Ralph Peer and the Making of Popular Roots Music (Enhanced Edition) PDF Download

Author: Barry Mazor
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
ISBN: 1613733887
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 320

View

Book Description
This is the first biography of Ralph Peer, the adventurous—even revolutionary—A&R man and music publisher who saw the universal power locked in regional roots music and tapped it, changing the breadth and flavor of popular music around the world. It is the story of the life and fifty-year career, from the age of cylinder recordings to the stereo era, of the man who pioneered the recording, marketing, and publishing of blues, jazz, country, gospel, and Latin music. The book tracks Peer’s role in such breakthrough events as the recording of Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues” (the record that sparked the blues craze), the first country recording sessions with Fiddlin’ John Carson, his discovery of Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family at the famed Bristol sessions, the popularizing of Latin American music during World War II, and the postwar transformation of music on the airwaves that set the stage for the dominance of R&B, country, and rock ‘n’ roll. But this is also the story of a man from humble midwestern beginnings who went on to build the world’s largest independent music publishing firm, fostering the global reach of music that had previously been specialized, localized, and marginalized. Ralph Peer redefined the ways promising songs and performers were identified, encouraged, and promoted, rethought how far regional music might travel, and changed our very notions of what pop music can be. This enhanced e-book includes 49 of the greatest songs Ralph Peer was involved with, from groundbreaking numbers that changed the history of recorded music to revelatory obscurities, all linked to the text so that the reader can hear the music while reading about it.

Author: Barry Mazor
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780252008443
Category : Sound recording executives and producers
Languages : en
Pages : 0

View

Book Description

Author: Josh Beckworth
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476631867
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 234

View

Book Description
 GB. Grayson and Henry Whitter were two of the most influential artists in the early days of country music. Songs they popularized—“Tom Dooley,” “Little Maggie,” “Handsome Molly,” and “Nine Pound Hammer”—are still staples of traditional music. Although the duo sold tens of thousands of records during the 1920s, the details of their lives remain largely unknown. Featuring never before published photographs and interviews with friends and relatives, this book chronicles for the first time the romantic intrigues and tragic deaths that marked their lives and explores the Southern Appalachian culture that shaped their music.

Author: Kyle Barnett
Publisher:
ISBN: 0472131036
Category : Popular music
Languages : en
Pages : 333

View

Book Description
"The 1920s was a crucial decade for the recording industry. Large record companies existed, but across the nation there were dozens of small, independently owned and regionally-oriented labels like Black Swan, Champion, Paramount, Gennett, Starr, Okeh, and others which catered to specific genres and audiences that were at the time outside the commercial mainstream: jazz, "race records," "old time" or "hillbilly" music, local religious music traditions, and exotica from abroad that the metropolitan record companies did not-yet-see as profitable. Kyle Barnett's book seeks to tell the story of the first big wave of consolidation of the record industry, when larger labels began to take an interest in what the smaller labels were doing, the growing pains that resulted in mainstream companies having to adapt their culture to promoting artists from the margins-poor or working class "hillbillies," African-Americans-and how the coming of the Depression threatened to turn back the clock of the industry's growth. In hindsight, the evolution of the recording industry toward consolidation looks inevitable, but there is no good, synthetic history of this crucial period that gives due credit to the development of the industry, both commercially and culturally"--

Author: Bill C. Malone
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 1477315373
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 769

View

Book Description
“Fifty years after its first publication, Country Music USA still stands as the most authoritative history of this uniquely American art form. Here are the stories of the people who made country music into such an integral part of our nation’s culture. We feel lucky to have had Bill Malone as an indispensable guide in making our PBS documentary; you should, too.” —Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan, Country Music: An American Family Story From reviews of previous editions: “Considered the definitive history of American country music.” —Los Angeles Times “If anyone knows more about the subject than [Malone] does, God help them.” —Larry McMurtry, from In a Narrow Grave “With Country Music USA, Bill Malone wrote the Bible for country music history and scholarship. This groundbreaking work, now updated, is the definitive chronicle of the sweeping drama of the country music experience.” —Chet Flippo, former editorial director, CMT: Country Music Television and CMT.com “Country Music USA is the definitive history of country music and of the artists who shaped its fascinating worlds.” —William Ferris, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities and coeditor of the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture Since its first publication in 1968, Bill C. Malone’s Country Music USA has won universal acclaim as the definitive history of American country music. Starting with the music’s folk roots in the rural South, it traces country music from the early days of radio into the twenty-first century. In this fiftieth-anniversary edition, Malone, the featured historian in Ken Burns’s 2019 documentary on country music, has revised every chapter to offer new information and fresh insights. Coauthor Tracey Laird tracks developments in country music in the new millennium, exploring the relationship between the current music scene and the traditions from which it emerged.

Author: Steve Sullivan
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442254491
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 830

View

Book Description
Volumes 3 and 4 of the The Encyclopedia of More Great Popular Song Recordings provides the stories behind approximately 1,700 more of the greatest song recordings in the history of the music industry, from 1890 to today. In this masterful survey, all genres of popular music are covered, from pop, rock, soul, and country to jazz, blues, classic vocals, hip-hop, folk, gospel, and ethnic/world music. Collectors will find detailed discographical data—recording dates, record numbers, Billboard chart data, and personnel—while music lovers will appreciate the detailed commentaries and deep research on the songs, their recording, and the artists. Readers who revel in pop cultural history will savor each chapter as it plunges deeply into key events—in music, society, and the world—from each era of the past 125 years. Following in the wake of the first two volumes of his original Encyclopedia of Great Popular Song Recordings, this follow-up work covers not only more beloved classic performances in pop music history, but many lesser -known but exceptional recordings that—in the modern digital world of “long tail” listening, re-mastered recordings, and “lost but found” possibilities—Sullivan mines from modern recording history. The Encyclopedia of Great Popular Song Recordings, Volumes 3 and 4 lets the readers discover, and, through their playlist services, from such as iTunes toand Spotify, build a truly deepcomprehensive catalog of classic performances that deserve to be a part of every passionate music lover’s life. Sullivan organizes songs in chronological order, starting in 1890 and continuing all the way throughto the present to include modern gems from June 2016. In each chapter, Sullivanhe immerses readers, era by era, in the popular music recordings of the time, noting key events that occurred at the time to painting a comprehensive picture in music history of each periodfor each song. Moreover, Sullivan includes for context bulleted lists noting key events that occurred during the song’s recording

Author: Ronald D. Cohen
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1626745870
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 170

View

Book Description
Selling Folk Music: An Illustrated History highlights commercial sources that reveal how folk music has been packaged and sold to a broad, shifting audience in the United States. Folk music has a varied and complex scope and lineage, including the blues, minstrel tunes, Victorian parlor songs, spirituals and gospel tunes, country and western songs, sea shanties, labor and political songs, calypsos, pop folk, folk-rock, ethnic, bluegrass, and more. The genre is of major importance in the broader spectrum of American music, and it is easy to understand why folk music has been marketed as America's music. Selling Folk Music presents the public face of folk music in the United States via its commercial promotion and presentation throughout the twentieth century. Included are concert flyers; sheet music; book, songbook, magazine, and album covers; concert posters and flyers; and movie lobby cards and posters, all in their original colors. The 1964 hootenanny craze, for example, spawned such items as a candy bar, pinball machine, bath powder, paper dolls, Halloween costumes, and beach towels. The almost five hundred images in Selling Folk Music present a new way to catalog the history of folk music while highlighting the transformative nature of the genre. Following the detailed introduction on the history of folk music, illustrations from commercial products make up the bulk of the work, presenting a colorful, complex history.

Author: Dick Spottswood
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496816420
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 354

View

Book Description
During the 1940s, country music was rapidly evolving from traditional songs and string band styles to honky-tonk, western swing, and bluegrass, via radio, records, and film. The Blue Sky Boys, brothers Bill (1917-2008) and Earl (1919-1998) Bolick, resisted the trend, preferring to perform folk and parlor songs, southern hymns, and new compositions that enhanced their trademark intimacy and warmth. They were still in their teens when they became professional musicians to avoid laboring in Depression-era North Carolina cotton mills. Their instantly recognizable style was fully formed by 1936, when even their first records captured soulful harmonies accented with spare guitar and mandolin accompaniments. They inspired imitators, but none could duplicate the Blue Sky Boys' emotional appeal or their distinctive Catawba County accents. Even their last records in the 1970sretained their unique magical sound decades after other country brother duets had come and gone. In this absorbing account, Dick Spottswood combines excerpts from Bill Bolick's numerous spoken interviews and written accounts of his music, life, and career into a single narrative that presents much of the story in Bill's own voice. Spottswood reveals fascinating nuggets about broadcasting, recording, and surviving in the 1930s world of country music. He describes how the growing industry both aided and thwarted the Bolick brothers' career, and how World War II nearly finished it. The book features a complete, extensively annotated list of Blue Sky Boys songs, an updated discography that includes surviving unpublished records, and dozens of vintage photos and sheet music covers.

Author: Heather Sparling
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000825752
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 210

View

Book Description
Disaster Songs as Intangible Memorials in Atlantic Canada draws on a collection of over 600 songs relating to Atlantic Canadian disasters from 1891 up until the present and describes the characteristics that define them as intangible memorials. The book demonstrates the relationship between vernacular memorials – informal memorials collectively and spontaneously created from a variety of objects by the general public – and disaster songs. The author identifies the features that define vernacular memorials and applies them to disaster songs: spontaneity, ephemerality, importance of place, motivations and meaning-making, content, as well as the role of media in inspiring and disseminating memorials and songs. Visit the companion website: www.disastersongs.ca.

Author: Glenn T. Eskew
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820333301
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 568

View

Book Description
John Herndon “Johnny” Mercer (1909–76) remained in the forefront of American popular music from the 1930s through the 1960s, writing over a thousand songs, collaborating with all the great popular composers and jazz musicians of his day, working in Hollywood and on Broadway, and as cofounder of Capitol Records, helping to promote the careers of Nat “King” Cole, Margaret Whiting, Peggy Lee, and many other singers. Mercer’s songs—sung by Bing Crosby, Billie Holiday, Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Tony Bennett, Lena Horne, and scores of other performers—are canonical parts of the great American songbook. Four of his songs received Academy Awards: “Moon River,” “Days of Wine and Roses,” “On the Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe,” and “In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening.” Mercer standards such as “Hooray for Hollywood” and “You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby” remain in the popular imagination. Exhaustively researched, Glenn T. Eskew’s biography improves upon earlier popular treatments of the Savannah, Georgia–born songwriter to produce a sophisticated, insightful, evenhanded examination of one of America’s most popular and successful chart-toppers. Johnny Mercer: Southern Songwriter for the World provides a compelling chronological narrative that places Mercer within a larger framework of diaspora entertainers who spread a southern multiracial culture across the nation and around the world. Eskew contends that Mercer and much of his music remained rooted in his native South, being deeply influenced by the folk music of coastal Georgia and the blues and jazz recordings made by black and white musicians. At Capitol Records, Mercer helped redirect American popular music by commodifying these formerly distinctive regional sounds into popular music. When rock ’n’ roll diminished opportunities at home, Mercer looked abroad, collaborating with international composers to create transnational songs. At heart, Eskew says, Mercer was a jazz musician rather than a Tin Pan Alley lyricist, and the interpenetration of jazz and popular song that he created expressed elements of his southern heritage that made his work distinctive and consistently kept his music before an approving audience.