American folk music and jazz in his compositions. His works included the Organ Symphony, which earned him comparisons to Igor Stravinsky, and the music for the ballet Appalachian Spring and the Copland Piano Variations. The New York blues was a type of blues music characterized by significant jazz influences and a more modernized, urban feel than the country blues. Prominent musicians from this field include Lionel Hampton and Big Joe Turner. In New York, jazz became fused with stride (an advanced form of ragtime) and became highly evolved. Among the first major New York jazz musicians was Fletcher Henderson, whose jazz orchestra, first appearing in 1923, helped invent swing music. The swing style that developed from New York's big jazz bands was catchy and very danceable, and was originally played largely by black orchestras. Later, white bands led by musicians like Jimmy Dorsey and Benny Goodman began to dominate and produced a number of instrumentalists that had a profound effect on the later evolution of jazz. Star vocalists also emerged, mainly women like the bluesy Billie Holiday and the scat singer Ella Fitzgerald. Beginning in the 1940s, New York was the center of a roots revival in American folk music. Many New Yorkers developed a renewed interest in blues, Appalachian folk music and other roots styles. Greenwich Village, in Lower Manhattan, became a hotbed of American folk music as well as leftist political activism. The performers associated with the Greenwich Village scene had sporadic mainstream success in the 1940s and 1950s; some, like Pete Seeger and the Almanac Singers, did well, but most were confined to local coffeehouses and other venues. Performers like Dave Van Ronk and Joan Baez helped expand the scene by appealing to university students. In the early 1960s, Baez was instrumental in introducing the up-and-coming young folk artist Bob Dylan to her audience and he quickly achieved national prominence. By the mid-'60s, folk and rock were merging, with Bob Dylan taking the lead in July 1965, releasing "Like a Rolling Stone", with a distinctive, revolutionary rock sound for its time, steeped in tawdry New York imagery, followed by an electric performance in late July at the Newport Folk Festival. Dylan plugged an entire generation into the milieu of the singer-songwriter, often writing from an urban, distinctly New York point of view. By the mid to late 1960s, bands and singer-songwriters began to proliferate the underground New