Recorded music in American life: the phonograph and popular memory, 1890-1945

Abstract

Have records, compact discs, and other sound reproduction equipment merely provided American listeners with pleasant diversions, or have more important historical and cultural influences flowed through them? Do recording machines simply capture what's already out there, or is music somehow transformed in dual process of documentation and dissemination? How would our lives be different without these machines? Such are questions that arise when we stop taking for granted phenomenon of recorded music and phonograph itself. Now comes an in-depth cultural history of phonograph in United States from 1890 to 1945. William Howland Kenney offers a full account of what he calls the 78 r.p.m. era-from formative early decades in which giants of industry reigned supreme in absence of radio, to postwar proliferation of independent labels, disk jockeys, and changes in popular taste and opinion. By examining interplay between recorded music and key social, political, and economic forces in America during phonograph's rise and fall as dominant medium of popular recorded sound, he addresses such vital issues as place of multiculturalism in phonograph's history, roles of women as record-player listeners and performers, belated commercial legitimacy of rhythm-and-blues recordings, hit record phenomenon in wake of Great Depression, origins of rock-and-roll revolution, and shifting place of popular recorded music in America's personal and cultural memories. Throughout book, Kenney argues that phonograph and recording industry served neither to impose a preference for high culture nor a degraded popular taste, but rather expressed a diverse set of sensibilities in which various sorts of people found a new kind of pleasure. To this end, Recorded Music in American Life effectively illustrates how recorded music provided focus for active recorded sound cultures, in which listeners shared what they heard, and expressed crucial dimensions of their private lives, by way of their involvement with records and record-players. Students and scholars of American music, culture, commerce, and history-as well as fans and collectors interested in this phase of our rich artistic past-will find a great deal of thorough research and fresh scholarship to enjoy in these pages.

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