Yet American music does not begin with Gershwin, nor with the European modernists intrigued by its brassy impatience. For all the dizzying esteem Gershwin’s compositions have earned — he stands comfortably in the same echelon as the Europeans whose forms he inherited — his style and sound trace their roots to humbler origins.

As music historian Ted Gioia argues in The History of Jazz, these early forms were a true cultural revolution, born from the harsh realities of black life in the American South. Long before jazz was seen as “cool” — before Miles Davis birthed “cool jazz” through his aloof charisma, preppy American tailoring, and sparsely arranged, chamber-like instrumentation — it was being forged in field hollers, work songs, church hymns, brass bands, ragtime, and the blues.

No discussion of America’s artistic triumphs is complete without mention of two of its greatest figures. Louis Armstrong transformed jazz from ensemble folk music into an art of individual expression, elevating the virtuoso soloist and creating the cultural blueprint for the guitar hero still to come. Duke Ellington, meanwhile, gave jazz architectural grandeur in works such as “Mood Indigo,” “Take the ‘A’ Train,” and “Black, Brown and Beige.” Their breakthroughs established the dual pillars of modern composition and instrumental improvisation that still govern popular music today.

It was the blues, in particular, that became the genetic code of American popular music. Birthed on rural plantations and later sharpened in juke joints, it gave voice to hardship and longing with a directness that European art music rarely attempted. In the decades that followed, it electrified and mutated.

In Chicago, it became louder and more urban. In Memphis and the South, it collided with country, gospel, and rhythm and blues to create rockabilly and rock and roll. By the time Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Buddy Holly, and Carl Perkins arrived, American music had become an unstoppable cultural sensation.

While the Soviets were producing state-approved hymns to Vladimir Lenin’s alleged virtues, Americans were producing musicians so potent that people invented myths about them selling their souls to the devil. Musically, the Reds had lost the Cold War before it began.

The blues did not take long to make its way overseas. Reeling from the financial devastation of World War II, and, in Britain’s case, the gloom austerity of postwar rationing, Europeans found unlikely solace and joy in an American music born from hardship. We refer to the 1960s, when the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, among others, arrived in America with chart-topping records, as the British Invasion.

Artistically, however, the invasion had already gone the other way. American blues, rhythm and blues, rockabilly, and early rock and roll had pervaded Europe, inspiring the very bands that would later be sold back to America as a British phenomenon. The Beatles were disciples of Berry, Little Richard, Holly, and Presley. The Rolling Stones took their name from a Muddy Waters song. The British Invasion was American music repackaged with a posh accent.

As the guitar emerged as the new mainstay of popular music, a subtle but revealing contrast surfaced between British and American rock. There are exceptions, of course, but Britain’s most successful stars were often bands: the Stones, the Who, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Queen.

America, meanwhile, kept producing spirited iconoclasts: Presley, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Patti Smith, Tom Petty, Carly Simon, Joan Jett, Prince, Michael Jackson, and Madonna. British rock honed the mythology of the band. American music kept returning to the tradition of the individual.

Reams of literature have been dedicated to Dylan’s enormity. His importance to the American songbook sprawls from the folk revival he helped define to the folk-rock he pioneered and far beyond. Dylan also elevated lyrical songwriting to a high art, rightfully earning him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016. After Dylan, lyrics could be surreal, accusatory, comic, apocalyptic, political, and personal all at once.

That American instinct for individual expression then writhed through a litany of styles, creating new genres and transforming old ones. From Aretha Franklin and Sam Cooke’s soulful and stirring ballads “Respect” and “A Change Is Gonna Come,” to James Brown’s novel idea to treat every instrument — guitars, horns, and his own vocals — as a percussion piece, heralding funk, to Prince, Jackson, and Madonna turning American pop into a global spectacle.

Hip-hop became the next great American folk music. Born in the Bronx in the 1970s, it gave voice to hardship and challenged the norms of polite society. Like the blues, it came from humble beginnings. Like jazz, it prized improvisation, rhythm, virtuosity, and competition. Groups such as Public Enemy wielded it for political protest, while Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G. grounded the style in an urban and unruly mythology. Later artists such as Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg carried it through commercial dominance and global prestige.

1776 AMERICA WASN’T A CHRISTIAN SUPERMAJORITY — 1955 WAS. 2026 IS NEITHER

By the 1990s and 2000s, America’s musical influence had become something closer to cultural hegemony. In a recent Rick Beato interview with contemporary jazz pianist Tigran Hamasyan, the Armenian musician lamented how difficult it is to find purely indigenous music in other cultures today, because nearly everything has been seasoned with American pop progressions and flourishes.

This is America’s great musical paradox. Its most enduring art began in hardship, worship, migration, rebellion, and the dogged American affinity for exploration and self-invention. Every nation has folk music. America’s peculiarity is that its folk music repeatedly became the world’s popular music. That is how a young republic took over the world’s jukebox.

Harry Khachatrian (@Harry1T6) is a film critic for the Washington Examiner. He is a software engineer, holds a master’s degree from the University of Toronto, and writes about wine at BetweenBottles.com