Kategoria BISAC: Music >> History & Criticism - General

The Johnson Family Singers, a gospel group from North Carolina, rose to national acclaim during the 1940s and 1950s. This memoir was written by one of the three sons who sang with them. It focuses not only upon family singers that became famous on popular radio but also upon American gospel music. Although neglected by scholars and historians, it is loved by aficionados and is cherished by many devoted Christians everywhere.

Here, in a frank, objective narrative Kenneth M. Johnson looks back on his singing days and details both the successes and struggles the Johnsons experienced during...

Hank Williams (1923--1953) is revered in the top tier of the country-music pantheon, and his forlorn ballads are classics in the country songbook. An inspired, natural genius, Williams was the complete country balladeer. Though he knew almost nothing about the technicalities of music, his plaintive songs---Cold, Cold Heart, - -Your Cheatin' Heart, - and -I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry---affirm that he knew everything about its heart.

Williams was to country music what Elvis Presley was to rock 'n' roll. With his legend already firmly established, he was only twenty-nine when he died...

Was there a sudden break in the world of art, literature, and music when modernism gave way to postmodernism?

Philip Nel attacks the notion of tremendous and sudden change in artistic understanding and literary practice. Instead, in The Avant-Garde and American Postmodernity: Small Incisive Shocks he proposes that a series of small but far-reaching changes drew understanding from modernism to postmodernism.

What bonds these two periods together? The constant agent of change, Nel argues, was the avant-garde. Tracking its influence on novelists, popular culture figures, and...

When Whitney Balliett's American Musicians appeared in the Fall of 1986, the acclaim it received was universal. Leonard Feather, writing in the Los Angeles Times, said -no other writer now living can write with comparable grace and equal enthusiasm about everyone from Jack Teagarden and Art Tatum to Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman.- And Bruce Cook in The New Leader called the book -the quintessential Whitney Balliett, the cream of the cream, a collection that leaves no doubt about his strength.-

That book gathered together all of Balliett's profiles of jazz...

Around the world there are grandparents, parents, and children who can still sing ditties by Tigger or Baloo the Bear or the Seven Dwarves. This staying power and global reach is in large part a testimony to the pizzazz of performers, songwriters, and other creative artists who worked with Walt Disney Records.

Mouse Tracks: The Story of Walt Disney Records chronicles for the first time the fifty-year history of the Disney recording companies launched by Walt Disney and Roy Disney in the mid-1950s, when Disneyland Park, Davy Crockett, and the Mickey Mouse Club were taking the...

Around the world there are grandparents, parents, and children who can still sing ditties by Tigger or Baloo the Bear or the Seven Dwarves. This staying power and global reach is in large part a testimony to the pizzazz of performers, songwriters, and other creative artists who worked with Walt Disney Records.

Mouse Tracks: The Story of Walt Disney Records chronicles for the first time the fifty-year history of the Disney recording companies launched by Walt Disney and Roy Disney in the mid-1950s, when Disneyland Park, Davy Crockett, and the Mickey Mouse Club were taking the...

Jimmie Rodgers (1897-1933), the first performer elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame, was a folk hero in his own lifetime and has been idolized by fans and emulated by performers ever since. His life story has been particularly susceptible to romanticizing, marked as it was by humble origins, sudden success and fame, and an early death from tuberculosis.

Nolan Porterfield's biography banishes the rumors and myths that have long shrouded the Blue Yodeler's life story. Unlike previous writings about Rodgers, Porterfield's book derives from extensive and detailed research into original...