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Tania León's Stride: A Polyrhythmic Life

Alejandro L. Madrid

More than a simple biography, this book is an affective exploration of the life and works of Cuban American composer Tania León in relation to questions of identity politics, nostalgia, ethnicity, ... More

More than a simple biography, this book is an affective exploration of the life and works of Cuban American composer Tania León in relation to questions of identity politics, nostalgia, ethnicity, absence, and diaspora. The book explores the composer’s upbringing in Cuba, the reasons to leave the island at a complicated political moment after the triumph of the Cuban revolution, her adaptation to U.S. culture through her involvement in a number of historically important African American artistic projects at the end of the civil rights movement, and the development of her unique compositional voice. Attention is paid to the current process of canonization of León and her music vis-à-vis issues of identity, representation, and self-representation that are often at odds. By focusing on León’s extraordinary life, this book provides a point of entry into understanding how regular folks have experienced apparently impersonal historical events such as the Cuban revolution, the Cold War, the struggle for civil rights, or identity politics in everyday U.S. life.Less

Dhol: Drummers, Identities, and Modern Punjab

Gibb Schreffler

In the early twenty-first century, the Punjab region’s traditional drummers, dholis, were experiencing “the toughest time ever.” Concurrently, their instrument, the iconic barrel-drum dhol, was ... More

In the early twenty-first century, the Punjab region’s traditional drummers, dholis, were experiencing “the toughest time ever.” Concurrently, their instrument, the iconic barrel-drum dhol, was experiencing unprecedented global popularity. This book uncovers why, notwithstanding the emblematic status of dhol for Punjabis, the dholis’ local communities are facing existential crisis. The pursuit of a national identity—which aids in political representation and maintaining historical consciousness during change—has led modern Punjabis to make particular economic, social, and artistic choices. A casualty of this pursuit has been the disenfranchisement of dholis, who do not find representation despite the symbolic import of dhol to that national identity. Through the example of dhol’s subtle appropriation, the book argues that the empowerment gained by bolstering Punjabi identity in the global arena works at the expense of people on Punjabi society’s margins. At its core are the hereditary-professional drummers who, while members of society’s low-status “outcaste” population, created and maintained dhol traditions over centuries. Exacerbated by a cultural nationalist discourse that downplays ethnic diversity, their subaltern ethnic identities have been rendered invisible. Recognizing their diverse ethnic affiliations, however, is only the first step towards hearing hitherto absent perspectives of individual musicians. As a work of advocacy, this book draws on two decades of ethnography of Indian, Pakistani, and diasporic Punjabi drummers to center their experiences in the story of modern Punjab.Less

Peace Be Still: How James Cleveland and the Angelic Choir Created a Gospel Classic

Robert M. Marovich

One evening in September 1963, the Angelic Choir of the First Baptist Church of Nutley, New Jersey, assembled in nearby Newark to record their third live album with gospel music’s rising star, James ... More

One evening in September 1963, the Angelic Choir of the First Baptist Church of Nutley, New Jersey, assembled in nearby Newark to record their third live album with gospel music’s rising star, James Cleveland. Nobody that evening could have predicted the album’s overwhelming popularity. For two years, Peace Be Still and its haunting title track held top positions on gospel radio and record sales charts. The album is reported to have sold as many as 300,000 copies by 1966 and 800,000 copies by the early 1970s—figures normally achieved by pop artists. Nearly sixty years later, the album still sells. Of the thousands of gospel records released in the early 1960s, why did Peace Be Still become the most successful and longest lasting? To answer this question, the book details the careers of the album’s musical architects, the Reverends Lawrence Roberts and James Cleveland. It provides a history of the First Baptist Church and the Angelic Choir, explores the vibrant gospel music community of Newark and the roots of live recordings of gospel, and, most important, assesses the sociopolitical environment in which the album was created. By exploring the album’s sonic and lyrical themes and contextualizing them with comments by participants in the recording session, the book challenges long-held assumptions about the album and offers new interpretations in keeping with the singers’ original intent.Less

A Respectable Spell: Transformations of Samba in Rio de Janeiro

This book is primarily about the social history and musical changes of samba in Rio de Janeiro from 1917 to the early 1930s, looking chiefly at the era’s commercial recordings. The year 1917 marks ... More

This book is primarily about the social history and musical changes of samba in Rio de Janeiro from 1917 to the early 1930s, looking chiefly at the era’s commercial recordings. The year 1917 marks the first time that a popular song designated as “samba” became a widespread Carnival success in the city. In the early 1930s, a new style of samba became dominant, such that it is still today the genre’s primary point of reference. The book proposes an analysis and interpretation of the differences in the musical styles, highlighting their rhythmic aspects. It also shows how these differences are linked to the way in which samba and sambistas are understood in Rio de Janeiro’s society and culture during this period. The first part of the book, “From Lundu to Samba,” deals with popular music genres created during the second half of the nineteenth century, such as lundu, Brazilian tango, and maxixe, whose musical characteristics came to be shared with old-style samba. The book’s second part, “From One Samba to Another,” deals with the emergence of samba in Rio de Janeiro as a commercial genre of popular music, and with the creation and success of the new style of samba, paying special attention to the trajectories of Ismael Silva and Noel Rosa, composers representative of this transition.Less

Politics as Sound: The Washington, DC, Hardcore Scene, 1978-1983

Shayna L. Maskell

This book aims to delineate, describe, explore, and examine hardcore in Washington, DC, during its zenith of both impact and innovation, 1978-83. During these indispensably creative and influential ... More

This book aims to delineate, describe, explore, and examine hardcore in Washington, DC, during its zenith of both impact and innovation, 1978-83. During these indispensably creative and influential years in DC music, hardcore was not simply born—a mutated sonic stepchild of rock ’n’ roll, British and American punk—but also evolved into an uncompromising and resounding paradigm of and for a specific segment of DC youth. Through the revelatory music of DC hardcore, a new formulation of sound, and a new articulation of youth, arose: one that was angry, loud, fast, and minimalistic. With a total of only ten albums among all five bands this book covers—Bad Brains, Minor Threat and Teen Idles (considered jointly), State of Alert, Government Issue, and Faith—over a five-year period, DC hardcore cemented a small yet significant subculture and scene. More specifically, this book considers two major components inherent in any genre of popular music: (1) aesthetics and (2) the social politics that stem from those aesthetics. Throughout these chapters, we consider the way music communicates, its structure—facets like timbre, melody, rhythm, pitch, volume, dissonance—and simultaneously dissects how these features communicate messages of social and cultural politics, expressly representations of race, class, and gender.Less

Listening to Bob Dylan

Larry Starr

This book presents the importance of listening to Bob Dylan’s recorded work as the essential basis for a deeper understanding and appreciation of his achievements. Here is a guide for both the ... More

This book presents the importance of listening to Bob Dylan’s recorded work as the essential basis for a deeper understanding and appreciation of his achievements. Here is a guide for both the curious listener and the enthusiastic Dylan fan, for both the nonspecialist who enjoys music and the professional. While fully acknowledging his celebrated gifts as a lyricist, this book embraces Dylan’s primary identity as a performing songwriter. For Bob Dylan, the creation of music, and its interpretation by voice and instruments, are as important as the words he sings. His performances offer inspired examples of an inclusive art form that is much more than the simple sum of its individual parts. Dozens of individual songs receive detailed attention, ranging from those released on Bob Dylan’s first album (1962) to those heard on his latest (2020) and including widely heralded selections like “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Like a Rolling Stone” along with lesser-known numbers equally worthy of discussion. Individual chapters explore Dylan’s recordings from multiple standpoints: his vocal style, the role of his harmonica, the songs as musical compositions, the instrumental arrangements, and the differences between live and studio performances of particular songs. A composite picture emerges of Dylan as a versatile, astute, and expressive artist, truly a man (in Duke Ellington’s words) “beyond category.”Less

Performing Environmentalisms: Expressive Culture and Ecological Change

John Holmes McDowell, Katherine Borland, Rebecca Dirksen, and Sue Tuohy (eds)

Performing Environmentalisms: Expressive Culture and Ecological Change is a fresh contribution to the environmental humanities, offering ten original essays anchored in the fields of folklore studies ... More

Performing Environmentalisms: Expressive Culture and Ecological Change is a fresh contribution to the environmental humanities, offering ten original essays anchored in the fields of folklore studies and ethnomusicology that engage productively with forms of traditional expressive culture at the crux of environmental debate and conflict. These essays draw on ethnographic research in several world regions to explore the ways individuals and groups express and perform their connection to the environment as they interpret changing environments, manage ecological crises, and seek to change policies, minds, and practices. Performing Environmentalisms brings together a set of essays that focus on genres and practices of expressive culture—songs, stories, handicrafts, and ritual and activist practices—as these are employed to come to grips with ecological change, and in doing so, argues for performing environmentalisms as a valuable perspective on ecological change and environmental crisis in the Anthropocene. The book consists of a substantial introduction, laying the foundation for thinking about expressive culture as an instrument of environmental discourse, followed by essays grouped into three sections: Perspectives on Diverse Environmentalisms, Performing the Sacred, and Environmental Attachments; a thoughtful afterword by Eduardo Brondizio locates Performing Environmentalisms as a welcome contribution toward a holistic approach to environmental issues.Less

Americanaland: Where Country & Western Met Rock 'n' Roll

John Milward

With a claim on artists from Jimmie Rodgers to Jason Isbell, Americana can be hard to define, but you know it when you hear it. This book is filled with the enduring performers and vivid stories that ... More

With a claim on artists from Jimmie Rodgers to Jason Isbell, Americana can be hard to define, but you know it when you hear it. This book is filled with the enduring performers and vivid stories that are at the heart of Americana. At base a hybrid of rock and country, Americana is also infused with folk, blues, rhythm and blues, bluegrass, and other types of roots music. Performers like Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Ray Charles, Joni Mitchell, and Gram Parsons used these ingredients to create influential music that took well-established genres down exciting new roads. The name Americana was coined in the 1990s to describe similarly inclined artists like Emmylou Harris, Steve Earle, and Wilco. Today, Brandi Carlile and I'm With Her are among the musicians carrying the genre into the twenty-first century. Essential and engaging, the book chronicles the evolution and resonance of this ever-changing amalgam of American music.Less

Manifest Technique: Hip Hop, Empire, and Visionary Filipino American Culture

Mark R. Villegas

Manifest Technique traces the ways in which Filipino American hip hop performances remember the racialized histories of the Filipino body. Mediated through what the book calls a Filipino American hip ... More

Manifest Technique traces the ways in which Filipino American hip hop performances remember the racialized histories of the Filipino body. Mediated through what the book calls a Filipino American hip hop vernacular, Filipino Americans have been fashioning crucial forms of Filipino racial knowledge. Inspired by hip hop’s cultural resources that uplifts the dignity of African Americans, Filipino Americans’ immersion in hip hop has influenced ongoing Filipino racial self-construction, engaging a longer struggle of Filipino decolonization. Manifest Technique testifies to the labor required to bridge the gaps within the margins of official memory by outlining how Filipino Americans have been instrumental in contributing to the broader contours of hip hop and in providing a counter-memory to their historical erasure. In observing artists’ and participants’ narratives, music, embodiments, and visual expressions, this book is an impetus to understand race and ethnicity in the United States not simply in terms of liberal multiculturalism, which distributes power horizontally and ahistorically, but through the critical lens of structural domination, which recognizes power as vertically applied and historically rooted. In short, this book observes the intersections of memory and empire by focusing on hip hop cultural practices embedded within the ongoing racial project of Filipino postcolonial emergence.Less

Homer Rodeheaver and the Rise of the Gospel Music Industry

Kevin Mungons and Douglas Yeo

Homer Rodeheaver rose to national prominence in the early 20th century as the trombone-playing songleader for Billy Sunday. For twenty years they captured attention with city-wide revival meetings, a ... More

Homer Rodeheaver rose to national prominence in the early 20th century as the trombone-playing songleader for Billy Sunday. For twenty years they captured attention with city-wide revival meetings, a mix of sincere devotion, popular religion, and modern marketing methods. In an era when music styles were emerging as marketable genres, Rodeheaver created a brand of gospel music that cast an enormous influence on popular music. Borrowing from evangelical hymns, African American spirituals, and popular music, he built a publishing empire in Chicago, selling hymnals as a way to encourage community singing. When tabernacle revivalism declined after World War I, Rodeheaver shifted to other ventures, bolstered by his personal popularity in a growing celebrity culture. He started the first gospel record label in 1920, then shifted to radio, where his community sing programs ran on three national networks. Near the end of his life, he strongly influenced Billy Graham and Cliff Barrows, the next generation of evangelical revivalists. The authors explore the birth of the commercial Christian music industry and its roots in congregational singing—its early rise as a communal, populist form that would later divide into racial and regional distinctions known as southern gospel and black gospel. As the first major biography of Homer Rodeheaver, the book explores the impact of racial segregation, the influence of technology, and the consequences of commercial Christian music.Less