AHC: Hard Rock music invented in late 19th century Britain

In OTL, when the British working class of the Victorian era developed, many former folk songs, and naval sea shanties developed into work songs and tavern songs fit for the conditions and rhythm of urban life centered around small tenements, strenous factory work, inequality, the pleasures of sexuality and occasionally getting something better to eat, and the small amount of leisure time workers could have in the pub or at home.

Sadly, the development of this new, early industrial music is not well documented, given the classism and strict morals of the time period, but from what little I could find, it seems to mirror a similar development taking place in 1970s and 80s Britain and Eastern Europe, and the growth of the Punk subculture, when young blue collar workers started making increasingly raucous and down-to-earth songs based on their experiences in life.

The most recognizable legacy of this era of OTL music history are the workers' protest songs, whose style the early Socialist and Communist movements adopted.

But what if, next to the protest songs, another development took place that created a loud and fast-paced music thematically centered around sharing in the hardships and emotions the new industrial life has brought?
The loudness of the music could be justified by many workers getting permanent hearing damage from the early, loud machines they toiled at every day, and the quickening of the rhythm could be explained by the faster-paced life the new technologies of the Industrial Revolution have brought.


Around 1890, a musically-inclined worker shares his opinions, experiences, sorrows, and joys in life with the crowd in a pub in a song reminiscent of the earlier folk song-inspired ballads that all of them had heard before. However, he suddenly picks the pace up and starts singing the chorus in a very loud voice with a fast tempo:

♫"The houses and towns all grew up with you,
Tired rundown railways, stone bridges!
If on cold nights, all the lights fade out,
my soul is wildened and tortured by a song!

Tell me, what do you want?!
You little, you big, you ugly, and nice!
Or has everything you yearned for been already lost?
And a song tortures you, wherever you go!"♫*


Although electric guitars and amplification are still decades off technologically, the style of music still has some effect, and more and more songs with a similar rhythm and theme are eventually written.

Do you think a development like this is possible? How would it alter history?



*I know my "song sample" doesn't rhyme and is not very well-paced, I'm not a poet and just wanted to demonstrate what I was thinking about. BTW, the lyrics were inspired by a song of an early 1980s Hungarian rock band called "Edda", the song is "Kínoz egy ének".
 
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@alter " and the quickening of the rhythm could be explained by the faster-paced life the new technologies of the Industrial Revolution have brought."

and perhaps combined with the music wall-of-sound concept? And one particularly talented musician sometimes alternates loud, fast parts with slow, soulful parts.
 
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The problem is, like heavy metal, hard rock has a distorted/overdriven sound to it. How are you going to get that sound? It is a very electric sound, and is based upon overdriving amps to distortion. Considering that electricity was in its infancy back in the 19th century, electric amps are a no go. You can make the statement that you can get a ratty/sort of dirty sound by blowing extra hard into wind instruments, or playing piano or stringed instruments very hard, but then it's just aggressively played folk, or brass/woodwind band music (Hector Berloiz composed, and conducted extra loud brass music, and post romantic period symphonic music can sound kind of aggressive at times, but nobody would even call either of them even proto-hard rock).

As a musician whose played guitar in bands that did a fair amount of hard rock and metal, my feeing is that without the disorted/crunchy wall of sound, it isn't hard rock.
 
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from wiki
The first practical electronic device that could amplify was the triode vacuum tube, invented in 1906 by Lee De Forest, which led to the first amplifiers around 1912

cctriode.gif


A pickup bar and steel wires for the guitar isn't that hard to work up once the Tube is done, but then the mid-range Speaker, vs the earlier horn that couldn't pump out the dBs That finally had the bugs worked out in 1921, after the idea for it was first described in 1877
 
from wiki
The first practical electronic device that could amplify was the triode vacuum tube, invented in 1906 by Lee De Forest, which led to the first amplifiers around 1912

cctriode.gif


A pickup bar and steel wires for the guitar isn't that hard to work up once the Tube is done, but then the mid-range Speaker, vs the earlier horn that couldn't pump out the dBs That finally had the bugs worked out in 1921, after the idea for it was first described in 1877

Yes, but the triode based amplifier (using the DeForest audion) was very rare, and very expensive, for years after its invention. Nobody was really sure about how it worked, with regards voltage biasing for setting amplification levels, etc. Even in radio or telephone usage, it wasn't used that often until WW1, and amplification levels were modest at best. As it was, distortion was considered an unwanted thing - everybody wanted to reproduce as faithfully as possible the original sound. You'd need somebody with some musical clout (IOT, it was the blues players penchant for dirty tones, influencing British guitarists in the 60s), saying, "yeah, that sounds cool", instead of the typical comment that recording engineers made in the 30s-60s of "ugh, you have some nasty distortion in your sound." So, getting that hard rock sound in the late 19th century was a long stretch at best. The triode wasn't invented until the early 20th century (by a guy who really didn't understand how it worked - it took other people like Edwin Armstrong to determine a few years after it's invention, how it worked), and even then, it took decades before distorted sound was accepted enough to be anything other than something to be avoided.

Nobody even considered using a magnetic pickup until the 30s. Even the first "electric guitars", made by Vivitone (the company Lloyd Loar [designer of the Gibson L5 - the first archtop guitar to have F-holes] founded) in the 20s, used a weird pickup (that was sort of akin to a telephone mouthpiece/microphone - not a piezo pickup) that basically sensed vibration through the guitar body, instead of sensing string movement through a magnetic field. Its output wasn't very high, meaning that the chances of it distorting a triode amp was pretty low IMO.

All in all, while the possibility exists for creating the distorted sound hard rock needs, in the late 19th century, it's a big stretch at best IMO.
 
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I think culture as well as technology is crucially relevant here. As I understand it, "rock" is a synthesis developed in the USA, from fusion of evolving African-American music being more or less appropriated by white Americans. We tend to underestimate here in the USA how deeply African influences affect us.

Britain too has African influences that tend to be underestimated to be sure. But it is not just "African plus European"=Rock. Both sides of the "racial" cultural divide evolved under 20th century influences. The electronic aspects of Rock music parallel cultural evolutions to a highly industrialized society and consumerism after all.

A possible identification I use sometimes on the Internet is an amazing drawing my grandfather, my mother's father whom I never met as he died just before I was born, drew back in 1950. It is an amazingly Punk kind of image that could have been printed and stuck up on walls in the early 1980s. My grandfather was born in London before the Great War and family stories say they emigrated to the USA (settling eventually in Los Angeles) on the Lusitania, on a prior voyage to its sinking of course. My mother is very conservative and so I had a rather distorted picture of her parents' own political culture, since my grandmother (who lived to 2000) was very dependent on my father for financial support and so bit her tongue on political subjects when we were kids, but in fact they were New Dealers very grateful to FDR. So the incredible "progressiveness" of my grandfather's very dark image of the year 2000 he imagined for his own is not perhaps so strange as I would have thought if I never got to know my grandmother too--but although a staunch Democrat she had her own conservative cultural preferences that seemed to be the striking thing when I was a young adult in the '80s visiting her. So it was quite shocking for me to see this punk piece of art drawn by a man born before the Great War, drawn at time when Rock would still be alien to the airwaves and largely in its infancy and very far short of a punk sensibility.

The hardscrabble life of British industrial workers then could indeed be expressed in ways that would seem very avant-garde to us--but I don't think the sound of Rock is culturally possible for either white or black people to be producing back in those days.

Perhaps in an ATL with a much earlier POD, such as Edelstein's Malê Rising, where an African presence in major British cities is larger and more visible, and with communications between an industrializing British West Africa, and the African-American community as well, steps in this direction could advance much more quickly. I still think it would have to wait until after experiences as shattering as the Great War and the Depression, and probably Second World War and disillusionments in its wake, to really become anything like rock as we know it--and by then, the technological tools allowing it would also be mature.

I think it is also meaningful to talk about the "pace" of life--about rhythms of steam engines accelerating to IC auto and airplane engines to the scream of a jet turbine. And beyond the African/European confrontation which is as it were the shock wave rock rides on, the general globalization of the whole world on a personal level that modern telecommunications and rapid mass transport allows (so that poor people can visit another continent and then go home again within days) is probably also vital to the sound and subtextual meaning.

Maybe steps can be skipped though, going straight into Punk from music hall, getting a different sequence with similar elements?
 
On top of the African stuff, even the acoustic guitar seems like an obstacle. IOTL, there was a high-profile country song with guitar in 1924 that helped lead to Rockabilly and then Rock and Roll, but for this kind of stuff to come into vogue in England a generation or two earlier sounds like a lot of work.
 
We tend to underestimate here in the USA how deeply African influences affect us.

I'm not so sure how true this is. Anyone who has had the least bit of interest in rock music history knows it comes from rhythm and blues music.

More broadly, the country blues from the Delta that gave birth to all modern American pop music is something you absolutely need prior to talking about hard rock coming from somewhere else. It's not really just African influences, it's not really just instrument technology, it was the specific way that those things came together with pre-existing musical traditions (whose African roots could be generations back). You can have a rhythm and blues influenced, loud, fast-paced, increasingly electric genre evolve somewhere else later, but you can't really divorce it from those roots without making it something else.
 
OTL Every generation of "angry young men" needs its own, distinctive genre of music.
First generation industrial workers tend to cling to the "olde tyke" music of their farming homelands. However the second or third generation rebels because they are tired of songs about milking cows and plowing fields because they have never seen or done that type of labour.

Innovation is most likely to occurr along borderlands or shorelines where different cultures mix. For example Nashville, Tennessee was where poor white hillbillies learned to mix their old Scots-Irish folk tunes with poor black sharecroppers singing work songs and gospel hymns. When early rockabilly music was recorded on vinyl disks, they sold out quickly to British and European audiences. Then early British rockers (Long John Baldry, Joe Cocker, Beatles, etc.) re-imported that rock and roll sound to the USA.
 

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Could the sound and instrumentation of loud, angry, but acoustic music be sort of like "the Pogues" and the "Celtic Punk" genre in the first half of the 20th century, which could eventually evolve with improvements of electric guitars and amplification from the 50s or 60s into a sound more like "Dropkick Murphys" ?
 
Could the sound and instrumentation of loud, angry, but acoustic music be sort of like "the Pogues" and the "Celtic Punk" genre in the first half of the 20th century, which could eventually evolve with improvements of electric guitars and amplification from the 50s or 60s into a sound more like "Dropkick Murphys" ?

Sure, but then you have at the time (the late 1800s), what would be called called nowadays punk-folk, or acoustic-punk. Yes, it could develop into music like the Dropkick Murphys (who are a cool group IMO), or Flogging Molly, but it's sort of a variation of punk rock, not hard rock. Most hard rock music has (as a derivation of its rock & roll, and electric blues roots) instrumental solos in it. Celtic punk usually does not. Also, the rythmic vibe is too folksy to be hard rock - hard rock rhythms have an element of "electric blues on steroids" to them.
 
Some of the bands with the more upsetting lyrics would imigrate to the United States for artistic freedom and for reasons of their health.
 
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