Timeline of Music in The United States To 1819 - 1774

1774

• The first Shakers arrive in the United States, beginning American Shaker music.
• English traveler Nicholas Cresswell notes a song which he describes as a "Negro tune". This "may well represent the earliest record of the influence of slave music on the white colonists". His work also contains the first reference to a banjo.
• George Leile, one of the first African Americans with official permission to preach, travels along the Savannah River preaching to slaves. He eventually formed one of the earliest self-governing black churches in the country, in Silver Bluff, South Carolina.
• Samson Occom, a Native American minister, publishes the first hymnal to contain refrains.
• John Behrent constructs a piano, and is said to have been the first person in what is now the United States to do so.