Music-History & Criticism

From the earliest days of rock and roll, white artists regularly achieved fame, wealth, and success that eluded the Black artists whose work had preceded and inspired them. This dynamic continued into the 1960s, even as the music and its fans grew to be...

In Songbooks, critic and scholar Eric Weisbard offers a critical guide to books on American popular music from William Billings's 1770 New-England Psalm-Singer to Jay-Z's 2010 memoir Decoded. Drawing on his background editing the Village Voice music section, coediting the Journal of Popular Music...

A revolution in consciousness was fueled in the United States in the 1960s by a small group of people who used the tools of psychedelic drugs, story-telling, improvisational theater, communal living, sharing, kindness, humor, and pranks to release people from the confines of society,...

New York City has long been a generative nexus for the transnational Latin music scene. Currently, there is no other place in the Americas where such large numbers of people from throughout the Caribbean come together to make music. In this book, Benjamin Lapidus...

In 1973, the musical collective 24-Carat Black released an unheralded masterpiece on Stax Records-and then disappeared. Ghetto: Misfortune's Wealth, a soul-funk concept album primarily written by the ex-Motown arranger Dale Warren, was too bleak, ambitious, or just outright bizarre to reach mainstream audiences. 24-Carat...

Gospel music evolved in often surprising directions during the post-Civil Rights era. Claudrena N. Harold's in-depth look at late-century gospel focuses on musicians like Yolanda Adams, Andra Crouch, the Clark Sisters, Al Green, Take 6, and the Winans, and on the network of black...

An all-star lineup of rock-n-rollers-from Jane's Addiction's Perry Farrell to Suzi Quatro and Verdine White of Earth, Wind & Fire-relay the uproariously wild, sentimental, and unexpected pre-stardom stories behind their favorite records. Rock Stars on the Record is a collection of first-hand tales by...

Amiri Baraka is unquestionably the most recognized leader of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and one of the key literary and cultural figures of the postwar United States. While Baraka's political and aesthetic stances changed considerably over the course of...

Jimi Hendrix - Black Legacy (A Dream Deferred) is a deep exploration of Jimi Hendrix's subtle, yet ubiquitous footprint on Black culture. Often, Jimi Hendrix was seen by many to have transcended race, which is a slap in the face to his deep cultural...

See the film Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song from Sony Pictures Classics This "thoughtful and illuminating" (The New York Times) work of music journalism is an unforgettable, fascinating, and unexpected account of one of the most performed and beloved songs in pop...

Live at the Safari Club: A People's History of HarDCore is the uncensored oral history of a notorious underground punk venue in the nation's capital, told by the bands, fans, zinesters, promoters, graffiti artists, scenesters, senators' kids and activists who made it happen. Over...

Twenty years after its release, Phish's double-CD collection A Live One has something rare and precious going for it: it still doesn't sound like anybody else. Oversized, perverse, requiring an unusual amount of listener background knowledge? Yes to all. Yet the collective improvisations it...

When George Jones recorded "He Stopped Loving Her Today" more than thirty years ago, he was a walking disaster. Twin addictions to drugs and alcohol had him drinking Jim Beam by the case and snorting cocaine as long as he was awake. Before it...

Outside his native France, the view of Serge Gainsbourg was once of a one-hit wonder lothario. This has been slowly replaced by an awareness of how talented and innovative a songwriter he was. Gainsbourg was an eclectic, protean figure; a Dadaist, po鑼e maudit, Pop-Artist,...

War seems to have frazzled the punks. That's an unusual turn of events considering punk is the subculture that gave us the phrases"let's have a war," "let's start a war," "war on 45," "my war," "wargasm," "war all the time," and so on. "Rock...

The Poetics of American Song Lyrics is the first collection of academic essays that regards songs as literature and that identifies intersections between the literary histories of poems and songs. The essays by well-known poets and scholars including Pulitzer Prize winner Claudia Emerson, Peter...

This is the fascinating story of music. How it started with a song and became one of our most beloved arts. Learn how early composers added modal rhythm to religious chants and turned them into something greater. Discover how the printing press standardized music...

The Decade was the birthplace of rock n roll in Pittsburgh, at the corner of Atwood and Sennott. The eclectic bar with parachutes covering the ceiling was home base for local bands such as the Iron City Houserockers, but it also served as a...

Starting with a few songs and a dream in 1943, King Records--a leading American independent--launched musical careers from a shabby brick factory on Brewster Avenue in Cincinnati's Evanston neighborhood. Founder Sydney Nathan recorded country singers Cowboy Copas, Hawkshaw Hawkins, Wayne Raney, and others and...

The Wild Tchoupitoulas is a definitive expression of the modern New Orleans sound. From "Hey Pocky A-Way" to "Big Chief Got a Golden Crown," the album draws on carnival traditions stretching back a century, adapting songs from the Mardi Gras Indians. Music chanted in...

Over a decade's worth of classic albums that defied categorization. An appearance on Nirvana's classic 'MTV Unplugged' performance. A hit video on MTV. A gold certified album. An opening slot on a sold-out tour with the Stone Temple Pilots. By the end of 1994,...

For two days in January 1972, Aretha Franklin sang at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Los Angeles while tape recorders and film cameras rolled. Everyone there knew the event had the potential to be historic: five years after ascending to soul royalty...

Long regarded as an expert of Casey Kasem's American Top 40 radio program, Pete Battistini provides highlights and summaries of nearly 500 AT40 programs from the 1970s, along with a highly-detailed list of all subscribing AT40 radio stations. Peppered with various anecdotes and perspectives,...

The origins and secrets of the Grateful Dead's magical sound are told! This book is the first in-depth examination of the Dead's technical side, including their recording methods. From the "Acid Tests" of the mid-'60s to the famous "Wall of Sound" PA setup in...

The author traces the history of Wings and delves into the inner dynamics of the group, its commercial and artistic success, and its demise.Author: Garry McGeeISBN-10: 0878333045ISBN-13: 9780878333042Publisher: Taylor Trade PublishingLanguage: EnglishPublished: 03/11/2003Pages: 284Format: PaperbackWeight: 0.85lbsSize: 8.94h x 6.14w x 0.56dReview Citation(s): Library Journal...

A autobiography of Dirk Dirksen and his rise as the promoter of the Mabuhay Gardens as told by Dirk Dirksen. Dirk Dirksen almost single-handedly made the early beginnings of Punk Rock possible in San Francisco, by providing an all-ages, low-admission-charge venue where anybody could...

A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction of 2011 title In the late 1960s, with popular culture hurtling forward on the sounds of rock music, some brave musicians looked back instead, trying to recover the lost treasures of English roots music and update them for the...

You never heard such sounds in your lifeIn 1964, Bernard Stollman launched the independent record label ESP-Disk' in New York City to document the free jazz movement there. A bare-bones enterprise, ESP was in the right place at the right time, producing albums by...

2007 Arts Club of Washington's National Award for Arts Writing - FinalistSEE ALSO: Pimps Up, Ho's Down: Hip Hop's Hold on Young Black Women by T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting. An inside look into the beats, lyrics, and flow of hip-hop's history With roots that stretch...

Making the Scene in the Garden State explores New Jersey's rich musical heritage through stories about the musicians, listeners and fans who came together to create sounds from across the American popular music spectrum. The book includes chapters on the beginnings of musical recording...

Florida Historical Society Charlton Tebeau Award When recalling the roots of soul music, most people are likely to name Memphis, Detroit, New Orleans, Muscle Shoals, or Macon. But Florida also has a rich soul music history-an important cultural legacy that has often gone unrecognized....

At once a groundbreaking cultural history of rock music and an impassioned defense of the unique value of art, The Day Alternative Music Died is a timely and essential addition to the cultural discourse. Featuring a meticulously researched and eminently readable narrative that will...

The Latin explosion of Marc Anthony, Ricky Martin, and the Buena Vista Social Club may look like it came out of nowhere, but the incredible variety of Latin music has been transforming the United States since the turn of the century, when Caribbean beats...

Now available for a new generation of swing enthusiasts, reissued to coincide with the release of "The World of Swing" CD from Columbia/Legacy, this monumental history of big band jazz, documented through interviews with forty leading musicians, has been updated with a new introduction...

Valerie Wilmer's 1970 classic, Jazz People, has long been considered one of the three or four finest books ever written on jazz. Featuring extensive interviews with fourteen jazz geniuses, including Art Farmer, Cecil Taylor, Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis, Thelonious Monk, Jimmy Heath, Clark Terry, Big...

This comprehensive survey of jazz piano, beginning with a brief history of the instrument within the jazz tradition and concluding with interviews that present twenty-seven pianists in their own words, is both wonderfully anecdotal and a serious piece of jazz history. Lyons has assembled...

Leonard Bernstein was arguably the most highly esteemed, influential, and charismatic American classical music personality of the twentieth century. Conductor, composer, pianist, writer, educator, and human rights activist, Bernstein truly led a life of Byronic intensity--passionate, risk-taking, and convention-breaking. In November 1989, just a...

How is the Beatles' "Help!" similar to Stravinsky's "Dance of the Adolescents?" How does Radiohead's "Just" relate to the improvisations of Bill Evans? And how do Chopin's works exploit the non-Euclidean geometry of musical chords? In this groundbreaking work, author Dmitri Tymoczko describes a...

From Nelson George, supervising producer and writer of the hit Netflix series, "The Get Down, Hip Hop America is the definitive account of the society-altering collision between black youth culture and the mass media.Author: Nelson GeorgeISBN-10: 0143035150ISBN-13: 9780143035152Publisher: Penguin BooksLanguage: EnglishPublished: 04/26/2005Pages: 256Format: PaperbackWeight:...

NPR Best Books of 2017In this sweeping history of popular music in the United States, NPR's acclaimed music critic examines how popular music shapes fundamental American ideas and beliefs, allowing us to communicate difficult emotions and truths about our most fraught social issues, most...

Bob Dylan's ways with words are a wonder, matched as they are with his music and verified by those voices of his. In response to the whole range of Dylan early and late (his songs of social conscience, of earthly love, of divine love,...

A tour de force of storytelling years in the making: a dual biography of two of the greatest songwriters, Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie, that is also a murder mystery and a history of labor relations and socialism, big business and greed in twentieth-century...

Today's hottest rapper' the enigmatic Eminem' delivers a provocative collection of his uncensored lyrics, complete with personal commentary on each controversial song. Angry Blonde is the only official Eminem book on the market, done with the complete authorisation and support of the rap superstar....

Exploring sounds of the musical rhythms of the Ring Shout and the evocative textures of the Caribbean bomba song and dance, this book presents a comparative musicological and ethnomusicological work that concentrates on the parallel diasporic aspects of history, religion, and music of the...

On Saturday, June 28, 1986, George Michael picked up his tasselled leather jacket, walked out of London's Wembley Stadium and cheerfully tore up five years of glittering pop history. He'd just disposed of Wham!, the band he'd formed with school friend Andrew Ridgeley when...

A No Depression Most Memorable Music Book of 2022 The forceful music that rolled out of Muscle Shoals in the 1960s and 1970s shaped hits by everyone from Wilson Pickett and Aretha Franklin to the Rolling Stones and Paul Simon. Christopher M. Reali's in-depth...

Before the French Revolution, making music was an activity that required permission. After the Revolution, music was an object that could be possessed. Everyone seemingly hoped to gain something from owning music. Musicians claimed it as their unalienable personal expression while the French nation...

Black metal is a paradox. A noisy underground metal genre brimming with violence and virulence, it has captured the world's imagination for its harsh yet flamboyant style and infamous history involving arson, blasphemy, and murder. Today black metal is nothing less than a cultural...

Does music have to be smart or does it just have to go to the heart?Chilly Gonzales is one of the most exciting, original, hard-to-pin-down musicians of our time, known as much for the intimate piano touch of his best-selling Solo Piano album trilogy...

Pittsburgh's contributions to the uniquely American art form of jazz are essential to its national narrative. Fleeing the Jim Crow South in the twentieth century, African American migration to the industrial North brought musical roots that would lay the foundation for jazz culture in...