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Merle Haggard has enjoyed artistic and professional triumphs few can match. He’s charted more than a hundred country hits, including thirty-eight number ones. He’s released dozens of studio albums and another half dozen or more live ones, performed upwards of ten thousand concerts, been inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame, and seen his songs performed by artists as diverse as Lynryd Skynyrd, Elvis Costello, Tammy Wynette, Willie Nelson, the Grateful Dead, and Bob Dylan. In 2011 he was feted as a Kennedy Center Honoree. But until now, no one has taken an in-depth look at his career and body of work.

In Merle Haggard: The Running Kind, David Cantwell takes us on a revelatory journey through Haggard’s music and the life and times out of which it came. Covering the entire breadth of his career, Cantwell focuses especially on the 1960s and 1970s, when Haggard created some of his best-known and most influential music, which helped invent the America we live in today. Listening closely to a masterpiece-crowded catalogue (including songs such as “Okie from Muskogee,” “Sing Me Back Home,” “Mama Tried,” “Working Man Blues,” “Kern River,” “White Line Fever,” “Today I Started Loving You Again,” and “If We Make It through December,” among many more), Cantwell explores the fascinating contradictions—most of all, the desire for freedom in the face of limits set by the world or self-imposed—that define not only Haggard’s music and public persona but the very heart of American culture.

In a career that took him from the cotton fields of East Texas to the concert stage at Carnegie Hall and beyond, Lightnin’ Hopkins became one of America’s greatest bluesmen, renowned for songs whose topics effortlessly ranged from his African American roots to space exploration, the Vietnam War, and lesbianism, performed in a unique, eccentric, and spontaneous style of guitar playing that inspired a whole generation of rock guitarists. Hopkins’s music directly and indirectly influenced an amazing range of artists, including Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Tom Waits, and Bob Dylan, as well as bands such as the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and ZZ Top, with whom Hopkins performed.

Mojo Hand follows Lightin’ Hopkins’s life and music from the acoustic country blues that he began performing in childhood, through the rise of 1950s rock ’n’ roll, which nearly derailed his career, to his reinvention and international success as a pioneer of electric folk blues from the 1960s to the 1980s. The authors draw on 130 vivid oral histories, as well as extensive archival and secondary sources, to provide the fullest account available of the development of Hopkins’s music; his idiosyncratic business practices, such as shunning professional bookers, managers, and publicists; and his durable and indelible influence on modern roots, blues, rock ’n’ roll, singer-songwriter, and folk music. Mojo Hand celebrates the spirit and style, intelligence and wit, and confounding musical mystique of a bluesman who shaped modern American music like no one else.

A merger of expert scholarship and eyewitness experience, Mongolian Sound Worlds illuminates a diverse and ever-changing musical culture.

Contributors: Bayarsaikhan Badamsuren, Otgonbaayar Chuulunbaatar, Andrew Colwell, Johanni Curtet, Charlotte D’Evelyn, Tamir Hargana, Peter K. Marsh, K. Oktyabr, Rebekah Plueckhahn, Jennifer C. Post, D. Tserendavaa, and Sunmin Yoon

Explores the Muslim-Jewish relationship through music in Algeria and its diaspora.

Today, more than six decades after the departure of Jews from Algeria to France at the moment of decolonization, music remains a compelling site for remembering Muslim-Jewish intimacy before the moment of rupture. In this way, music works against dominant discourses of Muslim-Jewish conflict and Jewish outsider status, instead presenting music as a sign of Muslim-Jewish brotherhood and of Jewish rootedness in North Africa. Yet digging deeper into the lived past and its relation to contemporary memory uncovers the fragility of brotherhood as well as competing ways to read Muslim-Jewish intimacy around music, some of which edge into rivalry, hierarchy, and difference. In More than Friends, Jonathan Glasser draws on historical archives and ethnographic research in Algeria and in France to weigh these multiple interpretations of the Muslim-Jewish past, ultimately offering an alternative, more resilient way of imagining what it means to be intimate through music.

An influential star of British pop for more than three decades, Morrissey is known for his outspoken and often controversial views on class, ethnicity, and sexuality. Among critics and his many fans, he has long been seen as an anti-establishment figure who continues to provoke devotion, argument, and spirited debate. 

This is the first collection of academic essays to focus exclusively on Morrissey’s solo career, and this important book offers a nuanced and rich reading of his highly influential creative and cultural output. Covering a broad range of academic disciplines and approaches, including musicology, ethnography, sociology, and cultural studies, these essays will be a must for fans of Morrissey or the Smiths, or those seeking to make sense of the many fascinating complexities of this global icon and controversial figure.

Mother of the Blues is the first substantive biography of Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, the pioneering blues vocalist that dominated blues in the 1920s. Through a comprehensive study of Rainey's remarkable career, Sandra R. Lieb analyzes how Rainey combined African American folk traditions with emerging blues styles to help establish and popularize the blues as a national musical phenomenon in the early twentieth century. With close attention to Rainey's recordings, performances, and cultural significance as a Black female artist, Lieb explores the impact of Ma Rainey distinctive deep-throated voice, mesmerizing presence, and songs of love, desire, sexuality, and society in American music history and blues culture. 

An oral history with the women of Parliament-Funkadelic, from forming the band to landing the mothership.

Parliament-Funkadelic is perhaps the greatest funk band ever assembled. Yet at the time of the group’s induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, none of the women who helped create the sound and performed in P-Funk were invited to the ceremony and their contributions have been largely overlooked.

Mothership Connected tells the story of Mallia Franklin, Lynn Mabry, Dawn Silva, Debbie Wright, and Shirley Hayden, all of whom were instrumental in making Parliament-Funkadelic, as well as the spin-off groups Parlet and the Brides of Funkenstein, into the legends they are today. Assembled by Seth Neblett, son of the “Queen of Funk” Mallia Franklin, and filled with the voices of funk icons like George Clinton, Sly Stone, Bootsy Collins, and the women themselves, this oral history makes clear why these “architects” at the “core” of P-Funk were both essential—and erased. From Franklin introducing Bootsy Collins to Clinton, to the Brides’ top-10 hit “Disco to Go,” to the drugs that helped destroy the group, this book reveals the hidden lives and uncomfortable truths of life in P-Funk. More than sex, drugs, and rock and roll, Mothership Connected is about Black women navigating a tumultuous era and industry to become musical pioneers. Now, after decades in the shadows, these genre-defining women are finally telling their story.

A collection of essays that reinvigorates our understanding of some of Mozart's best-loved works.

One of the world’s most revered composers, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) wrote works in almost every genre. His life and work continue to fascinate scholars, performers, and music lovers alike. Mozart and His World brings original perspectives to perennially popular topics in Mozart studies. Through wide-ranging essays that address interpretive, biographical, and contextual themes, the volume simultaneously widens and refines our view of Mozart’s oeuvre.

Mozart and His World moves from studies of instrumental music and musicians to the interpretation and reception of Mozart’s operas, and finally to primary sources from the decade or so after Mozart’s death. Across original chapters and several archival documents, Mozart and His World points new ways forward in key areas of Mozart scholarship, including the study of intellectual and stylistic ideas informing his works and of musicians and institutions within his orbit. While the volume reshapes our understanding of some of Mozart’s best-loved works, including The Magic Flute and his other operas, it also probes works that have received less attention, such as his early string quartets, an opera parody, and wind-music culture and arrangements.

The story of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s precocity is so familiar as to be taken for granted. In scholarship and popular culture, Mozart the Wunderkind is often seen as belonging to a category of childhood all by himself. But treating the young composer as an anomaly risks minimizing his impact. In this book, Adeline Mueller examines how Mozart shaped the social and cultural reevaluation of childhood during the Austrian Enlightenment. Whether in a juvenile sonata printed with his age on the title page, a concerto for a father and daughter, a lullaby, a musical dice game, or a mass for the consecration of an orphanage church, Mozart’s music and persona transformed attitudes toward children’s agency, intellectual capacity, relationships with family and friends, political and economic value, work, school, and leisure time.
 
Thousands of children across the Habsburg Monarchy were affected by the Salzburg prodigy and the idea he embodied: that childhood itself could be packaged, consumed, deployed, “performed”—in short, mediated—through music. This book builds upon a new understanding of the history of childhood as dynamic and reciprocal, rather than a mere projection or fantasy—as something mediated not just through texts, images, and objects but also through actions. Drawing on a range of evidence, from children’s periodicals to Habsburg court edicts and spurious Mozart prints, Mueller shows that while we need the history of childhood to help us understand Mozart, we also need Mozart to help us understand the history of childhood.

Exploring the ideas, innovations, and challenges shaping the future of music education.

This solid collection of essays, written by outstanding American music educators, reflects the current issues in music education and the ongoing attempt to overcome obstacles to excellence in teaching music. It stands as the most important and far-ranging professional overview of the discipline since the publication of the landmark Basic Concepts in Music Education in 1958, and early reviews indicate that it will generate both critical discussion and acclaim.

Several themes recur:(1) that music and, therefore, music education exist in a variety of social and cultural contexts, even when examined in controlled situations; (2) that music teaching has not yet freed itself from its traditional over-reliance on technical training, in spite of attention to aesthetic education; and (3) that there is a remarkable undercurrent of agreement among this diverse group of authors concerning the profession’s basic obligation to expand and refine the musical sensitivity of all age group of Americans. This book reflects some advanced thinking about these themes, which establishes new foundations for next generation theorizing and research.
 

Music Is My Life is the first comprehensive analysis of Louis Armstrong's autobiographical writings (including his books, essays, and letters) and their relation to his musical and visual performances. Combining approaches from autobiography theory, literary criticism, intermedia studies, cultural history, and musicology, Daniel Stein reconstructs Armstrong's performances of his life story across various media and for different audiences, complicating the monolithic and hagiographic views of the musician.

The book will appeal to academic readers with an interest in African American studies, jazz studies, musicology, and popular culture, as well as general readers interested in Armstrong's life and music, jazz, and twentieth-century entertainment. While not a biography, it provides a key to understanding Armstrong's oeuvre as well as his complicated place in American history and twentieth-century media culture.

Making music offers enormous possibilities--and faces significant limitations--in its power to generate belonging and advance social justice. Tony Perman and Stefan Fiol edit essays focused on the forms of interplay between music-making and community-making as mutually creative processes. Contributors in the first section look at cases where music arrived in settings with little or no sense of community and formed social bonds that lasted beyond its departure. In the sections that follow, the essayists turn to stable communities that used musical forms to address social needs and both forged new social groups and, in some cases, splintered established communities. By centering the value of difference in productive feedback dynamics of music and community while asserting the need for mutual moral indebtedness, they foreground music’s potential to transform community for the better.

Contributors: Stephen Blum, Joanna Bosse, Sylvia Bruinders, Donna A. Buchanan, Rick Deja, Veit Erlmann, Stefan Fiol, Eduardo Herrera, David A. McDonald, Tony Perman, Thomas Solomon, and Ioannis Tsekouras

Tracing the development of Berlin as a center of music from the eighteenth century to the present, examining how its music survived despite its turbulent history.

Berlin is a music-lover’s paradise, offering up everything from operas to raves. Yet unlike Vienna, Leipzig, or even Nashville, Berlin does not immediately come to mind as a city of music. Instead, its turbulent history evokes images of industry, commerce, militarism, destruction, division, and resurrection. Over the past three centuries, Berlin was the capital of a kingdom, an empire, a republic, and a dictatorship; it was ravaged by war and occupied by foreign powers; and its division and reunification made it a powerful symbol of the Cold War. Through all these highs and lows, the music played on. Music Metropolis Berlin is the first full-length exploration of how Berlin became a city of music against all odds. 

Unlike the other European music centers that stake their reputations on the fame of composers like Bach or Beethoven, Berlin is known for its ensembles, artists, theaters, organizers, intellectuals, and media stars. This is because Berlin took a very different, and almost accidental, route to becoming a city of music. Hampered for centuries by rulers who were more focused on military and industrial expansion than on cultural prestige, Berlin’s musical life prospered thanks to the ambitions of entrepreneurs and politicians who saw the value in serving the ever-changing music public in an expanding urban landscape. By focusing on Berlin as a rapidly developing global capital, Music Metropolis Berlin looks beyond the music, its creators, and its institutions to reveal how political, economic, and social forces fueled the creation of the Berlin metropolis and continue to nurture a vibrant and diverse musical life.