American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MP3

American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MP3 Review

The most complete, colorful, and authoritative package of its kind, American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MP3, Third Edition, examines popular music in the United States from its beginnings into the 21st century.

Highlighting the contributions of diverse groups, Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman trace the development of jazz, blues, country, rock, hip-hop, and other popular styles. They combine an in-depth treatment of the music itself--including discussions of stylistic elements and analyses of musical examples--with solid coverage of attendant historical, social, and cultural circumstances.

NEW TO THE THIRD EDITION

* Significantly expanded coverage of the Latin American stream of influence throughout, including Latin music in the big-band era, the mambo craze of the 1950s, bossa nova, and salsa
* Thoroughly updated discussions of online distribution models, technology, and new trends in popular music
* Exact timings included in the in-text listening guides to help students orient themselves as they use the two in-text
audio CDs
* New appendix--"Understanding Rhythm and Form"--illustrating the basic musical concepts of beat, tempo, rhythm, and form
* A FREE six-month subscription to the Encyclopedia of Popular Music, Fourth Edition Online (0.00 value!)

Remarkably accessible and student-friendly, the third edition also offers:

* Detailed in-text listening charts that explain the most important elements of recordings discussed at length in the text
* Boxed inserts on significant individuals, recordings, and cultural issues, with an illustrated timeline at the back of the book
* An iMix (published at iTunes)
* An updated Companion Website (www.oup.com/us/popmusic) containing resources for both instructors (PowerPoint lecture slides, assignments and exercises, filmographies, and review/discussion questions) and students (chapter outlines, brief biographies, flashcards, and weblinks)
* A free Instructor's Manual and Computerized Test Bank on CD

American Popular Music: Readings From the Popular Press Volume 2: The Age of Rock (Readings from the Popular Press Series)

American Popular Music: Readings From the Popular Press Volume 2: The Age of Rock (Readings from the Popular Press Series) Review

Beginning with the emergence of commercial American music in the nineteenth century, Volume 1 includes essays on the major performers, composers, media, and movements that shaped our musical culture before rock and roll. Articles explore the theoretical dimensions of popular music studies; the music of the nineteenth century; and the role of black Americans in the evolution of popular music. Also included—the music of Tin Pan Alley, ragtime, swing, the blues, the influences of W. S. Gilbert and Rodgers and Hammerstein, and changes in lyric writing styles from the nineteenth century to the rock era.

Crossroads: Popular Music in America

Crossroads: Popular Music in America Review

For introductory, general education pop-music courses intended for students who have no prior musical training; courses on American Popular Music. Innovative, lively, and contemporary in focus, this comparative study of the multicultural music of the United States explores the five broad groups that constitute American society. With its blended approach; strong contemporary focus; and coverage of a wide variety of musical styles-from folk music, to banda.

Masculinity in Fiction and Film: Representing men in popular genres, 1945-2000 (Continuum Literary Studies)

Masculinity in Fiction and Film: Representing men in popular genres, 1945-2000 (Continuum Literary Studies) Review

This book looks at a wide range of fiction and film texts, from the 1950s to the present, in order to analyse the ways in which masculinity has been represented in popular culture in Britain and the United States. It covers numerous genres, including spy fiction, science fiction, the Western and police thrillers. Each chapter focuses on key forms of masculinity found in each genre, such as the 'double agent', the 'rogue cop' and the 'citizen-soldier'.

Brian Baker takes a broad, contextual approach, placing a detailed discussion of key texts and issues concerning masculinity in their historical and cultural context. Written in a clear, accessible way, it explores the changing representation of men over the last fifty years.

Singing Poets: Literature And Popular Music in France And Greece, 1945-1975 (Legenda Studies in Comparative Literature) (Legenda Studies in Comparative Literature)

Singing Poets: Literature And Popular Music in France And Greece, 1945-1975 (Legenda Studies in Comparative Literature) (Legenda Studies in Comparative Literature) Review

Between 1945 and 1975, both France and Greece developed an interplay between literature and popular music, each making a new national canon. Literature provided the aesthetic criteria, the cultural prestige and the institutional basis for what aspired to be a higher form of popular song. Published poems were turned into popular songs, while a critical discourse, in return, celebrated songwriters not only for being as good as poets, but for being singing poets in their own right. In France, there were Georges Brassens, Leo Ferre and Serge Gainsbourg: in Greece, the presitigious title of tragoudopoios (maker of songs) was awarded to Mikis Theodorakis, Manos Hadjidakis and Dionysis Savvopoulos. This challenging and stimulating study draws on a wealth of materials, from theoretical writings by poets, through their lyrics, to the record sleeves and posters used to promote them.

The Rise of the Crooners: Gene Austin, Russ Columbo, Bing Crosby, Nick Lucas, Johnny Marvin and Rudy Vallee (Studies And Documentation In The History Of Popular Entertainment)

The Rise of the Crooners: Gene Austin, Russ Columbo, Bing Crosby, Nick Lucas, Johnny Marvin and Rudy Vallee (Studies And Documentation In The History Of Popular Entertainment) Review

Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, and Rudy Vallee—these cultural icons whose fame spanned all the important mass media, also played a vital role in the origin and development of the crooning tradition.

Crooning represented one of the most important musical styles of the twentieth century, intermingling with jazz and fronting the big band craze of the thirties and forties. Crooners spurred the rise of radio as home staple and the Golden Age of film musicals. When commercial television became a viable commodity, crooners anchored perhaps the first TV programming innovation, the variety show. It took the cataclysmic aesthetic and cultural changes ushered in by rock 'n' roll in the 1950s to finally bring crooners down from their pedestal.

The Rise of the Crooners examines the historical trends and events that led to the emergence of the crooning style. Ian Whitcomb, a successful popular music vocalist himself for almost 40 years, provides a personal perspective on this phenomenon. The lives and careers of six pioneers of the style—Bing Crosby, Russ Columbo, Gene Austin, Rudy Vallee, Johnny Marvin, and Nick Lucas—are covered at length. With the exception of one entry devoted to Crosby—possibly the greatest entertainer of the past century—these biographies (appended by lengthy bibliographies and discographies) are more thorough and up-to-date than any treatment in print about these seminal artists.

Recorded Music in American Life: The Phonograph and Popular Memory, 1890-1945

Recorded Music in American Life: The Phonograph and Popular Memory, 1890-1945 Review

Have records, compact discs, and other sound reproduction equipment merely provided American listeners with pleasant diversions, or have more important historical and cultural influences flowed through them? Do recording machines simply capture what's already out there, or is the music somehow transformed in the dual process of documentation and dissemination? How would our lives be different without these machines? Such are the questions that arise when we stop taking for granted the phenomenon of recorded music and the phonograph itself.

Now comes an in-depth cultural history of the phonograph in the United States from 1890 to 1945. William Howland Kenney offers a full account of what he calls "the 78 r.p.m. era"--from the formative early decades in which the giants of the record industry reigned supreme in the absence of radio, to the postwar proliferation of independent labels, disk jockeys, and changes in popular taste and opinion. By examining the interplay between recorded music and the key social, political, and economic forces in America during the phonograph's rise and fall as the dominant medium of popular recorded sound, he addresses such vital issues as the place of multiculturalism in the phonograph's history, the roles of women as record-player listeners and performers, the belated commercial legitimacy of rhythm-and-blues recordings, the "hit record" phenomenon in the wake of the Great Depression, the origins of the rock-and-roll revolution, and the shifting place of popular recorded music in America's personal and cultural memories.

Throughout the book, Kenney argues that the phonograph and the recording industry served neither to impose a preference for high culture nor a degraded popular taste, but rather expressed a diverse set of sensibilities in which various sorts of people found a new kind of pleasure. To this end, Recorded Music in American Life effectively illustrates how recorded music provided the focus for active recorded sound cultures, in which listeners shared what they heard, and expressed crucial dimensions of their private lives, by way of their involvement with records and record-players.

Students and scholars of American music, culture, commerce, and history--as well as fans and collectors interested in this phase of our rich artistic past--will find a great deal of thorough research and fresh scholarship to enjoy in these pages.