On Thu, 18 Jan 2001, Uday Mohan wrote:
> A friend makes the case for Armstrong by claiming that he changed the
> rhetorical style not only of jazz, but of popular culture in general, by
> introducing an informal, conversational mode of address. And that this
> helped shift popular culture away from a mannered, formal style.
Your friend has us confused with Europe. The informal, conversational mode of address was originally our only rhetorical style, and it never died out in popular culture. Instead what happened was that high culture, which for the first century of our existence was associated with treason, had to be painstakingly built on top of it out of nothing and against resistance. For a delightful book laying out in detail how this process occurred in classical music, museum-going and Shakespeare, see Lawrence Levine's _Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America_. It has many very funny bits and is written without a trace of jargon.
Michael
__________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com