Archival Research and the Expansion of Popular Music History

Abstract

The study of popular music is no longer a markedly marginalized area of scholarship within the academy. Much like the bulk of twentieth- and twenty-first-century popular music itself, which has become institutionalized and honoured through organizations like the US’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame or the UK’s Beatles Story Museum (Reising, 2001; Kruse II, 2009), the study of this topic has its own canon of key works, lauded authors, conferences and preferred methodologies (Jones, 2008). Popular music topics continue to be explored in disciplines like ethnomusicology, media studies, sociology and cultural studies. It is also evident that interested scholars have tended towards methodological practices promoted within their particular disciplines (see, for example, Moore, 2001; Frith, 1983; Grossberg, 1992; Bennett, 2008). While I would argue that aspects of historical research have aided scholars who, for instance, refer to cultural studies theories or use ethnography, it appears that ‘doing history’ (Rodman, 1999) has remained a more supplementary method of enquiry among popular music researchers.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 3 citations exist upstream.