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This book argues that knowledge of jazz, or more to the point, claims to knowledge of jazz, are the prime movers in forming jazz’s identity, its canon, and its community. Every jazz artist, critic, or fan understands jazz differently, based on each individual’s unique experiences and insights. Through playing, listening, reading, and talking about jazz, both as a form of musical expression and as a marker of identity, each aficionado develops a personalized relationship to the larger jazz world. Through the increasingly important role of media, listeners also engage in the formation of different communities that not only transcend traditional boundaries of geography, but increasingly exist only in the virtual world. The relationships of “jazz people” within and between these communities is at the center of this book. Some groups, such as those in academia, reflect a clash of sensibilities between historical traditions. Others, particularly online communities, represent new and exciting avenues for everyday fans, whose involvement in jazz has often been ignored. Other communities seek to define themselves as expressions of national or global sensibility, pointing to the ever-changing nature of jazz’s identity as an American art form in an international setting. What all these communities share, however, is an intimate, visceral link to the music and the artists who make it, brought to life through the medium of recording. Informed by an interdisciplinary approach and approaching the topic from a number of perspectives, the book charts a philosophical course in which many disparate perspectives can find common ground.

In the Mississippi Delta, creativity, community, and a rich expressive culture persist despite widespread poverty. Over five years of extensive work in the region, the author of this book collected a wealth of materials that demonstrate a vibrant musical scene. The book draws from classic studies of the blues as well as extensive ethnographic work to document the “changing same” of Delta music making. From the neighborhood juke joints of the contemporary Delta to the international hip-hop stage, it traces the musical networks that join the region’s African American communities to both traditional forms and new global styles. The book features the words and describes performances of contemporary artists, including blues musicians, gospel singers, radio and club DJs, barroom toast-tellers, preachers, poets, and a spectrum of Delta hip-hop artists. Contemporary Delta hip-hop artists Jerome “TopNotch the Villain” Williams, Kimyata “Yata” Dear, and DA F.A.M. have contributed freestyle poetry, extensive interview materials, and their own commentaries. The book focuses particularly on the biography of TopNotch, whose hip-hop poetics emerge from a lifetime of schoolyard dozens and training in the gospel church.

Carter and Ralph Stanley—the Stanley Brothers—are comparable to Bill Monroe and Flatt & Scruggs as important members of the earliest generation of bluegrass musicians. This biography of the brothers documents that Carter (1925–1966) and Ralph (b. 1927) were equally important contributors to the tradition of old-time country music. Together from 1946 to 1966, the Stanley Brothers began their careers performing in the schoolhouses of southwestern Virginia and expanded their popularity to the concert halls of Europe. In order to re-create this post-World War II journey through the changing landscape of American music, the author interviewed Ralph Stanley, the family of Carter Stanley, former members of the Clinch Mountain Boys, and dozens of musicians and friends who knew the Stanley Brothers as musicians and men. The late Mike Seeger allowed Johnson to use his invaluable 1966 interviews with the brothers. Notable old-time country and bluegrass musicians such as George Shuffler, Lester Woodie, Larry Sparks, and the late Wade Mainer shared their recollections of Carter and Ralph. The book begins and ends in the mountains of southwestern Virginia. Carter and Ralph were born there and had an early publicity photograph taken at the Cumberland Gap. In December 1966, pallbearers walked up Smith Ridge to bring Carter to his final resting place. In the intervening years, the brothers performed thousands of in-person and radio shows, recorded hundreds of songs and tunes for half a dozen record labels, and tried to keep pace with changing times.

This book chronicles the story of the rhythm section at Chips Moman’s American Studios from 1964, when the group began working together, until 1972, when Moman shut down the studio and moved the entire operation to Atlanta. Utilizing extensive interviews with Moman and the group, as well as additional comments from the songwriters, sound engineers, and office staff, the author creates a collective biography combined with a business history and a critical analysis of important recordings. She reveals how the personalities of the core group meshed, how they regarded newcomers, and how their personal and musical philosophies blended with Moman’s vision to create timeless music based on themes of suffering and sorrow. Recording sessions with Elvis Presley, the Gentrys, Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, the Box Tops, Joe Tex, Neil Diamond, B. J. Thomas, Dionne Warwick, and many others come alive in the book. The author provides the stories behind memorable songs composed by group writers, such as “The Letter,” “Dark End of the Street,” “Do Right Woman,” “Breakfast in Bed,” and “You Were Always on My Mind.” Featuring photographs, personal profiles, and a suggested listening section, the book details a significant phase of American music and the impact of one studio.

In October 2001, an unlikely gathering of musicians calling itself the MuzikMafia took place at the Pub of Love in Nashville, Tennessee. “We had all been beat up pretty good by the ‘industry’ and we told ourselves, if nothing else, we might as well be playing muzik,” explains Big Kenny of Big & Rich. For the next year and a half, the MuzikMafia performed each week and garnered an ever-growing, dedicated fan base. Five years, several national tours, six Grammy nominations, and eleven million sold albums later, it now comprises a family of artists including founding members Big & Rich, Jon Nicholson, and Cory Gierman along with Gretchen Wilson, Cowboy Troy, James Otto, Shannon Lawson, Damien Horne (Mista D), Two-Foot Fred, Rachel Kice, and several more in development. This book explores how a set of shared beliefs created a bond that transformed the MuzikMafia into a popular music phenomenon. The author examines the artists’ coalition from the inside perspective he gained in five years of working with them. Looking at all aspects of the collective, the book documents the problems encountered along the ascent, including business difficulties, tensions among members, disagreements with record labels, and miscalculations artists inevitably made, before the MuzikMafia unofficially dissolved in 2008. A final section examines hope for the future: the birth of Mafia Nation in 2009.

In the 1940s and ’50s, Richard Dyer-Bennet (1913–1991) was among the best-known and most respected folk singers in America. This book tells the story of Dyer-Bennet, often referred to as the “Twentieth-Century Minstrel.” Dyer-Bennet’s approach to singing sounded almost foreign to many American listeners. The folk artist followed a musical tradition in danger of dying out. The Swede Sven Scholander was the last European proponent of minstrelsy and served as Dyer-Bennet’s inspiration after the young singer traveled to Stockholm to meet him one year before Scholander’s death. Dyer-Bennet’s achievements were many. Nine years after his meeting with Scholander, he became the first solo performer of his kind to appear in Carnegie Hall. The book argues that Dyer-Bennet helped pave the way for the folk boom of the mid-1950s and early 1960s, finding his influence in the work of Joan Baez, Judy Collins, and many others. It also posits strong evidence that he would certainly be much better known today had his career not been interrupted midstream by the anticommunist, Red-scare blacklist and its ban on his performances.

This book is entirely dedicated to one of the most influential music labels of the twentieth century. In addition to creating the largest bluegrass catalog throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Starday was also known for its legendary rockabilly catalog, an extensive Texas honky-tonk outpouring, classic gospel and sacred recordings, and as a Nashville independent powerhouse studio and label. Written with the label president and co-founder, it traces the label’s origins in 1953 through the 1968 Starday–King merger. Interviews with artists and their families, employees, and the label’s president contribute to the stories behind famous hit songs, including “Y’all Come,” “A Satisfied Mind,” “Why Baby Why,” “Giddy-up Go,” “Alabama,” and many others. The book’s author’s research and interviews also shed new light on the musical careers of George Jones, Arlie Duff, Willie Nelson, Roger Miller, the Stanley Brothers, Cowboy Copas, Red Sovine, and countless other Starday artists. Conversations with the children of Pappy Daily and Jack Starns provide a unique perspective on the early days of Starday, and extensive interviews with the label’s president offer an insider glance at the country music industry during its golden era. Weathering the storm of rock and roll and, later, the Nashville Sound, Starday was a home to traditional country musicians and became one of the most successful independent labels in American history. Ultimately, this book is the record of a country music label that played an integral role in preserving America’s musical heritage.

From West Side Story in 1957 to Road Show in 2008, the musicals of Stephen Sondheim and his collaborators have challenged the conventions of the American musical theater and expanded the possibilities of what musical plays can do, how they work, and what they mean. Stephen Sondheim and the Reinvention of the American Musical places Sondheim’s musicals in two contexts: the exhaustion of the Rodgers and Hammerstein-style musical play that flourished after World War II; and the postmodernism that by the 1960s influenced all the U.S. arts. Sondheim’s musicals are central to the transition from the musical play that had dominated Broadway stages for twenty years to a new postmodern musical, one that reclaimed many of the self-aware, performative techniques of the 1930s musical comedy to develop its themes of the breakdown of narrative knowledge, the fragmentation of identity, and the problematization of representation. Sondheim, who was famously mentored by Oscar Hammerstein II, bridges the span between the musical play and the postmodern musical and, in his most recent work, stretches toward a twenty-first-century musical that seeks to break out of the self-referring web of language. Stephen Sondheim and the Reinvention of the American Musical offers close readings of all of Sondheim’s musicals; examines their dialogue, lyrics, musical themes, and structures; and finds in them their critiques of the operations of power, their questioning of conventional systems of knowledge, and their explorations of contemporary identity.

This book presents a collection of essays on the debates about origins, authenticity, and identity in folk and blues music. The essays had their origins in an international conference on the Transatlantic routes of American roots music, out of which emerged common themes and questions of origins and authenticity in folk music, black and white, American and British. The central theme is musical influences, but issues of identity—national, local, and racial—are also recurring subjects. The extent to which these identities were invented, imagined, or constructed by the performers, or by those who recorded their work for posterity, is also a prominent concern, and questions of racial identity are particularly central. The book features a new essay on the blues by Paul Oliver alongside an essay on Oliver’s seminal blues scholarship. There are also several essays on British blues and the links between performers and styles in the United States and Britain, and new essays on critical figures such as Alan Lomax and Woody Guthrie. The book offers perspectives from both sides of the Atlantic on the connections and interplay of influences in roots music and the debates about these subjects, drawing on the work of eminent established scholars and emerging young academics who are already making a contribution to the field.