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Kristen M. Turner is a lecturer in the music and honors departments at North Carolina State University. Her research centers on race and class in American popular entertainment at the turn of the twentieth century.
Soul is one of those concepts that is often evoked, but rarely satisfactorily defined. In The Meaning of Soul: Black Music and Resilience Since the 19…
Las Vegas is a place the American dream made; a city built in the middle of desert visited by millions of people every year hoping to make their dream…
Founded in 1925, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation provides support to what their current website says are "exceptional individuals in pur…
Imagining Musical Pasts: the Queer Literary Musicology of Vernon Lee, Rosa Newmarch, and Edward Prime-Stevenson (Clemson University Press, 2023) by Kr…
Ella Fitzgerald (1917–1996) was one of America’s greatest musicians. In this major biography, Becoming Ella Fitzgerald: The Jazz Singer who Transforme…
Francis O’Neill (1848–1936) was a Chicago police officer and a folk music collector. Michael O’Malley connects these two seemingly unrelated activitie…
Black vaudevillians and entertainers joked that T.O.B.A. stood for "tough on black artists." But the Theater Owner's Booking Association (T.O.B.A.) pl…
The heart of Brigid Cohen’s Musical Migration and Imperial New York: Early Cold War Scenes (University of Chicago Press, 2022) are the connections for…
On Music Theory and Making Music More Welcoming for Everyone (University of Michigan Press, 2023) by Philip Ewell is an unflinching look at white supr…
Literacy in a Long Blues Note: Black Women’s Literature and Music in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries by Coretta M. Pittman (Universi…
John W. Bubbles was an actor, singer, comedian, and most importantly, a dancer. Born in 1902, Bubbles was an innovator in the jazz tap style and half …
Notions of hip hop authenticity, as expressed both within hip hop communities and in the larger American culture, rely on the construction of the rapp…
The Music of the United States of America Series of musical editions is a monumental undertaking funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities w…
Any song as old and as familiar as “My Old Kentucky Home” is bound to have accrued many different meanings and an interesting history. Emily Bingham’s…
The national anthem of the United States is familiar around the world from Olympic medal ceremonies and American patriotic celebrations. Like anything…
Freedom Girls: Voicing Femininity in 1960s British Pop (Oxford University Press, 2021) by Alexandra M. Apolloni is about how the vocal performances of…
Singing Like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms by Kira Thurman (Cornell University Press, 2021) is a truly interdisc…
Today’s copyright laws are predicated on the idea that music is intellectual property; a commodity that has value to its creator and to its publisher.…
Patronage has long been an important topic of study in musicology, but is much more likely to be one that specialists in medieval or renaissance music…
“This is America”: Race Gender and Politics in America’s Musical Landscape by Katie Rios (Lexington Books, 2021) examines an eclectic mix of different…
Jake Johnson, author of Lying in the Middle: Musical Theater and Belief at the Heart of America (University of Illinois Press, 2021) takes as his subj…
Instruments of Empire: Filipino Musicians, Black Soldiers, and Military Band Music during US Colonization of the Philippines published in 2021 by the …
Presenting eclectic, irreverent marathons of experimental music in crumbling venues on the Lower East Side, Bang on a Can sold out concerts for a genr…
George Frederick Bristow, born in 1825, was a significant musical figure in the United States from the 1850s until his death in 1898. Now, almost one …