Popular between the two world wars, American barn dance radio evoked comforting images of a nostalgic and stable past for listeners beset by economic problems at home and worried about totalitarian governments abroad. Sentimental images such as the mountain mother and the chaste everybody's-little-sister "girl singer" helped to sell a new consumer culture and move commercial country music from regional fare to national treasure. Kristine M. McCusker examines the gendered politics of these images through the lives and careers of six women performers: Linda Parker, the Girls of the Golden West...
Popular between the two world wars, American barn dance radio evoked comforting images of a nostalgic and stable past for listeners beset by economic ...
John H. McDowell provides an in-depth study of the Mexican ballad form known as the corrido, a body of poetry that takes violence as its subject. Through interviews with corrido composers and performers, both male and female, and a generous sampling of ballad texts, McDowell reveals a living vernacular tradition that chronicles local and regional rivalries. A detailed case study with broad social and cultural implications, "Poetry and Violence" is a compelling commentary on violence as human experience and as communicative action.
John H. McDowell provides an in-depth study of the Mexican ballad form known as the corrido, a body of poetry that takes violence as its subject. Thro...
Nicholas Temperley documents the lives, careers, and music of three British composers who emigrated from England in mid-career and became leaders in the musical life of Federal-era America. William Selby of London and Boston (1738-98), Rayner Taylor of London and Philadelphia (1745-1825), and George K. Jackson of London, New York, and Boston (1757-1822) were among the first trained professional composers to make their homes in America and to pioneer the building of an art-music tradition in the New World akin to the esteemed European "classical" music. Temperley compares their lives, careers,...
Nicholas Temperley documents the lives, careers, and music of three British composers who emigrated from England in mid-career and became leaders in t...
The National Barn Dance was the nation's most popular country music radio show during the 1930s and 1940s, essentially defining country and western entertainment until it was supplanted by the Grand Ole Opry and rock 'n' roll in the 1950s. Broadcast for more than three decades from Chicago on WLS's powerful 50,000-watt signal, the show reached listeners throughout the Midwest, the East Coast, and large regions of the South, delivering popular entertainment to rural and urban areas and celebrating the folk traditions that were fading in an increasingly urbanized America.
Drawing on the...
The National Barn Dance was the nation's most popular country music radio show during the 1930s and 1940s, essentially defining country and western...
With his dynamic on-air personality and his trademark cry of "Burn, baby BURN " before spinning the hottest new records, Magnificent Montague was the charismatic voice of soul music in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s. In this memoir Montague recounts his momentous radio career, which ran from the era of segregation to that of the civil rights movement. He also tells the broader story of a life spent in the passionate pursuit of knowledge.
With his dynamic on-air personality and his trademark cry of "Burn, baby BURN " before spinning the hottest new records, Magnificent Montague was the...
Life Flows on in Endless Song explores American folk songs as a frame for the American experience. Robert V. Wells discusses how folk songs emerged from particular historical circumstances and evolved as they migrated from one region to another. Crafting a thematic map of four centuries of American history, Wells investigates how songs embody shifting attitudes toward the institution of the family, war and religion, work and the labor movement, transportation in America, and slavery and Jim Crow. He also considers modern folk heroes Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie. Featuring a selective...
Life Flows on in Endless Song explores American folk songs as a frame for the American experience. Robert V. Wells discusses how folk songs emerged...
Beginning in 1949, while Elvis Presley and Sun Records were still virtually unknown--and two full years before Alan Freed famously "discovered" rock 'n' roll--Dewey Phillips brought rock 'n' roll to the Memphis airwaves by playing Howlin' Wolf, B. B. King, and Muddy Waters on his nightly radio show "Red, Hot and Blue." The mid-South's most popular white deejay, "Daddy-O-Dewey" is part of rock 'n' roll history for being the first major disc jockey to play Elvis Presley (and subsequently to conduct the first live, on-air interview with Elvis). This book illustrates Phillips's role in turning a...
Beginning in 1949, while Elvis Presley and Sun Records were still virtually unknown--and two full years before Alan Freed famously "discovered" rock '...
Showcasing American music and music making during the Great Depression, Hard Luck Blues presents more than two hundred photographs created by the New Deal's Farm Security Administration photography program. With an appreciation for the amateur and the local, FSA photographers depicted a range of musicians sharing the regular music of everyday life, from informal songs in migrant work camps, farmers' homes, barn dances, and on street corners to organized performances at church revivals, dance halls, and community festivals. Captured across the nation from the northeast to the...
Showcasing American music and music making during the Great Depression, Hard Luck Blues presents more than two hundred photographs created b...
In this rich, imaginative survey of variety musical theater, Gillian M. Rodger masterfully chronicles the social history and class dynamics of the robust, nineteenth-century American theatrical phenomenon that gave way to twentieth-century entertainment forms such as vaudeville and comedy on radio and television. Fresh, bawdy, and unabashedly aimed at the working class, variety honed in on its audience's fascinations, emerging in the 1840s as a vehicle to accentuate class divisions and stoke curiosity about gender and sexuality. Cross-dressing acts were a regular feature of these...
In this rich, imaginative survey of variety musical theater, Gillian M. Rodger masterfully chronicles the social history and class dynamics of the ...
This award-winning book, now available in paperback, is the first solid appraisal of the legendary career of the eminent Hungarian-born conductor Fritz Reiner (1888-1963). Personally enigmatic and often described as difficult to work with, he was nevertheless renowned for the dynamic galvanization of the orchestras he led, a nearly unrivaled technical ability, and high professional standards. Reiner's influence in the United States began in the early 1920s and lasted until his death. Reiner was also deeply committed to serious music in American life, especially through the promotion of new...
This award-winning book, now available in paperback, is the first solid appraisal of the legendary career of the eminent Hungarian-born conductor F...
