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Wagner and the Erotic Impulse
Laurence Dreyfus
Harvard University Press, 2012

Though his image is tarnished today by unrepentant anti-Semitism, Richard Wagner (1813–1883) was better known in the nineteenth century for his provocative musical eroticism. In this illuminating study of the composer and his works, Laurence Dreyfus shows how Wagner’s obsession with sexuality prefigured the composition of operas such as Tannhäuser, Die Walküre, Tristan und Isolde, and Parsifal. Daring to represent erotic stimulation, passionate ecstasy, and the torment of sexual desire, Wagner sparked intense reactions from figures like Baudelaire, Clara Schumann, Nietzsche, and Nordau, whose verbal tributes and censures disclose what was transmitted when music represented sex.

Wagner himself saw the cultivation of an erotic high style as central to his art, especially after devising an anti-philosophical response to Schopenhauer’s “metaphysics of sexual love.” A reluctant eroticist, Wagner masked his personal compulsion to cross-dress in pink satin and drench himself in rose perfumes while simultaneously incorporating his silk fetish and love of floral scents into his librettos. His affection for dominant females and surprising regard for homosexual love likewise enable some striking portraits in his operas. In the end, Wagner’s achievement was to have fashioned an oeuvre which explored his sexual yearnings as much as it conveyed—as never before—how music could act on erotic impulse.

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Wagner Handbook
Ulrich Müller
Harvard University Press, 1992

Rarely has anyone in the history of Western culture stirred up such deep, contrary, and enduring passions as Richard Wagner. A proposal to perform his work ignites controversy in Israel. Wagner’s The Ride of the Valkyries blares from helicopters slicing the air of Apocalypse Now. His name leads a list of Germany’s spiritual heroes against a flaming backdrop in Anselm Kiefer’s largest work. Idolized by Nietzsche, appropriated by Hitler, defended by writers from Mann to Adorno, emulated by countless composers, interpreted by artists and filmmakers, Wagner has left us a legacy as complicated as it is profound. To this day the sheer magnitude of his accomplishment retains its power to overwhelm.

This book is a measure of that magnitude, an unprecedented attempt to bring together in one volume what is known about the composer’s life, his work, and his influence. Unparalleled in its scope and depth, this remarkable compendium offers readers a unique opportunity to understand what this prodigious man has meant to the Western world. Described by Brahms as a man of “colossal industry and horrendous energy,” Wagner composed dozens of works, many of them towering masterpieces; he influenced a whole generation of conductors, took part in a revolution, counseled kings and diplomats, and organized the building of the Bayreuth festival theater. His writings on a wide variety of subjects fill sixteen substantial volumes and his thousands of personal letters document a wildly eventful private life.

The Wagner Handbook addresses all of these aspects of the composer’s life and achievement. Central chapters include an account of Wagner’s place in music history by Carl Dahlhaus; Werner Breig’s treatment of individual musical works; Peter Wapnewski’s discussion of Wagner’s operatic works as literature; Isolde Vetter’s chapter on Wagner in the history of psychology; surveys of performance question over the years by Jens Malte Fischer and Oswal Bauer. These and other topics—the individuals who most powerfully influenced the composer and those he influenced, his impact on music history, and the political exploitation of his ideas—are masterfully drawn.

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Waiting for Buddy Guy
Chicago Blues at the Crossroads
Alan Harper
University of Illinois Press, 2016
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, British blues fan Alan Harper became a transatlantic pilgrim to Chicago. "I've come here to listen to the blues," he told an American customs agent at the airport, and listen he did, to the music in its many styles, and to the men and women who lived it in the city's changing blues scene. Harper's eloquent memoir conjures the smoky redoubts of men like harmonica virtuoso Big Walter Horton and pianist Sunnyland Slim. Venturing from stageside to kitchen tables to the shotgun seat of a 1973 Eldorado, Harper listens to performers and others recollect memories of triumphs earned and chances forever lost, of deep wells of pain and soaring flights of inspiration. Harper also chronicles a time of change, as an up-tempo, whites-friendly blues eclipsed what had come before, and old Southern-born black players held court one last time before an all-conquering generation of young guitar aces took center stage.
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Wake the Town and Tell the People
Dancehall Culture in Jamaica
Norman C. Stolzoff
Duke University Press, 2000
Jamaican dancehall has long been one of the most vital and influential cultural and artistic forces within contemporary global music. Wake the Town and Tell the People presents, for the first time, a lively, nuanced, and comprehensive view of this musical and cultural phenomenon: its growth and historical role within Jamaican society, its economy of star making, its technology of production, its performative practices, and its capacity to channel political beliefs through popular culture in ways that are urgent, tangible, and lasting.
Norman C. Stolzoff brings a fan’s enthusiasm to his broad perspective on dancehall, providing extensive interviews, original photographs, and anthropological analysis from eighteen months of fieldwork in Kingston. Stolzoff argues that this enormously popular musical genre expresses deep conflicts within Jamaican society, not only along lines of class, race, gender, sexuality, and religion but also between different factions struggling to gain control of the island nation’s political culture. Dancehall culture thus remains a key arena where the future of this volatile nation is shaped. As his argument unfolds, Stolzoff traces the history of Jamaican music from its roots in the late eighteenth century to 1945, from the addition of sound systems and technology during the mid-forties to early sixties, and finally through the post-independence years from the early sixties to the present.
Wake the Town and Tell the People offers a general introduction for those interested in dancehall music and culture. For the fan or musicologist, it will serve as a comprehensive reference book.
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War Dance
Plains Indian Musical Performance
William K. Powers
University of Arizona Press, 1990
The Indian powwow, with its colorful war dance, is among the most vital aspects of American Indian culture. William Powers has witnessed both the traditions and trends in Plains Indian music and dance over the past thirty years, and here encapsulates his long career in what may be the first book that deals with Plains Indian musical culture as a unit. After providing background material on the study of American Indian music, Powers gives a full description of the popular war dance, discusses the powwow as the context in which the war dance appears, and describes associated dances. While observing that a fascination with "pan-Indianism" temporarily misdirected the study of Plains Indian music and dance by focusing too sharply on what many believed was a nationalization of American Indians, Powers notes that individual tribes continue to be concerned with maintaining their ethnic identities through their styles of music and dance. In the balance of the book, Powers offers essays describing Plains songs available on disc and tape, including notes on the history and culture of tribes and some translations of Lakota songs. A concluding essay offers some observations of why Plains Indian music and dance have received the interest they have and why they will continue to symbolize a burgeoning contemporary American Indian culture--not only on the Plains, but in every corner of the world where American Indians are respected, admired, and imitated.
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Way Up North in Dixie
A Black Family's Claim to the Confederate Anthem
Howard L. Sacks and Judith Rose Sacks
University of Illinois Press, 2003
This book traces the lives of the Snowdens, an African American family of musicians and farmers living in rural Knox County, Ohio. Howard L. Sacks and Judith Rose Sacks examine the Snowdens' musical and social exchanges with rural whites from the 1850s through the early 1920s and provide a detailed exploration of the claim that the Snowden family taught the song "Dixie" to Dan Emmett-–the white musician and blackface minstrel credited with writing the song. This edition features a new introduction in which the authors discuss the public response to this controversial claim, and present new information on the Snowdens' musical and social experiences.
 
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Waylon
A Biography
R. Serge Denisoff
University of Tennessee Press, 1983
From his earliest recordings to his posthumously released albums, the haunting baritone of Waylon Jennings marked him as an extraordinarily individualistic country music artist. This biography by the late R. Serge Denisoff, first published in 1983, recounts Waylon’s west Texas upbringing, his introduction to music as a radio announcer at thirteen years old, his tutelage by rock star Buddy Holly, and his eventual stellar yet stormy music career. Where the original 1983 biography ends, music scholar Travis Stimeling picks up with the waning years of Waylon’s recording and performing. Stimeling recounts in the new afterword Waylon’s continued musical success in the early 1980s—though his financial troubles and battle with drugs and alcohol would soon cost him both professionally and personally—his triumphant and sober return in the 1990s and collaboration with longtime recording artists in the industry, and his continued musical relevance in an evolving industry driven by Nashville’s urban popularization of country music. Additionally, series editor Ted Olson, in his foreword, touches on Waylon’s legacy and the continued influence of his outlaw style of country music. Fans of Waylon, country music, and the Nashville music scene are sure to find this second edition of R. Serge Denisoff’s classic biography a welcome addition to the publications on the father of outlaw country.
 
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We Gotta Get Out of This Place
The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War
Doug Bradley
University of Massachusetts Press, 2015
For a Kentucky rifleman who spent his tour trudging through Vietnam's Central Highlands, it was Nancy Sinatra's "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'." For a "tunnel rat" who blew smoke into the Viet Cong's underground tunnels, it was Jimi Hendrix's "Purple Haze." For a black marine distraught over the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., it was Aretha Franklin's "Chain of Fools." And for countless other Vietnam vets, it was "I Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die," "Who'll Stop the Rain," or the song that gives this book its title.

In We Gotta Get Out of This Place, Doug Bradley and Craig Werner place popular music at the heart of the American experience in Vietnam. They explore how and why U.S. troops turned to music as a way of connecting to each other and the World back home and of coping with the complexities of the war they had been sent to fight. They also demonstrate that music was important for every group of Vietnam veterans—black and white, Latino and Native American, men and women, officers and "grunts"—whose personal reflections drive the book's narrative. Many of the voices are those of ordinary soldiers, airmen, seamen, and marines. But there are also "solo" pieces by veterans whose writings have shaped our understanding of the war—Karl Marlantes, Alfredo Vea, Yusef Komunyakaa, Bill Ehrhart, Arthur Flowers—as well as songwriters and performers whose music influenced soldiers' lives, including Eric Burdon, James Brown, Bruce Springsteen, Country Joe McDonald, and John Fogerty. Together their testimony taps into memories—individual and cultural—that capture a central if often overlooked component of the American war in Vietnam.
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We Had Fun and Nobody Died
Adventures of a Milwaukee Music Promoter
Amy T. Waldman
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2024

The entertaining and inspiring story of a stubbornly independent promoter and club owner 

This irreverent biography provides a rare window into the music industry from a promoter’s perspective. From a young age, Peter Jest was determined to make a career in live music, and despite naysayers and obstacles, he did just that, bringing national acts to his college campus at UW–Milwaukee, booking thousands of concerts across Wisconsin and the Midwest, and opening Shank Hall, the beloved Milwaukee venue named after a club in the cult film This Is Spinal Tap.

This funny, nostalgia-inducing book details the lasting friendships Jest established over the years with John Prine, Arlo Guthrie, and Milwaukee’s own Violent Femmes, among others. It also shines a light into the seldom-seen world of music promotion, as Jest attempts to manage a turbulent band on the road, negotiates with agents, deals with fires (both real and metaphorical), struggles through a pandemic, and takes pleasure in presenting music of all kinds—from world-famous acts to up-and-coming local bands. In addition to photos of celebrated musicians, the book includes concert posters, tickets, and backstage passes documenting decades of rock, folk, and alternative shows that helped put Milwaukee on the live music map.

As the music industry has become dominated by profit-driven corporations, We Had Fun and Nobody Died chronicles the career of a one-of-a-kind independent promoter whose hardheadedness and love of music have helped him keep it real and make it in the music business for more than forty years. 

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We Shall Not Be Moved/No nos moveran
Biography of a Song of Struggle
David Spener
Temple University Press, 2016

The activist anthem “We Shall Not Be Moved” expresses resolve in the face of adversity; it helps members of social movements persevere in their struggles to build a better world. The exact origins of the song are unknown, but it appears to have begun as a Protestant revival song sung by rural whites and African slaves in the southeastern United States in the early nineteenth century. The song was subsequently adopted by U.S. labor and civil rights activists, students and workers opposing the Franco dictatorship in Spain, and by Chilean supporters of that country’s socialist government in the early 1970s. 

In his fascinating biography, We Shall Not Be Moved, David Spener details the history and the role the song has played in each of the movements in which it has been sung. He analyzes its dissemination, function, and meaning through a number of different sociological and anthropological lenses to explore how songs can serve as an invaluable resource to participants in movements for social change.

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We Take Care of Our Own
Faith, Class, and Politics in the Art of Bruce Springsteen
June Skinner Sawyers
Rutgers University Press, 2024
We Take Care of Our Own traces the evolution of Bruce Springsteen’s beliefs, beginning with his New Jersey childhood and ending with his most recent works from Springsteen on Broadway to Letter to You. The author follows the singer’s life, examining his albums and a variety of influences (both musical and non-musical), especially his Catholic upbringing and his family life, to show how he became an outspoken icon for working-class America -- indeed for working class life throughout the world. In this way, the author emphasizes the universality of Springsteen’s canon and depicts how a working-class sensibility can apply to anyone anywhere who believes in fairness and respect. In addition, the author places Springsteen in the historical context not only of literature (especially John Steinbeck) but also in the art world (specifically the work of Thomas Hart Benton and Edward Hopper). Among the themes explored in the book include community, a sense of place, America as the Promised Land, the myth of the West, and, ultimately, mortality.
 
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Pacers
We Wanna Boogie: The Rockabilly Roots of Sonny Burgess and the Pacers
Marvin Schwartz
Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, 2014
Rock and roll pioneer and Newport native Sonny Burgess is a member of the Rockabilly Hall of Fame. In this book full of personal interviews and remembrances, Burgess and his band tell of their original recordings for Sun Records in the 1950s; their shows with greats such as Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, and Jerry Lee Lewis; and their success in the contemporary rockabilly revival. This also is the history of a once prominent and spirited Delta community of extensive agricultural wealth. Newport was home to numerous music clubs that hosted national artists as well as illicit backroom gambling. Burgess is a product of this history, and his vivacious music is shaped by his hometown and the dramatic transformation of southern rural life it witnessed.
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Welcome 2 Houston
Hip Hop Heritage in Hustle Town
Langston Collin Wilkins
University of Illinois Press, 2023
Langston Collin Wilkins returns to the city where he grew up to illuminate the complex relationship between place, identity, and music in Houston’s hip hop culture. Interviews with local rap artists, producers, and managers inform an exploration of how artists, audiences, music, and place interact to create a heritage that musicians negotiate in a variety of ways. Street-based musicians, avant-garde underground rappers, and Christian artists offer candid views of the scene while Wilkins delves into related aspects like slab, the area’s hip hop-related car culture. What emerges is a portrait of a dynamic reciprocal process where an artist, having identified with and embodied a social space, reproduces that space in a performance even as the performance reconstructs the social space.

A vivid journey through a southern hip hop bastion, Welcome 2 Houston offers readers an inside look at a unique musical culture.

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A Well-Tempered Mind
Using Music to Help Children Listen and Learn
Peter Perret and Janet Fox
Dana Press, 2006
A Well-Tempered Mind investigates the intriguing connection between music education and brain development in children. Peter Perret and Janet Fox use the details of an innovative music education program for elementary school students to explore this fascinating relationship. A Well-Tempered Mind describes how the students of Bolton Elementary in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and a local quintet worked together and then explains the ongoing research that focuses on how music engages the brain’s cognitive capabilities, from memory and language to emotional processing. Music, A Well-Tempered Mind reveals, is a universal language that expands young minds in essential ways. 

“The authors put flesh on the feeling shared by all music teachers that the experience of music enhances thought and learning in unexpected directions, well beyond the simple act of enjoying the sound. … It’s exciting and necessary reading for all who are battling to ensure the place of music in the school curriculum."—Times Educational Supplement

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We're the Light Crust Doughboys from Burrus Mill
An Oral History
By Jean A. Boyd
University of Texas Press, 2003

The Light Crust Doughboys are one of the most long-lived and musically versatile bands in America. Formed in the early 1930s under the sponsorship of Burrus Mill and Elevator Company of Fort Worth, Texas, with Bob Wills and Milton Brown (the originator of western swing) at the musical helm and future Texas governor W. Lee "Pappy" O'Daniel as band manager and emcee, the Doughboys are still going strong in the twenty-first century. Arguably the quintessential Texas band, the Doughboys have performed all the varieties of music that Texans love, including folk and fiddle tunes, cowboy songs, gospel and hymns, commercial country songs and popular ballads, honky-tonk, ragtime and blues, western swing and jazz, minstrel songs, movie hits, and rock 'n' roll.

In this book, Jean Boyd draws on the memories of Marvin "Smokey" Montgomery and other longtime band members and supporters to tell the Light Crust Doughboys story from the band's founding in 1931 through the year 2000. She follows the band's musical evolution and personnel over seven decades, showing how band members and sponsors responded to changes in Texas culture and musical tastes during the Great Depression, World War II, and the postwar years. Boyd concludes that the Doughboys' willingness to change with changing times and to try new sounds and fresh musical approaches is the source of their enduring vitality. Historical photographs of the band, an annotated discography of their pre-World War II work, and histories of some of the band's songs round out the volume.

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Were You There When They Crucified My Lord
Allan Rohan Crite
Harvard University Press

One of the best loved of the American spirituals is here interpreted by an artist whose birthright is an authentic understanding of the spirituals. He gives us that understanding in terms of an art having all the appeal of the Negro's conception of religion in its narrative quality, its close emotional identification with religious ideas and events, and its simplicity of feeling.

The thirty-nine black-and-white drawings which compose the drama are not "illustrations" in the usual sense of visual elaborations of a text, but are rather a translation from musical rhythm into visual rhythm. Where the sung spiritual creates cumulative dramatic tension by repeated variations of a musical phrase, the artist lays increasing stress on the central idea of a pictorial sequence, each drawing dependent for its full power on its relation to those preceding and following it. Human figures have been used as symbols depicting the various shadings and accents of the great story as it is suggested by the words and music of the spiritual. The main motif is that of Christ; the secondary motifs or accompaniments are the Blessed Virgin Mary and St. John, with the chorus in the background. Throughout, the spirit is reverent, and there is, as the changing text of the spiritual demands, a subtle and inevitable change from realism to symbolism.

Artistically the drawings are simple, with an unusual vitality and strength characteristic of this artist's skillful brushwork, which is bold or delicate as the subject matter demands. Crite's work has been exhibited extensively throughout the country and is represented in many collections.

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West African Pop Roots
John Collins
Temple University Press, 1992
"Collins-Lowry gives persuasive examples of how employment gains made by Blacks in the 80's were rather more marginalized than we like to think." --Publishers Weekly Against the backdrop of increasing ambivalence in the federal government commitment to race-based employment policies, this book reveals how African-Americans first broke into professional and managerial jobs in corporations during the sixties and offers in-depth profiles of their subsequent career experiences. Two sets of interviews with the most successful Black executives in Chicago's major corporations are used to demonstrate how the creation of the Black business elite is connected to federal government pressures and black social unrest that characterized the civil Rights movement in the sixties. Black Corporate Executives presents, first hand, the dilemmas and contradictions that face this first wave of Black managers and reveals a subtle new employment discrimination. Corporations hired these executives in response to race-conscious political pressures and shifted them into "racialized" positions directing affirmative action programs or serving "special" markets of minority clients, customers, or urban affairs. Many executives became, as one man said, "the head Black in charge of Black people." These positions gave upper-middle-class lifestyles to those who held them but also siphoned these executives out of mainstream paths to corporate power typically leading through planning and production areas. As the political climate has become more conservative and the economy undergoes restructuring, these Black executives believe that the importance of recruiting Blacks has waned and that the jobs Blacks hold are vulnerable. Collins-Lowry's analysis challenges arguments that justify dismantling affirmative action. She argues that it is a myth to believe that Black occupational attainments are evidence that race no longer matters in the middle-class employment arena. On the contrary, Blacks' progress and well-being are tied to politics and employment practices that are sensitive to race.
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What Is Post-Punk?
Genre and Identity in Avant-Garde Popular Music, 1977-82
Mimi Haddon
University of Michigan Press, 2020

Popular music in the US and UK during the late 1970s and early 1980s was wildly eclectic and experimental. “Post-punk,” as it was retroactively labeled, could include electro-pop melodies, distorted guitars, avant-garde industrial sounds, and reggae beats, and thus is not an easily definable musical category.

What Is Post-Punk? combines a close reading of the late-1970s music press discourse with musical analyses and theories of identity to unpack post-punk’s status as a genre. Mimi Haddon traces the discursive foundations of post-punk across publications such as Sounds, ZigZag, Melody Maker, the Village Voice, and NME, and presents case studies of bands including Wire, PiL, Joy Division, the Raincoats, and Pere Ubu. By positioning post-punk in relation to genres such as punk, new wave, dub, and disco, Haddon explores the boundaries of post-punk, and reveals it as a community of tastes and predilections rather than a stylistically unified whole. Haddon diversifies the discourse around post-punk, exploring both its gender and racial dynamics and its proto-industrial aesthetics to restore the historical complexity surrounding the genre’s terms and origins.
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When Colleges Sang
The Story of Singing in American College Life
J. Lloyd Winstead
University of Alabama Press, 2013
When Colleges Sang is an illustrated history of the rich culture of college singing from the earliest days of the American republic to the present.
 
Before fraternity songs, alma maters, and the rahs of college fight songs became commonplace, students sang. Students in the earliest American colleges created their own literary melodies that they shared with their classmates. As J. Lloyd Winstead documents in When Colleges Sang, college singing expanded in conjunction with the growth of the nation and the American higher education system.
 
While it was often simply an entertaining pastime, singing had other subtle and not-so-subtle effects. Singing indoctrinated students into the life of formal and informal student organizations as well as encouraged them to conform to college rituals and celebrations. University faculty used songs to reinforce the religious practices and ceremonial observances that their universities supported. Students used singing for more social purposes: students sang to praise their peer’s achievements (and underachievements), mock the faculty, and provide humor. In extreme circumstances, they sang to intimidate classmates and faculty, and to defy college authorities. Singing was, and is, an intrinsic part of campus culture.
 
When Colleges Sang explores the dynamics that inspired collegiate singing and the development of singing traditions from the earliest days of the American college. Winstead explores this tradition’s tenuous beginnings in the Puritan era and follows its progress into the present. Using historical documents provided by various universities, When Colleges Sang follows the unique applications and influences of song that persisted in various forms. This original and significant contribution to the literature of higher education sheds light on how college singing traditions have evolved through the generations and have continued to remain culturally relevant even today.
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When Sunday Comes
Gospel Music in the Soul and Hip-Hop Eras
Claudrena N. Harold
University of Illinois Press, 2020
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, Andraé Crouch, the Clark Sisters, Al Green, Take 6, and the Winans, and on the network of black record shops, churches, and businesses that nurtured the music. Harold details the creative shifts, sonic innovations, theological tensions, and political assertions that transformed the music, and revisits the debates within the community over groundbreaking recordings and gospel's incorporation of rhythm and blues, funk, hip-hop, and other popular forms. At the same time, she details how sociopolitical and cultural developments like the Black Power Movement and the emergence of the Christian Right shaped both the art and attitudes of African American performers.

Weaving insightful analysis into a collective biography of gospel icons, When Sunday Comes explores the music's essential place as an outlet for African Americans to express their spiritual and cultural selves.

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When We Were Good
The Folk Revival
Robert S. Cantwell
Harvard University Press

When We Were Good traces the many and varied cultural influences on the folk revival of the sixties from early nineteenth-century blackface minstrelsy; the Jewish entertainment and political cultures of New York in the 1930s; the Almanac singers and the wartime crises of the 1940s; the watershed record album Folkways Anthology of American Folk Music; and finally to the cold-war reactionism of the 1950s. This drove the folk-song movement, just as Pete Seeger and the Weavers were putting "On Top of Old Smokey" and "Goodnight, Irene" on the Hit Parade, into a children's underground of schools, summer camps, and colleges, planting the seeds of the folk revival to come. The book is not so much a history as a study of the cultural process itself, what the author calls the dreamwork of history.

Cantwell shows how a body of music once enlisted on behalf of the labor movement, antifascism, New Deal recovery efforts, and many other progressive causes of the 1930s was refashioned as an instrument of self-discovery, even as it found a new politics and cultural style in the peace, civil rights, and beat movements. In Washington Square and the Newport Folk Festival, on college campuses and in concert halls across the country, the folk revival gave voice to the generational tidal wave of postwar youth, going back to the basics and trying to be very, very good.

In this capacious analysis of the ideologies, traditions, and personalities that created an extraordinary moment in American popular culture, Cantwell explores the idea of folk at the deepest level. Taking up some of the more obdurate problems in cultural studies--racial identity, art and politics, regional allegiances, class differences--he shows how the folk revival was a search for authentic democracy, with compelling lessons for our own time.

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Where Did Our Love Go?
The Rise and Fall of the Motown Sound
Nelson George. Foreword by Quincy Jones, Introduction by Robert Christgau.
University of Illinois Press, 2007
Nelson George's chronicle of Motown Records' rise and fall remains a classic account of an essential American music company and its dynamic founder Berry Gordy Jr.

Gordy's uncanny instinct for finding extraordinary talent--from performers and musicians to songwriters and producers—packed the label's roster with a who's who of historic artists and hitmakers. Here is the story of the Supremes and superstar Diana Ross, of the towering solo acts Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder, of vocal groups led by the Temptations and Four Tops, of the phenomenal Jackson Five and Michael Jackson, and of singer/songwriter and Motown executive Smokey Robinson. Up front about Gordy's manipulative and complex relationships with his artists, George reveals the inner workings of how Motown conducted its business. He also offers portraits of the Funk Brothers and other musicians who played the unforgettable songs.

George's preface shows how Motown influenced a later generation of young artists and music moguls, including R. Kelly, D'Angelo, Sean Combs, and Russell Simmons.

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Where the Devil Don't Stay
Traveling the South with the Drive-By Truckers
Stephen Deusner
University of Texas Press, 2021

In 1996, Patterson Hood recruited friends and fellow musicians in Athens, Georgia, to form his dream band: a group with no set lineup that specialized in rowdy rock and roll. The Drive-By Truckers, as they named themselves, grew into one of the best and most consequential rock bands of the twenty-first century, a great live act whose songs deliver the truth and nuance rarely bestowed on Southerners, so often reduced to stereotypes.

Where the Devil Don’t Stay tells the band’s unlikely story not chronologically but geographically. Seeing the Truckers’ albums as roadmaps through a landscape that is half-real, half-imagined, their fellow Southerner Stephen Deusner travels to the places the band’s members have lived in and written about. Tracking the band from Muscle Shoals, Alabama, to Richmond, Virginia, to the author’s hometown in McNairy County, Tennessee, Deusner explores the Truckers’ complex relationship to the South and the issues of class, race, history, and religion that run through their music. Drawing on new interviews with past and present band members, including Jason Isbell, Where the Devil Don’t Stay is more than the story of a great American band; it’s a reflection on the power of music and how it can frame and shape a larger culture.

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Wherever the Sound Takes You
Heroics and Heartbreak in Music Making
David Rowell
University of Chicago Press, 2019
David Rowell is a professional journalist and an impassioned amateur musician. He’s spent decades behind a drum kit, pondering the musical relationship between equipment and emotion. In Wherever the Sound Takes You, he explores the essence of music’s meaning with a vast spectrum of players, trying to understand their connection to their chosen instrument, what they’ve put themselves through for their music, and what they feel when they play.

This wide-ranging and openhearted book blossoms outward from there. Rowell visits clubs, concert halls, street corners, and open mics, traveling from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland to a death metal festival in Maryland, with stops along the way in the Swiss Alps and Appalachia. His keen reportorial eye treats us to in-depth portraits of musicians from platinum-selling legend Peter Frampton to a devout Christian who spends his days alone in a storage unit bashing away on one of the largest drum sets in the world. Rowell illuminates the feelings that both spur music’s creation and emerge from its performance, as well as the physical instruments that enables their expression. With an uncommon sensitivity and grace, he charts the pleasure and pain of musicians consumed with what they do—as all of us listen in.
 
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Whiskey River (Take My Mind)
The True Story of Texas Honky-Tonk
By Johnny Bush with Rick Mitchell
University of Texas Press, 2007

When it comes to Texas honky-tonk, nobody knows the music or the scene better than Johnny Bush. Author of Willie Nelson's classic concert anthem "Whiskey River," and singer of hits such as "You Gave Me a Mountain," "Undo the Right," "Jim, Jack and Rose," and "I'll Be There," Johnny Bush is a legend in country music, a singer-songwriter who has lived the cheatin', hurtin', hard-drinkin' life and recorded some of the most heart-wrenching songs about it. He has one of the purest honky-tonk voices ever to come out of Texas. And Bush's career has been just as dramatic as his songs—on the verge of achieving superstardom in the early 1970s, he was sidelined by a rare vocal disorder that he combated for thirty years. But, survivor that he is, Bush is once again filling dance halls across Texas and inspiring a new generation of musicians who crave the authenticity—the "pure D" country—that Johnny Bush has always had and that Nashville country music has lost.

In Whiskey River (Take My Mind), Johnny Bush tells the twin stories of his life and of Texas honky-tonk music. He recalls growing up poor in Houston's Kashmere Gardens neighborhood and learning his chops in honky-tonks around Houston and San Antonio—places where chicken wire protected the bandstand and deadly fights broke out regularly. Bush vividly describes life on the road in the 1960s as a band member for Ray Price and Willie Nelson, including the booze, drugs, and one-night stands that fueled his songs but destroyed his first three marriages. He remembers the time in the early 1970s when he was hotter than Willie and on the fast track to superstardom—until spasmodic dysphonia forced his career into the slow lane. Bush describes his agonizing, but ultimately successful struggle to keep performing and rebuild his fan base, as well as the hard-won happiness he has found in his personal life.

Woven throughout Bush's autobiography is the never-before-told story of Texas honky-tonk music, from Bob Wills and Floyd Tillman to Junior Brown and Pat Green. Johnny Bush has known almost all the great musicians, past and present, and he has wonderful stories to tell. Likewise, he offers shrewd observations on how the music business has changed since he started performing in the 1950s—and pulls no punches in saying how Nashville music has lost its country soul. For everyone who loves genuine country music, Johnny Bush, Willie Nelson, and stories of triumph against all odds, Whiskey River (Take My Mind) is a must-read.

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Whisper Not
The Autobiography of Benny Golson
Benny Golson
Temple University Press, 2016

One of the greatest artists our country has is Benny Golson. He is not only a great musician, but an original and fabulous composer. He is inventive and creative and his work is loved the world over. Benny is a rare, creative genius. All I would like to say is THREE CHEERS for Benny Golson!”—Tony Bennett

Composer supreme, tenor man supreme, jazz man supreme, good guy supreme: that’s BENNY GOLSON!"—Sonny Rollins

Born during the de facto inaugural era of jazz, saxophonist Benny Golson learned his instrument and the vocabulary of jazz alongside John Coltrane while Golson was still in high school in Philadelphia. Quickly establishing himself as an iconic fixture on the jazz landscape, Golson performed with dozens of jazz greats, from Sonny Rollins, Coleman Hawkins, and Jimmy Heath to Dizzy Gillespie, Freddie Hubbard, and many others. An acclaimed composer, Golson also wrote music for Hollywood films and television and composed such memorable jazz standards as “Stablemates,” “Killer Joe,” and “Whisper Not.”

An eloquent account of Golson’s exceptional life—presented episodically rather than chronologically—Whisper Not includes a dazzling collection of anecdotes, memories, experiences, and photographs that recount the successes, the inevitable failures, and the rewards of a life eternally dedicated to jazz.

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Who Got the Camera?
A History of Rap and Reality
Eric Harvey
University of Texas Press, 2021

Reality first appeared in the late 1980s—in the sense not of real life but rather of the TV entertainment genre inaugurated by shows such as Cops and America’s Most Wanted; the daytime gabfests of Geraldo, Oprah, and Donahue; and the tabloid news of A Current Affair. In a bracing work of cultural criticism, Eric Harvey argues that reality TV emerged in dialog with another kind of entertainment that served as its foil while borrowing its techniques: gangsta rap. Or, as legendary performers Ice Cube and Ice-T called it, “reality rap.”

Reality rap and reality TV were components of a cultural revolution that redefined popular entertainment as a truth-telling medium. Reality entertainment borrowed journalistic tropes but was undiluted by the caveats and context that journalism demanded. While N.W.A.’s “Fuck tha Police” countered Cops’ vision of Black lives in America, the reality rappers who emerged in that group’s wake, such as Snoop Doggy Dogg and Tupac Shakur, embraced reality’s visceral tabloid sensationalism, using the media's obsession with Black criminality to collapse the distinction between image and truth. Reality TV and reality rap nurtured the world we live in now, where politics and basic facts don’t feel real until they have been translated into mass-mediated entertainment.

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Who Killed Cock Robin?
British Folk Songs of Crime and Punishment
Stephen Sedley and Martin Carthy
Reaktion Books, 2021
Now in paperback, an entertaining and enlightening compendium at the intersection of two great British folk traditions: song and encounters with the law.
 
At the heart of traditional songs rest the concerns of ordinary people. And folk throughout the centuries have found themselves entangled with the law: abiding by it, breaking it, and being caught and punished by it. Who Killed Cock Robin? is an anthology of just such songs compiled by one of Britain’s most senior judges, Stephen Sedley, and best-loved folk singers, Martin Carthy. The songs collected here are drawn from manuscripts, broadsides, and oral tradition. They are grouped according to the various categories of crime and punishment, from Poaching to the Gallows. Each section contains a historical introduction, and every song is presented with a melody, lyrics, and an illuminating commentary that explores its origins and sources. Together, they present unique, sometimes comic, often tragic, and always colorful insight into the past, while preserving an important body of song for future generations.
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Who Put the Rainbow in The Wizard of Oz?
Yip Harburg, Lyricist
Harold Meyerson and Ernie Harburg
University of Michigan Press, 1995
". . . required reading for anyone interested in the great American songs."-New York Times Book Review
Many of us can sing along with Dorothy when she imagines a place "Over the Rainbow." And we all remember the Depression-era classic "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" But very few can name the man who put the words to these celebrated hallmarks of American music- Yip Harburg. Five hundred songs spanning a fifty-year career bear witness to the brilliance of this until-now obscure figure.
Plunge into this scrupulously documented volume and discover how Harburg, once a poet of light verse, played a major role in the transformation of the Broadway revue into the sophisticated musical of the 1940s and 1950s. With extensive and exclusive interviews and lyrical analysis, the authors capture Harburg's wit, distinctive voice, and creative and collaborative methods.
Inquiry into Harburg's Jewish, New York City roots, apprenticeship in his craft, and involvement in the radical politics of the 1930s- he was blacklisted in the 1950s- puts into context the seemingly irreconcilable skepticism and optimism that contoured this lyrical genius's life and work.
Harold Meyerson is Executive Editor and chief political columnist, L.A. Weekly, and is on the editorial board of Dissent. Ernie Harburg is a social psychologist and epidemiologist at the University of Michigan, coauthor (with Bernard Rosenberg) of The Broadway Musical: Collaboration in Commerce and Art, and Yip Harburg's son.
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"The Whorehouse Bells Were Ringing" and Other Songs Cowboys Sing
Collected and edited by Guy Logsdon
University of Illinois Press, 1995
Think cowboys croon lullabies to cattle at night? Not exactly. Whether 'round the campfire or in the barroom, cowboys love a lusty chorus of the kinds of songs their mothers never taught them. Guy Logsdon painstakingly sought out, listened to, and recorded the bawdy songs of America's real working cowboys. Honest and hilarious songs ranging from "Little Joe, the Wrangler" to "Boring for Oil" and "Old Man's Lament" reveal an affection for humor--sometimes crude, sometimes clever--as well as an affable warts-and-all view of human nature.

Winner of the Westerners International Co-Founders Awards of the Western History Association, 1990.
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Whose National Music?
Identity, Mestizaje, and Migration in Ecuador
Ketty Wong
Temple University Press, 2012

Musical genres, musical instruments, and even songs can often capture the essence of a country's national character. In Whose National Music?, the first book-length study of Ecuadorian popular music, Ketty Wong explores Ecuadorians' views of their national identity in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries through an examination of the music labels they use. Wong deftly addresses the notion of música nacional, an umbrella term for Ecuadorian popular songs often defined by the socio-economic, ethnic, racial, and generational background of people discussing the music.

Wong shows how the inclusion or exclusion of elite and working-class musics within the scope of música nacional articulate different social, ethnic, and racial configurations of the nation for white, mestizo, indigenous, and Afro-Ecuadorian populations.

Presenting a macropicture of what música nacional is—or should be—Whose National Music? provides a lively historical trajectory of a country's diverse musical scene.

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Why Bushwick Bill Matters
By Charles L. Hughes
University of Texas Press, 2021

In 1989 the Geto Boys released a blistering track, “Size Ain’t Shit,” that paid tribute to the group’s member Bushwick Bill. Born with dwarfism, Bill was one of the few visibly disabled musicians to achieve widespread fame and one of the even fewer to address disability in a direct, sustained manner. Initially hired as a dancer, Bill became central to the Geto Boys as the Houston crew became one of hip-hop’s most important groups.

Why Bushwick Bill Matters chronicles this crucial artist and explores what he reveals about the relationships among race, sex, and disability in pop music. Charles L. Hughes examines Bill's recordings and videos (both with the Geto Boys and solo), from the horror-comic persona of “Chuckie” to vulnerable verses in songs such as “Mind Playing Tricks On Me,” to discuss his portrayals of dwarfism, addiction, and mental illness. Hughes also explores Bill’s importance to his era and to the longer history of disability in music. A complex figure, Bill exposed the truths of a racist and ableist society even as his violent and provocative lyrics put him in the middle of debates over censorship and misogyny. Confrontational and controversial, Bushwick Bill left a massive legacy as he rhymed and swaggered through an often-inaccessible world.

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Why Karen Carpenter Matters
By Karen Tongson
University of Texas Press, 2019

In the '60s and '70s, America's music scene was marked by raucous excess, reflected in the tragic overdoses of young superstars such as Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. At the same time, the uplifting harmonies and sunny lyrics that propelled Karen Carpenter and her brother, Richard, to international fame belied a different sort of tragedy—the underconsumption that led to Karen's death at age thirty-two from the effects of an eating disorder.

In Why Karen Carpenter Matters, Karen Tongson (whose Filipino musician parents named her after the pop icon) interweaves the story of the singer’s rise to fame with her own trans-Pacific journey between the Philippines—where imitations of American pop styles flourished—and Karen Carpenter’s home ground of Southern California. Tongson reveals why the Carpenters' chart-topping, seemingly whitewashed musical fantasies of "normal love" can now have profound significance for her—as well as for other people of color, LGBT+ communities, and anyone outside the mainstream culture usually associated with Karen Carpenter’s legacy. This hybrid of memoir and biography excavates the destructive perfectionism at the root of the Carpenters’ sound, while finding the beauty in the singer's all too brief life.

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Why Labelle Matters
By Adele Bertei
University of Texas Press, 2021

Finalist, 2022 Lesbian Memoir/Biography, Lambda Literary Award for Arts and Culture 

Crafting a legacy all their own, the reinvented Labelle subverted the “girl group” aesthetic to invoke the act’s Afrofuturist spirit and make manifest their vision of Black womanhood.


Performing as the Bluebelles in the 1960s, Patti LaBelle, Nona Hendryx, and Sarah Dash wore bouffant wigs and chiffon dresses, and they harmonized vocals like many other girl groups of the era. After a decade on the Chitlin Circuit, however, they were ready to write their own material, change their name, and deliver—as Labelle—an electrifyingly celestial sound and styling that reached a crescendo with a legendary performance at the Metropolitan Opera House to celebrate the release of Nightbirds and its most well-known track, “Lady Marmalade.” In Why Labelle Matters, Adele Bertei tells the story of the group that sang the opening aria of Afrofuturism and proclaimed a new theology of musical liberation for women, people of color, and LGBTQ people across the globe.

With sumptuous and galactic costumes, genre-bending lyrics, and stratospheric vocals, Labelle’s out-of-this-world performances changed the course of pop music and made them the first Black group to grace the cover of Rolling Stone. Why Labelle Matters, informed by interviews with members of the group as well as Bertei’s own experience as a groundbreaking musician, is the first cultural assessment of this transformative act.

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Why Lhasa de Sela Matters
By Fred Goodman
University of Texas Press, 2019

An artist in every sense of the word, Lhasa de Sela wowed audiences around the globe with her multilingual songs and spellbinding performances, mixing together everything from Gypsy music to Mexican rancheras, Americana and jazz, chanson française, and South American folk melodies. In Canada, her album La Llorona won the Juno Award and went gold, and its follow-up, The Living Road, won a BBC World Music Award. Tragically, de Sela succumbed to breast cancer in 2010 at the age of thirty-seven after recording her final album, Lhasa.

Tracing de Sela’s unconventional life and introducing her to a new generation, Why Lhasa de Sela Matters is the first biography of this sophisticated creative icon. Raised in a hippie family traveling between the United States and Mexico in a converted school bus, de Sela developed an unquenchable curiosity, with equal affinities for the romantic, mystic, and cerebral. Becoming a sensation in Montreal and Europe, the trilingual singer rejected a conventional path to fame, joining her sisters’ circus troupe in France. Revealing the details of these and other experiences that inspired de Sela to write such vibrant, otherworldly music, Why Lhasa de Sela Matters sings with the spirit of this gifted firebrand.

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Why Mariah Carey Matters
Andrew Chan
University of Texas Press, 2023

The first book to critically examine the legacy of pop superstar Mariah Carey.

When it comes to Mariah Carey, star power is never in doubt. She has sold hundreds of millions of albums and cut more chart-topping hits than any other solo artist—ever. And she has that extraordinary five-octave vocal range. But there is more to her legacy than eye-popping numbers.

Why Mariah Carey Matters examines the creative evolution and complicated biography of a true diva, making the case that, despite her celebrity, Carey’s musicianship and influence are insufficiently appreciated. A pioneering songwriter and producer, Carey pairs her vocal gifts with intimate lyrics and richly layered sonic details. In the mid-1990s, she perfected a blend of pop, hip-hop, and R&B with songs such as “Fantasy” and “Honey” and drew from her turbulent life to create the introspective masterpiece Butterfly. Andrew Chan looks beyond Carey’s glamorous persona to explore her experience as a mixed-race woman in show business, her adventurous forays into house music and gospel, and her appeal to multiple generations of queer audiences. He also reckons with the transcendent ideal of the voice that Carey represents, showing how this international icon taught artists around the world to sing with soul-shaking intensity and a spirit of innovation.

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Why Marianne Faithfull Matters
By Tanya Pearson
University of Texas Press, 2021

First as a doe-eyed ingénue with “As Tears Go By,” then as a gravel-voiced phoenix rising from the ashes of the 1960s with a landmark punk album, Broken English, and finally as a genre-less icon, Marianne Faithfull carved her name into the history of rock ’n’ roll to chart a career spanning five decades and multiple detours. In Why Marianne Faithfull Matters, Tanya Pearson crafts a feminist account that explains the musician’s absence from the male-dominated history of the British Invasion and champions the eclectic late career that confirmed her redemption.

Putting memoir on equal footing with biographical history, Pearson writes about Faithfull as an avid fan, recovered addict, and queer musician at a crossroads. She’s also a professional historian unafraid to break from the expectations of the discipline if a “titty-centered analysis” or astrology can illuminate the work of her subject. Whether exploring Faithfull’s rise to celebrity, her drug addiction and fall from grace as spurned “muse,” or her reinvention as a sober, soulful chanteuse subverting all expectations for an aging woman in music, Pearson affirms the deep connections between listeners and creators and reveals, in her own particular way, why Marianne Faithfull matters.

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The Why of Music
Dialogues in an Unexplored Region of Appreciation
Donald N. Ferguson
University of Minnesota Press, 1969

The Why of Music was first published in 1969. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

In his many tears of teaching and writing about music Professor Ferguson has given much thought to the question of the why of music — why does music affect us as it does, why are we deeply moved by some music by not by other music, what is it about music that "sends" us, and where does it send us? In this book he explores such questions in depth and provides intriguing answers. The discussions are presented in the form of dialogues between the author and several friends.

As Professor Ferguson explains, the book is intended to take the reader on a guided tour, a tour which follows, in part, the familiar roads of formal music appreciation but which leads more often into byways where, almost hidden by the brilliant Hows that line the more familiar roads, lurks the essential Why of music. He describes this Why as the fertilizing commerce between music and human experience—a portrayal, not of the tangible facts of experience, but of the concern aroused by our encounter with those facts. He explains that while avant-garde abstractionism is concerned only with music as art—a concern too specialized for the general music lover to grasp and too narrow to sustain interest—the Why of enduring music lies in its endeavor to portray experience as it lives in Everyman's mind.

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Why Patti Smith Matters
Caryn Rose
University of Texas Press, 2022

Patti Smith arrived in New York City at the end of the Age of Aquarius in search of work and purpose. What she found—what she fostered—was a cultural revolution. Through her poetry, her songs, her unapologetic vocal power, and her very presence as a woman fronting a rock band, she kicked open a door that countless others walked through. No other musician has better embodied the “nothing-to-hide” rawness of punk, nor has any other done more to nurture a place in society for misfits of every stripe.

Why Patti Smith Matters is the first book about the iconic artist written by a woman. The veteran music journalist Caryn Rose contextualizes Smith’s creative work, her influence, and her wide-ranging and still-evolving impact on rock and roll, visual art, and the written word. Rose goes deep into Smith’s oeuvre, from her first album, Horses, to acclaimed memoirs operating at a surprising remove from her music. The portrait of a ceaseless inventor, Why Patti Smith Matters rescues punk’s poet laureate from “strong woman” clichés. Of course Smith is strong. She is also a nuanced thinker. A maker of beautiful and challenging things. A transformative artist who has not simply entertained but also empowered millions.

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Why Sinéad O'Connor Matters
Allyson McCabe
University of Texas Press, 2023

A stirring defense of Sinéad O’Connor’s music and activism, and an indictment of the culture that cancelled her.

In 1990, Sinéad O’Connor’s video for “Nothing Compares 2 U” turned her into a superstar. Two years later, an appearance on Saturday Night Live turned her into a scandal. For many people—including, for years, the author—what they knew of O’Connor stopped there. Allyson McCabe believes it’s time to reassess our old judgments about Sinéad O’Connor and to expose the machinery that built her up and knocked her down.

Addressing triumph and struggle, sound and story, Why Sinéad O’Connor Matters argues that its subject has been repeatedly manipulated and misunderstood by a culture that is often hostile to women who speak their minds (in O’Connor’s case, by shaving her head, championing rappers, and tearing up a picture of the pope on live television). McCabe details O’Connor’s childhood abuse, her initial success, and the backlash against her radical politics without shying away from the difficult issues her career raises. She compares O’Connor to Madonna, another superstar who challenged the Catholic Church, and Prince, who wrote her biggest hit and allegedly assaulted her. A journalist herself, McCabe exposes how the media distorts not only how we see O’Connor but how we see ourselves, and she weighs the risks of telling a story that hits close to home.

In an era when popular understanding of mental health has improved and the public eagerly celebrates feminist struggles of the past, it can be easy to forget how O’Connor suffered for being herself. This is the book her admirers and defenders have been waiting for.

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Why Sinéad O'Connor Matters
Allyson McCabe
University of Texas Press, 2023

A stirring defense of Sinéad O’Connor’s music and activism, and an indictment of the culture that cancelled her.

In 1990, Sinéad O’Connor’s video for “Nothing Compares 2 U” turned her into a superstar. Two years later, an appearance on Saturday Night Live turned her into a scandal. For many people—including, for years, the author—what they knew of O’Connor stopped there. Allyson McCabe believes it’s time to reassess our old judgments about Sinéad O’Connor and to expose the machinery that built her up and knocked her down.

Addressing triumph and struggle, sound and story, Why Sinéad O’Connor Matters argues that its subject has been repeatedly manipulated and misunderstood by a culture that is often hostile to women who speak their minds (in O’Connor’s case, by shaving her head, championing rappers, and tearing up a picture of the pope on live television). McCabe details O’Connor’s childhood abuse, her initial success, and the backlash against her radical politics without shying away from the difficult issues her career raises. She compares O’Connor to Madonna, another superstar who challenged the Catholic Church, and Prince, who wrote her biggest hit and allegedly assaulted her. A journalist herself, McCabe exposes how the media distorts not only how we see O’Connor but how we see ourselves, and she weighs the risks of telling a story that hits close to home.

In an era when popular understanding of mental health has improved and the public eagerly celebrates feminist struggles of the past, it can be easy to forget how O’Connor suffered for being herself. This is the book her admirers and defenders have been waiting for.

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Why Solange Matters
By Stephanie Phillips
University of Texas Press, 2021

Growing up in the shadow of her superstar sister, Solange Knowles became a pivotal musician in her own right. Defying an industry that attempted to bend her to its rigid image of a Black woman, Solange continually experimented with her sound and embarked on a metamorphosis in her art that continues to this day.

In Why Solange Matters, Stephanie Phillips chronicles the creative journey of an artist who became a beloved voice for the Black Lives Matter generation. A Black feminist punk musician herself, Phillips addresses not only the unpredictable trajectory of Solange Knowles's career but also how she and other Black women see themselves through the musician's repertoire. First, she traces Solange’s progress through an inflexible industry, charting the artist’s development up to 2016, when the release of her third album, A Seat at the Table, redefined her career. Then, with A Seat at the Table and 2019’s When I Get Home, Phillips describes how Solange embraced activism, anger, Black womanhood, and intergenerational trauma to inform her remarkable art. Why Solange Matters not only cements the place of its subject in the pantheon of world-changing twenty-first century musicians, it introduces its writer as an important new voice.

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Why Tammy Wynette Matters
Steacy Easton
University of Texas Press, 2023

How Tammy Wynette channeled the conflicts of her life into her music and performance.

With hits such as “Stand By Your Man” and “Golden Ring,” Tammy Wynette was an icon of American domesticity and femininity. But there were other sides to the first lady of country. Steacy Easton places the complications of Wynette’s music and her biography in sharp-edged relief, exploring how she made her sometimes-tumultuous life into her work, a transformation that was itself art.

Wynette created a persona of high femininity to match the themes she sang about—fawning devotion, redemption in heterosexual romance, the heartbreak of loneliness. Behind the scenes, her life was marked by persistent class anxieties; despite wealth and fame, she kept her beautician’s license. Easton argues that the struggle to meet expectations of southernness, womanhood, and southern womanhood, finds subtle expression in Wynette’s performance of “Apartment #9”—and it’s because of these vocal subtleties that it came to be called the saddest song ever written. Wynette similarly took on elements of camp and political critique in her artistry, demonstrating an underappreciated genius. Why Tammy Wynette Matters reveals a musician who doubled back on herself, her façade of earnestness cracked by a melodrama that weaponized femininity and upended feminist expectations, while scoring twenty number-one hits.

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Why the Beach Boys Matter
By Tom Smucker
University of Texas Press, 2018

Of all the white American pop music groups that hit the charts before the Beatles, only the Beach Boys continued to thrive throughout the British Invasion to survive into the 1970s and beyond. The Beach Boys helped define both sides of the era we broadly call the sixties, split between their early surf, car, and summer pop and their later hippie, counterculture, and ambitious rock. No other group can claim the Ronettes and the Four Seasons as early 1960s rivals; the Mamas and the Papas and Crosby, Stills and Nash as later 1960s rivals; and the Beatles and the Temptations as decade-spanning counterparts.

This is the first book to take an honest look at the themes running through the Beach Boys’ art and career as a whole and to examine where they sit inside our culture and politics—and why they still grab our attention.

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Why the Grateful Dead Matter
Michael Benson
University Press of New England, 2016
In Why the Grateful Dead Matter, veteran writer and lifelong Deadhead Michael Benson argues that the Grateful Dead are not simply a successful rock-and-roll band but a phenomenon central to American culture. He defends the proposition that the Grateful Dead are, in fact, a musical movement as transformative as any -ism in the artistic history of this century and the last. And a lot more fun than most. From the street festivals of Haight-Ashbury to the cross-country acid tests with the Merry Pranksters, and from the sound-and-light show at the Great Pyramid at Giza to the ecstatic outpouring of joy at Soldier Field in the summer of ’15, the Grateful Dead have been at the center of American life, music, and karmic flow for fifty years. In Why the Grateful Dead Matter, Michael Benson brings it all back to life and makes a compelling case for the band’s lasting cultural importance.
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Why the Ramones Matter
By Donna Gaines
University of Texas Press, 2018

The central experience of the Ramones and their music is of being an outsider, an outcast, a person who’s somehow defective, and the revolt against shame and self-loathing. The fans, argues Donna Gaines, got it right away, from their own experience of alienation at home, at school, on the streets, and from themselves. This sense of estrangement and marginality permeates everything the Ramones still offer us as artists, and as people. Why the Ramones Matter compellingly makes the case that the Ramones gave us everything; they saved rock and roll, modeled DIY ethics, and addressed our deepest collective traumas, from the personal to the historical.

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Why Willie Mae Thornton Matters
Lynnée Denise
University of Texas Press, 2023

Finalist, 2024 Lesbian Memoir/Biography, Lambda Literary Award for Arts and Culture 

A queer, Black “biography in essays” about the performer who gave us “Hound Dog,” “Ball and Chain,” and other songs that changed the course of American music.

Born in Alabama in 1926, raised in the church, appropriated by white performers, buried in an indigent’s grave—Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton's life events epitomize the blues—but Lynnée Denise pushes past the stereotypes to read Thornton’s life through a Black, queer, feminist lens and reveal an artist who was an innovator across her four-decade-long career.

Why Willie Mae Thornton Matters “samples” elements of Thornton’s art—and, occasionally, the author’s own story—to create “a biography in essays” that explores the life of its subject as a DJ might dig through a crate of records. Denise connects Thornton’s vaudevillesque performances in Sammy Green’s Hot Harlem Revue to the vocal improvisations that made “Hound Dog” a hit for Peacock Records (and later for Elvis Presley), injecting music criticism into what’s often framed as a cautionary tale of record-industry racism. She interprets Thornton’s performing in men’s suits as both a sly, Little Richard–like queering of the Chitlin Circuit and a simple preference for pants over dresses that didn’t have a pocket for her harmonica. Most radical of all, she refers to her subject by her given name rather than "Big Mama," a nickname bestowed upon her by a white man. It's a deliberate and crucial act of reclamation, because in the name of Willie Mae Thornton is the sound of Black musical resilience.

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Wilbur's Poetry
Music in a Scattering Time
Bruce Michelson
University of Massachusetts Press, 2009
Poet laureate of the United States, two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, chancellor of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, recipient of the Bollingen Prize, the Prix de Rome, and many other major honors, Richard Wilbur has been a central figure in American literature since World War II. Yet commentary about his poetry has been sparse. In this book, Bruce Michelson brings to Wilbur's achievement the close critical attention it deserves.

The first extended study of Wilbur's work in twenty-five years, Wilbur's Poetry explores the light poems, the darker mediations, the brilliant translations of Moliere and Racine, as well as the risks Wilbur has taken as an artist. There are chapters on Wilbur's unique use of language and his response to a vast poetic heritage, on form and closure and their thematic implications, and of Wilbur's place as a poet in a complex and "scattering" time.
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Wild Songs, Sweet Songs
The Albanian Epic in the Collections of Milman Parry and Albert B. Lord
Nicola Scaldaferri
Harvard University Press, 2021

In the 1930s, Milman Parry and Albert B. Lord, two pioneering scholars of oral poetry, conducted adventurous fieldwork in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and northern Albania, collecting singularly important examples of Albanian epic song. Wild Songs, Sweet Songs presents these materials, which have not previously been published, for the first time.

Nicola Scaldaferri and his collaborators provide a complete catalogue of the Albanian texts and recordings collected by Parry and Lord; a selection of twelve of the most significant texts, including the longest Albanian epic ever collected, in Albanian with accompanying English translations; four essays contextualizing the materials and outlining their significance; and an assortment of related photographs and documents. The book is an authoritative guide to one of the most significant collections of Balkan folk epic in existence.

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William Grant Still
Catherine Parsons Smith
University of Illinois Press, 2008
Once called the dean of African American composers, William Grant Still created a unique version of musical modernism that influenced commercial music, symphonic music, and opera. The acclaimed and enormously popular Afro-American Symphony, like many of his works, drew on Black American musical heritage, and Still was the first Black composer to have his work performed by a major symphony orchestra.

Catherine Parsons Smith’s biography tracks the composer's interrelated careers in popular and concert music. Still’s artistic journey took him from conservatory study with George W. Chadwick to collaborating with Langston Hughes, working as a commercial arranger and composer on Broadway and radio, arranging for artists like Sophie Tucker and Artie Shaw, and serving as the recording director for the first Black-owned record label. But despite his prolific production and multidimensional talents, Still endured financial struggles and declining attention to his work.

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William Kentridge
Being Led by the Nose
Jane Taylor
University of Chicago Press, 2017
South African artist William Kentridge’s drawings, films, books, installations, and collaborations with opera and theater companies have established him as a world-class star in contemporary art, media, and theater. In 2010, and again in 2013, he staged Dmitri Shostakovich’s The Nose at the Metropolitan Opera; after the premiere, the New York Times noted that “Kentridge, who directed this production, helped design the sets and created the videos that animate the staging, received the heartiest bravos.” In this book, Jane Taylor, Kentridge’s friend and frequent collaborator, invites us to take an extraordinary behind-the-scenes look at his work for the show.

Kentridge has long been admired for his unconventional use of conventional media to produce art that is stunning, evocative, and narratively powerful—and how he works is as important as what he creates. This book is more than just a simple record of The Nose. The opera serves as a springboard into a bracing conversation about how Kentridge’s methods serve his unique mode of expression as a narrative and political artist. Taylor draws on his etchings, sculptures, and drawings to render visible the communication that occurs between his mind and hand as he thinks through the activity of making. Beautifully illustrated in color, William Kentridge offers striking insights about one of the most innovative artists of our present moment.
 
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William L. Dawson
Gwynne Kuhner Brown
University of Illinois Press, 2024
William L. Dawson is recognized for his genre-defining choral spirituals and for his Negro Folk Symphony, a masterpiece enjoying a twenty-first-century renaissance. Gwynne Kuhner Brown’s engaging and tirelessly researched biography reintroduces a musical leader whose legacy is more important today than ever.

Born in 1899, Dawson studied at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. He worked as a church, jazz, and orchestral musician in Kansas City and Chicago in the 1920s while continuing his education as a composer. He then joined the Tuskegee faculty, where for 25 years he led the Tuskegee Institute Choir to national prominence through performances of spirituals at the opening of Radio City Music Hall, on radio and television, and at the White House. The Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Leopold Stokowski premiered Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony in 1934.

Engaging and long overdue, William L. Dawson celebrates a pioneering Black composer whose contributions to African American music, history, and education inspire performers and audiences to this day.

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William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock 'n' Roll
By Casey Rae
University of Texas Press, 2019

William S. Burroughs's fiction and essays are legendary, but his influence on music's counterculture has been less well documented—until now. Examining how one of America's most controversial literary figures altered the destinies of many notable and varied musicians, William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock 'n' Roll reveals the transformations in music history that can be traced to Burroughs.

A heroin addict and a gay man, Burroughs rose to notoriety outside the conventional literary world; his masterpiece, Naked Lunch, was banned on the grounds of obscenity, but its nonlinear structure was just as daring as its content. Casey Rae brings to life Burroughs's parallel rise to fame among daring musicians of the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, when it became a rite of passage to hang out with the author or to experiment with his cut-up techniques for producing revolutionary lyrics (as the Beatles and Radiohead did). Whether they tell of him exploring the occult with David Bowie, providing Lou Reed with gritty depictions of street life, or counseling Patti Smith about coping with fame, the stories of Burroughs's backstage impact will transform the way you see America's cultural revolution—and the way you hear its music.

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The Williamsburg Avant-Garde
Experimental Music and Sound on the Brooklyn Waterfront
Cisco Bradley
Duke University Press, 2023
In The Williamsburg Avant-Garde Cisco Bradley chronicles the rise and fall of the underground music and art scene in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn between the late 1980s and the early 2010s. Drawing on interviews, archival collections, musical recordings, videos, photos, and other ephemera, Bradley explores the scene’s social, cultural, and economic dynamics. Building on the neighborhood’s punk DIY approach and aesthetic, Williamsburg's free jazz, postpunk, and noise musicians and groups---from Mary Halvorson, Zs, and Nate Wooley to Matana Roberts, Peter Evans, and Darius Jones---produced shows in a variety of unlicensed venues as well as in clubs and cafes. At the same time, pirate radio station free103point9 and music festivals made Williamsburg an epicenter of New York’s experimental culture. In 2005, New York’s rezoning act devastated the community as gentrification displaced its participants farther afield in Brooklyn and in Queens. With this portrait of Williamsburg, Bradley not only documents some of the most vital music of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries; he helps readers better understand the formation, vibrancy, and life span of experimental music and art scenes everywhere.
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Wisconsin Riffs
Jazz Profiles from the Heartland
Kurt Dietrich
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2018
An extensive, upbeat compilation of Wisconsin’s jazz musicians

Although New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago are often considered the epicenters of American jazz, this extensive, upbeat compilation of jazz musician biographies details Wisconsin’s rich association the genre since its  the inception of the genre in the early 1900s. Iconic musicians Bunny Berigan, Woody Herman, Les Paul, and Al Jarreau all hailed from Wisconsin, as have many other influential players, composers, and teachers. Wisconsin Riffs features these musicians side-by-side—from the world-renowned to obscure regional artists—to portray a comprehensive history of jazz in Wisconsin.

Through meticulous research and more than a hundred interviews, author Kurt Dietrich has assembled a group of musicians who represent a wide range of backgrounds, ages, stylistic schools, and experiences—from leaders of swing-era big bands to legendary Wisconsin Conservatory instructors to today’s up-and-coming practitioners of contemporary jazz and jazz rock. For aspiring musicians, jazz enthusiasts, and fans of Wisconsin culture alike, Wisconsin Riffs presents a compelling, complex, and multi-layered concoction—just like jazz itself.
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Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
A Biography
Piero Melograni
University of Chicago Press, 2006

This year marks the 250th anniversary of the birth of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, one of the most enduringly popular and celebrated composers to have ever lived. His substantial oeuvre contains works that are considered to be among the most exquisite pieces of symphonic, chamber, and choral music ever written. His operas too cast a long shadow over those staged in their wake. And since his untimely death in 1791, he remains an enigmatic figure—the subject of fascination for aficionados and novices alike. 

Piero Melograni here offers a wholly readable account of Mozart’s remarkable life and times. This masterful biography proceeds from the young Mozart’s earliest years as a Wunderkind—the child prodigy who traveled with his family to perform concerts throughout Europe—to his formative years in Vienna, where he fully absorbed the artistic and intellectual spirit of the Enlightenment, to his deathbed, his unfinished Requiem, and the mystery that still surrounds his burial. Melograni’s deft use of Mozart’s letters throughout confers authority and vitality to his recounting, and his expertise brings Mozart’s eighteenth-century milieu evocatively to life. Written with a gifted historian’s flair for narrative and unencumbered by specialized analyses of Mozart’s music, Melograni’s is the most vivid and enjoyable biography available.

At a time when music lovers around the world are paying honor to Mozart and his legacy, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart will be welcomed by his enthusiasts—or anyone wishing to peer into the mind of one of the greatest composers ever known. 

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Woman Walk the Line
How the Women in Country Music Changed Our Lives
By Holly Gleason
University of Texas Press, 2017

Full-tilt, hardcore, down-home, and groundbreaking, the women of country music speak volumes with every song. From Maybelle Carter to Dolly Parton, k.d. lang to Taylor Swift—these artists provided pivot points, truths, and doses of courage for women writers at every stage of their lives. Whether it’s Rosanne Cash eulogizing June Carter Cash or a seventeen-year-old Taylor Swift considering the golden glimmer of another precocious superstar, Brenda Lee, it’s the humanity beneath the music that resonates.

Here are deeply personal essays from award-winning writers on femme fatales, feminists, groundbreakers, and truth tellers. Acclaimed historian Holly George Warren captures the spark of the rockabilly sensation Wanda Jackson; Entertainment Weekly’s Madison Vain considers Loretta Lynn’s girl-power anthem “The Pill”; and rocker Grace Potter embraces Linda Ronstadt’s unabashed visual and musical influence. Patty Griffin acts like a balm on a post-9/11 survivor on the run; Emmylou Harris offers a gateway through paralyzing grief; and Lucinda Williams proves that greatness is where you find it.

Part history, part confessional, and part celebration of country, Americana, and bluegrass and the women who make them, Woman Walk the Line is a very personal collection of essays from some of America’s most intriguing women writers. It speaks to the ways in which artists mark our lives at different ages and in various states of grace and imperfection—and ultimately how music transforms not just the person making it, but also the listener.

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Women and Music in Cross-Cultural Perspective
Edited by Ellen Koskoff
University of Illinois Press, 1989
"The past fifteen years have been a time of intense scholarly interest in women, resulting in an explosion of literature that has begun to reveal the overriding effects of gender on other cultural domains. Affecting all aspects of culture, issues of sexuality, gender-related behaviors, and inter-gender relations also have profound implications for music performance. This volume represents an introduction to the field of women, music, and culture and in no way attempts to be comprehensive in its coverage nor conclusive in its implications. For example, Western classical music is not discussed here, many large world areas are not covered, nor does this volume present a comprehensive survey of all recent developments in feminist-oriented anthropology. What these essays do share is a focus on women's culture identity and musical activity, either in socially isolated performance environments or within the public arenas shared by their male counterparts."--From the preface
 
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Women and Music in the Age of Austen
Linda Zionkowski
Bucknell University Press, 2024
Women and Music in the Age of Austen highlights the central role women played in musical performance, composition, reception, and representation, and analyzes its formative and lasting effect on Georgian culture. This interdisciplinary collection of essays from musicology, literary studies, and gender studies challenges the conventional historical categories that marginalize women’s experience from Austen’s time. Contesting the distinctions between professional and amateur musicians, public and domestic sites of musical production, and performers and composers of music, the contributors reveal how women’s widespread involvement in the Georgian musical scene allowed for self-expression, artistic influence, and access to communities that transcended the boundaries of gender, class, and nationality. This volume’s breadth of focus advances our understanding of a period that witnessed a musical flourishing, much of it animated by female hands and voices.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.


 
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Women and Musical Salons in the Enlightenment
Rebecca Cypess
University of Chicago Press, 2022
A study of musical salons in Europe and North America between 1760 and 1800 and the salon hostesses who shaped their musical worlds.

In eighteenth-century Europe and America, musical salons—and the women who hosted and made music in them—played a crucial role in shaping their cultural environments. Musical salons served as a testing ground for new styles, genres, and aesthetic ideals, and they acted as a mediating force, bringing together professional musicians and their audiences of patrons, listeners, and performers. For the salonnière, the musical salon offered a space between the public and private spheres that allowed her to exercise cultural agency.

In this book, musicologist and historical keyboardist Rebecca Cypess offers a broad overview of musical salons between 1760 and 1800, placing the figure of the salonnière at its center. Cypess then presents a series of in-depth case studies that meet the salonnière on her own terms. Women such as Anne-Louise Brillon de Jouy in Paris, Marianna Martines in Vienna, Sara Levy in Berlin, Angelica Kauffman in Rome, and Elizabeth Graeme in Philadelphia come to life in multidimensional ways. Crucially, Cypess uses performance as a tool for research, and her interpretations draw on her experience with the instruments and performance practices used in eighteenth-century salons. In this accessible, interdisciplinary book, Cypess explores women’s agency and authorship, reason and sentiment, and the roles of performing, collecting, listening, and conversing in the formation of eighteenth-century musical life.
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Women in Texas Music
Stories and Songs
By Kathleen Hudson
University of Texas Press, 2007

Across the state and across a wide variety of musical genres, women are making their mark on Texas music. Some have become international superstars, while others are just starting to make their voices heard. But every woman who goes out and plays her music proves that "baring one's heart and soul takes courage, and Texas women artists have a lot of courage," as Lloyd Maines observes in the opening interview of this book. To pay tribute to these dedicated musicians and to capture their unique perspectives on what it means to be a woman in the music business, Kathleen Hudson has spent many years interviewing Texas women musicians for the Texas Heritage Music Foundation.

In Women in Texas Music, Hudson lets us listen in on conversations with thirty-nine musical artists, including Emily Robison, Terri Hendrix, Lee Ann Womack, Rosie Flores, Betty Buckley, Marcia Ball, Lavelle White, and Bobbie Nelson. Hudson encourages and allows the women to tell their own stories as she delves into their life journeys, creative processes, and the importance of writing and performing music, be it blues, rock, country, folk, jazz, or pop. The interviews are warm and open, like good friends sharing the lessons that a life of playing music has taught them.

What emerges from this collection is a solid sense of the strength and integrity that women bring to and gain from Texas music. Everyone who cares about music and culture in Texas will want to join the conversation.

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Women Making Music
The Western Art Tradition, 1150-1950
Edited by Jane Bowers and Judith Tick
University of Illinois Press, 1986
"Do look after my music!" Irene Wienawska Polowski exclaimed before her death in 1932. And from the urgency of that sentiment the authors here have taken their cue to reveal and "look after" the previously neglected contributions of women throughout the history of Western art music.
 
The first work of its kind, Women Making Music presents biographies of outstanding performers and composers, as well as analyses of women musicians as a class, and provides examples of music from all periods including medieval chant, Renaissance song, Baroque opera, German lieder, and twentieth-century composition. Unlike most standard historical surveys, the book not only sheds light upon the musical achievements of women, it also illuminates the historical contexts that shaped and defined those achievements.
 
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Women Musicians of Uzbekistan
From Courtyard to Conservatory
Tanya Merchant
University of Illinois Press, 2015
Fascinated by women's distinct influence on Uzbekistan's music, Tanya Merchant ventures into Tashkent's post-Soviet music scene to place women musicians within the nation's evolving artistic and political arenas.
 
Drawing on fieldwork and music study carried out between 2001 and 2014, Merchant challenges the Western idea of Central Asian women as sequestered and oppressed. Instead, she notes, Uzbekistan's women stand at the forefront of four prominent genres: maqom, folk music, Western art music, and popular music. Merchant's recounting of the women's experiences, stories, and memories underscores the complex role that these musicians and vocalists play in educational institutions and concert halls, street kiosks and the culturally essential sphere of wedding music. Throughout the book, Merchant ties nationalism and femininity to performances and reveals how the music of these women is linked to a burgeoning national identity.
 
Important and revelatory, Women Musicians of Uzbekistan looks into music's part in constructing gendered national identity and the complicated role of femininity in a former Soviet republic's national project.
 
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Women of Valor
Orthodox Jewish Troll Fighters, Crime Writers, and Rock Stars in Contemporary Literature and Culture
Karen E. H. Skinazi
Rutgers University Press, 2018
Honorable Mention for the Robert K. Martin Prize 2019

Media portrayals of Orthodox Jewish women frequently depict powerless, silent individuals who are at best naive to live an Orthodox lifestyle, and who are at worst, coerced into it. Karen E. H. Skinazi delves beyond this stereotype in Women of Valor to identify a powerful tradition of feminist literary portrayals of Orthodox women, often created by Orthodox women themselves. She examines Orthodox women as they appear in memoirs, comics, novels, and movies, and speaks with the authors, filmmakers, and musicians who create these representations. Throughout the work, Skinazi threads lines from the poem “Eshes Chayil,” the Biblical description of an Orthodox “Woman of Valor.” This proverb unites Orthodoxy and feminism in a complex relationship, where Orthodox women continuously question, challenge, and negotiate Orthodox and feminist values. Ultimately, these women create paths that unite their work, passions, and families under the framework of an “Eshes Chayil,” a woman who situates religious conviction within her own power.
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Women Singers in Global Contexts
Music, Biography, Identity
Edited by Ruth Hellier: Afterword by Ellen Koskoff
University of Illinois Press, 2016
 
Exploring and celebrating individual lives in diverse situations, Women Singers in Global Contexts is a new departure in the study of women's worldwide music-making. Ten unique women constitute the heart of this volume: each one has engaged her singing voice as a central element in her life, experiencing various opportunities, tensions, and choices through her vocality. These biographical and poetic narratives demonstrate how the act of vocalizing embodies dynamics of representation, power, agency, activism, and risk-taking.
 
Engaging with performance practice, politics, and constructions of gender through vocality and vocal aesthetics, this collection offers valuable insights into the experiences of specific women singers in a range of sociocultural contexts. Contributors trace themes and threads that include childhood, families, motherhood, migration, fame, training, transmission, technology, and the interface of private lives and public identities.
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Woody Guthrie, American Radical
Will Kaufman
University of Illinois Press, 2011
Woody Guthrie, American Radical reclaims the politically radical profile of America's greatest balladeer. Although he achieved a host of national honors and adorns U.S. postage stamps, and although his song "This Land Is Your Land" is often considered the nation's second national anthem, Woody Guthrie committed his life to the radical struggle. Will Kaufman traces Guthrie's political awakening and activism throughout the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, the Korean War, the Civil Rights struggle, and the poison of McCarthyism. He examines Guthrie's role in the development of a workers' culture in the context of radical activism spearheaded by the Communist Party of the USA, the Popular Front, and the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Kaufman also establishes Guthrie's significance in the perpetuation of cultural front objectives into the era of the "New Left" and beyond, particularly through his influence on the American and international protest song movement. Utilizing a wealth of previously unseen archival materials such as letters, song lyrics, essays, personal reflections, photos, and other manuscripts, Woody Guthrie, American Radical introduces a heretofore unknown Woody Guthrie: the canny political strategist, fitful thinker, and cultural front activist practically buried in the general public's romantic celebration of the "Dust Bowl Troubadour." A portion of the royalties from the sales of this book will be donated to the Woody Guthrie Foundation.
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Wordless Rhetoric
Musical Form and the Metaphor of the Oration
Mark Evan Bonds
Harvard University Press, 1991

Although “form” is one of the most commonly used terms in music interpretation, it remains one of the most ambiguous. This penetrating study explores evolving ideas of musical form from a historical perspective and sheds new light on current conceptualizations of music.

Mark Evan Bonds examines the image—dominant among eighteenth-century composers and analysts—of music as a language, a kind of wordless discourse, which could move audiences. In the Baroque and Classical periods an instrumental composition was viewed as analogous to an oration, its form the intelligible elaboration of a central thematic idea. The predominant emphasis, therefore, was on the perspective of the listener. This rhetorical metaphor is shown giving way in the nineteenth century to the idea of a musical work as an organic entity, an image that emphasizes the autonomy of the work. The listener, in effect, becomes merely an interested third party.

In his account of these changing perspectives, Bonds draws on the writing of a broad range of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century theorists. His analyses focus on specific sonata form movements by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven and are informed by the theoretical premises that characterize the composers’ own times. In a final synthesis, the eighteenth-century rhetorical model—with its focus on the structural function of musical ideas and the role of the listener—emerges as a forerunner of today’s listener-oriented and plot theories about musical form.

In Wordless Rhetoric, Bonds makes fruitful use of literary theory to develop his innovative evaluation of musical form. This book will be invaluable to anyone who studies music or seeks to understand music analysis.

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Words On Music
From Addison To Barzun
Jack Sullivan
Ohio University Press, 1990
For centuries, distinguished writers have taken on the challenge of describing great music and its significance in their lives. From Joseph Addison to Virgil Thomson, writers in and out of the music field have used their most vivid language to conjure the sounds and emotions of the music that mattered most to them. Yet until this book, no single volume has ever collected the best of this writing in one place. Scattered in magazines, essay collections, and program notes, this literature is largely unknown to the general reader—who often thinks that music essays are for musicians only—and even to the musician—who often reads only narrow specialty publications.

Words on Music is thus the first book of its kind. Covering instrumental and vocal music from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries, it features essays distinguished by their literary quality, their readability, and their appeal to a wide audience. Included is writing by novelists, essayists, composers, performers, cultural historians, and others who have written about music with precision and passion.

Here is George Bernard Shaw on Handel, Albert Schweitzer on Bach, Glenn Gould on Scarlatti, E. T. A. Hoffman on Beethoven, Heinrich Heine on Rossini, Aaron Copland on Mozart, George Eliot on Wagner, G. K. Chesterton on Gilbert and Sullivan, Leonard Bernstein on Mahler, Guy Davenport on Ives, Pierre Boulez on Stravinsky, Ned Rorem on Ravel, and more than fifty others. Here also are essays on broader topics—Joseph Addison on opera, Anthony Burgess on music and literature, Jacques Barzun on music criticism, H. L. Mencken on “Music an Sin”—as well as musical memoirs by such masters of the genre as Hector Berlioz, Leigh Hunt, and Ethel Smyth.

Words on Music is a uniquely literary and readable book on music. With its wide range of tones and voices, it is ideal for the general reader, the humanities educator, and the musical specialist. Each article is introduced by an informative headnote on the writer and subject. In addition, the volume offers a bibliography with valuable clues for further reading and a substantial essay introducing the elusive art of writing about music.
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Work Songs
Ted Gioia
Duke University Press, 2006
All societies have relied on music to transform the experience of work. Song accompanied the farmer's labors, calmed the herder's flock, and set in motion the spinner's wheel. Today this tradition continues. Music blares on the shop floor; song accompanies transactions in the retail store; the radio keeps the trucker going on the long-distance haul.

Now Ted Gioia, author of several acclaimed books on the history of jazz, tells the story of work songs from prehistoric times to the present. Vocation by vocation, Gioia focuses attention on the rhythms and melodies that have attended tasks such as the cultivation of crops, the raising and lowering of sails, the swinging of hammers, the felling of trees. In an engaging, conversational writing style, he synthesizes a breathtaking amount of material, not only from songbooks and recordings but also from travel literature, historical accounts, slave narratives, folklore, labor union writings, and more. He draws on all of these to describe how workers in societies around the world have used music to increase efficiency, measure time, relay commands, maintain focus, and alleviate drudgery.

At the same time, Gioia emphasizes how work songs often soar beyond utilitarian functions. The heart-wringing laments of the prison chain gang, the sailor’s shanties, the lumberjack’s ballads, the field hollers and corn-shucking songs of the American South, the pearl-diving songs of the Persian Gulf, the rich mbube a cappella singing of South African miners: Who can listen to these and other songs borne of toil and hard labor without feeling their sweep and power? Ultimately, Work Songs, like its companion volume Healing Songs, is an impassioned tribute to the extraordinary capacity of music to enter into day-to-day lives, to address humanity’s deepest concerns and most heartfelt needs.

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Working Girl Blues
The Life and Music of Hazel Dickens
Hazel Dickens and Bill C. Malone
University of Illinois Press, 2007
Hazel Dickens was an Appalachian singer and songwriter known for her superb musicianship, feminist country songs, union anthems, and blue-collar laments. Growing up in a West Virginia coal mining community, she drew on the mountain music and repertoire of her family and neighbors when establishing her own vibrant and powerful vocal style that is a trademark in old-time, bluegrass, and traditional country circles. Working Girl Blues presents forty original songs that Hazel Dickens wrote about coal mining, labor issues, personal relationships, and her life and family in Appalachia. Conveying sensitivity, determination, and feistiness, Dickens comments on each song, explaining how she came to write them and what they meant and continue to mean to her. Bill C. Malone's introduction traces Dickens's life, musical career, and development as a songwriter, In addition, Working Girl Blues features forty-one illustrations and a detailed discography of Dickens's commercial recordings.
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Working Musicians
Labor and Creativity in Film and Television Production
Timothy D. Taylor
Duke University Press, 2023
In Working Musicians Timothy D. Taylor offers a behind-the-scenes look at the labor of the mostly unknown composers, music editors, orchestrators, recording engineers, and other workers involved in producing music for films, television, and video games. Drawing on dozens of interviews with music workers in Los Angeles, Taylor explores the nature of their work and how they understand their roles in the entertainment business. Taylor traces how these cultural laborers have adapted to and cope with the conditions of neoliberalism as, over the last decade, their working conditions have become increasingly precarious. Digital technologies have accelerated production timelines and changed how content is delivered, while new pay schemes have emerged that have transformed composers from artists into managers and paymasters. Taylor demonstrates that as bureaucratization and commercialization affect every aspect of media, the composers, musicians, music editors, engineers, and others whose soundtracks excite, inspire, and touch millions face the same structural economic challenges that have transformed American society, concentrating wealth and power in fewer and fewer hands.
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World Flutelore
Folktales, Myths, and Other Stories of Magical Flute Power
Dale A. Olsen
University of Illinois Press, 2013
In many places around the world, flutes and the sounds of flutes are powerful magical forces for seduction and love, protection, vegetal and human fertility, birth and death, and other aspects of human and nonhuman behavior. This book explores the cultural significance of flutes, flute playing, and flute players from around the world as interpreted from folktales, myths, and other stories--in a word, ""flutelore."" A scholarly yet readable study, World Flutelore: Folktales, Myths, and Other Stories of Magical Flute Power draws upon a range of sources in folklore, anthropology, ethnomusicology, and literary analysis.

Describing and interpreting many examples of flutes as they are found in mythology, poetry, lyrics, and other narrative and literary sources from around the world, veteran ethnomusicologist Dale Olsen seeks to determine what is singularly distinct or unique about flutes, flute playing, and flute players in a global context. He shows how and why flutes are important for personal, communal, religious, spiritual, and secular expression and even, perhaps, existence. This is a book for students, scholars, and any reader interested in the cultural power of flutes.

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The World Got Away
A Memoir
Mikel Rouse. Foreward by Kyle Gann
University of Illinois Press, 2024

One of the most innovative composers of his generation, Mikel Rouse is known for a trilogy of operas that includes Dennis Cleveland and a gift for superimposing pop vernaculars onto avant-garde music. This memoir channels Rouse’s high energy personality into an exuberant account of the precarity and pleasures of artistic creation. Raconteur and starving artist, witty observer and acclaimed musician, Rouse emerged from the legendary art world of 1980s New York to build a forty-year career defined by stage and musical successes, inexhaustible creativity, and a support network of famous faces, loyal allies, and high art hustlers. Rouse guides readers through a working artists’ hardscrabble life while illuminating the unromantic truth that a project’s reception may depend on a talented cast and crew but can depend on reliable air conditioning.

Candid and hilarious, The World Got Away is a one-of-a-kind account of a creative life fueled by talent, work, and luck.

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Writing the Record
The Village Voice and the Birth of Rock Criticism
Devon Powers
University of Massachusetts Press, 2013
During the mid-1960s, a small group of young journalists made it their mission to write about popular music, especially rock, as something worthy of serious intellectual scrutiny. Their efforts not only transformed the perspective on the era's music but revolutionized how Americans have come to think, talk, and write about popular music ever since.

In Writing the Record, Devon Powers explores this shift by focusing on The Village Voice, a key publication in the rise of rock criticism. Revisiting the work of early pop critics such as Richard Goldstein and Robert Christgau, Powers shows how they stood at the front lines of the mass culture debates, challenging old assumptions and hierarchies and offering pioneering political and social critiques of the music. Part of a college-educated generation of journalists, Voice critics explored connections between rock and contemporary intellectual trends such as postmodernism, identity politics, and critical theory. In so doing, they became important forerunners of the academic study of popular culture that would emerge during the 1970s.

Drawing on archival materials, interviews, and insights from media and cultural studies, Powers not only narrates a story that has been long overlooked but also argues that pop music criticism has been an important channel for the expression of public intellectualism. This is a history that is particularly relevant today, given the challenges faced by criticism of all stripes in our current media environment. Powers makes the case for the value of well-informed cultural criticism in an age when it is often suggested that "everyone is a critic."
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Writings through John Cage's Music, Poetry, and Art
Edited by David W. Bernstein and Christopher Hatch
University of Chicago Press, 2001
This volume looks at the creative work of the great avant-gardist John Cage from an exciting interdisciplinary perspective, exploring his activities as a composer, performer, thinker, and artist.

The essays in this collection grew out of a pivotal gathering during which a spectrum of participants including composers, music scholars, and visual artists, literary critics, poets, and filmmakers convened to examine Cage's extraordinary artistic legacy. Beginning with David Bernstein's introductory essay on the reception of Cage's music, the volume addresses topics ranging from Cage's reluctance to discuss his homosexuality, to his work as a performer and musician, and his forward-looking, provocative experimentation with electronic and other media. Several of the essays draw upon previously unseen sketches and other source materials. Also included are transcripts of lively panel discussions among some of Cage's former colleagues. Taken together, this collection is a much-needed contribution to the study of one of the most significant American artists of the twentieth century.
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