In the sound of the 1960s and 1970s, nothing symbolized the rift between black and white America better than the seemingly divided genres of country and soul. Yet the music emerged from the same ...songwriters, musicians, and producers in the recording studios of Memphis and Nashville, Tennessee, and Muscle Shoals, Alabama--what Charles L. Hughes calls the "country-soul triangle." In legendary studios like Stax and FAME, integrated groups of musicians like Booker T. and the MGs and the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section produced music that both challenged and reconfirmed racial divisions in the United States. Working with artists from Aretha Franklin to Willie Nelson, these musicians became crucial contributors to the era's popular music and internationally recognized symbols of American racial politics in the turbulent years of civil rights protests, Black Power, and white backlash.Hughes offers a provocative reinterpretation of this key moment in American popular music and challenges the conventional wisdom about the racial politics of southern studios and the music that emerged from them. Drawing on interviews and rarely used archives, Hughes brings to life the daily world of session musicians, producers, and songwriters at the heart of the country and soul scenes. In doing so, he shows how the country-soul triangle gave birth to new ways of thinking about music, race, labor, and the South in this pivotal period.
Music was integral to the profound cultural, social and political changes that swept the globe in 1968. This collection of essays offers new perspectives on the role that music played in the events ...of that year, which included protests against the ongoing Vietnam War, the May riots in France and the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. From underground folk music in Japan to antiauthoritarian music in Scandinavia and Germany, Music and Protest in 1968 explores music's key role as a means of socio-political dissent not just in the US and the UK but in Asia, North and South America, Europe and Africa. Contributors extend the understanding of musical protest far beyond a narrow view of the 'protest song' to explore how politics and social protest played out in many genres, including experimental and avant-garde music, free jazz, rock, popular song, and film and theatre music.
Then He Kissed Me, He's A Rebel, Chains, Stop! In the Name of Love all these songs capture the spirit of an era and an image of "girlhood" in post-World War II America that still reverberates today.
...While there were over 1500 girl groups recorded in the '60s--including key hitmakers like the Ronettes, the Supremes, and the Shirelles - studies of girl-group music that address race, gender, class, and sexuality have only just begun to appear. Warwick is the first writer to address '60s girl group music from the perspective of its most significant audience--teenage girls--drawing on current research in psychology and sociology to explore the important place of this repertoire in the emotional development of young girls of the baby boom generation.
Girl Groups, Girl Culture stands as a landmark study of this important pop music and cultural phenomenon. It promises to be a classic work in American musicology and cultural studies.
British Rock Modernism, 1967-1977 explains how the definitive British rock performers of this epoch aimed, not at the youthful rebellion for which they are legendary, but at a highly self-conscious ...project of commenting on the business in which they were engaged. They did so by ironically appropriating the traditional forms of Victorian music hall. Faulk focuses on the mid to late 1960s, when British rock bands who had already achieved commercial prominence began to aspire to aesthetic distinction. The book discusses recordings such as the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour album, the Kinks' The Village Green Preservation Society, and the Sex Pistols' Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols, and television films such as the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour and the Rolling Stones' Rock and Roll Circus that defined rock's early high art moment. Faulk argues that these 'texts' disclose the primary strategies by which British rock groups, mostly comprised of young working and lower middle-class men, made their bid for aesthetic merit by sampling music hall sounds. The result was a symbolically charged form whose main purpose was to unsettle the hierarchy that set traditional popular culture above the new medium. Rock groups engaged with the music of the past in order both to demonstrate the comparative vitality of the new form and signify rock's new art status, compared to earlier British pop music. The book historicizes punk rock as a later development of earlier British rock, rather than a rupture. Unlike earlier groups, the Sex Pistols did not appropriate music hall form in an ironic way, but the band and their manager Malcolm McLaren were obsessed with the meaning of the past for the present in a distinctly modernist fashion.
Can a type of music be "owned"? Examining how music is linked to racial constructs and how African American musicians and audiences reacted to white appropriation,Blues Music in the Sixtiesshows the ...stakes when whites claim the right to play and live the blues.In the 1960s, within the larger context of the civil rights movement and the burgeoning counterculture, the blues changed from black to white in its production and reception, as audiences became increasingly white. Yet, while this was happening, blackness--especially black masculinity--remained a marker of authenticity. Crossing color lines and mixing the beats of B.B. King, Eric Clapton, and Janis Joplin; the Newport Folk Festival and the American Folk Blues Festival; and publications such as Living Blues, Ulrich Adelt discusses these developments, including the international aspects of the blues. He highlights the performers and venues that represented changing racial politics and addresses the impact and involvement of audiences and cultural brokers.
Listen to This stands out as the first book exclusively dedicated to Davis’s watershed 1969 album, Bitches Brew . Victor Svorinich traces its incarnations and inspirations for ten-plus years before ...its release. The album arrived as the jazz scene waned beneath the rise of rock and roll and as Davis (1926–1991) faced large changes in social conditions affecting the African-American consciousness. This new climate served as a catalyst for an experiment that many considered a major departure. Davis’s new music projected rock and roll sensibilities, the experimental essence of 1960s’ counterculture, yet also harsh dissonances of African-American reality. Many listeners embraced it, while others misunderstood and rejected the concoction.
Listen to This is not just the story of Bitches Brew . It reveals much of the legend of Miles Davis—his attitude and will, his grace under pressure, his bands, his relationship to the masses, his business and personal etiquette, and his response to extraordinary social conditions seemingly aligned to bring him down. Svorinich revisits the mystery and skepticism surrounding the album, and places it into both a historical and musical context using new interviews, original analysis, recently found recordings, unearthed session data sheets, memoranda, letters, musical transcriptions, scores, and a wealth of other material. Additionally, Listen to This encompasses a thorough examination of producer Teo Macero’s archives and Bitches Brew’s original session reels in order to provide the only complete day-to-day account of the sessions.
Elvis Presley's clever manipulation of his numerous interests remains one of the music world's great marvels. His synthesis of country, rhythm & blues and gospel created an inventive mixture of ...hair-raising rock & roll and balladry, with one foot in delta muck and the other in a country hoedown. This history focuses squarely on the music of Presley's groundbreaking early years and includes a comprehensive analysis of every Presley recording session from the 1950s. Chapters deftly illustrate how Presley, and his musical compatriots Scotty Moore and Bill Black, fused two distinctly American musical forms-country and blues-to form what would come to be known as "rockabilly." Also detailed is Presley's influence on music and how his contributions are still celebrated today.
Perfect for the ultimate Led Zeppelin fan, this definitive anthology each of the 81 tracks on Zep's nine studio albums in mind-boggling, awesome detail.
A Social History of Early Rock 'n' Roll in Germany explores the people and spaces of St. Pauli's rock'n'roll scene in the 1960s. Starting in 1960, young British rockers were hired to entertain ...tourists in Hamburg's red-light district around the Reeperbahn in the area of St. Pauli. German youths quickly joined in to experience the forbidden thrill of rock'n'roll, and used African American sounds to distance themselves from the old Nazi generation. In 1962 the Star Club opened and drew international attention for hosting some of the Beatles' most influential performances. In this book, Julia Sneeringer weaves together this story of youth culture with histories of sex and gender, popular culture, media, and subculture. By exploring the history of one locale in depth, Sneeringer offers a welcome contribution to the scholarly literature on space, place, sound and the city, and pays overdue attention to the impact that Hamburg had upon music and style. She is also careful to place performers such as The Beatles back into the social, spatial, and musical contexts that shaped them and their generation. This book reveals that transnational encounters between musicians, fans, entrepreneurs and businessmen in St. Pauli produced a musical style that provided emotional and physical liberation and challenged powerful forces of conservatism and conformity with effects that transformed the world for decades to come.
Long before the world discovered grunge, the Pacific Northwest
was already home to a singular music culture. In the late 1950s,
locals had codified a distinct offshoot of rockin' R&B, and a
...surprising number of them would skyrocket to success, including
Little Bill and the Bluenotes, the Wailers, Ron Holden, Paul Revere
and the Raiders, the Kingsmen, Merrilee Rush, and the Sonics.
With entertaining accounts gleaned from hundreds of interviews,
Peter Blecha tells the story of music in the Pacific Northwest from
the 1940s to the 1960s, a golden era that shaped generations of
musicians to come. The local R&B scene evolved from the area's
vibrant jazz scene, and Blecha illuminates the musical continuum
between Ray Charles (who cut his first record in Seattle) and
Quincy Jones to the rock 'n' rollers who forged the classic
jazz-tinged "Northwest Sound." DJs built a teen dance circuit that
the authorities didn't like but whose popularity pushed bands to
develop crowd-friendly beats. Do-it-yourself enthusiasts launched
groundbreaking record companies that scored a surprising number of
hit songs.
Highlighting key but overlooked figures and offering a new look
at well-known musicians (such as an obscure guitarist then known as
Jimmy Hendrix), Blecha shows how an isolated region launched
influential new sounds upon an unsuspecting world.
