British Invasion Influence On American Culture

During the late 50’s and early 60’s the skiffle scene was starting to die out, and it’s place emerged and flourishing culture of groups. With acts such as Elvis Presley and the whole R&B genre starting to die, music became vulnerable to a whole new type of sound that the world has yet to hear. The Rock scene came to be when the British invasion got into American’s hearts.

In many of the big urban cities of the U.K. (Liverpool, London, Manchester, and Birmingham) there was around 300+ active bands per city. Beat bands were heavily influenced by American bands at the time, such as Buddy Holly and the Crickets. Some other bands that became known during the beat boom were the Kinks, the Yardbirds, and the Rolling Stones. The beat

1 hit on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, which started the British invasion of the American music charts.

The British invasion helped spread the production of Rock music. In America this meant that music such as vocal groups, teen idols, and instrumental surf music was coming to an end of the time when their music was dominant on the charts. The British invasion gave a huge blow to surviving R&B acts, and it even temperairily derailed old rock and roll acts such as Elvis Presley. The British invasion also helped gain popularity of rock music, and it also helped cement the primacy of the rock group.

By the 1960’s in America, the scene that was created out of the folk music revival had grown to a ginormous movement. In the late 50’s and early 60’s figures such as Bob Dylan had come to the front in folk revival movement as singer-songwriters. Bob Dylan started to gain major popularity with his songs Blowin’ in the Wind and Masters of War. Masters of War brought the idea/concept of protest songs to a wider audieance, but while folk influenced rock, and vice versa, the two remained their own. In 1964 Dylan had adopted electric instruments with such he created the song Like a Rolling Stone which instantly became a hit single. The hybridization of folk and rock has been seen as having a major influence on the development of rock music, bringing in elements of psychedelia, and helping to develop the ideas of

This new rock vibe began in the folk scene. Psychedelic rock particularly took off in California's emerging music scene as groups followed the Byrds from folk to folk rock in 1965. Many groups emerged during this time such as The Doors, and Jimi Hendrix.In the early 1960s, one of the most popular forms of rock was Surf Rock, which was characterized by being nearly entirely instrumental and by heavy use of reverb on the guitars. The spring reverb featured in Fender amplifiers of the day, cranked to its maximum volume, produced a guitar tone shimmering with sustain and evoking surf and ocean imagery. Roots rock is the term now used to describe a move away from the excesses of the psychedelic scene, to a more basic form of rock and roll that incorporated its original