In the spring of 1862, Lucy McKim, the nineteen-year-old daughter of a Philadelphia abolitionist Quaker family, traveled with her father to the Sea Islands of South Carolina to aid him in his efforts ...

Blessed with one of the great tenor voices of all time, Mario Lanza (1921-1959) rose to spectacular heights in a film, recording, and concert career that spanned little more than a decade. Groomed at ...

To Do This, You Must Know How traces black vocal music instruction and inspiration from the halls of Fisk University to the mining camps of Birmingham and Bessemer, Alabama, and on to Chicago and New Orleans. ...

When George Jones recorded “He Stopped Loving Her Today” more than thirty years ago, he was a walking disaster. Twin addictions to drugs and alcohol had him drinking Jim Beam by the case and snorting ...

This book presents a collection of essays on the debates about origins, authenticity, and identity in folk and blues music. The essays had their origins in an international conference on the Transatlantic ...

Racial Uplift and American Music, 1878-1943 traces the career of racial uplift ideology as a factor in elite African Americans' embrace of classical music around the turn of the previous century, from ...

Carter and Ralph Stanley—the Stanley Brothers—are comparable to Bill Monroe and Flatt & Scruggs as important members of the earliest generation of bluegrass musicians. In this first biography of the ...

Alan Lomax (1915-2002) began working for the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress in 1936, first as a special and temporary assistant, then as the permanent Assistant in Charge, starting ...

Ken Prouty argues that knowledge of jazz, or more to the point, claims to knowledge of jazz, are the prime movers in forming jazz's identity, its canon, and its community. Every jazz artist, critic, or ...