The story of the banjo's journey from Africa to the western hemisphere blends music, history, and a union of cultures. In Banjo Roots and Branches, Robert B. Winans presents cutting-edge scholarship that covers the instrument's West African origins and its adaptations and circulation in the Caribbean and United States. The contributors provide detailed ethnographic and technical research on gourd lutes and ekonting in Africa and the banza in Haiti while also investigating tuning practices and regional playing styles. Other essays place the instrument within the context of slavery, tell the stories of black banjoists, and shed light on the banjo's introduction into the African- and Anglo-American folk milieus. Wide-ranging and illustrated with twenty color images, Banjo Roots and Branches offers a wealth of new information to scholars of African American and folk musics as well as the worldwide community of banjo aficionados. Contributors: Greg C. Adams, Nick Bamber, Jim Dalton, George R. Gibson, Chuck Levy, Shlomo Pestcoe, Pete Ross, Tony Thomas, Saskia Willaert, and Robert B. Winans.
(source: Nielsen Book Data) 9780252083600 20181105

From classic films like Carmen Jones to contemporary works like The Diary of Sally Hemings and U-Carmen eKhayelitsa, American and South African artists and composers have used opera to reclaim black people's place in history. Naomi Andre draws on the experiences of performers and audiences to explore this music's resonance with today's listeners. Interacting with creators and performers, as well as with the works themselves, Andre reveals how black opera unearths suppressed truths. These truths provoke complex, if uncomfortable, reconsideration of racial, gender, sexual, and other oppressive ideologies. Opera, in turn, operates as a cultural and political force that employs an immense, transformative power to represent or even liberate. Viewing opera as a fertile site for critical inquiry, political activism, and social change, Black Opera lays the foundation for innovative new approaches to applied scholarship.
(source: Nielsen Book Data) 9780252083570 20180625

• Intro; Title Page; Copyright Page; Contents; Foreword; Acknowledgments; Introduction; Prologue; Summer 1961; Meeting Monroe: June-July 1961; Bean Blossom: 1961; House Band: July-August 1961; Meeting the Audience: July 1961; Playing the Five: 1953-June 1961; Letters to Home: August 1961; Meeting the Regulars: August 1961; Bloomington: July-August 1961; Fall 1961; Monroe Again: September 1961; Autumn Work: September-October 1961; Stepping Up: October 1961; Connections: October 1961; White House Blues: October 1961; End of the Season: November 1961; Cannonball Blues: December 1961; Spring 1962

• Meeting Marvin Hedrick: January-June 1962College Kids: March-May 1962; Summer 1962; Back to the Jamboree: July-August 1962; Folk in Bloomington: July-September 1962; Fall 1962; Mocking Bird Hill: September 1962; Folk and Country: October 1962; College Folk, Bluegrass, Banjo Necks: November 1962; Spring 1963; On the Road: January-March 1963; Spring Pickin': April 1963; Reno & Smiley: April 1963; Stonemans, Banjo Contest: May 1963; Summer 1963; Meeting Ralph Rinzler: June 1963; Ralph Fires Birch: June 1963; A Business Model: June-July 1963; Bobby Hits the Barn: June 1963

• Two Country Sundays: July 1963Conversations with Ralph: July 1963; Week
• 6 and the Letter: July-August 1963; Mandolin Sunday: August 1963; Berkeley Bluegrass: August-September 1963; Marvin Takes Over: August-September 1963; Fall 1963; Back to the Barn: September 1963; Monroe Day: September-October 1963; Bluegrass HQ: October-November 1963; Bean Blossom Hop: November 1963; Last Report to Ralph: November-December 1963; After the Jamboree: 1964-1967; Afterword; Recordings, Notes, and Bibliography; Recordings; Notes; Bibliography; Credits; General Index; Song Title Index; About the Author

• Introduction
• Southern blues
• Carving out a home in the promised land
• Southern migrant blues : Lee Bradley and the Black Metropolis
• The rise of Big Bill
• I come for to sing
• We love the blues, but tell us about jazz
• Big Bill Broonzy : the making of a legend
• Escaping the folk : the 'authentic' career of a black pop star
• Epilogue.

Over the course of his long career, legendary bluesman William ""Big Bill"" Broonzy (1893@-1958) helped shape the trajectory of the genre, from its roots in the rural Mississippi River Delta, through its rise as a popular genre in the north, to its eventual international acclaim. Along the way, Broonzy adopted an evolving personal and professional identity, tailoring his self-presentation to the demands of the place and time. His remarkable professional fluidity mirrored the range of expectations from his audiences, whose ideas about race, national belonging, identity, and the blues were refracted through Broonzy as if through a prism. Kevin D. Greene argues that Broonzy's popular success testifies to his ability to navigate the cultural expectations of his different audiences. However, this constant reinvention came at a personal and professional cost. Using Broonzy's multifaceted career, Greene situates blues performance at the center of understanding African American self-presentation and racial identity in the first half of the twentieth century. Through Broonzy's life and times, Greene assesses major themes and events in African American history, including the Great Migration, urbanization, and black expatriate encounters with European culture consumers. Drawing on a range of historical source materials as well as oral histories and personal archives held by Broonzy's son, Greene perceptively interrogates how notions of race, gender, and audience reception continue to shape concepts of folk culture and musical authenticity.
(source: Nielsen Book Data) 9781469646480 20181126

• Introduction
• 1. Breaking with Tradition
• 2. Finding a Place in the City
• 3. Acceptance as a Rising Star
• 4. The Hazards of Becoming a Jazz Queen
• 5. Everybody's Mama
• 6. Grasping for Recognition
• 7. The Value of Devotion
• 8. Sophie Tucker for President Epilogue Acknowledgments Notes Photo Credits Index.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

The "First Lady of Show Business" and the "Last of the Red Hot Mamas, " Sophie Tucker was a star in vaudeville, radio, film, and television. A gutsy, song-belting stage performer, she entertained audiences for sixty years and inspired a host of younger women, including Judy Garland, Carol Channing, and Bette Midler. Tucker was a woman who defied traditional expectations and achieved success on her own terms, becoming the first female president of the American Federation of Actors and winning many other honors usually bestowed on men. Dedicated to social justice, she advocated for African Americans in the entertainment industry and cultivated friendships with leading black activists and performers. Tucker was also one of the most generous philanthropists in show business, raising over four million dollars for the religious and racial causes she held dear. Drawing from the hundreds of scrapbooks Tucker compiled, Red Hot Mama presents a compelling biography of this larger-than-life performer. Lauren Rebecca Sklaroff tells an engrossing story of how a daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants set her sights on becoming one of the most formidable women in show business and achieved her version of the American dream. More than most of her contemporaries, Tucker understood how to keep her act fresh, to change branding when audiences grew tired and, most importantly, how to connect with her fans, the press, and entertainment moguls. Both deservedly famous and unjustly forgotten today, Tucker stands out as an exemplar of the immigrant experience and a trailblazer for women in the entertainment industry.
(source: Nielsen Book Data) 9781477312360 20180530

• Cover; Title; Copyright; Contents; Acknowledgments;
• 1. They All Go Native on a Saturday Night: Civilized versus Native in American Vernacular Music;
• 2. Yes Indeed: Race, Revival, and Rock 'n' Roll;
• 3. Let's All Get Dixie Fried: Sexuality, Masculinity, Race, and Rockabilly;
• 4. Take Me Higher: Dancing, Drinking, and Doing Drugs;
• 5. Blues and the Abstract Truth: From Blues to Jazz;
• 6. I Was So Much Older Then: Folk Revival into Rock 'n' Roll;
• 7. The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down: Bluegrass, Folk Rock, and Outlaw Country;
• 8. Come Back to Texas: From "Bogalusa Boogie" to "Soy Chicano"; Notes

The cowboy songs and dusty Texas car rides of his youth set Patrick B. Mullen on a lifelong journey into the sprawling Arcadia of American music. That music fused so-called civilized elements with native forms to produce everything from Zydeco to Conjunto to jazz to Woody Guthrie. The civilized/native idea, meanwhile, helped develop Mullen's critical perspective, guide his love of music, and steer his life's work. Part scholar's musings and part fan's memoir, Right to the Juke Joint follows Mullen from his early embrace of country and folk to the full flowering of an idiosyncratic, omnivorous interest in music. Personal memory merges with a lifetime of fieldwork in folklore and anthropology to provide readers with a deeply informed analysis of American roots music. Mullen opens up on the world of ideas and his own tireless fandom to explore how his cultural identity--and ours--relates to concepts like authenticity and "folkness." The result is a charming musical map drawn by a gifted storyteller whose boots have traveled a thousand tuneful roads.
(source: Nielsen Book Data) 9780252041648 20180723

Spanish emigre guitarist Celedonio Romero gave his American debut performance on a June evening in 1958. In the sixty years since, the Romero Family-Celedonio, his wife Angelita, sons Celin, Pepe, and Angel, as well as grandsons Celino and Lito-have become preeminent in the world of Spanish flamenco and classical guitar in the United States. Walter Aaron Clark's in-depth research and unprecedented access to his subjects have produced the consummate biography of the Romero family. Clark examines the full story of their genius for making music, from their outsider's struggle to gain respect for the Spanish guitar to the ins and outs of making a living as musicians. As he shows, their concerts and recordings, behind-the-scenes musical careers, and teaching have reshaped their instrument's very history. At the same time, the Romeros have organized festivals and encouraged leading composers to write works for guitar as part of a tireless, lifelong effort to promote the guitar and expand its repertoire. Entertaining and intimate, Los Romeros opens up the personal world and unfettered artistry of one family and its tremendous influence on American musical culture.
(source: Nielsen Book Data) 9780252041907 20180813

• Setting the stage: "It's lonely out here by myself"
• September
• 1966: Swinging London
• October
• 1966: A meeting of the gods
• November
• 1966: "The best guitarist in the world"
• December
• 1966: At home with the blues
• January
• 1967: "Wild man of Borneo"
• February
• 1967: Making a media darling
• March
• 1967: "The black Bob Dylan"
• April
• 1967: Hendrixmania
• May
• 1967: "The group they love to hate"
• June
• 1967: Setting the world on fire.

A compelling portrait of rock's greatest guitarist at the moment of his ascendance, Stone Free is the first book to focus exclusively on the happiest and most productive period of Jimi Hendrix's life. As it begins in the fall of 1966, he's an under-sung, under-accomplished sideman struggling to survive in New York City. Nine months later, he's the toast of Swinging London, a fashion icon, and the brightest star to step off the stage at the Monterey International Pop Festival. This momentum-building, day-by-day account of this extraordinary transformation offers new details into Jimi's personality, relationships, songwriting, guitar innovations, studio sessions, and record releases. It explores the social changes sweeping the U.K., Hendrix's role in the dawning of ""flower power, "" and the prejudice he faced while fronting the Jimi Hendrix Experience. In addition to featuring the voices of Jimi, his bandmates, and other eyewitnesses, Stone Free draws extensively from contemporary accounts published in English- and foreign-language newspapers and music magazines. This celebratory account is a must-read for Hendrix fans.
(source: Nielsen Book Data) 9781469647067 20190114

• 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