| Description |
xxii, 530 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm. |
| Series |
Refiguring American music |
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Refiguring American music.
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| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| Contents |
Setting the Scene -- The Jazz Age -- Midcentury Icons -- Vernacular Counterculture -- After the Revolution -- New Voices, New Methods -- Topics in Progress. |
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Part I: Setting the scene -- First writer, of music and music: William Billings, The New-England Psalm-Singer, 1770 -- Blackface minstrelsy extends its twisted roots: T.D. Rice, "Jim Crow," c. 1832 -- Shape-note singing and early country: B. F. White and E. J. King, The Sacred Harp, 1844 -- Music in captivity: Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, 1853 -- Champion of the white male vernacular: Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 1855 -- Notating spirituals: William Francis Allen, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison, eds., Slave Songs of the United States, 1867 -- First Black music historian: James Trotter, Music and Some Highly Musical People: The Lives of Remarkable Musicians of the Colored RAce, 1878 -- Child ballads and folklore: Francis James Child, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, 1882-1898 -- Women not inventing ethnomusicology: Alice C. Fletcher, A Study of Omaha Indian Music, 1893 -- First hist songwriter, from pop to folk and back again: Morrison Foster, Biography, Songs and Musical Compositions of Stephen C. Foster, 1896 -- Novelist of urban pop longings: Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie, 1900 -- Americana emerges: Emma Bell Miles, The Spirit of the Mountains, 1905 -- Documenting the story: O. G. Sonneck, Bibliography of Early Secular American Music, 1905 -- Tin Pan Alley's sheet music biz: Charles K. Harris, How to Write a Popular song, 1906 -- First family of folk collecting: John A. Lomax, Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, 1910 -- Proclaiming Black modernity: James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, 1912 -- Songcatching in the mountains: Olive Dame Campbell and Cecil J. Sharp, English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians, 1917. |
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Part II: The jazz age -- Stories for the slicks: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Flappers and Philosophers, 1920 -- Remembering the first Black star: Mabel Rowland, ed., Bert Williams, Son of Laughter, 1923 -- Magazine criticism across popular genres: Gilbert Seldes, The Seven Lively Arts, 1924 -- Harlem Renaissance: Alain Locke, ed., The New Negro: An Interpretation, 1925 -- Tin Pan Alley's standards setter: Alexander Woollcott, The Story of Irving Berlin, 1925 -- Broadway musical as supertext: Edna Ferber, Show Boar, 1926 -- Father of the blues in Print: W. C. Handy, Ed., Blues: An Anthology, 1926 -- Poet of the blare and racial mountain: Langston Hughes, The Weary Blues, 1926 -- Blessed immortal, forgotten songwriter: Carrie Jacobs-Bond, The Roads of Melody, 1927 -- Tune detective and expert explainer: Sigmund Spaeth, Read 'Em and Weep: The Songs You Forgot to Remember, 1927 -- Pop's first history lesson: Isaac Goldberg, Tin Pan Alley: A Chronicle of the American Popular Music Racket, 1930 -=- Roots intellectual: Constance Rourke, American Humor: A Study of the National Character, 1931 -- Jook ethnography, inventing Black music studies: Zora Neal Hurston, Mules and Men, 1935 -- What he played came first: Louis Armstrong, Swing That Music, 1936 -- Jazz's original novel: Dorothy Baker, Young Man with a Horse -- Introducing jazz critics: Frederic Ramsey Jr. and Charles Edward Smith, eds., Jazzmen, 1939. |
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Part III: Midcentury icons -- Folk embodiment: Woody Guthrie, Bound for Glory, 1942 -- A hack story soldiers took to war: David Ewen, Man of Popular Music, 1944 -- From immigrant Jew to red hot mama: Sophie Tucker, Some of These Days, 1945 -- White Negro drug dealer: Mezz Mezzrow and Bernard Wolfe, Really the blues, 1946 -- Composer of tone parallels: Barry Ulanov, Duke Ellington, 1946 -- Jazz's precursor as pop and art: Rudi Blesh and Harriet Janis, They All Played Ragtime: The True Story of an American Music, 1950 -- Field Recording in the Library of Congress: Alan Lomax, Mister Jelly Roll: The Fortunes of Jelly Roll Morton, New Orleans Creole and "Inventor" of Jazz, 1950 -- Dramatizing Blackness from a distance: Ethel Waters with Charles Samuels, His Eye Is on the Sparrow, 1951 -- Centering vernacular song: Gilbert Chase, America's Music, 1955 -- Writing about records: Roland Gelart, The Fabulous Phonograph: From Tin Foil to High Fidelity, 1955 -- Collective oral history to document scenes: Nat Shapiro and Nat Hentoff, eds., Hear Me Talkin' to Ya: The Story of Jazz as Told by the Men Who Made It, 1955 -- The greatest jazz singer's star text: Billie Holiday with William Dufty, Lady Sings the Blues, 1956 -- Beat generation: Jack Kerouac, On the Road, 1957 -- Borderlands folklore and transnational imaginaries: Americo Paredes, "With His Pistol in His Hands": A Border Ballad and Its Hero, 1958 -- New Yorker critic of a genre becoming middlebrow: Whitney Balliett, The Sound of Surprise: 46 Pieces on Jazz, 1959. |
| Summary |
"Songbooks, a critical guide to American popular music writing, unfolds chronologically, with entries on authors, artists, and topics beginning with William Billings's 1770 New-England Psalm-Singer. Outsiders proliferate in these pages: women and/or writers of color, authors displaced by sexuality, self-educated scholars, elites deviating from norms. Their work routinely took non-academic shapes: compilations of songs, memoirs and biographies, fiction and magazine essays. Others fought within the academy to establish fields like ethnomusicology and jazz studies. Drawing on his background as a Village Voice music critic and as the longtime organizer of the Pop Conference, Eric Weisbard offers an important corrective to a fragmented field"-- Provided by publisher. |
| Subject |
Popular music -- United States -- History and criticism.
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Popular music -- United States -- Historiography.
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Popular music. (OCoLC)fst01071422
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Popular music -- Historiography.
(OCoLC)fst01920673
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United States. (OCoLC)fst01204155
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| Genre/Form |
Criticism, interpretation, etc. (OCoLC)fst01411635
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| Other Form: |
Online version: Weisbard, Eric Songbooks Durham : Duke University Press, 2021. 9781478021391 (DLC) 2020032093 |
| ISBN |
9781478011941 hardcover |
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1478011947 hardcover |
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9781478014089 paperback |
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1478014083 paperback |
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9781478021391 electronic book |
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