Browse

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.

Earl Eugene Scruggs (1924-2012) came from the hills of North Carolina and learned the banjo from the days he was too small to hold it properly. While still a schoolboy in Boiling Springs, North Carolina, he developed the high-powered three-finger picking method that both him and the banjo famous. At age 21, he joined the founder of bluegrass music, Bill Monroe, on the Grand Ole Opry, completing a sound that Monroe had worked to conceive. Leaving Monroe in 1948, Scruggs and guitarist Lester Flatt started their own group and made recordings including “Foggy Mountain Breakdown.” The lightning-fast banjo instrumental cut a swath through American music, inspiring countless pickers and becoming the “voice” of the business-disrupting 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde. During a long career in music, Scruggs had many famous friends and collaborators. His influence also meant that his Gibson Granada banjo became an icon of American music

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.”

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.

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.

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.

Peoria, Illinois has long been a benchmark for the cautious and the conservative, a popular American test market for ideas, entertainment acts, and products. Beginning in the 1980s, hardcore punk rock bands “played in Peoria,” right alongside Reagan Republicanism and a series of factory closings. Spanning two decades and many waves of youth, this book explores how various misfits and outcasts repurposed elements of their deindustrializing city to promote local and touring bands, build social networks, and grapple with the possibilities and shortcomings of subcultural and countercultural politics. The vast majority of books about subcultures, and punk rock in particular, focus on bands, music scenes, and youth in vibrant, world-class metropolitan areas such as London, New York, and Los Angeles. In contrast, this book examines the efforts of young people to create an alternative music scene, from scratch, in Peoria – a typical, conservative, mid-sized city in the American Midwest.

Rocking the Closet: How Little Richard, Johnnie Ray, Liberace, and Johnny Mathias Queered Pop Music examines the way four popular male musicians who emerged in the 1950s, Johnnie Ray, Little Richard, Johnny Mathis, and Liberace challenged post-World War II masculine conventions. Rocking is a critical close reading that fuses queer literary theory, musicology, and popular music studies frameworks to develop its argument. Recent scholarship in queer theory and literary history constitutes a key strand of the book’s discussion of queer ambivalence regarding identity. Notably, the book explores how the four artists challenged male gender and sexual conventions without overtly identifying their respective sexual orientations or necessarily affiliating with gay activism, identity politics, or community tropes. The book outlines the emergence of postwar social expectations of male figures and employs these expectations to define a unique a set of five “queering” tools the four musicians employed in various combinations, to develop their public personae and build audiences. These tools include self-neutering, self-domesticating, spectacularizing, playing the “freak,” and playing the race card. Despite the prevalence of postwar gender norms, their deft use of these tools enabled each artist to develop sexually ambiguous personae and capitalize on the postwar audiences’ attraction to novelty and difference. These “queering” tools endure among contemporary musicians who challenge masculine conventions in popular music.