Popular music Books

Book SynopsisSince their first performances in 1960, The Beatles'' cultural influence grew in unparalleled ways. From Liverpool to Beatlemania, and from dance halls to Abbey Road Studios and the digital age, the band''s impact exploded during their heyday, and has endured in the decades following their disbandment. Beatles fashion and celebrity culture, politics, psychedelia and the Summer of Love, all highlight different aspects of the band''s complex relationship with the world around them. With a wide range of short, snapshot chapters, The Beatles in Context brings together key themes in which to better explore The Beatles'' lives and work and understand their cultural legacy, focusing on the people and places central to The Beatles'' careers, the visual media that contributed to their enduring success, and the culture and politics of their time.Trade Review'… this is a solid introduction to the life and times of the most successful musical group in history.' J. F. Lyons, ChoiceTable of ContentsPart I. Beatle People and Beatle Places: 1. Britain at mid-century and the rise of The Beatles Jude Southerland Kessler; 2. The Beatles in Liverpool David Bedford; 3. The Beatles on the Reeperbahn Spencer Leigh; 4. Brian Epstein, Beatlemania's architect Kenneth Womack; 5. Love, love, love: tracing the contours of Tthe Beatles' inner circle Kenneth L. Campbell; Part II. The Beatles in Performance: 6. The love there that's sleeping: guitars of the early Beatles Walter Everett; 7. From dance hall days to stadium tours Chuck Gunderson; 8. Beatlemania! Melissa Davis; 9. The end of the road David Venturo; Part III. The Beatles on TV, Film, and the Internet: 10. From Juke-Box Jury to The Ed Sullivan Show Al Sussman; 11. Projecting the visuality of The Beatles: 'A Hard Day's Night' and 'Help!' David Melbye; 12. Beatletoons: moxie, music, and the media Mitchell Axelrod; 13. Documentary, rockumentary: 'Let It Be' and the rooftop concert Steve Matteo; 14. The Beatles redux: the Anthology series and the video age Walter J. Podrazik; 15. Pop goes the internet Allison J. Boron; Part IV. The Beatles' Sound: 16. Abbey Road Studios Brian Southall; 17. Producing sound pictures with Sir George Martin Kenneth Womack; 18. Rock and Roll music!: The Beatles and the rise of the Merseybeat Anthony Robustelli; 19. Positively Bob Dylan: The Beatles and the folk movement Kit O'Toole; 20. Listen to the colour of your dreams: The Beatles Writ Psychedelic Jason Kruppa; 21. Getting back Robert Rodriguez; 22. On the record!: (Dis)covering The Beatles Jerry Zolten; Part V. The Beatles as Sociocultural and Political Touchstones: 23. The Beatles, fashion, and cultural iconography Katie Kapurch; 24. The rise of celebrity culture and fanship with The Beatles in the 1960s Jeffrey Roessner; 25. Psychedelia, 'swinging London,' and the Summer of Love Kathryn Cox; 26. Leaving the West behind: The Beatles and India Steve Hamelman; Part VI. The Beatles' Critical Reception and Cultural Legacy: 27. Phantom band: The Beatles after the Beatles Jacqueline Edmondson; 28. The Beatles, Apple, and the business of music publishing Stuart Rosenberg; 29. Rebooting Beatlemania in the digital age Joe Rapolla; 30. The Beatles in the new millennium Michael Frontani.

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Book SynopsisA People''s Music presents the first full history of jazz in East Germany, drawing on new and previously unexamined sources and vivid eyewitness accounts. Helma Kaldewey chronicles the experiences of jazz musicians, fans, and advocates, and charts the numerous policies state socialism issued to manage this dynamic art form. Offering a radical revision of scholarly views of jazz as a musical genre of dissent, this vivid and authoritative study marks developments in the production, performance, and reception of jazz decade by decade, from the GDR''s beginning in the 1940s to its end in 1990, examining how members of the jazz scene were engaged with (and were sometimes complicit with) state officials and agencies throughout the Cold War. From postwar rebuilding, to Stalinism and partition, to détente, Ostpolitik, and glasnost, and finally to its acceptance as a national art form, Kaldewey reveals just how many lives jazz has lived.Trade Review'This is a book that stakes a claim to telling a new story about the GDR: the history of jazz and its complex relationship with the mechanisms of the state. I do not know of anything that does this, quite like this volume. Clear and wonderfully engaging, this draws on a wealth of new material, interviews, government documents, oral histories, archives of the secret police or Stasi, private holdings, and a huge range of visual records of the time. It is a fascinating read and a case study in the new historiographies to emerge out of the fallen socialist state.' Karen Leeder, University of Oxford'A People's Music adds an important new dimension to our understanding of the history of jazz and everyday life under state socialism. Students of East German history will benefit from the book's close examination of the GDR's cultural politics, while jazz fans will be fascinated by its examination of little-known histories of the music's spread and reception. Readers interested more broadly in the politics of popular music in 20th Century Europe, meanwhile, will find that the book has much to offer.' Timothy Scott Brown, Northeastern University'Kaldewey's A People's Music speaks to readers with academic or general interest in the cultural competition of the Cold War. The book contributes new insight to an already extensive historiography, in itself no small feat, by dissecting the ideological conundrums that jazz posed to Communist states.' Sven Kube, Journal of Cold War Studies'Kaldewey's historical work A People's Music. Jazz in East Germany, 1945-1990 contributes valuable insights into the academic knowledge and discourses in the field of historical jazz research. She is providing a vast amount of new sources and rendering the topic of jazz under state socialism more accessible for international audiences, especially since research on jazz in the former GDR was mainly written in German-until now.' Martin Breternitz, German Society for Popular Music StudiesTable of ContentsList of figures; Selected chronology; List of abbreviations; Introduction; 1. Jazz in Weimar and Nazi Germany, 1918–1945; 2. Jazz in the Soviet Zone, 1945–1949; 3. Jazz in the founding years of the GDR, 1949–1961; 4. Jazz behind the wall, 1961–1971; 5. The rise of new jazz, 1971–1979; 6. 'A national treasure': jazz made in the GDR, 1980–1990; Archival sources; Appendix; Bibliography; Index.

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Book SynopsisYank Rachell and his mandolin playing style moved every musician lucky enough to hear him perform in the early sixties. When he died in April 1997, he left behind a stack of unanswered requests to tour Europe and to play blues festivals in the United States. In Blues Mandolin Man: The Life and Music of Yank Rachell, Richard Congress delivers the first biography of a family man whose playing inspired and energized the likes of David Honeyboy Edwards, Sleepy John Estes, and Henry Townsend. No other biography discusses the mandolin's influence and role in the blues. Guitar great Ry Cooder said, ""Yank's style fascinated me because it had a lot of power and it's very raw-and what a great thing to do, just attack this little instrument like that."" Charlie Musselwhite, the noted harp player, worked with Rachell and club hopped in Chicago with the elder bluesman. ""He just had a great spirit about him,"" Musselwhite said of Rachell's playing and singing, ""really just shouting it out. If the world was made up of people like Yank Rachell it would be a wonderful place to live."" Blues Mandolin Man chronicles the life, times, and music of a man who was born into a family of sharecroppers in 1910 in rural western Tennessee. An active musician for 75 years, Rachell mastered several musical instruments and first recorded for Victor in Memphis in 1929. Through the blues, Rachell's world expanded to include Chicago, New York, recording studios and, after the sixties, radio, TV, and national and European tours. Yank's recollections reveal new information about personalities and events that will delight blues history buffs. Rich appendixes detail Yank's mandolin and guitar style and his place in the blues tradition. For this book Richard Congress, who reissued two of Rachell's old LPs in CD format, worked closely with him to record memories spanning decades of blues playing. Congress tells a compelling and engaging story about a colorful and thoughtful character who as a child picked cotton and plowed a field behind a mule, who grew to manhood coping with the southern Jim Crow system, and who participated in the creation and perpetuation of the blues. Richard Congress is the owner of Random Chance Records, a record company based in New York City.

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Book SynopsisAcross all imaginable borders, Johnny Cash fans show the appeal of a thoroughly American performer who simultaneously inspires people worldwide. A young Norwegian shows off his Johnny Cash tattoo. A Canadian vlogger sings 'I Walk the Line' to camel herders in Egypt's White Desert. A shopkeeper in Northern Ireland plays Cash as his constant soundtrack. A Dutchwoman coordinates the activities of Cash fans worldwide and is subsequently offered the privilege of sleeping in Johnny's bedroom. And on a more global scale, millions of people watch Cash's videos online, then express themselves through commentary and debate.In Johnny Cash International, Hinds and Silverman examine digital and real-world fan communities and the individuals who comprise them, profiling their relationships to Cash and each other. Studying Johnny Cash's international fans and their love for the man reveals new insights about music, fandom, and the United States.

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