The King of Rock and Roll

Elvis Presley came from a very poor family. He was born on 8 January 1935 in Mississippi.

Elvis loved music. He went to church every Sunday and sang in the choir. When he was 13, his mother bought him a guitar. In the same year Elvis and his family left Mississippi for Memphis, Tennessee.

One day in 1954 he went to a recording studio called Sun Records. He wanted to make a record for his mother's birthday. The secretary at the studio heard Elvis and she told her boss, Sam Phillips.

Elvis was Sam Phillips's dream - "a white boy with a black voice".

Phillips became Elvis's manager and Elvis made his first single - That's All Right, Mama. When the disc jockeys played it on their studio stations, American teenagers went wild. Many American parents didn't like Elvis. He was too sexy.

In 1955, Elvis appeared on TV in New York. The following year he went to Hollywood and made his first film Love Me Tender. In the next two years he had many hit records - Blue Suede Shoes, Heartbreak Hotel, All Shook up, Teddy Bear.

In 1958, Elvis joined the American army and went to Germany. When he returned to the United States in the early 1960s, pop was not the same. British groups like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were the new stars.

Elvis was a millionaire, but he was a very lonely man. In his last years he became fat and depressed. He died of a heart attack on 16 August 1977 in his mansion. But for his millions of fans, Elvis is still the King.

Scott Joplin

Scott was born in Texas in 1868, into a poor but musical black family. His father, who was a freed slave, played the violin, and his mother played the banjo and sang. Scott played the violin and bugle but his favourite instrument was his neighbour's piano. His father worked extra hours to buy him a battered old grand piano, and soon Scott was playing by ear negro tunes, blues, and spirituals. Music flowed naturally from his fingers, and he quickly became the talk of the town.

Scott didn't learn to read music until he was 11, when an old German music teacher spotted his talent and gave him free, formal piano lessons. He learned to play the works of such composers as Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart as well as his improvised music. Thus when he started to write music, his tunes were a wonderful mixture of classical European and African beat. This unique style was known as Ragtime, and was played everywhere in the USA in the early 1900s by both black and white musicians.

In 1882, when Scott was 14, his mother died and he left home to seek his fortune in St. Louis. In the 1880s, St. Louis was noisy and bustling with life. The waterfront of the Mississippi River was full of gangsters, gamblers, and sailors. The sound of music was everywhere - black, white and mixed. The hot steamy nights were filled with blues, working songs, banjos. Scott was soon playing Ragtime piano in cheap bars on the waterfront. This was a rough, tough area of the city where arguments over girls, whisky, and money were settled with fists and guns. Scott grew up very fast and his musical talent continued to develop. All in all he wrote about 50 piano rags.

Scott Joplin died in 1917. Today he is the undisputed King of Ragtime, thanks to his natural ability, his unusual musical education and the popularity of his most famous composition - The Entertainer.

3. Discuss the following:

Ø Can serious and pop music be substituted by one another? Can there be sort of peaceful coexistence between these two genres?

Ø Rock stars often become cult figures or idols, the objects of a personality cult.

Ø Computerized music, synthesizers are replacing live musicians on stage.

Ø What makes a pop star?

Дата добавления: 2015-10-30