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Author : Wayne W. Daniel Publisher : University of Illinois Press Page : 332 pages File Size : 50,6 Mb Release : 2001 Category : History ISBN : 0252069684
But for a few twists of fate, Atlanta could have grown to be the recording center that Nashville is today. Pickin' on Peachtree traces Atlanta's emergence in the 1920s as a major force in country recording and radio broadcasting and its forty years as a hub of country music. From the Old Time Fiddlers' Conventions and barn dances through the rise of station WSB and other key radio outlets, Wayne W. Daniel thoroughly documents the consolidation of country music as big business in Atlanta. He also profiles a vast array of performers, radio personalities, and recording moguls who transformed the Peachtree city into the nerve center of early country music.
Highbrows, Hillbillies, and Hellfire by Steve Goodson Pdf
From the end of Reconstruction to the eve of the Great Depression, Atlanta was the New South's "Gate City." Steve Goodson's social and cultural history looks at the variety of public amusements available to Atlantans of the day, including theater, vaudeville, dime museums, movies, radio, and classical, blues, and country music. Revealed in the ways its people embraced or condemned everything from burlesque to opera is an Atlanta unsure of its identity and acutely sensitive of its image in the eyes of the nation. While the general populace hungered for novelty and diversion, middle-class Atlantans, white and black, saw entertainment as a source of--or threat to--status and respectability. Goodson traces the roots of this tension to the city's rapid and problematic growth, its uncomfortably diverse population, and its multiplying ties to national markets. At the same time he portrays some lively individuals who shaped Atlanta's entertainment scene. Among them are impresario Laurent DeGive, tightrope walker Professor Leon, patent-medicine salesman Yellowstone Kit, country music great Fiddlin' John Carson, and blues legends Bessie Smith and Blind Willie McTell. Goodson also brings alive the atmosphere of such venues as DeGive's resplendent Grand Opera House, George Johnson's tacky Museum of Living Wonders, the pioneering Trocadero vaudeville house, and the notorious 81 Theater on Decatur Street, an avenue whose decadent promise rivaled that of Beale in Memphis and Bourbon in New Orleans. Milestone trends and events are also showcased: performances of the play Uncle Tom's Cabin and showings of the film Birth of a Nation, visits by the Metropolitan Opera Company, the debate over Sunday entertainment, the beginning of broadcasts by "The Voice of the South"--radio station WSB--and the rise of Atlanta as the earliest capital of country and blues recording. Accepted historical views of public entertainment in America suggest that ethnicity and class would be the most pronounced forces shaping this aspect of Atlanta's popular culture. Goodson finds, however, that race and evangelical Christianity also heavily influenced the circumstances in which Atlantans went about their fun. With implications for the entire urban South, this is an engaging look at how and why its major city once grasped at sophistication and progress with one hand while pushing it away with the other.
Contrary to popular belief, the roots of American country music do not lie solely on southern farms or in mountain hollows. Rather, much of this music recorded before World War II emerged from the bustling cities and towns of the Piedmont South. No group contributed more to the commercialization of early country music than southern factory workers. In Linthead Stomp, Patrick Huber explores the origins and development of this music in the Piedmont's mill villages. Huber offers vivid portraits of a colorful cast of Piedmont millhand musicians, including Fiddlin' John Carson, Charlie Poole, Dave McCarn, and the Dixon Brothers, and considers the impact that urban living, industrial work, and mass culture had on their lives and music. Drawing on a broad range of sources, including rare 78-rpm recordings and unpublished interviews, Huber reveals how the country music recorded between 1922 and 1942 was just as modern as the jazz music of the same era. Linthead Stomp celebrates the Piedmont millhand fiddlers, guitarists, and banjo pickers who combined the collective memories of the rural countryside with the upheavals of urban-industrial life to create a distinctive American music that spoke to the changing realities of the twentieth-century South.
In the mid-twentieth century, certain elements of the American popular music industry (publishers, recording companies, and broadcasters) began to redefine their product as something more than mere entertainment. This became evident in the arguments made by competing sides in a series of clashes that unfolded during that period, starting with the ASCAP-Radio dispute of 1941 and ending with the payola scandal in 1959. Although these disputes typically revolved around economic issues, in making their cases to the public the respective sides often asserted the significant role played by popular music in promoting core national values. While such rhetoric was basically self-serving, when set against the backdrop of major events like World War II, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Cold War, it resonated strongly with the public and helped convince many that popular music offered more to its audience than momentary diversion. Considering that the resolutions to these conflicts also tended to expand opportunities for previously marginalized styles and performers, notably African-Americans and rural southerners, it became natural to link popular music to ideas of social progress as well. This contributed to the creation of what could be called “rock and roll culture,” a coherent set of values related to concepts of youth, authenticity, sexual liberation, and social equality that emerged by the end of the 1950s. These traits became a prevalent part of American culture through the end of the twentieth century, with popular music seen a perhaps the most significant medium for expressing those values.
Author : Peter La Chapelle Publisher : University of Chicago Press Page : 355 pages File Size : 54,5 Mb Release : 2019-09-09 Category : Music ISBN : 9780226923000
Long before the United States had presidents from the world of movies and reality TV, we had scores of politicians with connections to country music. In I’d Fight the World, Peter La Chapelle traces the deep bonds between country music and politics, from the nineteenth-century rise of fiddler-politicians to more recent figures like Pappy O’Daniel, Roy Acuff, and Rob Quist. These performers and politicians both rode and resisted cultural waves: some advocated for the poor and dispossessed, and others voiced religious and racial anger, but they all walked the line between exploiting their celebrity and righteously taking on the world. La Chapelle vividly shows how country music campaigners have profoundly influenced the American political landscape.
Author : Edward P. Comentale Publisher : University of Illinois Press Page : 299 pages File Size : 51,9 Mb Release : 2013-02-28 Category : Music ISBN : 9780252094576
Sweet Air rewrites the history of early twentieth-century pop music in modernist terms. Tracking the evolution of popular regional genres such as blues, country, folk, and rockabilly in relation to the growth of industry and consumer culture, Edward P. Comentale shows how this music became a vital means of exploring the new and often overwhelming feelings brought on by modern life. Comentale examines these rural genres as they translated the traumas of local experience--the racial violence of the Delta, the mass exodus from the South, the Dust Bowl of the Texas panhandle--into sonic form. Considering the accessibility of these popular music forms, he asserts the value of music as a source of progressive cultural investment, linking poor, rural performers and audiences to an increasingly vast network of commerce, transportation, and technology.
The Oxford Handbook of Country Music by Travis D. Stimeling Pdf
Approaches country music through an interdisciplinary lens, Features close analyses of gendered and racial disparities in country music, Examines politics of both the performance of country music and the scholarship surrounding it Book jacket.
The Father of Bluegrass Music, Bill Monroe was a major star of the Grand Ole Opry for over fifty years; a member of the Country Music, Songwriters, and Rock and Roll Halls of Fame; and a legendary figure in American music. This authoritative biography sets out to examine his life in careful detail--to move beyond hearsay and sensationalism to explain how and why he accomplished so much. Former Blue Grass Boy and longtime music journalist Tom Ewing draws on hundreds of interviews, his personal relationship with Monroe, and an immense personal archive of materials to separate the truth from longstanding myth. Ewing tells the story of the Monroe family's musical household and Bill's early career in the Monroe Brothers duo. He brings to life Monroe's 1940s heyday with the Classic Bluegrass Band, the renewed fervor for his music sparked by the folk revival of the 1960s, and his declining fortunes in the years that followed. Throughout, Ewing deftly captures Monroe's relationships and the personalities of an ever-shifting roster of band members while shedding light on his business dealings and his pioneering work with Bean Blossom and other music festivals. Filled with a wealth of previously unknown details, Bill Monroe offers even the most devoted fan a deeper understanding of Monroe's towering achievements and timeless music.
Recorded Music in American Life by William Howland Kenney Pdf
Have records, compact discs, and other sound reproduction equipment merely provided American listeners with pleasant diversions, or have more important historical and cultural influences flowed through them? Do recording machines simply capture what's already out there, or is the music somehow transformed in the dual process of documentation and dissemination? How would our lives be different without these machines? Such are the questions that arise when we stop taking for granted the phenomenon of recorded music and the phonograph itself. Now comes an in-depth cultural history of the phonograph in the United States from 1890 to 1945. William Howland Kenney offers a full account of what he calls "the 78 r.p.m. era"--from the formative early decades in which the giants of the record industry reigned supreme in the absence of radio, to the postwar proliferation of independent labels, disk jockeys, and changes in popular taste and opinion. By examining the interplay between recorded music and the key social, political, and economic forces in America during the phonograph's rise and fall as the dominant medium of popular recorded sound, he addresses such vital issues as the place of multiculturalism in the phonograph's history, the roles of women as record-player listeners and performers, the belated commercial legitimacy of rhythm-and-blues recordings, the "hit record" phenomenon in the wake of the Great Depression, the origins of the rock-and-roll revolution, and the shifting place of popular recorded music in America's personal and cultural memories. Throughout the book, Kenney argues that the phonograph and the recording industry served neither to impose a preference for high culture nor a degraded popular taste, but rather expressed a diverse set of sensibilities in which various sorts of people found a new kind of pleasure. To this end, Recorded Music in American Life effectively illustrates how recorded music provided the focus for active recorded sound cultures, in which listeners shared what they heard, and expressed crucial dimensions of their private lives, by way of their involvement with records and record-players. Students and scholars of American music, culture, commerce, and history--as well as fans and collectors interested in this phase of our rich artistic past--will find a great deal of thorough research and fresh scholarship to enjoy in these pages.
Poor Gal: The Cultural History of Little Liza Jane chronicles the origins and evolution of a folk tune beloved by millions worldwide. Dan Gutstein delves into the trajectory of the “Liza Jane” family of songs, including the most popular variant “Li’l Liza Jane.” Likely originating among enslaved people on southern plantations, the songs are still performed and recorded centuries later. Evidence for these tunes as part of the repertoire of enslaved people comes from the Works Progress Administration ex-slave narratives that detail a range of lyrics and performance rituals related to “Liza Jane.” Civil War soldiers and minstrel troupes eventually adopted certain variants, including “Goodbye Liza Jane.” This version of the song prospered in the racist environment of burnt cork minstrelsy. Other familiar variants, such as “Little Liza Jane,” likely remained fixed in folk tradition until early twentieth-century sheet music popularized the melody. New genres and a slate of stellar performers broadly adopted these folk songs, bringing the tunes to far-reaching listeners. In 1960, to an audience of more than thirty million viewers, Harry Belafonte performed “Little Liza Jane” on CBS. The song was featured on such popular radio shows as Fibber McGee & Molly; films such as Coquette; and a Mickey Mouse animation. Hundreds of recognizable performers—including Fats Domino, Bing Crosby, Nina Simone, Mississippi John Hurt, and Pete Seeger—embraced the “Liza Jane” family. David Bowie even released “Liza Jane” as his first single. Gutstein documents these famous renditions, as well as lesser-known characters integral to the song’s history. Drawing upon a host of cultural insights from experts—including Eileen Southern, Carl Sandburg, Thomas Talley, LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Charles Wolfe, Langston Hughes, and Alan Lomax—Gutstein charts the cross-cultural implications of a voyage unlike any other in the history of American folk music.
Twenty outstanding essays from the engaging and readable Wilson Quarterly magazine illuminate journalism, entertainment, and the cultural underpinnings of modern communications. Media in America's sections cover literacy, popular culture, and advertising; news and politics; movies and music; and television and new media technologies. A natural for classes in journalism and media studies, Media in America: The Wilson Quarterly Reader includes the best and most relevant material from twenty years of the Wilson Quarterly, adds one original article, and offers bibliographic essays indicating additional reading in all areas of media studies.
This text argues that the hillbilly - in his various guises - has been viewed by mainstream Americans simultaneously as a violent degenerate who threatens the modern order and as a keeper of traditional values and thus symbolic of a nostalgic past free of the problems of contemporary life.
Author : Jeffrey J. Lange Publisher : University of Georgia Press Page : 340 pages File Size : 40,5 Mb Release : 2004 Category : Music ISBN : 0820326224
Smile when You Call Me a Hillbilly by Jeffrey J. Lange Pdf
Today, country music enjoys a national fan base that transcends both economic and social boundaries. Sixty years ago, however, it was primarily the music of rural, working-class whites living in the South and was perceived by many Americans as “hillbilly music.” In Smile When You Call Me a Hillbilly, Jeffrey J. Lange examines the 1940s and early 1950s as the most crucial period in country music’s transformation from a rural, southern folk art form to a national phenomenon. In his meticulous analysis of changing performance styles and alterations in the lifestyles of listeners, Lange illuminates the acculturation of country music and its audience into the American mainstream. Dividing country music into six subgenres (progressive country, western swing, postwar traditional, honky-tonk, country pop, and country blues), Lange discusses the music’s expanding appeal. As he analyzes the recordings and comments of each of the subgenre’s most significant artists, including Roy Acuff, Bob Wills, Bill Monroe, Hank Williams, and Red Foley, he traces the many paths the musical form took on its road to respectability. Lange shows how along the way the music and its audience became more sophisticated, how the subgenres blended with one another and with American popular music, and how Nashville emerged as the country music hub. By 1954, the transformation from “hillbilly” music to country music was complete, precipitated by the modernizing forces of World War II and realized by the efforts of promoters, producers, and performers.
