Era of origin
1900s music genres
Explore music genres with documented origins in the 1900s.
45 genre guides
1900Argentine Tango
A genre born in the Río de la Plata, Argentine tango carries both urban grit and formal grace. It moved from marginal dance music into a durable song tradition, then into a modern concert language through figures such as Gardel and Piazzolla.
1900Australian Country
A rooted, story-first country tradition shaped by the bush, the pub, and the long road between them.
1900Background music
A practical, use-based label with a real commercial history and a looser artistic halo around ambient and easy-listening repertoire.
1900Calypso
A Trinidadian carnival-rooted song tradition built on wit, commentary, and a strong vocal center.
1900Cape Jazz
A Cape Town-rooted jazz tradition with deep local memory: church music, township rhythm, and improvisation braided into a sound that feels both intimate and outward-looking.
1900Chanson
A long-lived French song tradition that stretches from medieval courtly music to the intimate, word-first popular songs associated with Piaf and Aznavour.
1900Chanukah music
A holiday-music tag for songs tied to Hanukkah, spanning synagogue-adjacent classics, community singalongs, and contemporary parody-pop releases.
1900Children’s Music
A broad, durable children’s-music entry anchored in nursery-rhyme tradition, the rise of recorded children’s albums, and later education-focused performers.
1900Christian Country
A faith-forward branch of country music that leans on familiar roots instrumentation and gospel-minded storytelling. The label is historically connected to country gospel and has been carried by artists who moved fluidly between sacred and mainstream country worlds.
1900Christmas: Children’s
A family-facing holiday niche that pulls old carols, nursery-rhyme simplicity, and children’s-media packaging into one seasonal listening lane.
1900Christmas: Comedy
A playful, evidence-constrained label for Christmas-themed comedy and parody records: festive on the surface, sly underneath.
1900Close Harmony
A broad vocal-harmony label with real historical roots in barbershop and a wider life in pop, country, and group singing.
1900Comedy music
A broad, lightly bounded umbrella for music built around humor, parody, and comic performance. The modern recorded form is especially visible in U.S. pop culture, where artists like Weird Al Yankovic made the joke-song into a durable craft.
1900Country Blues
A prewar acoustic blues umbrella rooted in rural Southern Black life, Country Blues is best understood as a family of local styles rather than a single fixed sound. The classic recordings are spare and vivid, with guitar lines that can sound both intricate and weathered, and singers who make a whole world out of a few minutes of shellac.
1900Cumbia
A coastal Colombian tradition that has traveled far, cumbia now lives as both a local heritage and a sprawling Latin American family of sounds.
1900Delta Blues
A stark, intimate branch of blues rooted in the Mississippi Delta, where solo guitar and voice can sound both lean and haunted.
1900Detroit Blues
A regional blues label rooted in Detroit’s postwar Black club culture, best documented through John Lee Hooker’s early recordings and the city’s smaller, less-publicized blues archive.
1900Dixieland
A lively early-jazz tag for the New Orleans sound that became nationally visible through landmark 1917 recordings, even as the name itself remained contested among musicians and historians.
1900Early Jazz
Early jazz carries the sound of crowded rooms, parade streets, and brass bands turning around one another in real time. The music often moves with a buoyant pulse, and the famous New Orleans-style frontline of cornet or trumpet, clarinet, and trombone can feel both tightly woven and delightfully loose, with collective improvisation doing much of the expressive work. The label is broader than any single substyle, though writers and listeners often use it alongside or instead of New Orleans jazz or Dixieland.
1900Electronic music
A broad, studio-born genre with deep roots in early electronic instruments and a major public breakthrough through European pioneers in the 1970s.
1900Elevator music
A practical, listener-facing label for the soft instrumental background music that grew out of Muzak and easy listening. The term is more about function than a strict genre boundary, which is why it gathers together music meant to soothe, smooth edges, and sit quietly in public space.
1900Expressionist music
A historically grounded early-modernist tag, best used for Schoenberg-centered works that push emotional extremity through dissonance, fragmentation, and speech-like vocal writing.
1900Gospel
A broad Christian genre with deep roots in Black church tradition, gospel came into focus in the 1930s and remains inseparable from powerful singing and communal uplift.
1900Harmonica Blues
A harmonica-forward blues tag that grew out of early country and urban blues and later found a defining voice in amplified Chicago playing.
1900Holiday
A broad seasonal tag rather than a single style, Holiday sits where church carols, pop nostalgia, and yearly ritual meet. Its modern shape was formed by older hymn traditions, wider 19th-century publication, and the 20th-century dominance of evergreen recordings like Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas.”
1900Huayno
A durable Andean song-and-dance tradition rooted in the central highlands, huayno carries older village performance practices into modern recording and urban listening cultures.
1900Indo jazz
A compact but important fusion label with a clear documented 1960s origin in London. The sound grew from a genuine collaboration rather than a vague stylistic borrowing, which is why the Harriott-Mayer recordings still function as the genre’s anchor point.
1900Iranian Pop
A broad Persian-language pop tradition that took modern form in mid-20th-century Iran, splintered across the revolution and exile, and later re-entered public life in new forms.
1900Jazz Blues
A historically loose but useful umbrella for recordings where jazz phrasing, harmony, and improvisation meet blues form and feeling.
1900Mariachi
A living Mexican ensemble tradition that moved from rural, string-led gatherings into trumpets, recordings, film, and national symbolism, with Jalisco at the center of its documented story.
1900Memphis blues
A foundational Memphis-centered blues label rooted in early 20th-century African American performance culture, especially the city’s Beale Street scene and W. C. Handy’s landmark songwriting.
1900Modern Composition
A broad catch-all for modern concert music that leans experimental, minimalist, or textural rather than strictly tonal or traditional. The label is useful, but it is loose enough that the history should be read as a cluster of related practices rather than a single origin story.
1900Musical theatre
A broad theatrical genre rather than a narrowly bounded musical style, musical theatre spans classic Broadway and West End traditions, film-adjacent stage works, and modern cast-recording culture.
1900Novelty
A flexible comic-pop label for songs that aim to amuse, surprise, or parody as much as they aim to entertain musically.
1900Schlager
A warm, mainstream German-language pop tradition with deep roots in operetta and postwar hit culture, schlager remains a durable home for big hooks, plainspoken emotion, and a polished, communal feel.
1900Son cubano
A foundational Cuban genre with eastern-rooted origins, son cubano carries a relaxed but driving swing that helped shape later Latin dance music. The modern revival around Buena Vista Social Club kept its older songs in circulation for new listeners.
1900Southern Gospel
A warm, quartet-centered gospel tradition rooted in Southern church singing and carried forward by radio, recordings, and live harmony groups.
1900Spoken Word
A broad, voice-led category that sits between poetry and music, with its modern recorded history especially visible in Beat-era performance poetry, jazz-inflected recitation, and socially charged Black spoken performance.
1900Tex-Mex
A borderlands style with a deep dancehall history, Tex-Mex sits where Mexican regional traditions meet Texas country, polka, and the bright push of the accordion.
1900Texas Blues
A Texas-born blues tradition that moved from acoustic country blues into a more supple electric language, with Blind Lemon Jefferson and T-Bone Walker forming two of its clearest historical anchors.
1900Thanksgiving
A small seasonal category rather than a full genre, Thanksgiving music usually leans on acoustic, homey arrangements and songs about gratitude, family, and harvest-time warmth. Its documented footprint is real but modest, with much of the repertoire living in holiday playlists and artist catalogs instead of a standardized canon.
1900Traditional jazz
A concise revival-era umbrella term for early New Orleans jazz and its later rediscovery, with a strong emphasis on collective improvisation and front-line horn interplay.
1900Traditional Celtic
A broad editorial umbrella for older Irish and Scottish traditional music, with strong documentary support for the Irish side of the story and a widely used modern Celtic framing around it.
1900Twoubadou
A Haitian acoustic song tradition with blurred historical edges, twoubadou sits between folk memory and popular performance. Its most durable image is of small, mobile ensembles: guitars up front, percussion close behind, and songs that feel personal even when they move through public space.
1900Vocal Jazz
A concise, listener-friendly overview of vocal jazz centered on American jazz history, swing-era vocalists, and the voice-as-instrument tradition.