electric music he had been recording. The shocked folk purists howled back at him in rage, and for fair reason: The music that Dylan began making on albums like Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited would effectively kill off any remaining notions that folk was the imperative new art form of American youth and confer on rock a greater sense of consequence and a deeper expressiveness. Clearly, it was music worth the killing of old conceits and older ways. In particular, with "Like a Rolling Stone" (the singer's biggest hit and the decade's most liberating, form-stretching single), Dylan framed perfectly the spirit of an emerging generation that was trying to live by its own rules and integrity and that was feeling increasingly cut off from the conventions and privileges of the mainstream culture. In the same manner that he had once given voice to a rising political consciousness, Dylan seemed to be voicing our deepest-felt fears and hopes - to be speaking for us. "How does it feeeel," he brayed at his brave new audience. "To be without a home/Like a complete unknown/Like a ROO-olling STONE?"

How did it feel? It felt scary; it felt exhilarating; and suddenly it felt exactly like rock & roll.

Combined, the Beatles and Dylan had a seismic effect on popular music and youth culture. They changed the soundscape and ambition of rock & roll in thorough and irrevocable ways that, a quarter-century later, still carry tremendous influence. They also had a sizable impact on each other. The Beatles opened up new possibilities in style and consensus; without their headway, Dylan probably would never have conceived "Like a Rolling Stone," much less enjoyed a smash hit with it. But if the Beatles opened up a new audience, Dylan determined what could be done with that consensus, what could be said to that audience. His mid-1960s work single-handedly reinvented pop's known rules of language and meaning and revealed that rock & roll's familiar structures could accommodate new, unfamiliar themes, that a pop song could be about any subject a writer was smart or daring enough to tackle. Without this crucial assertion, it is inconceivable that the Beatles would have gone on to write "Nowhere Man," "Eleanor Rigby," "Paperback Writer," "Strawberry Fields Forever" or "A Day in the Life," or even that the Rolling Stones would have written the decade's toughest riff and most taunting and libidinous declaration: "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction."

Dylan also influenced the Beatles in two other important respects. For one thing, he was reportedly the person who introduced them to drugs (marijuana, specifically), during his 1964 tour of England. This brand of experimentation would gradually affect not only the Beatles' musical and lyrical perspectives but also the perspectives of an entire generation. Indeed, in the mid-1960s, drug use became increasingly identified with rock culture - though it certainly wasn't the first time drugs had been extolled as recreation or sacrament, or exploited for artistic inspiration. Many jazz and blues musicians (and truth be known, numerous country & western artists) had been using marijuana and narcotics to enhance their improvisational bents for several decades, and in the 1950s, the Beats had brandished dope as another badge of nonconformism. But with 1960s rock, as drugs crossed over from the hip underground (and from research laboratories), stony references became more overt and more mainstream than ever before. Getting high started being seen as a way of understanding deeper truths and sometimes as a way of deciphering coded pop songs (or simply enjoying the palpable aural sensations of the music). Just as important, getting stoned was a way of participating in private, forbidden experiences - as a means of staking out a consciousness apart from that of the "straight world." Along with music and politics, drugs were seen as an agency for a better world, or at least a shortcut to enlightenment or transcendence. And though the Beatles would stay demure on the subject for another year or two, by 1965 hip kids and angry authorities were already citing various Dylan and Rolling Stones songs for what were perceived as their "druggy" meanings. "Satisfaction," "Get Off of My Cloud," "Mr. Tambourine Man" and "Rainy Day Women #12 and 35" were among the singles targeted by conservative critics.
100 Greatest Artists of All Time: Bob Dylan
The other thing Dylan did for the Beatles was help politicize them (in fact, he helped politicize a vast segment of rock culture), inspiring the group to accept its popularity as an opportunity to define and speak to a vital youth constituency. More and more, Lennon and McCartney's music - and rock at large - became a medium for addressing the issues and events that affected that generation.

This interplay between Dylan and the Beatles was one of the central dynamics of mid-1960s rock, but it didn't make for the bulk of the action. Some of the most pleasurable and enduring music of the period was being made by the monumental black-run Detroit label, Motown - which by 1965 alone had scored over two dozen Top Ten hits by such artists as Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, the Supremes, the Four Tops, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, the Temptations, Martha and the Vandellas and Mary Wells. By contrast, a grittier brand of the new soul sensibility was being defined by Memphis-based artists on the Volt, Stax and Atlantic labels, like Sam and Dave, Booker T. and the MGs, Wilson Pickett, Carla and Rufus Thomas, Johnnie Taylor, Eddie Floyd, William Bell and, most memorably, Otis Redding. In other words, black forms remained vital to rock and pop's growth (in fact, R&B's codes, styles and spirit had long served as models for white pop and teen rebellion). And as racial struggles continued through the decade, soul - as well as the best jazz from artists like Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Eric Dolphy, Ornette Coleman, Archie Shepp, Cecil Taylor and Sonny Rollins - increasingly expressed black culture's developing views of pride, identity, history and power. By 1967, when Aretha Franklin scored a massive hit with a cover of Otis Redding's "Respect," black pop signified ideals of racial pride and feminist valor that would have been unthinkable a decade earlier.

Yet perhaps the greatest triumph of the time was simply that all these riches - white invention and black genius - played alongside one another in a radio marketplace that was more open than it had ever been before (or would ever be again) for a shared audience that revered it all. Just how heady and diverse the scene was came across powerfully in the 1965 film The T.A.M.I. Show - a greatest-hits pop revue that in its remarkable stylistic and racial broad-mindedness anticipated the would-be catholic spirit that later characterized the Monterey Pop and Woodstock festivals. For those few hours of The T.A.M.I. Show, as artists like the Supremes, the Beach Boys, Chuck Berry, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Marvin Gaye, Jan and Dean, James Brown and the Rolling Stones stood alongside one another onstage at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, rock & roll looked and felt like a dizzying, rich, complex and joyous community in which any celebration or redemption was possible.

In many ways, this longing for community - the dream of self-willed equity and harmony, or at least tolerant pluralism in a world where familiar notions of family and accord were breaking down - would haunt rock's most meaningful moments for the remainder of the decade. Unfortunately, the same forces that deepened and expanded music's social-mindedness were also the forces that would contribute to the dissolution of the dream. In 1965, after waging the most successful "peace" campaign in America's electoral history, President Lyndon B. Johnson began actively committing American troops to a highly controversial military action in Vietnam, and it quickly became apparent that it was the young who would pay the bloodiest costs for this lamentable war effort. Sixties rock had given young people a sense that they possessed not just a new identity, but a new empowerment. Now Vietnam began to teach that same audience that it was at risk, that its government and parents would willingly sacrifice young lives for old fears and distant threats - and would even use war as a means of diffusing youth's sovereignty. The contrast between those two realizations - between power and peril, between joy and fear - became the central tension that defined the late-1960s youth culture, and as rock increasingly reflected that tension, it also began forming oppositions to the jeopardy.

Consequently, the music started losing its "innocence." The Beatles still managed to maintain a facade of effervescence in the sounds of records like Beatles for Sale, Help and even Rubber Soul, but the content of the songs had turned more troubled. It was as if the group had lost a certain mooring - Lennon was singing more frequently about alienation and apprehension, McCartney about the unreliability of love - and whereas their earlier music had fulfilled the familiar structures of 1950s rock, their newer music was moving into unaccustomed areas and incorporating strange textures. Primarily, though, the band was growing fatigued from a relentless schedule of touring, writing and recording. Following the imbroglio surrounding Lennon's assertion that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus Christ and after one last dispirited swing through America (in which they were unable to play their more adventurous new material), the Beatles called a formal quits to live performances.

Meantime, Dylan was changing the language and aspirations of popular culture with his every work and gesture - in fact, he was the clearest shot at an individual cultural hero that rock & roll had produced since Presley - but he had also been pushing himself in intense personal and creative ways. In July 1966, following a triumphant but strenuous tour of England with his storming backing band the Hawks, Dylan suffered a motorcycle accident that broke his neck and would remove him from the recording scene for over a year. And the bad news continued: Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones were arrested for drug possession in a series of 1967 busts in London and pilloried by the British press and legal system. "I'm not concerned with your petty morals, which are illegitimate," Richards bravely (or perhaps foolishly) told a court official at his trial. Plainly, generational tensions were heating up into full-fledged cultural war.

Maybe these developments should have been perceived as harbingers of dissolution, but the vision of rock as a unifying and liberating force had become too exciting, too deep-seated, to be denied. By this time, rock & roll was plainly youth style, and youth was forming alternative communities and political movements throughout Europe and America. In the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, something approaching utopia seemed to be happening. Bands like the Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, the Quicksilver Messenger Service, Big Brother and the Holding Company and the Charlatans were forming social bonds with their audiences and trying to build a communal ethos out of a swirling mix of music, drugs, sex, metaphysics and idealistic love.

In mid-1967, after a yearlong hiatus, the Beatles helped raise this marginal worldview to worldwide possibility with the release of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band - a cohesive, arty and brilliant work that tapped perfectly the collective generational mood of the times and that reestablished the foursome's centrality in rock's power structure. It wasn't that the Beatles had invented the psychedelic or avant-garde aesthetics that their new music epitomized - in fact, the spacey codes and the florid textures and arrangements had been clearly derived from the music of numerous innovative San Francisco and British bands. But with Sgt. Pepper, the Beatles refined what these other groups had been groping for, and they did so in a way that unerringly manifested the sense of independence and iconoclasm that now seized youth culture. At the album's end, John Lennon sang "A Day in the Life" - the loveliest-sounding song about alienation that pop had ever yielded - and then all four Beatles hit the same loud, portentous chord on four separate pianos. As the chord lingered and then faded, it bound up an entire culture in its mysteries, its implications, its sense of power and hope. In some ways, it was the most magical moment that culture would ever share, and it was the last gesture of genuine unity that we would ever hear from the Beatles.
500 Greatest Albums of All Time: 'Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band'
Sgt. Pepper was an era-defining and form-busting work. To many, it certified that rock was now art and that art was, more than ever, a mass medium. It also established the primacy of the album as pop's main format - as a vehicle for fully formed concepts and as the main means by which rock artists communicated with their audience. Rock was now saturated not only with ideals of defiance but also with dreams of love, community and spirituality. Even the Rolling Stones - who had always sung about much darker concerns - would start recording songs about love and altruism (that is, for a week or two). "For a brief while," wrote critic Langdon Winner of the Sgt. Pepper era, "the irreparably fragmented consciousness of the West was unified, at least in the minds of the young."

But that blithe center couldn't forever hold. By the time Sgt. Pepper was on the streets, the Haight-Ashbury was already turning into an ugly place, riddled with hard drugs like cocaine, heroin and speed and overpopulated with runaways, bikers, rapists, thieves and foolish shamans. In addition, a public backlash was forming. Many Americans were afraid they had lost their young to irredeemable allures and ideologies, and in California, Ronald Reagan had already won a gubernatorial campaign that was largely predicated on anti-youth sentiment. It was a time for media panic, for generational recrimination and political separatism, for opposing views of America's worth and future. It was an intoxicating time but also a frightening one. More and more, it looked as if there were no turning back and as if everything were at stake.

Then, within a few months, a pop counterrevolution (or at least a redefinition) was underway - headed by none other than Bob Dylan. In some ways, it was Dylan who had made psychedelia possible; more than anybody, he had announced that all rules of form, length and content were subject to new visions and ambitions. But as works like Sgt. Pepper were finding their way into Dylan's remote Woodstock, New York, home (where he was recuperating from his accident), rumor had it that he was put off by the stylistic baroqueness, facile rhetoric and relentless drugginess of much of the new pop. Or perhaps he was simply concerned about whether rock had outdistanced him.

In any event, at heart Dylan was (and remains) a die-hard American formalist and Jeffersonian moralist, and the rock & roll that he had been making in seclusion with his companion backing group the Hawks (now simply called the Band) was music that explored the idea of what could be salvaged from the American value system. In January 1968, Dylan took this fixation one step further with his formal return to the public arena, the release of John Wesley Harding - a record that on one level was about a nation coming apart from within (but then, Dylan's best work had always been about America's forsworn potentials). On another level, with its sparse, almost stoical three-piece Sun Studio-derived acoustic rock & roll sound, John Wesley Harding was also the boldest musical critique or challenge that Dylan ever offered. If nothing else, its simplicity made the current music of the Beatles (Magical Mystery Tour) and the Rolling Stones (Their Satanic Majesties Request) - which is to say the entire mainstream and avant-garde realm of rock - seem frivolous, if not irresponsible. It was as if Dylan thought there might be a direction home after all.

John Wesley Harding helped set in motion a reevaluation - and a reaffirmation - of rock & roll root values. In a short time, old and new blues guitarists were enjoying fresh currency, gospel singers were scoring pop hits, Everly Brothers-style groups like Crosby, Stills and Nash were finding a mass audience, and even country & western style was meeting with a new reception. This last trend, in particular, disturbed some critics a year later, when Dylan recorded an LP of lovely and pure country songs, Nashville Skyline, that included a raggedy duet with C&W star Johnny Cash. Since country was widely viewed as the music of a working-class sensibility and since it represented a conservative audience that was seen as a stalwart supporter of the war in Vietnam, did this mean that Dylan had now switched political sides? Or had he simply lost faith in political solutions altogether? The truth was, folks like Dylan and his cohorts in the Band - who had emerged in their own meaningful right with Music From Big Pink and the Band - were simply trying to offer a saner, more embracing alternative to the rancorous spirit that had alienated many everyday Americans from the rock revolution. Dylan and the Band understood that there was still much to love about America and its people, despite their grand failings; in addition, there was no way the young could alienate the working- and middle-class masses and still win a genuine revolution.

In late 1969, the Band's leader, guitarist Robbie Robertson, described his and Dylan's new music as a refutation of "the punky attitude that had to do with music - hate your mother and stab your father."

"So what if your parents did do you wrong?" Robertson asked. "Maybe they did, but so what? I'm tired of hearing . . . Jim Morrison and those people. I just think they're a drag. Even if that is their situation, who cares? That's got nothing to do with music."

Plenty of other artists, of course, had fewer reservations about offering music as a force of division or rebellion. Among them were the Doors (who, indeed, had sung gleefully about the prospect of offing dad and fucking mom), the Velvet Underground (who had popularized songs about S&M and heroin addiction), Iggy Pop and the Stooges (who acted out impulses of self-destruction), the Mothers of Invention (who looked like bikers and played like prodigies) and MC5 (a white Detroit band that was openly dedicated to the ideal of violent black revolution). In part, perhaps, these bands were simply trading on the increasingly commercial value of shock. But they were also making plain that underneath the veneer of altruism and idealism, the 1960s youth scene was riddled with some considerably darker truths - namely, that drugs had quickly become as much a means to obliterate as to enlighten, and that in a truly free or anarchistic society, bloodshed was as likely to be encountered as lasting peace or equality. It is a testament to the merit of such bands as the Velvets, the Doors and the Stooges that their ability to face and address these realities has helped make their music among the more enduring and oddly affirming legacies of the era.

Increasingly, the best late-1960s music was music about fear, doubt and the possibility of apocalypse, and no band addressed these concerns more forthrightly or valuably than the Rolling Stones, who were quickly establishing themselves as perhaps rock's smartest and greatest band. Throughout their history - from the time they were arrested for pissing in public to the brouhaha over their drug busts - the Stones epitomized rebellion and disrespect to both fans and detractors, and they had long been the band that many parents and authority figures hated the most. Now, like Dylan and the Band, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had started reasserting primal blues and country forms, and they were also asking some of the toughest questions around ("I shouted out who killed the Kennedys?" sang Jagger in "Sympathy for the Devil," and then answered unabashedly, "When after all it was you and me"). But whereas Dylan would, more and more, make music of withdrawal and abdication, the Stones flirted openly with questions about evil and violence that aimed to reveal both themselves and their fans as accomplices in all the modern terror and chaos.
100 Greatest Artists of All Time: the Rolling Stones
By 1968 - a year in which Robert Kennedy was murdered in Los Angeles, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot to death in Memphis, and the broken hopes of millions of people erupted in costly, long-term violence (perhaps most famously at the Chicago Democratic National Convention, at which police brutally bludgeoned American youth) - rock & roll had become a field of hard options and opposing arguments. The Beatles seemed dazed and wearied by their role as youth leaders. On one hand, they had recorded two versions of "Revolution," in which they opted in, and then out, of the notion of violent revolt; then, on the other, they issued "Hey Jude," their greatest anthem of community and forbearance.

The Stones, though, faced the contradictions of their positions more directly. In "Salt of the Earth" (from Beggar's Banquet), Jagger extolled the working-class masses, only to admit his hopeless distance from any real involvement with such people ("When I search a faceless crowd/ A swirling mass of gray and black and white/They don't look real to me/In fact they look so strange"), and in "Street Fighting Man" (banned in several U.S. cities for fear that it might incite more political riots), the Stones admitted to both a desire for violent confrontation and a longing for equivocation ("Hey! Think the time is right for a palace revolution/But where I live the game to play is compromise solution").

This meant that rock's consensus of joy and opportunity was finished, and its most significant components came apart quickly. The Beatles made more great music, but they shortly disintegrated into a tense, mutually distrusting partnership; in many ways, their deterioration was a metaphor for a larger dissolution: the failed hope for a social community we had longed for but never really achieved. Dylan withdrew for a time into writing domestic bromides, and though he would go on to make some of his most resourceful music in the 1970s (Blood on the Tracks and ), he would never again affect rock music and American culture as sweepingly as he had with "Like a Rolling Stone" and John Wesley Harding. Meantime, the Rolling Stones capped their grandest triumph with a tragic debacle. At the end of 1969, following the dismissal and then death of founding member Brian Jones, the Stones recouped with their strongest album, Let It Bleed, and with an American tour that amounted to rock's most successful large-scale concert series to date. But at the end of the tour, eager to deflect charges of greed, the Stones staged a free concert outside San Francisco at Altamont Speedway, and following the example of the Grateful Dead, they hired the Hell's Angels as a security force. It was a day of legendary violence: The Angels pummeled scores of people, usually with little or no provocation, and in the evening, as the Stones performed "Under My Thumb," the bikers beat and stabbed a young black man to death in front of the stage, in full view of the band, the audience members and a camera crew.

Altamont was rock's ugliest moment - for years, it deflated the culture's sense of its own idealism. It also brought the Stones face to face with the violence that had been implicit in their work for years, scaring Jagger and Richards away from the themes they had been pursuing, and helped contribute to a long bout of artistic decline from which the band never fully recovered.

The dream, as one of rock's most honest voices would shortly announce, was over.

Did this series of disintegrations and bad ends negate the joy or worth of 1960s pop music? Hardly. Though it's easy to over-romanticize the period, rock in the 1960s achieved some sizable victories, and the best of them have enjoyed an enduring legacy. For one thing, rock established itself as a remarkably protean form: It was now a field with a sense of its own history and traditions, as well as a field that was willing to stretch and disrupt its own aesthetics by incorporating ideas and textures from numerous other disciplines. Today we can see the perpetuation of that spirit of adventure and openness as more and more pop artists fuse African, Jamaican, Brazilian and other musical forms with familiar American and British pop sounds.

Sixties rock also showed that it was capable of more than disruption - that it could unite masses for worthy causes and could actually bring about social and humanitarian change. That assertion helped pave the way for later philanthropic and political ventures like Rock Against Racism, No Nukes, Live Aid, Farm Aid and the anti-apartheid efforts. More important, in a time when countless conservative strategists claim credit for the rise of freedom and democracy movements throughout the world, it is important to declare that the protests of the 1960s youth culture - and the spirit of courage and defiance that those protests shared with rock music - have probably served as an even greater impetus for many of today's brave revolutionists.

Finally, 1960s music not only deepened rock & roll's ability to work as a music of rebellion, disobedience and disrespect - often worthy and noble impulses that were reenacted in 1970s punk and are still acted out in much of today's best (and worst) rap and heavy-metal music - but also made plain that pop music had become capable of expressing emotional and thematic truths that were as rich and consequential as anything contemporary film or literature had to offer. In other words, the 1960s proved that rock is anything but a trivial music; it does have impact, and at its worthiest, it still aims to threaten, to draw boundaries, to defy and to win young people over to its view and its ethos.

But it is also true that rock has lost much of its political and social convictions in recent years, that it is now a music that can accommodate ugly views of sexism and racism, and that perhaps too much of it has helped spread an unthinking affection for alcohol and drugs. To put it differently, 1960s rock didn't save the world - maybe didn't even change the world enough - but it fought good battles, and it enriched a progressive struggle that is far from finished, and far from lost. In the end, rock and youth culture met with considerable and determined opposition - and that opposition is still formidable. But for a moment, in the middle of a momentous decade, rock & roll was heroic enough to tell us the essential fact of our time: that we were finally on our own, and that we were "with no direction home." In some ways, the most important music since that time has struggled either to deny that bold truth or to follow its chilling and liberating implications to their bravest and most surprising ends.

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Bob Dylan, the Beatles, and the Rock of the Sixties

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In the 1950s, rock & roll meant disruption: It was the clamor of young people, kicking hard against the Eisenhower era's ethos of vapid repression.

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When we look back at The Beatles' career, it's only natural that we trace their progress through the groundbreaking albums they made between 1963 and 1969. But that only tells part of the story. The Beatles may have helped shift the focus from singles to long-playing albums, but at the start of their career they were, first and foremost, a band that made phenomenal singles, many of which didn't actually appear on their albums. With pop music still primarily a singles market in the mid-60s, The Beatles' singles, then, offer something of a parallel discography: a different lens through which to trace their artistic trajectory.

1962: 'Love Me Do'

The group had actually recorded a single even before signing with Parlophone. Credited as The Beat Brothers, John, Paul, George and Pete Best backed the English singer Tony Sheridan on a rocked-up version of "My Bonnie Lies Over The Ocean," which was released on Polydor in West Germany. It was a customer's request for that recording that led to Liverpool record-shop owner Brian Epstein tracking down and eventually managing The Beatles.

Once Brian had secured them a short contract with George Martin's Parlophone Records, a subsidiary of EMI, the producer began looking into which songs to include on their first single. "I picked up on "Love Me Do" mainly because of the harmonica sound," Martin later recalled. And so it was that the first Beatles single, "Love Me Do"/"PS I Love You," was issued in the U.K. on October 5, 1962, and entered the U.K. singles charts. After a few weeks of going up, then down, then back up and down again, it finally peaked at No.17 in the last week of 1962. They were off and running.

1963: 'Please Please Me', 'From Me To You', 'She Loves You', 'I Want To Hold Your Hand'

For the follow-up, Martin decided to play it safe and get the boys to record a song that he knew would be a hit - "How Do You Do It?," by songwriter Mitch Murray. The only snag was, The Beatles didn't like it. But, being good Beatles, they took the song away and rehearsed it, before returning to EMI Studios to give it a go. Martin was not unsympathetic to their renewed protests, and asked them what they had of their own that could compete. It was at this point that they played him "Please Please Me," a song composed by John at his Aunt Mimi's house in Liverpool, in the summer of 1962. Originally a slow-rocker in the style of Roy Orbison's "Only The Lonely," they sped the song up on Martin's advice, and set to work recording it. "They played me 'Please Please Me' but it was very slow and rather dreary," Martin recalled. "I told them if they doubled the speed it might be interesting."

The single was recorded on November 26, 1962, and, towards the end of the session, Martin told the boys: "You've just made your first No.1." Released on January 11, 1963, "Please Please Me"/"Ask Me Why" topped both the NME and Melody Maker charts, but stalled at No.2 on the Record Retailer chart - the one that would later become the U.K.'s official listing.

"Please Please Me" was the first of four astonishing singles the group released in 1963, with the next three all topping the U.K. charts. First off was "From Me To You," which John and Paul wrote while touring the U.K. on a bill with Helen Shapiro. By now, the band was almost continually on the road, driving the length and breadth of the United Kingdom in their cramped van, often playing two or more shows a day, as well as recording TV and radio appearances. Living out of suitcases, John and Paul would have no option but to write on the move.

For their fourth Parlophone single, Paul McCartney remembered a songwriting session in their hotel room in Newcastle: "We must have had a few hours before the show, so we said, 'Oh, great! Let's have a ciggie and write a song!'" "She Loves You" broke all records and became the biggest-selling single of the 60s in the U.K.; its catchy "Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!" chorus became a universal refrain. In mere months, The Beatles had gone from provincial upstarts to national treasures - though not everybody loved the song. Paul recalled how they finished it at his family home on Forthlin Road, Liverpool, before proudly taking it into the living room to play to his dad. "He said, 'That's very nice, son, but there's enough of these Americanisms around. Couldn't you sing 'She loves you. Yes! Yes! Yes!'?"

By now, George Martin was becoming increasingly frustrated with EMI's Capitol Records in the U.S., who steadfastly refused to release The Beatles' singles stateside. But their next offering proved too tempting even for Capitol. It seemed as though there was no doubt by now that "I Want To Hold Your Hand" would be another No.1 - The Beatles' fourth of the year, depending on which charts you read. But more than just another sonic smash for Liverpool's finest, "I Want To Hold Your Hand" would be the single that broke them across the Atlantic - and, subsequently, around the globe.

1964: 'Can't Buy Me Love', 'A Hard Day's Night', 'I Feel Fine'

The Beatles began 1964 in fine fettle. Whereas 12 months earlier, they had been fighting to get a Lennon/McCartney composition released as an A-side, 1964 found them writing hit records seemingly to order. With their whirlwind first visit to the U.S. having been perhaps the greatest success in show-business history, the group returned to the U.K. to begin work on their first feature film for United Artists. The first single to be taken from the movie was "Can't Buy Me Love," written by Paul at the Olympia Theatre in Paris, and recorded at the city's Pathé Marconi Studios, making it the only Beatles single recorded outside of London.

With a number of working titles, the work-in-progress movie finally found its identity when John wrote "A Hard Day's Night," a song based on a comment from Ringo. "I was going home in the car and Dick Lester suggested the title from something Ringo had said," John later explained. "I had used it in In His Own Write, but it was an off-the-cuff remark by Ringo, one of those malapropisms - a Ringoism - said not to be funny, just said. So Dick Lester said, 'We are going to use that title,' and the next morning I brought in the song." "A Hard Day's Night" was their next release. Needless to say, both the movie's singles topped the charts.

However, the idea of lifting their singles from albums went against The Beatles' belief that this was taking unfair advantage of their fans. Aside from their two movie soundtracks, where the singles and album were a part of the deal, The Beatles preferred that their singles be standalone cuts. And so it was with their final single of 1964.

"I Feel Fine" is notable for being the first Beatles single to feature the sort of sonic innovation that would become their trademark over the coming years, as they spent more time playing around with sounds in the studio. The single opens with a burst of feedback - believed to be the first deliberate use of feedback on a pop single. As George Harrison explained in Anthology, "John got a bit of feedback unintentionally and liked the sound and thought that it would be good at the start of the song. From then on he started to hold the guitar to create the feedback for every take that we recorded."

1965: 'Ticket To Ride', 'Help!', 'We Can Work It Out'/'Day Tripper'

Much as with the previous year, The Beatles kicked off 1965 as actors. Filming on their second movie, Help!, began in the Bahamas in February. Though the film wasn't released until the summer, the first single from its accompanying soundtrack appeared in April 1965, and, with it, a new period in Beatles singles was born.

"Ticket To Ride" was in so many ways an artistic advance from their output of even just a few months prior. As Ian MacDonald put it in his book Revolution In The Head, "As sheer sound, 'Ticket To Ride' is extraordinary for its time - massive with chiming electric guitars, weighty rhythm, and rumbling floor tom-toms." John Lennon described it as "one of the earliest heavy metal records".

With the movie came the soundtrack album and title song. But while the film was a madcap comedy in which The Beatles whizz around the world to increasingly exotic locations (for no real reason other than the four of them fancied going there), the title song hid in plain sight the mounting pressures of being a Beatle - especially on John Lennon: "I didn't realize it at the time - I just wrote the song because I was commissioned to write it for the movie - but later I knew, really I was crying out for help. 'Help!' was about me."

Its B-side, the Little Richard-inspired "I'm Down," would be the last time the group would look backwards on a single until consciously doing so in 1969. From here on, everything they put out would signal another advance, beginning with their first double-A-sided single, the remarkable "We Can Work It Out"/"Day Tripper."

Paul had written"'We Can Work It Out" as a "more uptempo thing, country and western". But the band all contributed to its evolution, with John helping on the "Life is very short" middle eight (John: "You've got Paul writing 'We can work it out', real optimistic; and me, impatient: 'Life is very short and there's no time for fussing...'"), and George suggesting the waltz-time section.

For John's "Day Tripper," Paul's driving bass guitar underpins a great R&B track, his simple rhythmic playing on the middle eight serving to build that passage to a frenzied climax. The combination of the two gave the group their third No.1 hit of a year that also featured two albums, a full-color movie, a US tour that included a record-breaking concert at New York's Shea Stadium, and the MBE, awarded by the Queen.

1966: 'Paperback Writer', 'Eleanor Rigby'

By comparison, 1966 might on the surface seem something of a quieter year. Just the one new album, , no movies, and only two singles - one of which having uncharacteristically been lifted from an album. However, where they may have reduced the quantity, they ramped the quality up to hitherto unimagined levels.

Spending much of April to June at EMI recording their revolutionary new album, The Beatles' first single of the year was breathtaking, both in its vitality and innovation. The A-side, "Paperback Writer," was a song Paul had begun while driving out to John's house in Surrey. "Because I had a long drive to get there, I would often start thinking away and writing on my way out, and I developed the whole idea in the car. I came in, had my bowl of cornflakes, and said, 'How's about if we write a letter: "Dear Sir or Madam," next line, next paragraph, etc?' I wrote it all out and John said, 'Yeah, that's good.' It just flowed."

"Paperback Writer" featured layers of harmony vocals and a stinging electric guitar from George. On the flipside was John's "Rain," which became the first Beatles record to use backwards music, and was also notable for its brilliant rhythm section, in the shape of Ringo's drums and Paul's bass. Released on June 10, 1966, the single soundtracked a baking-hot British summer that saw the England football team win the World Cup at Wembley, and the streets of London throb with hip young people, as swinging London's Carnaby Street and King's Road boutiques fitted the dedicated followers of fashion with the latest fab gear.

For The Beatles, however, that summer was a very different scene, as they courted controversy on their world tour. They landed first in Japan, where locals protested their performance at Tokyo's Budokan, a venue previously only used for sacred traditional martial arts. Things boiled over in the Philippines, as a perceived snub on President Marcos and his wife saw them pleased to escape the country with their lives. And in the wake of John Lennon's comments about how The Beatles were becoming more popular than Jesus Christ, their tour of the United States was marred by protests again his supposed blasphemy.

The band returned to England on August 31, determined never to tour again, and promptly all took a well-earned few months off.

With the demand for a Christmas single and the new album growing, but with no new product on the horizon, Brian Epstein and George Martin made the decision to release the Revolver album and, on the same day, a single with two tracks - "Eleanor Rigby" and "Yellow Submarine" - lifted from it, despite the group's hesitance to make fans pay twice for the same song. That Christmas saw the release of A Collection Of Beatles Oldies (But Goldies!), a compilation of singles, B-sides, and album cuts. Had The Beatles finally run out of ideas?

1967: 'Strawberry Fields Forever'/'Penny Lane', 'All You Need Is Love', 'Hello, Goodbye'

In December 1966, they regrouped at EMI to begin work on their next project. Initial ideas included making a concept album about their childhood, and the first songs they recorded reflected that. First up was "Strawberry Fields Forever." John had begun writing the song during breaks from filming How I Won The War, in Almeria, Spain. The title referred to Strawberry Field, a Salvation Army children's home close to John's childhood home with his Aunt Mimi in the leafy Liverpool suburb of Woolton, where John would play while growing up, and which became an escape as a teenager.

Two versions of the song were recorded, one with orchestration from George Martin, the other a heavier and faster version with the full band. Unable to choose between the two, John asked Martin to create a third version by splicing the two together. This "cut-and-shut" was achieved as much by luck, as the two versions were in different pitches and speeds. By chance, slowing one down matched the pitches perfectly.

Paul's foil to this was "Penny Lane," written about a district of Liverpool that he would pass through on his way into the city center. The song perfectly evokes life under the blue suburban skies, with its fireman, barber, and "four of fish and finger pie" behind the bus stop in the middle of the roundabout. Layering pianos one on top of the other, Paul created a bright piece of pop on top of which he wanted to add a "tremendously high trumpet" that he'd heard on the TV. George Martin hired the same player, David Mason, to play a piccolo trumpet part that stretched even perhaps the country's finest trumpeter to the limit.

With recording taking so much longer now, and the group in no apparent hurry to deliver a finished album, demand for new Beatles product became so great that Epstein and Martin opted to release "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Penny Lane" as a double-A-side in February 1967. Still considered by many critics to be one of the finest 7" singles ever released, it seems impossible now to think that this was The Beatles' first single not to top the charts since "Love Me Do," being kept from the top spot by Englebert Humperdinck's "Release Me." The Beatles were philosophical about this, however, with Paul remarking, "It's fine if you're kept from being No.1 by a record like 'Release Me,' because you're not trying to do the same kind of thing. That's a completely different scene altogether."

With their attention now firmly on completing Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, it began to look as though the group was shifting their focus from the singles market to albums. And yet, no sooner had they finished Sgt Pepper than they were back in the studio, working on yet another hit single written to order.

Brian Epstein had been approached to invite The Beatles to represent Britain on Our World, the world's first live, international satellite-television broadcast. John wrote "All You Need Is Love" for the occasion. As George Harrison explained in Anthology, "Because of the mood of the time, it seemed to be a great idea to perform that song while everybody else was showing knitting in Canada or Irish clog dances in Venezuela."

"All You Need Is Love" became the anthem for what would go down in history as the Summer Of Love, and the single was backed with a tasty tune called "Baby, You're A Rich Man," boasting the Flower Power refrain, "How does it feel to be one of the beautiful people?"

But the group wasn't done for the year. Following the accidental death of manager Brian Epstein in August, they embarked on their latest project, a self-made movie for TV, called Magical Mystery Tour. While these days, most people consider the Magical Mystery Tour album to be part of The Beatles' catalog, it was originally only ever released as an album in the U.S.; in the U.K. it was released as a beautifully packaged gatefold double-EP. But before that came "Hello, Goodbye"/"I Am The Walrus" - another No.1 hit, which featured one of the greatest B-sides in history, as Lennon's Lewis Carroll-inspired masterpiece featured all kinds of psychedelic sound effects, random radio sounds, backwards music and surreal lyrics. His ideas, it seemed, just wouldn't stop flowing.

1968: 'Lady Madonna', 'Hey Jude'

For John, Paul, George, and Ringo, 1968 would be dominated by two major events. Firstly, from mid-February, the four bandmates, plus wives and girlfriends, as well as other friends, journeyed to Rishikesh, India, to study Transcendental Meditation under Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Though Ringo and then Paul left within around a month, John and George remained at the Maharishi's Ashram until mid-April.

The second major Beatles event of 1968 was recording "The White Album", which consisted of many songs written in India. Recording started on the sprawling double-album in May and took up most of their time until its completion in October.

Despite these two events spanning three quarters of the year, The Beatles still managed to find time to record two more No.1 singles. The first of these was released while the group was in India, in order to maintain a public profile. Written by Paul on the piano, 'Lady Madonna' was inspired by Fats Domino - hence the distinctly New Orleans flavor to the song. The B-side, however, traced its origins to the other side of the world, in India. "The Inner Light" marked the first time a George Harrison song was included on a Beatles 7" in the U.K. and featured no Beatles on the instrumental backing, which was created by Indian musicians under Harrison's supervision.

The group's next single would be one of their biggest-selling and one of their most enduring. It would also be the first release on their newly established Apple record label. Written again by Paul, this time after visiting John's estranged first wife, Cynthia, and their son, Julian, "Hey Jude" began life as "Hey Jules." At over seven minutes long, it was an unusual choice for a single, and yet its nine-week run at the top of the US charts was the longest of any Beatles single.

The song's famous singalong ending had its first outing in the unlikely venue of a pub in a Bedfordshire village called Harrold, chosen simply because Paul and some friends liked the name. As publicist Derek Taylor recalled, "In the pub, Paul got to a piano and a sing-song was started - he'd always been good at that sort of thing - and he said, 'Well, here's a new one,' and he played 'Hey Jude'. Taught them how it went: 'Na, na, na, na, na, na, naa...' so they were all at it! That was the premiere of 'Hey Jude'. It was an unbelievably wonderful night. We didn't leave there until dawn was coming up."

"Hey Jude" was backed by a ferocious rocker from John, which reflected the social upheaval in the air. 1968 was a year of riots on the streets of Paris, Chicago, London and other cities, as civil-rights issues and increasing opposition to the war in Vietnam brought tensions around the world to a head. John's "Revolution" called for change, while at the same time leaving the Beatle on the fence when it came to his involvement. On the single version he sings, "When you talk about destruction/Don't you know that you can count me out," but on other versions he's more ambiguous, changing the lyric to "... count me out/in".

The filming of a promo clip for each side of this latest single saw The Beatles performing in front of an audience for the first time in two years. Their enjoyment of interacting with a roomful of people would inspire their next project.

1969: 'Get Back', 'The Ballad Of John & Yoko', 'Something'

Having spent much of 1968 in the studio, The Beatles entered 1969 with another No.1 album to their name; but their work rate showed no signs of stopping, and the group reconvened on January 2 to begin a new project. The idea was to film The Beatles preparing new songs to be performed at an unspecified venue, with the result being issued as an album. The group began filming rehearsals - known as the "Get Back" sessions - at Twickenham Film Studios, before moving to their own Apple Studios, recently built in the basement of their Savile Row office building, where they staged the famous rooftop concert.

While the sessions have gone down in Beatles-lore as their darkest hour, much of the footage from Savile Row shows the band enjoying playing together, working on songs that would eventually form the Let It Be album. After the rooftop performance, however, the sessions wrapped without a full project having taken shape, though the single "Get Back"/"Don't Let Me Down" was released in April. Joining the four of them at Savile Row was an old friend, the American keyboardist Billy Preston. Such was his contribution that the single was credited to "The Beatles with Billy Preston" - the only time the group credited an outside artist on a single.

"Get Back" was still at the top of the charts when The Beatles issued a follow-up. Unusually, only two of the group appeared on "The Ballad Of John & Yoko." The song told the story of the titular couple's whirlwind wedding and honeymoon, and Lennon was keen to get it recorded and released as quickly as possible. "John and Yoko came round to see me," Paul remembered. "And John said, 'I've got this song about me and Yoko, and I'm hot to record it. I'd like to ring up the studio, get some time and we could do it right now. You could play bass and you could play drums,'" which is exactly what happened.

If The Beatles were getting towards the end of their time working together, it didn't seem to be denting their productivity. With the bulk of one album and a film already in the can, they began work in earnest on their third album within 12 months that summer (though the first session for what became dated back to February 1969). With that album having been issued in September, the release of "Something"/"Come Together" as a single in October proved the only time in their lifespan as a group that The Beatles put out a single of tracks in the U.K. that were already available.

1970: 'Let It Be'

By now, the group's energy and enthusiasm was waning. With each band member moving in a different direction, the final session for Abbey Road, in August 1969, had marked the last time the four Beatles would ever work together. No more recording took place at all in 1969, but on January 3, 1970, Paul, George, and Ringo returned once more to Abbey Road, where they spent two days working on songs for the revived "Get Back" project. Their last recording session together involved overdubs on what would become their next single, "Let It Be." Paul's gospel-tinged ballad had first surfaced during a break in recording "While My Guitar Gently Weeps", in September 1968.

And that was it. In April 1970, in a "self-interview" press release accompanying advance copies of his first solo album McCartney, Paul announced a break from The Beatles. Replying to the question of whether it was "temporary or permanent", he said, "I don't know." Nevertheless, news media around the world reported The Beatles had split up. Rumors persisted for years to come of a reunion, all of which were silenced by the murder of John Lennon in December 1980. And yet...

The 90s: 'Free As A Bird', 'Real Love'

Fast-forward a quarter of a century. Since before their split, long-term associate Neil Aspinall had been charged with the task of acquiring rights to footage of the group, as they sought to tell their own story in a documentary style. But it wasn't until the mid-90s that the project, by now expanded to a multi-part series entitled Anthology, saw the surviving Beatles reunited - and not just to recount their history.

After Paul had been given a cassette of some of John's unfinished home demos by Yoko Ono, he, George, and Ringo returned to the studio to finish them off. The result was two new Beatles recordings - the first in 25 years. First came "Free As A Bird," released for Christmas 1995, and then "Real Love." The Beatles always had impeccable timing, and so it was that these new recordings emerged just as Britain was enjoying its most vibrant music scene for decades. Dubbed "Britpop", the music created by bands like Blur, Pulp, and avowed Beatles fanatics Oasis had journalists recalling the glory years of the 60s, when The Beatles and their string of hit singles had first made Britain No.1 in the world for pop music...

Spanning 23 7"s, The Beatles: The Singles Collection box set is out now. Buy it here.

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The Beatles' Singles: 22 Songs That Changed The World | uDiscover

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When we look back at The Beatles ' career, it's only natural that we trace their progress through the groundbreaking albums they made between 1963 and 1969. But that only tells part of the story.

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What is melody in music? Well, the simplest definition for melody is - a melody is a series of pitches that form a tune. Another way of thinking of melody in music is to define a melody as "the part you remember or sing along to" in a piece of music. Most people do not sing the drumbeat, or the bass line, or even the part of another melodic instrument, but they do sing, rather loudly at times, the melody or main musical idea of the music.

For Western European musical tradition, the melody is the main ingredient in the music, it is what everything else is based around. The melody determines how the other elements of music can interact and support the melody. For example, the harmony and tonality of the music are created to accompany and make the melody be the star and focal point through the key and the chords that are used.

There are several musical terms that can help you to appreciate and describe a melody. These come under the broader headings of instrument or voice, contour, motion, register, range, phrasing, articulation, and ornamentation. These terms will all be explained in further detail in this article.
If you would like a copy of the Elements of Music Mind Maps used in this blog post, click here her for your FREE download.
Melody in Music Definitions

Instrument or voice

A melody can only be performed by a pitched instrument or voice. In a single piece of music, the melody can change between instruments or voices in different sections. In "Bolero" by Ravel, the melody is repeated several times, but each time it is repeated, another instrument from the orchestra has a turn. Listen to the excerpt and try to order the instruments that perform the melody.

Melodic Contour

The melodic contour is the shape of the melody. If you were to use the musical notation or score of the melody you would be able to see the shape of the melody by joining the note heads together. The contour of a melodic line can be described by using words such as smooth, flowing, jagged, jumpy, angular, repetitive, arching, scale like, steep, shallow, as well as many more.

Melodic Motion

The motion of a melody can be described in several ways. Two main terms are conjunct and disjunct. A conjunct melody is one that moves in steps, and a disjunct melody moves in leaps. In a melody, both of these can be stepping or leaping either by ascending or going higher in pitch, or descending meaning that it is getting lower in pitch.

Often a melody is made up of both conjunct and disjunct sections. It might be that, for example, the verse of a song is more conjunct and sung in steps, whereas the chorus could be predominantly disjunct and sung in leaps.

Register of a Melody

The musical definition of register is the height of the pitch that an instrument performs in. For example, a violin can perform in a higher register than the cello, and the cello can perform higher than the double bass.

To describe the register of a melody there are two main terms that can be used - treble or bass. A simple way to remember this is to think of a piano. Roughly in the middle of the piano is a note called "Middle C". Anything above or to the right of this note is in the treble register, and any note below or to the left is in the bass register.

Describing the register of a melody can go even further by adding the terms upper, mid or lower to treble or bass. For example, a melody performed by a piccolo could be described as played in the upper treble register. Another example could be the bassoon performing a melody in the mid to low bass register.

A great example of a melody being performed in several different registers is the piece by Greig from the Peer Gynt Suite - In the Hall of the Mountain King. In this music, the melody is repeated by several instruments, in the beginning the melody is performed in a very low bass register, and as the music progresses, the register of the melody changes with each different instrument. Try mapping the register of the melody in the music.

Range of a Melody

The range of a melody can be defined as the distance between the lowest and the highest note being performed. It is like the range in a set of numbers or statistics. The range of a melody can be described as narrow, medium, an octave, wide, very wide, or extensive. A good example of a melody that has a narrow range would be in the children's nursery rhyme - "Hot Cross Buns". This simple melody uses only three pitches, and therefore has a very narrow range.

A song with a medium range would be "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star". This melody has a range that does not go beyond the octave. An example of an instrument with the potential for an extensive range is the piano. From its lowest note, to its highest spans 7 octaves!

Melody and Phrasing

A musical phrase can be either melodic or rhythmic. A phrase is like a small musical sentence. To begin to hear a phrase, try listening to a singer performing the melody. When they take a breath, or there is a slight pause, that is the end of the phrase. An instrumental phrase can often go longer than one that is sung, simply because the instrument, such as a violin, does not need to take a breath!

When describing a phrase first listen for how many bars in length it is, is it being performed in 2,3,4,5,6,7, 8, or any number of bars long? To do this you firstly need to work out the time signature. Once you know how many beats are in the bar, you can count the phrase length.

Another way to describe a phrase is by using words such as even, balanced, or symmetrical. A phrase that is even can be divided in half and each half is the same. Phrases that are uneven, unbalanced, or asymmetrical are different on either side. These types of phrases might start high, then end low, or they might be heard in the first bar of the phrase, and then there is a longer pause before the next phrase.

Melodic Articulation

The definition of melodic articulation is the manner or way a single note is performed. In Western music, there are four common musical articulations that are used- staccato, legato, tenuto and marcato.

Staccato - short and detached

Legato - smooth and well connected

Tenuto - holding the note for its full value or note length

Marcato - to play a note loudly and with force

Melodic Ornamentation

Composers will often use many different techniques to create interest and variety in a melody. The technique used will be different, depending on the instrument performing. Some common melodic embellishments include - grace notes, appoggiaturas, trills, slides, tremolo, vibrato, and many more.

Grace note - an extra note added as an embellishment and is not essential to the melody

Appoggiatura - is Italian for "to lean upon". It means for an auxiliary note to be stressed before the main note that is in the melody or chord

Trill - a rapid alternation between two neighbouring notes

Slide - a joining of two or more notes by "sliding" in an upward or downward motion

Tremolo - a rapid movement across the string with the bow (or on the guitar, by the pick)

Vibrato - a slight wavering of the pitch

Singers will often use a variety of other melodic devices to make the melody interesting. A common vocal ornamentation is to use melisma. Melisma means to sing more than one pitch on a syllable. Another type of ornamentation often used by opera singers, and some pop singers, is the cadenza. This is to sing a very fancy ending to a section of the music. Another way to describe a cadenza is "vocal gymnastics"! It is an opportunity for the vocalist to show off their skills, range, and tricks at the end of a song or section to create a dramatic effect. Watch the clip below to hear some examples of a cadenza.

Why is Melody Important in Music?

In Western music tradition, most people would agree that the melody is the most important part of the music. The melody, and the series of pitches that it consists of, determines how all the elements of music are used. Below is a few ways that melody effects another element of music.

Music Appreciation and Melody

To appreciate a piece of music, or to study and analyze a piece of music, often the most obvious place to start is with the melody. The melody is what every other part of the composition hinges from, it where each of the other elements of music derive their accompanying parts.

Next time you hear a piece of music, try taking note of the different features of the melody and how it is performed. Even better still, in your next performance, think about how you can add variety and personal flair to the melody by adding or subtracting some of the different characteristics. You could maybe perform the melody in a different register, or try a different instrument, or maybe adding in some different embellishments!
If you would like a copy of the Elements of Music Mind Maps used in this blog post, click here her for your FREE download.
Watch the video explanation about Melody below

Until next time

Julia from Jooya

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What is Melody in Music? - Jooya Teaching Resources

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What is melody in music? Well, the simplest definition for melody is - a melody is a series of pitches that form a tune. Another way of thinking of melody in music is to define a melody as "the part you remember or sing along to" in a piece of music.

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Queen - We Are The Champions (Official Video)

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eight essential artists from the '70s - cnn

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Eight essential artists from the '70s - CNN

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The '70s produced some great music across a broad variety of genres, from progressive rock to disco to punk. (Yes, disco. Get over it.)

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Audacity ® | Free Audio editor, recorder, music making and more!

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Audacity is the world’s most popular audio editing and recording app. Edit, mix, and enhance your audio tracks with the power of Audacity. Download now!

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The cloud platform where musicians and fans create music, collaborate, and engage with each other across the globe

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Incredible music.
In the key of easy.

GarageBand is a fully equipped music creation studio inside your Mac - with a complete sound library that includes instruments, presets for guitar and voice, and an incredible selection of session drummers and percussionists. With Touch Bar features for MacBook Pro and an intuitive, modern design, it's easy to learn, play, record, create and share your hits worldwide. Now you're ready to make music like a pro.
Download GarageBand for Mac

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GarageBand is a fully equipped music creation studio inside your Mac - with a complete sound library that includes instruments, presets for guitar and voice, and an incredible selection of session drummers and percussionists. With Touch Bar features for MacBook Pro and an intuitive, modern design, it's easy to learn, play, record, create and share your hits worldwide.

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Noteflight - Online Music Notation Software

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A very easy to use online drum machine. You can choose from various drum kits, create, save and edit your drum patterns and record it as audio files.

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Code:

Press CTRL + C to copy!AFUEK8Z

Link:

Press CTRL + C to copy!https://www.soundtrap.com/invite/AFUEK8Z

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Originally an instrumental from August 2014 titled "Fade," Alan released this updated version in December 2015 under the slightly-altered name "Faded," with ISELIN providing vocals.

"I'm still just an eighteen year old from Bergen in Norway," Walker told Genius. Until "Faded" blew up, he was "more concerned about [his] homework and lack of focus in studies than on having a song that was topping the charts in many territories."

I'm just really humble and grateful for the response and feedback this track has gotten. Unimaginable, if that's possible to say. Just unreal!

Restrung Version:

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Faded Lyrics: You were the shadow to my light / Did you feel us? / Another star, you fade away / Afraid our aim is out of sight / Wanna see us alight / Where are you now? / Where are you now

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Van Halen - Jump (Official Music Video) [HD]

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Can't Get Enough - Bad Company / [Intro] / C Bb F Bb F (x2) / [Verse 1] / C Bb F Well, I'll take whatever I want and baby, I want you You give me something I need Now tell me I got something

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Bad Company - Can't Get Enough (Official Audio)

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Intro] / G G D/F# Em C G / [Verse 1] / G White lips, pale face D/F# Em Breathing in snowflakes C G Burnt lungs, sour taste G Light's gone, day's end D/F# Em Struggling to pay rent C G Long

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Ed Sheeran - The A Team [Official Music Video]

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P!NK, Willow Sage Hart - Cover Me In Sunshine (Official Video)