• Heaven and hell parties: Southern religion and the devil's music
• Sold it to the devil: the great migration, lost generations, and the perils of the urban dance hall
• I'm going to marry the devil's daughter: blues tricksters signifying on Jim Crow
• The devil's gonna get you: blues romance and the paradoxes of black freedom
• Selling it at the crossroads: the lives and legacies of Robert Johnson
• Playing for the haints: Ike's protégé and crossroads folklore
• I got a big white fella from Memphis made a deal with me: black men, white boys, and the anxieties of blues postmodernity in Walter Hill's crossroads
• Local and private legislation: branding the crossroads in Clarksdale, Mississippi.

The devil is the most charismatic and important figure in the blues tradition. He's not just the music's namesake (""the devil's music""), but a shadowy presence who haunts an imagined Mississippi crossroads where, it is claimed, Delta bluesman Robert Johnson traded away his soul in exchange for extraordinary prowess on the guitar. Yet, as scholar and musician Adam Gussow argues, there is much more to the story of the devil and the blues than these cliched understandings.In this groundbreaking study, Gussow takes the full measure of the devil's presence. Working from original transcriptions of more than 125 recordings released during the past ninety years, Gussow explores the varied uses to which black southern blues people have put this trouble-sowing, love-wrecking, but also empowering figure. The book culminates with a bold reinterpretation of Johnson's music and a provocative investigation of the way in which the citizens of Clarksdale, Mississippi, managed to rebrand a commercial hub as ""the crossroads"" in 1999, claiming Johnson and the devil as their own.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)9781469633664 20171023

Banjo music possesses a unique power to evoke a bucolic, simpler past. The artisans who build banjos for old-time music stand at an unusual crossroads "asked to meet the modern musician's needs while retaining the nostalgic qualities so fundamental to the banjo's sound and mystique. Richard Jones-Bamman ventures into workshops and old-time music communities to explore how banjo builders practice their art. His interviews and long-time personal immersion in the musical culture shed light on long-overlooked aspects of banjo making. What is the banjo builder's role in the creation of a specific musical community? What techniques go into the styles of instruments they create? Jones-Bamman explores these questions and many others while sharing the ways an inescapable sense of the past undergirds the performance and enjoyment of old-time music. Along the way he reveals how antimodernism remains integral to the music's appeal and its making.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)9780252082849 20171201

The Chinatown opera house provided Chinese immigrants with an essential source of entertainment during the pre "World War II era. But its stories of loyalty, obligation, passion, and duty also attracted diverse patrons into Chinese American communities Drawing on a wealth of new Chinese- and English-language research, Nancy Yunhwa Rao tells the story of iconic theater companies and the networks and migrations that made Chinese opera a part of North American cultures. Rao unmasks a backstage world of performers, performance, and repertoire and sets readers in the spellbound audiences beyond the footlights. But she also braids a captivating and complex history from elements outside the opera house walls: the impact of government immigration policy; how a theater influenced a Chinatown's sense of cultural self; the dissemination of Chinese opera music via recording and print materials; and the role of Chinese American business in sustaining theatrical institutions. The result is a work that strips the veneer of exoticism from Chinese opera, placing it firmly within the bounds of American music and a profoundly American experience.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)9780252082030 20170321

• Prologue
• "I've got dreams to remember" : post-war years-Lubbock, Texas
• "The cost of living" : North Texas in the early '50s
• "Never been rocked enough" : the birth of rock and roll
• "A right to be wrong" : coming of age in a Texas roadhouse
• "Honky-tonkin' (I guess I've done me some)" : the Straitjackets
• "If you really want me to, I'll go" : the Rondels
• "Livin' it down" : learning the business of music
• "Two more bottles of wine" : the Los Angeles years
• "California livin'" : Clean Records
• "Victim of life's circumstances" : going solo
• "Ain't what you eat but the way how you chew it" : progressive country
• "Second wind" : the road warrior
• "I want to love you" : Wendy and the lost boys
• "Take it easy lovin' me" : the worst of times
• "Good man, good woman" : making it work
• "Have a little faith in me" : Curb cuts
• "Acquired taste" : the millennial groove
• "Sandy beaches" : the Delbert cruises
• "Sending me angels" : family ties and old friends
• "Best of me" : staying power
• Epilogue
• Afterword
• Appendix
• Notes
• Selected discography.

Influenced at a young age by classic country, Tejano, western swing, and the popular music of wartime America, blues musician Delbert McClinton grew up with a backstage pass to some of the most significant moments in American cultural and music history. From his birth on the high plains of West Texas during World War II to headlining sold-out cruises on chartered luxury ships well into his seventies, McClinton admits he has been "One of the Fortunate Few."This book chronicles McClinton's path through a free-range childhood in Lubbock and Fort Worth; an early career in the desegregated roadhouses along Fort Worth's Jacksboro Highway, where he led the house bands for Jimmy Reed, Muddy Waters, Bo Diddly, and others while making a name for himself as a regional player in the birth of rock and roll; headlining shows in England with a little-known Liverpool quartet called The Beatles; and heading back to Texas in time for the progressive movement, kicking off Austin's burgeoning role in American music history.Today, more than sixty years after he first stepped onto a stage, Delbert McClinton shows no signs of slowing down. He continues to play sold-out concert and dance halls, theaters, and festival events across the nation. An annual highlight for his fans is the Delbert McClinton Sandy Beaches Cruise, the longest-running music-themed luxury cruise in history at more than twenty-five years of operation. More than the story of a rags-to-riches musician, Delbert McClinton: One of the Fortunate Few offers readers a soundtrack to some of the most pivotal moments in the history of American popular music-all backed by a cooking rhythm section and featuring a hot harmonica lead.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)9781623495886 20180129

George Szell was the Cleveland Orchestra's towering presence for over a quarter of a century. From the boardroom to the stage, Szell's powerful personality affected every aspect of a musical institution he reshaped in his own perfectionist image. Marcia Hansen Kraus's participation in Cleveland's classical musical scene allowed her an intimate view of Szell and his achievements. As a musician herself, and married to an oboist who worked under Szell, Kraus pulls back the curtain on this storied era through fascinating interviews with orchestra musicians and patrons. Their recollections combine with Kraus's own to paint a portrait of a multifaceted individual who both earned and transcended his tyrannical reputation. If some musicians hated Szell, others loved him or at the least respected his fair-minded toughness. A great many remember playing under his difficult leadership as the high point in their lives. Filled with vivid backstage stories, George Szell's Reign reveals the human side of a great orchestra "and how one visionary built a premier classical music institution.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)9780252041310 20171211

Tarantella, a genre of Southern Italian folk music and dance, is an international phenomenon--seen and heard in popular festivals, performed across the Italian diaspora, even adapted for New Age spiritual practices. The boom in popularity has diversified tarantella in practice while setting it within a host of new, unexpected contexts. Incoronata Inserra ventures into the history, global circulation, and recontextualization of this fascinating genre. Examining tarantella's changing image and role among Italians and Italian Americans, Inserra illuminates how factors like tourism, translation, and world music venues have shifted the ethics of place embedded in the tarantella cultural tradition. Once rural, religious, and rooted, tarantella now thrives in settings urban, secular, migrant, and ethnic. Inserra reveals how the genre's changing dynamics contribute to reimagining Southern Italian identity. At the same time, they translate tarantella into a different kind of performance that serves new social and cultural groups and purposes. Indeed, as Inserra shows, tarantella's global growth promotes a reassessment of gender relations in the Italian South and helps create space for Italian and Italian-American women to reclaim gendered aspects of the genre.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)9780252082832 20180115

Born into folk music's first family, Peggy Seeger has blazed her own trail artistically and personally. Jean Freedman draws on a wealth of research and conversations with Seeger to tell the life story of one of music's most charismatic performers and tireless advocates. Here is the story of Seeger's multifaceted career, from her youth to her pivotal role in the American and British folk revivals, from her instrumental virtuosity to her tireless work on behalf of environmental and feminist causes, from wry reflections on the U.K. folk scene to decades as a songwriter. Freedman also delves into Seeger's fruitful partnership with Ewan MacColl and a multitude of contributions which include creating the renowned Festivals of Fools, founding Blackthorne Records, masterminding the legendary Radio Ballads documentaries, and mentoring performers in the often-fraught atmosphere of The Critics Group. Bracingly candid and as passionate as its subject, Peggy Seeger is the first book-length biography of a life set to music.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)9780252040757 20170410

• Guitarchaeology : setting the stage
• Nick Lucas : America's first guitar hero
• Ry Cooder : prewar country blues
• Barney Kessel : the rise of Charlie Christian
• Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown : "American music, Texas-style"
• Roebuck "Pops" Staples : gospel guitar
• Ricky Nelson : remembering rockabilly
• Carol Kaye : the first lady of rock
• Stevie Ray Vaughan : on Jimi Hendrix
• James Gurley : "the Yuri Gagarin of psychedelic guitar"
• Jerry Garcia : "it's the next note, not the last one"
• Johnny Winter : sliding the blues
• Gregg Allman : "my brother Duane"
• Carlos Santana : "put wings on people's hearts"
• Neil Young : the power of one note
• Eddie Van Halen : "my first interview"
• Tom Petty : songwriting and the art of rhythm guitar
• Eric Johnson : the journey inward
• Joe Satriani : the resurgence of instrumental rock
• Ben Harper : "the strongest spirit in all creation."

In this lively collection of interviews, storied music writer Jas Obrecht presents a celebration of the world's most popular instrument as seen through the words, lives, and artistry of some of its most beloved players. Readers will read--and hear--accounts of the first guitarists on record, pioneering bluesmen, gospel greats, jazz innovators, country pickers, rocking rebels, psychedelic shape-shifters, singer-songwriters, and other movers and shakers. In their own words, these guitar players reveal how they found their inspirations, mastered their instruments, crafted classic songs, and created enduring solos. Also included is a CD of never-before-heard moments from Obrecht's insightful interviews with these guitar greats. Highlights include Nick Lucas's recollections of waxing the first noteworthy guitar records; Ry Cooder's exploration of prewar blues musicians; Carole Kaye and Ricky Nelson on the early years of rock and roll; Stevie Ray Vaughan on Jimi Hendrix; Gregg Allman on his brother, Duane Allman; Carlos Santana and Pops Staples on spirituality in music; Jerry Garcia, Neil Young, and Tom Petty on songwriting and creativity; Early interviews with Eddie Van Halen, Eric Johnson, Joe Satriani, and Ben Harper.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)9781469631646 20170530

• Business and politics : the landscape
• Ace race arranger : the Broadway music clinic
• Harlem on Broadway : nightclub and theater revues
• Theory and practice : the fundamentals
• Episode and interlude : Broadway modernism
• Futuristic ragtime : style and identity
• Heavy stuff : classics and concertos
• Give me some skin : novelty songs and ballads
• Jungle madness : jazz dance and exotic numbers.

Behind the iconic jazz orchestras, vocalists, and stage productions of the Swing Era lay the talents of popular music's unsung heroes: the arrangers. John Wriggle takes you behind the scenes of New York City's vibrant entertainment industry of the 1930s and 1940s to uncover the lives and work of jazz arrangers, both black and white, who left an indelible mark on American music and culture. Blue Rhythm Fantasy traces the extraordinary career of arranger Chappie Willet--a collaborator of Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Gene Krupa, and many others--to revisit legendary Swing Era venues and performers from Harlem to Times Square. Wriggle's insightful music analyses of big band arranging techniques explore representations of cultural modernism, discourses on art and commercialism, conceptions of race and cultural identity, music industry marketing strategies, and stage entertainment variety genres. Drawing on archives, obscure recordings, untapped sources in the African American press, and interviews with participants, Blue Rhythm Fantasy is a long-overdue study of the arranger during this dynamic era of American music history.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)9780252040405 20161003

• Headless heroes of the apocalypse
• Cuba libre
• Dedicated to the struggle
• Cosa nuestra.

In Chocolate Surrealism Njoroge Njoroge highlights connections among the production, performance, and reception of popular music at critical historical junctures in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The author sifts different origins and styles to place socio-musical movements into a larger historical framework. Calypso reigned during the turbulent interwar period and the ensuing crises of capitalism. The Cuban rumba/son complex enlivened the postwar era of American empire. Jazz exploded in the Bandung period and the rise of decolonization. And, lastly, Nuyorican Salsa coincided with the period of the civil rights movement and the beginnings of black/brown power. Njoroge illuminates musics of the circum-Caribbean as culturally and conceptually integrated within the larger history of the region. He pays close attention to the fractures, fragmentations, and historical particularities that both unite and divide the region's sounds. At the same time, he engages with a larger discussion of the Atlantic world. Njoroge examines the deep interrelations between music, movement, memory, and history in the African diaspora. He finds the music both a theoretical anchor and a mode of expression and representation of black identities and political cultures. Music and performance offer ways for the author to re-theorize the intersections of race, nationalism and musical practice, and geopolitical connections. Further music allows Njoroge a reassessment of the development of the modern world system, through local, popular responses to the global age. The book analyzes different styles, times, and politics to render a brief history of Black Atlantic sound.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)9781496806895 20160725

Essays that overthrow stereotypes and demonstrate the genre's power and mystique. Contributions by Georgia Christgau, Alexander S. Dent, Leigh H. Edwards, Caroline Gnagy, Kate Heidemann, Nadine Hubbs, Jocelyn Neal, Ase Ottosson, Travis Stimeling, Matthew D. Sutton, and Chris Wilson Country music boasts a long tradition of rich, contradictory gender dynamics, creating a world where Kitty Wells could play the demure housewife and the honky-tonk angel simultaneously, Dolly Parton could move from traditionalist "girl singer" to outspoken trans rights advocate, and current radio playlists can alternate between the reckless masculinity of bro-country and the adolescent girlishness of Taylor Swift. In this follow-up volume to A Boy Named Sue, some of the leading authors in the field of country music studies reexamine the place of gender in country music, considering the ways country artists and listeners have negotiated gender and sexuality through their music and how gender has shaped the way that music is made and heard. In addition to shedding new light on such legends as Wells, Parton, Loretta Lynn, and Charley Pride, it traces more recent shifts in gender politics through the performances of such contemporary luminaries as Swift, Gretchen Wilson, and Blake Shelton. The book also explores the intersections of gender, race, class, and nationality in a host of less expected contexts, including the prisons of WWII-era Texas, where the members of the Goree All-Girl String Band became the unlikeliest of radio stars; the studios and offices of Plantation Records, where Jeannie C. Riley and Linda Martell challenged the social hierarchies of a changing South in the 1960s; and the burgeoning cities of present-day Brazil, where "college country" has become one way of negotiating masculinity in an age of economic and social instability.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)9781496805058 20160619

• "Nothing but realism": early hillbilly music's blend of rural and urban
• "Country comes to town": a new urban identity for country music in the 1960s
• "You sound like us but you look like them": the racial politics of country music in the city of Nashville
• "Country music is wherever the soul of a country music fan is": Opryland U.S.A. and the importance of "home" in country music
• "They're not as backward as they used to be": country music's commercial success in the 1990s and the transformation of downtown Nashville.

Country music evokes a simple, agrarian past, with images of open land and pickup trucks. While some might think of the genre as a repository of nostalgia, popular because it preserves and reveres traditional values, Jeremy Hill argues that country music has found such expansive success because its songs and its people have forcefully addressed social and cultural issues as well as geographic change. Hill demonstrates how the genre and its fans developed a flexible idea of ""country, "" beyond their rural roots, and how this flexibility allowed fans and music to ""come to town, "" to move into and within urban spaces, while retaining a country ""character."" To understand how the genre has become the far-reaching commercial phenomenon that it is today, Hill explores how various players within the country music fold have grappled with the notion of place. He shows both how the industry has transformed the city of Nashville and how country music -- through song lyrics, imagery associated with the music, and branding -- has reshaped ideas about the American landscape and character. As the genre underwent significant change in the last decades of the twentieth century, those who sought to explain its new styles and new locations relied on a traditional theme: ""You can take the boy out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the boy."" Hill demonstrates how this idea -- that you can still be ""country"" while no longer living in a rural place -- has been used to expand country's commercial appeal and establish a permanent home in the urban space of Nashville.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)9781625341723 20160619

• Introductory notes / Enrique Cámara de Landa ; Terada Yoshitaka
• 1. Theory and methodology.
• The ethnomusicological documentary: Some principles and guidelines / Nico Staiti
• Approaches to visual anthropology applied to ethnomusicology: "Multivocal editing" and musical action as a form of knowledge / Charlotte Vignau
• A regola d'Arte, an experience in reflexive visual anthropology / Fulvia Caruso
• 2. Ethics and representation.
• On making "Drumming out a Message": Filmmaking and marginalized communities / Terada Yoshitaka
• Payada, empathy and social commitment: a filming experience in an Argentinian prison / Matías Isolabella
• 3. Analysis.
• Using video as a tool for the analysis of music and dance performances / Giorgio Adamo
• Western chaco flutes and flute players revisited / María Eugenia Dominguez
• Saludos amigos: Reflections about Brazilian's cultural identity / Daniel Vilela ; João Egashira
• 4. Education.
• Producing ethnomusicological audiovisuals in current educational contexts / Enrique Cámara de Landa
• Ethnomusicology in the audiovisual world: Theoretical and educational applications / Nick Poulakis
• 5. Fieldwork footage.
• The birth of an intangible heritage archive: Guitarrón music and chino dances in central Chile / Claudio Mercado M.
• Life beyond the archive: Converting archived fieldwork footage into a documentary / Rui Oliveira
• 6. TV Documentaries.
• An ethnomusicological perspective for a television documentary film shot in Calabar (Nigeria) / Leonardo D'Amico
• Researching and producing visual ethnomusicology in Peru: On ethnographic videos and television documentaries / Raúl R. Romero.

Harry T. Burleigh (1866-1949) played a leading role in American music and culture in the twentieth century. Celebrated for his arrangements of spirituals, Burleigh was also the first African American composer to create a significant body of art song. An international roster of opera and recital singers performed his works and praised them as among the best of their time. Jean E. Snyder traces Burleigh's life from his Pennsylvania childhood through his fifty-year tenure as soloist at St. George's Episcopal Church in Manhattan. As a composer, Burleigh's pioneering work preserved and transformed the African American spiritual; as a music editor, he facilitated the work of other black composers; as a role model, vocal coach, and mentor, he profoundly influenced American song; and in private life he was friends with AntonA-n DvoA(TM)A!k, Marian Anderson, Will Marion Cook, and other America luminaries. Snyder provides rich historical, social, and political contexts that explore Burleigh's professional and personal life within an era complicated by changes in race relations, class expectations, and musical tastes.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)9780252039942 20160619

• Listening to jazz
• Developing "big ears" : jazz fans
• Making the scene : fan communities
• Providing a place and time : jazz presenters
• Jazz jobbing : music professionals
• Hear and now : collective improvisation and spiritual synergy.

How do we speak about jazz? In this provocative study based on the author's deep immersion in the New York City jazz scene, Tom Greenland turns from the usual emphasis on artists and their music to focus on non-performing participants, describing them as active performers in their own right who witness and thus collaborate in a happening made one-of-a-kind by improvisation, mood, and moment. Jazzing shines a spotlight on the constituency of proprietors, booking agents, photographers, critics, publicists, painters, amateur musicians, fans, friends, and tourists that makes up New York City's contemporary jazz scene. Drawn from deep ethnographic research, interviews, and long term participant observation, Jazzing charts the ways New York's distinctive physical and social-cultural environment affects and is affected by jazz. Throughout, Greenland offers a passionate argument in favor of a radically inclusive conception of music-making, one in which individuals collectively improvise across social contexts to co-create community and musical meaning. An odyssey through the clubs and other performance spaces on and off the beaten track, Jazzing is an insider's view of a vibrant urban art world.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)9780252081606 20160704