Sweet air
Subtitle: modernism, regionalism, and American popular song
By: Edward P. Comentale
Series: Music in American life; Music in American life
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2013
Language: eng
Number of pages: 274
ISBN-13: 9780252078927; 9780252037399
Copyright date: 2013
Subjects: Social life and customs; Popular music; History and criticism; Modernism (Aesthetics); History
Description: Sweet Air rewrites the history of early twentieth-century pop music in modernist terms. Tracking the evolution of popular regional genres such as blues, country, folk, and rockabilly in relation to the growth of industry and consumer culture, Edward P. Comentale shows how this music became a vital means of exploring the new and often overwhelming feelings brought on by modern life. Comentale examines these rural genres as they translated the traumas of local experience--the racial violence of the Delta, the mass exodus from the South, the Dust Bowl of the Texas panhandle--into sonic form. Considering the accessibility of these popular music forms, he asserts the value of music as a source of progressive cultural investment, linking poor, rural performers and audiences to an increasingly vast network of commerce, transportation, and technology [Publisher description]
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction. From a basement on Long Island to a mansion on the hill; title: Lord, it just won't stop! Work and blues in the industrial Delta; title: Thought I had your heart forever : death, detachment, and the modernity of early country music; title: A rambling funny streak : Woody Guthrie, revolutionary folk song, and the migrant art of the refrain; title: Four Elvises : on the Dada possibilities of midcentury rock and roll and modern fan culture.