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This first critical appreciation of T Bone Burnett reveals how the proponent of Americana music and producer of artists ranging from Robert Plant and Alison Krauss to B. B. King and Elvis Costello has profoundly influenced American music and culture.

T Bone Burnett is a unique, astonishingly prolific music producer, singer-songwriter, guitarist, and soundtrack visionary. Renowned as a studio maven with a Midas touch, Burnett is known for lifting artists to their greatest heights, as he did with Raising Sand, the multiple Grammy Award–winning album by Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, as well as acclaimed albums by Los Lobos, the Wallflowers, B. B. King, and Elvis Costello. Burnett virtually invented “Americana” with his hugely successful roots-based soundtrack for the Coen Brothers film, O Brother, Where Art Thou? Outspoken in his contempt for the entertainment industry, Burnett has nevertheless received many of its highest honors, including Grammy Awards and an Academy Award.

T Bone Burnett offers the first critical appreciation of Burnett’s wide-ranging contributions to American music, his passionate advocacy for analog sound, and the striking contradictions that define his maverick artistry. Lloyd Sachs highlights all the important aspects of Burnett’s musical pursuits, from his early days as a member of Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue and his collaboration with the playwright Sam Shepard to the music he recently composed for the TV shows Nashville and True Detective and his production of the all-star album Lost on the River: The New Basement Tapes. Sachs also underscores Burnett’s brilliance as a singer-songwriter in his own right. Going well beyond the labels “legendary” or “visionary” that usually accompany his name, T Bone Burnett reveals how this consummate music maker has exerted a powerful influence on American music and culture across four decades.

Michelle R. Scott’s institutional history details T.O.B.A.’s origins and practices while telling the little-known stories of the managers, producers, performers, and audience members involved in the circuit. Looking at the organization over its eleven-year existence (1920–1931), Scott places T.O.B.A. against the backdrop of what entrepreneurship and business development meant in black America at the time. Scott also highlights how intellectuals debated the social, economic, and political significance of black entertainment from the early 1900s through T.O.B.A.’s decline during the Great Depression.

Clear-eyed and comprehensive, T.O.B.A. Time is a fascinating account of black entertainment and black business during a formative era.

The overriding aim of this groundbreaking volume—whether the subject is vocal ornamentation in 19th-century opera or the collective improvisation of the Grateful Dead—is to give new recognition to performance as the core of musical culture. The collection brings together renowned scholars from performance studies and musicology (including Philip Auslander, David Borgo, Daphne Brooks, Nicholas Cook, Maria Delgado, Susan Fast, Dana Gooley, Philip Gossett, Jason King, Elisabeth Le Guin, Aida Mbowa, Ingrid Monson, Roger Moseley, Richard Pettengill, Joseph Roach, and Margaret Savilonis), with the intent of sparking a productive new dialogue on music as performance. Taking It to the Bridge is on the one hand a series of in-depth studies of a broad range of performance artists and genres, and on the other a contribution to ongoing methodological developments within the study of music, with the goal of bridging the approaches of musicology and performance studies, to enable a close, interpretive listening that combines the best of each. At the same time, by juxtaposing musical genres that range from pop and soul to the classics, and from world music to games and web-mediated performances, Taking It to the Bridge provides an inventory of contrasted approaches to the study of performance and contributes to its developing centrality within music studies.

Nuanced and multifaceted, Tania León's Stride looks at the life, legacy, and milieu that created and sustained one of the most important figures in American classical music.

In Arab culture, at the ineffable point where music meets emotion, lies ṭarab. Often glossed as the ecstasy experienced and expressed when performing or listening to singing, instrumental works, and recitations of poetry, ṭarab is both a practice and an orienting concept central to musical aesthetics and spirituality characteristic of Middle Eastern cultures.

Gathering fifteen essays by scholars of music, affect, literature, religion, and education, Ṭarab extends the study of ṭarab historically, geographically, and sociologically. Historical essays explore ṭarab’s role in the medieval Middle East and the Ottoman Empire. Turning to the modern era, authors examine ṭarab and related concepts in Egypt, Albania, and Iraq, and among Turkish Roma and Lebanese Maronite Christians. The contributors also address contemporary practitioners and the intersections of ṭarab and maqām, belly dancing, music streaming, and university music ensembles. Situating this unique cultural concept in a global context, these studies enrich the story of ṭarab and provide new insight into music’s powerful emotional appeal.

Televising Taste: Performing Classical Music on American Screens explores how American television portrayed canonical European classical music in the Cold War era. Situating mid-century TV culture within a history of music visualization efforts, it complicates narratives about the postwar decades as a peak moment of polarity between “high” and “low” cultures, and between ideologies of consensus and rebellion. Drawing on discourse analysis, archival research, and the medium of videographic analysis, Evelyn Kreutzer suggests that the legacies of European classical music played an important part in the formation of an American national identity and that they were interwoven with and negotiated through popular media. Conjunctions of classical music and television occurred in dialogue with aspirations for cultural capital, which were attached to European classical music and inscribed into visions of American cultural literacy and citizenship. Simultaneously, these conjunctions responded to anxieties that popular culture and mass media would diminish “serious” music appreciation and turn audiences into passive consumers.

Through musical mediations on television, Televising Taste addresses larger ideological and historical implications of taste and canon politics, contributing a new interdisciplinary perspective on the interdependence of music and media cultures.

Willie Nelson, Joe Ely, Marcia Ball, Tish Hinojosa, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Lyle Lovett...the list of popular songwriters from Texas just goes on and on. In this collection of thirty-four interviews with these and other songwriters, Kathleen Hudson pursues the stories behind the songs, letting the singers' own words describe where their songs come from and how the diverse, eclectic cultures, landscapes, and musical traditions of Texas inspire the creative process.

Conducted in dance halls, dressing rooms, parking lots, clubs-wherever the musicians could take time to tell their stories-the interviews are refreshingly spontaneous and vivid. Hudson draws out the songwriters on such topics as the sources of their songs, the influence of other musicians on their work, the progress of their careers, and the nature of Texas music. Many common threads emerge from these stories, while the uniqueness of each songwriter becomes equally apparent. To round out the collection, Hudson interviews Larry McMurtry and Darrell Royal for their perspectives as longtime friends and fans of Texas musicians. She also includes a brief biography and discography of each songwriter.

Texas musicians and jazz share a history that goes all the way back to the origins of jazz in ragtime, blues, and boogie-woogie. Texans have left their mark on all of jazz's major movements, including hot jazz, swing, bebop, the birth of the cool, hard bop, and free jazz. Yet these musicians are seldom identified as Texans because their careers often took them to the leading jazz centers in New Orleans, Chicago, New York, Kansas City, and Los Angeles.

In Texan Jazz, Dave Oliphant reclaims these musicians for Texas and explores the vibrant musical culture that brought them forth. Working through the major movements of jazz, he describes the lives, careers, and recordings of such musicians as Scott Joplin, Hersal Thomas, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Sippie Wallace, Jack Teagarden, Buster Smith, Hot Lips Page, Eddie Durham, Herschel Evans, Charlie Christian, Red Garland, Kenny Dorham, Jimmy Giuffre, Ornette Coleman, John Carter, and many others.

The great strength of Texan Jazz is its record of the contributions to jazz made by African-American Texans. The first major book on this topic ever published, it will be fascinating reading for everyone who loves jazz.

Doug Sahm was a singer, songwriter, and guitarist of legendary range and reputation. The first American musician to capitalize on the 1960s British invasion, Sahm vaulted to international fame leading a faux-British band called the Sir Douglas Quintet, whose hits included "She's About a Mover," "The Rains Came," and "Mendocino." He made the cover of Rolling Stone magazine in 1968 and 1971 and performed with the Grateful Dead, Dr. John, Willie Nelson, Boz Scaggs, and Bob Dylan.

Texas Tornado is the first biography of this national music legend. Jan Reid traces the whole arc of Sahm's incredibly versatile musical career, as well as the manic energy that drove his sometimes turbulent personal life and loves. Reid follows Sahm from his youth in San Antonio as a prodigy steel guitar player through his breakout success with the Sir Douglas Quintet and his move to California, where, with an inventive take on blues, rock, country, and jazz, he became a star in San Francisco and invented the "cosmic cowboy" vogue. Reid also chronicles Sahm's later return to Texas and to chart success with the Grammy Award–winning Texas Tornados, a rowdy "conjunto rock and roll band" that he modeled on the Beatles and which included Sir Douglas alum Augie Meyers and Tejano icons Freddy Fender and Flaco Jimenez.

With his exceptional talent and a career that bridged five decades, Doug Sahm was a rock and roll innovator whose influence can only be matched among his fellow Texas musicians by Buddy Holly, Roy Orbison, Janis Joplin, and Stevie Ray Vaughan. Texas Tornado vividly captures the energy and intensity of this musician whose life burned out too soon, but whose music continues to rock.

Long a symbol of American culture, the banjo actually originated in Africa before European-Americans adopted it. Karen Linn shows how the banjo--despite design innovations and several modernizing agendas--has failed to escape its image as a "half-barbaric" instrument symbolic of antimodernism and sentimentalism. 

Caught in the morass of American racial attitudes and often used to express ambivalence toward modern industrial society, the banjo stood in opposition to the "official" values of rationalism, modernism, and belief in the beneficence of material progress. Linn uses popular literature, visual arts, advertisements, film, performance practices, instrument construction and decoration, and song lyrics to illustrate how notions about the banjo have changed. 

Linn also traces the instrument from its African origins through the 1980s, alternating between themes of urban modernization and rural nostalgia. She examines the banjo fad of bourgeois Northerners during the late nineteenth century; the African-American banjo tradition and the commercially popular cultural image of the southern black banjo player; the banjo's use in ragtime and early jazz; and the image of the white Southerner and mountaineer as banjo player.

Elvis Presley and Bill Haley. Sam Cooke and the Shirelles. The Crows and the Chords. American Bandstand and Motown. From its first rumblings in the outland alphabet soup of R&B and C&W, rock & roll music promised to change the world--and did it. 

Combining social history with a treasure trove of trivia, Richard Aquila unleashes the excitement of rock's first decade and shows how the music reflected American life from the mid-1950s through the dawn of Beatlemania. His year-by-year timelines and a photo essay place the music in historical perspective by linking artists and their hits to the news stories, movies, TV shows, fads, and lifestyles. In addition, he provides a concise biographical dictionary of the performers who made the charts between 1954 and 1963, along with the label and chart position of each of their hit songs.

This rich collection considers the accordion and its myriad forms, from the concertina, button accordion, and piano accordion familiar in European and North American music to the exotic-sounding South American bandoneon and the sanfoninha. Capturing the instrument's spread and adaptation to many different cultures in North and South America, contributors illuminate how the accordion factored into power struggles over aesthetic values between elites and working-class people who often were members of immigrant and/or marginalized ethnic communities. Specific histories and cultural contexts discussed include the accordion in Brazil, Argentine tango, accordion traditions in Colombia and the Dominican Republic, cross-border accordion culture between Mexico and Texas, Cajun and Creole identity, working-class culture near Lake Superior, the virtuoso Italian-American and Klezmer accordions, Native American dance music, and American avant-garde.

Contributors are María Susana Azzi, Egberto Bermúdez, Mark DeWitt, Joshua Horowitz, Sydney Hutchinson, Marion Jacobson, James P. Leary, Megwen Loveless, Richard March, Cathy Ragland, Helena Simonett, Jared Snyder, Janet L. Sturman, and Christine F. Zinni.

In The Amateur Wind Instrument Maker, Trevor Robinson provides clear, practical instructions for building a wide variety of wind instruments using materials and tools accessible to the dedicated amateur. Beginning with an introduction to the principles of wind instrument design and the basic woodworking materials required, Robinson proceeds through detailed plans and step-by-step guidance for constructing instruments including flutes and fifes, recorders, clarinets, shawms, and oboes, among others. Each chapter combines historical context with hands-on instruction, offering dimensions, bore specifications, tone hole placement, and finishing techniques that allow the builder to produce genuinely playable instruments. 

Compact and accessibly written, the revised edition of The Amateur Wind Instrument Maker remains a foundational reference in the field of amateur instrument building, enabling generations of amateur builders to craft their own instruments, from straightforward projects suitable for beginners to more demanding undertakings for experienced woodworkers.

A classroom essential and an invaluable reference, The Arithmetic of Listening offers beginners the grounding in music theory necessary to find their own way into microtonality and the places it may take them. Moving from ancient Greece to the present, Kyle Gann delves into the infinite tunings available to any musician who feels straitjacketed by obedience to standardized Western European tuning. He introduces the concept of the harmonic series and demonstrates its relationship to equal-tempered and well-tempered tuning. He also explores recent experimental tuning models that exploit smaller intervals between pitches to create new sounds and harmonies.

Systematic and accessible, The Arithmetic of Listening provides a much-needed primer for the wide range of tuning systems that have informed Western music.

Audio examples demonstrating the musical ideas in The Arithmetic of Listening can be found at: https://www.kylegann.com/Arithmetic.html

A raw, firsthand account of feuds, fiddling, moonshining, and survival in a small Alabama town, told by its most colorful chronicler and shaped through careful historical insight.

The Ballad of Fiddling Tom Freeman is a riveting portrait of a forgotten America, drawn from the handwritten memoirs of a bootlegger, fiddler, and chronicler of life in Bug Tussle, Alabama, in the first half of the twentieth century. Today, rural voices are often drowned out by polished narratives, but this book resurrects the unfiltered perspective of a man who lived through—and candidly documented—the chaos and violence in his home place as he shared stories of the large close-knit families who lived there.

Freeman’s storytelling is as wild and tangled as the lives he describes, and author Joyce H. Cauthen, with the assistance of historical researcher Robin Sterling, brings clarity and context to his tales without sanding down their rough edges. The result is a vivid, bottom-up history of a place where lawlessness and loyalty often walked hand in hand.

The Ballad of Fiddling Tom Freeman stands out as a testament to the power of personal narrative. Not just a story about one man, it’s a window into a community shaped by hardship, music, and survival, told in a voice that refuses to be forgotten. This book is essential reading for historians, folklorists, musicians, and anyone drawn to the untamed stories of America’s backroads and backwoods.
 

The remarkable story of how modern Irish music was shaped and spread through the brash efforts of a Chicago police chief.

Irish music as we know it today was invented not just in the cobbled lanes of Dublin or the green fields of County Kerry, but also in the burgeoning metropolis of early-twentieth-century Chicago. The genre’s history combines a long folk tradition with the curatorial quirks of a single person: Francis O’Neill, a larger-than-life Chicago police chief and an Irish immigrant with a fervent interest in his home country’s music.

Michael O’Malley’s The Beat Cop tells the story of this singular figure, from his birth in Ireland in 1865 to his rough-and-tumble early life in the United States. By 1901, O’Neill had worked his way up to become Chicago’s chief of police, where he developed new methods of tracking criminals and recording their identities. At the same time, he also obsessively tracked and recorded the music he heard from local Irish immigrants, enforcing a strict view of what he felt was and wasn’t authentic. Chief O’Neill’s police work and his musical work were flip sides of the same coin, and O’Malley delves deep into how this brash immigrant harnessed his connections and policing skills to become the foremost shaper of how Americans see, and hear, the music of Ireland.

John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr are four of the most famous names in the history of music. In the 1960s, the Beatles became the bestselling pop band in the world, inspiring legions of fans and developing into popular music icons. Fifty years later, their recordings are still in demand. But none of this happened overnight. As Ian Inglis reveals in this tale of the band’s early years, before they took the world by storm, the Beatles were little more than an inexperienced, semi-professional group of talented musicians in dire need of practice.

The Beautiful Music All Around Us presents the extraordinarily rich backstories of thirteen performances captured on Library of Congress field recordings between 1934 and 1942 in locations reaching from Southern Appalachia to the Mississippi Delta and the Great Plains. Including the children's play song "Shortenin' Bread," the fiddle tune "Bonaparte's Retreat," the blues "Another Man Done Gone," and the spiritual "Ain't No Grave Can Hold My Body Down," these performances were recorded in kitchens and churches, on porches and in prisons, in hotel rooms and school auditoriums. Documented during the golden age of the Library of Congress recordings, they capture not only the words and tunes of traditional songs but also the sounds of life in which the performances were embedded: children laugh, neighbors comment, trucks pass by.

Musician and researcher Stephen Wade sought out the performers on these recordings, their families, fellow musicians, and others who remembered them. He reconstructs the sights and sounds of the recording sessions themselves and how the music worked in all their lives. Some of these performers developed musical reputations beyond these field recordings, but for many, these tracks represent their only appearances on record: prisoners at the Arkansas State Penitentiary jumping on "the Library's recording machine" in a rendering of "Rock Island Line"; Ora Dell Graham being called away from the schoolyard to sing the jump-rope rhyme "Pullin' the Skiff"; Luther Strong shaking off a hungover night in jail and borrowing a fiddle to rip into "Glory in the Meetinghouse."

Alongside loving and expert profiles of these performers and their locales and communities, Wade also untangles the histories of these iconic songs and tunes, tracing them through slave songs and spirituals, British and homegrown ballads, fiddle contests, gospel quartets, and labor laments. By exploring how these singers and instrumentalists exerted their own creativity on inherited forms, "amplifying tradition's gifts," Wade shows how a single artist can make a difference within a democracy.

Reflecting decades of research and detective work, the profiles and abundant photos in The Beautiful Music All Around Us bring to life largely unheralded individuals--domestics, farm laborers, state prisoners, schoolchildren, cowboys, housewives and mothers, loggers and miners--whose music has become part of the wider American musical soundscape. The hardcover edition  also includes an accompanying CD that presents these thirteen performances, songs and sounds of America in the 1930s and '40s.

Since the magazine's founding in 1995, No Depression has reported on and helped define the music that goes by names such as alt.country, Americana, and roots music. Though dismissed by the commercial country music establishment as "music that doesn't sell," alternative country has attracted thousands of listeners who long for the authenticity and rich complexity that come from its potent blend of country and rock 'n' roll and any number of related musical genres and subgenres.

To celebrate No Depression's tenth anniversary and spotlight some of the most important artists and trends in alt.country music, editors Grant Alden and Peter Blackstock have compiled this anthology of twenty-five of the magazine's best and most representative feature articles. Their subjects range from venerated country artists such as Johnny Cash and Ray Price to contemporary songwriters such as Lucinda Williams and Buddy and Julie Miller to the post-punk country-influenced bands Wilco and the Drive-By Truckers. All of the articles included here illustrate No Depression's commitment to music writing that puts the artist front-and-center and covers his or her career in sufficient depth to be definitive. Alden and Blackstock have also written a preface to this volume in which they discuss the alt.country phenomenon and the history and editorial philosophy that have made No Depression the bible for everyone seeking genuine American roots music.