Music comes from everywhere, and so do the names we call it by. There's a longstanding cliche that only the music business needs genre names – everyone else either likes it or they don't. That is, of course, bunk, as anyone who's heard enough people trot out lines such as "I like all music except for rap and country" is aware. Not least because quite a lot of those genre names come from the artists themselves.
More often, a genre name will come from a musician's works. Free jazz comes from Ornette Coleman's 1960 album of the same name; ditto blue-eyed soul, from the Righteous Brothers' 1963 LP. The mid-60s Jamaican boogie dubbed rocksteady is named for an 1966 Alton Ellis single, while reggae followed it into Jamaican dancehalls on the heels of the Maytals' Do the Reggay in 1968. Soca is a condensation of Trinidadian artist Lord Shorty's Soul of Calypso, from 1974, while acid house, originally from Phuture's 1987 single Acid Tracks, has come to mean anything with a yammering, squealing TB-303 on it.
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Genre busting: the origin of music categories | Music | The Guardian
More often, a genre name will come from a musician's works. Free jazz comes from Ornette Coleman's 1960 album of the same name; ditto blue-eyed soul, from the Righteous Brothers' 1963 LP. The mid-60s Jamaican boogie dubbed rocksteady is named for an 1966 Alton Ellis single, while reggae followed it into Jamaican dancehalls on the heels of the Maytals' Do the Reggay in 1968. Soca is a condensation of Trinidadian artist Lord Shorty's Soul of Calypso, from 1974, while acid house, originally from Phuture's 1987 single Acid Tracks, has come to mean anything with a yammering, squealing TB-303 on it.
more...
Genre busting: the origin of music categories | Music | The Guardian