Blacksound

Blacksound
Author: Matthew D. Morrison
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2024
Genre: African American musicians
ISBN: 0520390571

A new concept for understanding the history of the American popular music industry. Blacksound explores the sonic history of blackface minstrelsy and the racial foundations of American musical culture from the early 1800s through the turn of the twentieth century. With this namesake book, Matthew D. Morrison develops the concept of "Blacksound" to uncover how the popular music industry and popular entertainment in general in the United States arose out of slavery and blackface. Blacksound as an idea is not the music or sounds produced by Black Americans but instead the material and fleeting remnants of their sounds and performances that have been co-opted and amalgamated into popular music. Morrison unpacks the relationship between performance, racial identity, and intellectual property to reveal how blackface minstrelsy scripts became absorbed into commercial entertainment through an unequal system of intellectual property and copyright laws. By introducing this foundational new concept in musicology, Blacksound highlights what is politically at stake--for creators and audiences alike--in revisiting the long history of American popular music.

Making American Culture

Making American Culture
Author: P. Bradley
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 259
Release: 2009-09-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 0230100473

This book offers a social and cultural history of American culture in the formative years of the twentieth century, examining forms such as vaudeville, early film, popular songs, modernist art, and many others in the context of contemporary social changes.

America's Songs

America's Songs
Author: Philip Furia
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 359
Release: 2006-05-12
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1135471924

America's Songs tells the stories behind the most beloved popular songs of the last century. We all have songs that have a special meaning in our lives; hearing them evokes a special time or place. Little wonder that these special songs have become enduring classics. Nothing brings the roarin '20s to life like Tea for Two or I'm just Wild About Harry; the Great Depression is evoked in all of its pain and misery in songs like Brother Can You Spare a Dime?; God Bless America revives the powerful hope that American democracy promised to the world during the dark days of World War II; Young at Heart evokes the postwar optimism of the '50s. And then there are the countless songs of love, new romance, and heartbreak: As Time Goes By, Always, Am I Blue...the list is endless. Along with telling the stories behind these songs, America's Songs suggests, simply and succinctly, what makes a song great. The book illuminates the way each great song melds words and music - sentiment and melody - into a seamless whole. America's Songs also traces the fascinating but mysterious process of collaboration, the give-and-take between two craftsmen, a composer and a lyricist, as they combined their talents to create a song. For anyone interested in the history of the songs that America loves, America'sSongs will make for fascinating reading.

Sweet Mystery

Sweet Mystery
Author: Ellen M. Peck
Publisher:
Total Pages: 193
Release: 2020
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0190873582

The women who wrote -- An old story in a new dress : the emerging playwright -- Ah! Sweet mystery of life : Naughty Marietta -- The old-fashioned things must go : musical comedies -- Just one of the boys : Young as co-writer -- Will you remember? : operetta in wartime -- Dream girl : end of a career -- Appendix : List of works by Rida Johnson Young.

Music Sociology

Music Sociology
Author: Sara Towe Horsfall
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 333
Release: 2015-11-17
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317255844

Music Sociology explores 16 different genres to demonstrate that music everywhere reflects social values, organisational processes, meanings and individual identity. Presenting original ethnographic research, the contributors use descriptions of subcultures to explain the concepts of music sociology, including the rituals that link people to music, the past and each other. Music Sociology introduces the sociology of music to those who may not be familiar with it and provides a basic historical perspective on popular music in America and beyond.

The Business

The Business
Author: Simon Napier-Bell
Publisher: Unbound Publishing
Total Pages: 509
Release: 2023-01-27
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1800182546

“The only history of pop music you’ll ever have to read.”— Huffington Post Let legendary rock manager Simon Napier-Bell take you inside the (dodgy) world of popular music – not just a creative industry, but a business that has made people rich beyond their wildest dreams. This book describes the evolution of the music industry from 1713 – the year parliament granted writers ownership over what they wrote – to today, when a global, 100 billion pound industry is controlled by just three major players: Sony, Universal and Warner. Inside you will uncover some little-known facts about the industry, including: how a formula for writing hit songs in the 1900s helped create 50,000 of the best-known songs of all time; how Jewish immigrants and black jazz musicians dancing cheek-to-cheek created a template for all popular music that followed; and how rock tours became the biggest, quickest, sleaziest and most profitable ventures the music industry has ever seen. Through it all, Napier-Bell balances seductive anecdotes – pulling back the curtain on the gritty and absurd side of the industry – with an insightful exploration of the relationship between creativity and money.

Stolen Time

Stolen Time
Author: Shane Vogel
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 267
Release: 2018-09-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 022656844X

In 1956 Harry Belafonte’s Calypso became the first LP to sell more than a million copies. For a few fleeting months, calypso music was the top-selling genre in the US—it even threatened to supplant rock and roll. Stolen Time provides a vivid cultural history of this moment and outlines a new framework—black fad performance—for understanding race, performance, and mass culture in the twentieth century United States. Vogel situates the calypso craze within a cycle of cultural appropriation, including the ragtime craze of 1890s and the Negro vogue of the 1920s, that encapsulates the culture of the Jim Crow era. He follows the fad as it moves defiantly away from any attempt at authenticity and shamelessly embraces calypso kitsch. Although white calypso performers were indeed complicit in a kind of imperialist theft of Trinidadian music and dance, Vogel argues, black calypso craze performers enacted a different, and subtly subversive, kind of theft. They appropriated not Caribbean culture itself, but the US version of it—and in so doing, they mocked American notions of racial authenticity. From musical recordings, nightclub acts, and television broadcasts to Broadway musicals, film, and modern dance, he shows how performers seized the ephemeral opportunities of the fad to comment on black cultural history and even question the meaning of race itself.

Encyclopedia of Great Popular Song Recordings

Encyclopedia of Great Popular Song Recordings
Author: Steve Sullivan
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 830
Release: 2017-05-17
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1442254491

Volumes 3 and 4 of the The Encyclopedia of More Great Popular Song Recordings provides the stories behind approximately 1,700 more of the greatest song recordings in the history of the music industry, from 1890 to today. In this masterful survey, all genres of popular music are covered, from pop, rock, soul, and country to jazz, blues, classic vocals, hip-hop, folk, gospel, and ethnic/world music. Collectors will find detailed discographical data—recording dates, record numbers, Billboard chart data, and personnel—while music lovers will appreciate the detailed commentaries and deep research on the songs, their recording, and the artists. Readers who revel in pop cultural history will savor each chapter as it plunges deeply into key events—in music, society, and the world—from each era of the past 125 years. Following in the wake of the first two volumes of his original Encyclopedia of Great Popular Song Recordings, this follow-up work covers not only more beloved classic performances in pop music history, but many lesser -known but exceptional recordings that—in the modern digital world of “long tail” listening, re-mastered recordings, and “lost but found” possibilities—Sullivan mines from modern recording history. The Encyclopedia of Great Popular Song Recordings, Volumes 3 and 4 lets the readers discover, and, through their playlist services, from such as iTunes toand Spotify, build a truly deepcomprehensive catalog of classic performances that deserve to be a part of every passionate music lover’s life. Sullivan organizes songs in chronological order, starting in 1890 and continuing all the way throughto the present to include modern gems from June 2016. In each chapter, Sullivanhe immerses readers, era by era, in the popular music recordings of the time, noting key events that occurred at the time to painting a comprehensive picture in music history of each periodfor each song. Moreover, Sullivan includes for context bulleted lists noting key events that occurred during the song’s recording

Live Music in America

Live Music in America
Author: Elsie Irwin Sweeney Professor of Music Steve Waksman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 705
Release: 2022-09-13
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0197570534

When the Swedish concert singer Jenny Lind toured the U.S. in 1850, she became the prototype for the modern pop star. Meanwhile, her manager, P.T. Barnum, became the prototype for another figure of enduring significance: the pop culture impresario. Starting with Lind's fabled U.S. tour and winding all the way into the twenty-first century, Live Music in America surveys the ongoing impact and changing conditions of live music performance in the U.S. It covers a range of historic performances, from the Fisk Jubilee Singers expanding the sphere of African American music in the 1870s, to Benny Goodman bringing swing to Carnegie Hall in 1938, to 1952's Moondog Coronation Ball in Cleveland - arguably the first rock and roll concert - to Beyoncé's boundary-shattering performance at the 2018 Coachella festival. More than that, the book details the roles played by performers, audiences, media commentators, and a variety of live music producers (promoters, agents, sound and stage technicians) in shaping what live music means and how it has evolved. Live Music in America connects what occurs behind the scenes to what takes place on stage to highlight the ways in which live music is very deliberately produced and does not just spontaneously materialize. Along the way, author Steve Waksman uses previously unstudied archival materials to shed new light on the origins of jazz, the emergence of rock 'n' roll, and the rise of the modern music festival.

Reinventing Dixie

Reinventing Dixie
Author: John Bush Jones
Publisher: LSU Press
Total Pages: 295
Release: 2015-03-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 080715945X

Tin Pan Alley, once New York City’s songwriting and recording mecca, issued more than a thousand songs about the American South in the first half of the twentieth century. In Reinventing Dixie, John Bush Jones explores the broad impact of these songs in creating and disseminating the imaginary view of the South as a land of southern belles, gallant gentlemen, and racial harmony. In profiles of Tin Pan Alley’s lyricists and composers, Jones explains how a group of undereducated and untraveled writers—the vast majority of whom were urban northerners or European immigrants— constructed the specific and detailed images of the South used in their song lyrics. In the process of evaluating the origins of Tin Pan Alley’s songbook, Jones analyzes these songwriters’ attitudes about North-South reconciliation, ideals of honor and hospitality, and the recurring theme of the yearning for home. Though a few of the songs employed parody or satire to undercut the vision of a peaceful, romantic South, the majority ignored the realities of racism and poverty in the region. By the end of Tin Pan Alley’s era of cultural prominence in the mid-twentieth century, Jones contends that the work of its writers had cemented the “moonlight and magnolias” myth in the minds of millions of Americans. Reinventing Dixie sheds light on the role of songwriters in forming an idyllic vision of the South that continues to influence the American imagination.