Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
7
result(s) for
"Popular music United States 1951-1960 History and criticism."
Sort by:
Stolen Time : Black fad performance and the Calypso craze
In 1956 Harry Belafonte's Calypso became the first LP to sell more than a million copies. For a few fleeting months, calypso music was the top-selling genre in the US--it even threatened to supplant rock and roll. Stolen Time provides a vivid cultural history of this moment and outlines a new framework--black fad performance--for understanding race, performance, and mass culture in the twentieth century United States. Vogel situates the calypso craze within a cycle of cultural appropriation, including the ragtime craze of 1890s and the Negro vogue of the 1920s, that encapsulates the culture of the Jim Crow era. He follows the fad as it moves defiantly away from any attempt at authenticity and shamelessly embraces calypso kitsch. Although white calypso performers were indeed complicit in a kind of imperialist theft of Trinidadian music and dance, Vogel argues, black calypso craze performers enacted a different, and subtly subversive, kind of theft. They appropriated not Caribbean culture itself, but the US version of it--and in so doing, they mocked American notions of racial authenticity. From musical recordings, nightclub acts, and television broadcasts to Broadway musicals, film, and modern dance, he shows how performers seized the ephemeral opportunities of the fad to comment on black cultural history and even question the meaning of race itself.
Book
Before Elvis
An essential work for rock fans and scholars, Before Elvis: The Prehistory of Rock ‘n’ Roll surveys the origins of rock ’n’ roll from the minstrel era to the emergence of Bill Haley and Elvis Presley. Unlike other histories of rock, Before Elvis offers a far broader and deeper analysis of the influences on rock music. Dispelling common misconceptions, it examines rock’s origins in hokum songs and big-band boogies as well as Delta blues, detailing the embrace by white artists of African-American styles long before rock ’n’ roll appeared. This unique study ranges far and wide, highlighting not only the contributions of obscure but key precursors like Hardrock Gunter and Sam Theard but also the influence of celebrity performers like Gene Autry and Ella Fitzgerald. Too often, rock historians treat the genesis of rock ’n’ roll as a bolt from the blue, an overnight revolution provoked by the bland pop music that immediately preceded it and created through the white appropriation of music till then played only by and for black audiences. In Before Elvis, Birnbaum daringly argues a more complicated history of rock’s evolution from a heady mix of ragtime, boogie-woogie, swing, country music, mainstream pop, and rhythm-and-blues—a melange that influenced one another along the way, from the absorption of blues and boogies into jazz and pop to the integration of country and Caribbean music into rhythm-and-blues. Written in an easy style, Before Elvis presents a bold argument about rock’s origins and required reading for fans and scholars of rock ’n’ roll history.
eBook
Freedom is, freedom ain't : jazz and the making of the sixties
The age of Roach's Freedom Now Suite, Coltrane's A Love Supreme, and Mingus's The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady was a time when jazz became newly militant and newly seductive, its example shaping the social dramas of the Civil Rights movement, the Black Power movement, and the counterculture. Saul tells the broader story of this period.
eBook
When Paul met Artie : the story of Simon & Garfunkel
Long before they became one of the most beloved and successful duos of all time, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel were just two kids growing up in Queens, New York -- best friends who met in a sixth-grade production of Alice in Wonderland and bonded over girls, baseball, and rock'n'roll.
Book