[Ebook PDF] American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MP3, 5th Edition

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American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MP3, 5th Edition

ISBN-13: 978-0190632991
ISBN-10: 0190632992

Author: Larry Starr (Author), Christopher Waterman (Author)

Explore the rich terrain of American popular music with the most complete, colorful, and authoritative introduction of its kind. In the fifth edition of their best selling text, American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MP3, Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman provide a unique combination of cultural and social history with the analytical study of musical styles.

Preface
IT SEEMS SCARCELY POSSIBLE THAT WE ARE NOW AT THE POINT OF PRESENTING
the fifth edition of American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MP3, some fifteen years after the book’s initial publication. It is not possible to thank adequately the many students, colleagues, and other interested readers whose enthusiasm for the previous editions of the book has brought us to this point, and whose many helpful observations and suggestions have informed the creation of this new edition at every stage.
What distinguishes our book from others in this rapidly growing field is that it combines two perspectives not often found in the same place: the study of cultural and social history on the one hand, and the analytical study of musical style on the other. In presenting this introductory survey of the rich terrain of American popular music, we bring years of experience in teaching courses for a general student population and in lecturing on musical subjects to general audiences. This experience has taught us that it is neither necessary nor desirable to talk down, write down, or think down to such groups. People
love music and can quickly grasp all kinds of intricacies and subtleties concerning music so long as what they read is free of jargon, clear, and unpretentious. We love American popular music ourselves—that is why we have written this book—and we have attempted to foreground this love for the subject in our writing, realizing that it is the most valuable common bond we share with all potential readers of our work.
Our Approach
We fully expect that students, teachers, and readers of all kinds will enter into a creative dialog with the material in this book. No general overview of a complex subject can begin to satisfy everyone. And since passions run high in the field of popular music, we anticipate that our particular perspectives, and particularly our choices of artists to emphasize and specific examples to study, may well provoke some controversy at times, whether in the classroom or simply in the mind of the reader. We have felt it better to identify clearly our own viewpoints and enthusiasms rather than try to hide behind a scrim of apparent objectivity. The opening chapter outlines particular themes and streams that serve as recurring reference points throughout the book, ensuring that our narrative focus and strategy are articulated at the outset.
Throughout the book, we have striven to take as broad a view as possible of “popular music,” but it is inevitable that some readers will find certain genres and styles either excessively prominent or underestimated, depending on their own tastes and viewpoints. We have tried in particular to avoid the trap of viewing the period from the 1960s to the present as exclusively the “age of rock.” Those wishing a study of rock music per se are directed to our companion text, Rock: Music, Culture, and Business (Oxford University Press, 2012), written in collaboration with Joseph G. Schloss, which offers a different perspective on the American musical landscape from the period following World War II to the present day.
While we feel that this text provides a sound and reliable starting point for the study and appreciation of American popular music, we claim no more than that. We hope and expect that teachers who use this book will share supplementary and contrasting perspectives on the material with their students, and that individual readers will use the bibliography as an enriching source of such perspectives as well. We inevitably bring certain limitations of perspective, along with our passions, to our understanding of the broad trajectory of American pop, and it is certainly desirable for all readers to seek out other perspectives and modes of understanding as they pursue this subject further.