Era of origin
1920s music genres
Explore music genres with documented origins in the 1920s.
19 genre guides
1920Christian & Gospel
Christian & Gospel music is characterized by its focus on themes of worship, praise, and devotion, often featuring lyrics that reflect Christian beliefs and teachings. The sound can range from traditional hymns and choral arrangements to contemporary pop, rock, and even hip-hop influences.
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1920Classic Blues
A historically grounded name for the first great commercial blues wave, centered on women singers and the records that carried their voices far beyond the South.
1920Classic Female Blues
Classic Female Blues names the moment when women’s blues singing moved from stage life into the recording age, leaving behind a small but towering body of sides that still feel intimate and alive.
1920Country Gospel
A warm, plainspoken form of sacred country music that grew out of early Southern recording culture and still feels rooted in front-porch harmony and revival songs.
1920Europe – Greece: Laiko, Entechno, Rebetika
This genre encompasses traditional Greek music styles that are characterized by their emotive melodies and often poignant lyrics. Laiko is a popular form of Greek music that blends traditional Greek folk music with modern sounds. Entechno is a more artistic and sophisticated style that often incorporates poetic lyrics and classical influences. Rebetika, known as the Greek blues, is marked by its soulful and often melancholic themes, typically featuring instruments like the bouzouki.
View guide1920Folk-Blues
A loose, acoustic-minded blues umbrella with deep roots in Southern U.S. performance culture and later importance in folk revival listening.
1920Gospel Blues
A sacred-blues crossroads genre with early recording-era roots in African American Southern music, later sharpened by figures such as Blind Willie Johnson and Sister Rosetta Tharpe.
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1920Original Score
A practical, industry-facing label for music written to fit a specific screen story. The phrase sits closest to film scoring, but it also travels across television and games, where the same basic job applies: support the image, steer the feeling, and leave enough room for the scene to breathe.
1920Piano Blues
A broad keyboard-centered blues tradition that runs from early 20th-century acoustic recordings to urban Chicago club music, with boogie-woogie energy and a wide emotional range.
View guide1920Piedmont Blues
A well-documented acoustic blues style from the southeastern U.S., Piedmont Blues sits at the meeting point of ragtime, string-band music, and blues. The best recordings feel agile and unforced, with the guitar carrying both rhythm and melody in the same breath.
1920Twelve-tone technique
A concise, evidence-based record for Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method, emphasizing its Austrian origins, early-1920s development, and canonical early recordings.
1920Yodel
A mountain-born vocal style that moved from Alpine herding calls into folk song and early country recording, where it found some of its most famous American exponents.
1927Conjunto
A concise, borderland tradition note: classic conjunto is accordion-led dance music from the Texas-Mexico border, rooted in German and Czech influence and later carried into wider Tejano and Tex-Mex worlds.
1927Country music
A broad, durable American genre that took shape in the early twentieth century but reaches back into older folk and ballad traditions. Its first stars made the template: plainspoken songs, close harmonies, and a frontier between homegrown intimacy and mass-market polish.
1927Hokum Blues
A compact, commercial blues fad from the late 1920s and early 1930s, hokum lives on through its playful recordings rather than a rigid scene or canon. The style’s best-documented center is Chicago, where Tampa Red and Georgia Tom made the formula click for a national audience.
1927Kansas City Blues
A city-rooted blues label with a real historical core, but one that overlaps heavily with Kansas City jazz and swing. The evidence points to a relaxed, rhythm-forward club style more than a sharply bounded standalone genre.
1927Movie Soundtrack
A broad, film-centered category that stretches from silent-era accompaniment to modern soundtrack albums, with a history rooted in live performance and later standardized by synchronized sound.
1927South African music
This record should be treated as a broad umbrella entry rather than a single genre label. South African music spans many scenes and eras, so the safest approach is to describe the country’s musical ecosystem, then point readers toward representative artists and recordings.
1927Traditional Country
Traditional country sits at the point where rural song, early recording culture, and plainspoken storytelling met. Its sound is spare but vivid, and its earliest stars helped define what country music would become for decades.