Soul Covers is an engaging look at how three very different rhythm and blues performers--Aretha Franklin, Al Green, and Phoebe Snow--used cover songs to negotiate questions of artistic, racial, and personal authenticity. Through close readings of song lyrics and the performers' statements about their lives and work, the literary critic Michael Awkward traces how Franklin, Green, and Snow crafted their own musical identities partly by taking up songs associated with artists such as Dinah Washington, Hank Williams, Willie Nelson, George Gershwin, Billie Holiday, and the...

Few expressions of popular culture have been shaped as profoundly by the relationship between commercialism and authenticity as country music has. While its apparent realism, sincerity, and frank depictions of everyday life are country's most obvious stylistic hallmarks, Diane Pecknold demonstrates that commercialism has been just as powerful a cultural narrative in its development. Listeners have long been deeply invested in the "business side" of country. When fans complained in the mid-1950s about elite control of the mass media, or when they expressed their gratitude that the Country...

Few expressions of popular culture have been shaped as profoundly by the relationship between commercialism and authenticity as country music has. While its apparent realism, sincerity, and frank depictions of everyday life are country's most obvious stylistic hallmarks, Diane Pecknold demonstrates that commercialism has been just as powerful a cultural narrative in its development. Listeners have long been deeply invested in the "business side" of country. When fans complained in the mid-1950s about elite control of the mass media, or when they expressed their gratitude that the Country...

In jazz circles, players and listeners with big ears hear and engage complexity in the moment, as it unfolds. Taking gender as part of the intricate, unpredictable action in jazz culture, this interdisciplinary collection explores the terrain opened up by listening, with big ears, for gender in jazz. Essays range from a reflection on the female boogie-woogie pianists who played at Cafe Society in New York during the 1930s and 1940s to interpretations of how the jazzman is represented in Dorothy Baker s novel Young Man with a Horn (1938) and Michael Curtiz s film adaptation (1950)....

In jazz circles, players and listeners with big ears hear and engage complexity in the moment, as it unfolds. Taking gender as part of the intricate, unpredictable action in jazz culture, this interdisciplinary collection explores the terrain opened up by listening, with big ears, for gender in jazz. Essays range from a reflection on the female boogie-woogie pianists who played at Cafe Society in New York during the 1930s and 1940s to interpretations of how the jazzman is represented in Dorothy Baker s novel Young Man with a Horn (1938) and Michael Curtiz s film adaptation (1950)....

Stretching from the years during the Second World War when young couples jitterbugged across the dance floor at the Zenda Ballroom, through the early 1950s when honking tenor saxophones could be heard at the Angelus Hall, to the Spanish-language cosmopolitanism of the late 1950s and 1960s, "Mexican American Mojo" is a lively account of Mexican American urban culture in wartime and postwar Los Angeles as seen through the evolution of dance styles, nightlife, and, above all, popular music. Revealing the links between a vibrant Chicano music culture and postwar social and geographic mobility,...

Stretching from the years during the Second World War when young couples jitterbugged across the dance floor at the Zenda Ballroom, through the early 1950s when honking tenor saxophones could be heard at the Angelus Hall, to the Spanish-language cosmopolitanism of the late 1950s and 1960s, Mexican American Mojo is a lively account of Mexican American urban culture in wartime and postwar Los Angeles as seen through the evolution of dance styles, nightlife, and, above all, popular music. Revealing the links between a vibrant Chicano music culture and postwar social and geographic...

The fourth collection of poetry from the literary and cultural critic Fred Moten, B Jenkins is named after the poet's mother, who passed away in 2000. It is both an elegy and an inquiry into many of the themes that Moten has explored throughout his career: language, music, performance, improvisation, and the black radical aesthetic and political tradition. In Moten's verse, the arts, scholarship, and activism intertwine. Cadences echo from his mother's Arkansas home through African American history and avant-garde jazz riffs. Formal innovations suggest the ways that words, sounds, and...

The fourth collection of poetry from the literary and cultural critic Fred Moten, B Jenkins is named after the poet's mother, who passed away in 2000. It is both an elegy and an inquiry into many of the themes that Moten has explored throughout his career: language, music, performance, improvisation, and the black radical aesthetic and political tradition. In Moten's verse, the arts, scholarship, and activism intertwine. Cadences echo from his mother's Arkansas home through African American history and avant-garde jazz riffs. Formal innovations suggest the ways that words, sounds, and...

In Segregating Sound, Karl Hagstrom Miller argues that the categories that we have inherited to think and talk about southern music bear little relation to the ways that southerners long played and heard music. Focusing on the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth, Miller chronicles how southern music a fluid complex of sounds and styles in practice was reduced to a series of distinct genres linked to particular racial and ethnic identities. The blues were African American. Rural white southerners played country music. By the 1920s, these depictions were touted in folk song...