Meeting Jimmie Rodgers
Meeting Jimmie Rodgers

Author: Barry Mazor

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2009-05-15

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 0199716668

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In Meeting Jimmie Rodgers, the first book to explore the deep legacy of "The Singing Brakeman" from a twenty-first century perspective, Barry Mazor offers a lively look at Rodgers' career, tracing his rise from working-class obscurity to the pinnacle of renown that came with such hits as "Blue Yodel" and "In the Jailhouse Now." As Mazor shows, Rodgers brought emotional clarity and a unique sense of narrative drama to every song he performed, whether tough or sentimental, comic or sad. His wistful singing, falsetto yodels, bold flat-picking guitar style, and sometimes censorable themes--sex, crime, and other edgy topics--set him apart from most of his contemporaries. But more than anything else, Mazor suggests, it was Rodgers' shape-shifting ability to assume many public personas--working stiff, decked-out cowboy, suave ladies' man--that connected him to such a broad public and set the stage for the stars who followed him. In reconstructing this far-flung legacy, Mazor enables readers to meet Rodgers and his music anew-not as an historical figure, but as a vibrant, immediate force.

Meeting Jimmie Rodgers
Meeting Jimmie Rodgers

Author: Barry Mazor

Publisher: Oxford University Press on Demand

Published: 2009-05-15

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 0195327624

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Here is the first book to explore the legacy of Jimmie Rodgers, offering a lively look at Rodgers' career, tracing his rise from working-class obscurity to the pinnacle of renown. As Mazor shows, Rodgers brought emotional clarity and a unique sense of narrative drama to every song he performed. But more than anything else, Mazor suggests, it was Rodgers' shape-shifting ability to assume many public personas--working stiff, decked-out cowboy, suave ladies' man--that connected him to a broad public and set the stage for the stars who followed.

Jimmie Rodgers
Jimmie Rodgers

Author: Nolan Porterfield

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 516

ISBN-13: 9781604731606

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Ralph Peer and the Making of Popular Roots Music (Enhanced Edition)
Ralph Peer and the Making of Popular Roots Music (Enhanced Edition)

Author: Barry Mazor

Publisher: Chicago Review Press

Published: 2015-04-01

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 1613733887

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This is the first biography of Ralph Peer, the adventurous—even revolutionary—A&R man and music publisher who saw the universal power locked in regional roots music and tapped it, changing the breadth and flavor of popular music around the world. It is the story of the life and fifty-year career, from the age of cylinder recordings to the stereo era, of the man who pioneered the recording, marketing, and publishing of blues, jazz, country, gospel, and Latin music. The book tracks Peer’s role in such breakthrough events as the recording of Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues” (the record that sparked the blues craze), the first country recording sessions with Fiddlin’ John Carson, his discovery of Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family at the famed Bristol sessions, the popularizing of Latin American music during World War II, and the postwar transformation of music on the airwaves that set the stage for the dominance of R&B, country, and rock ‘n’ roll. But this is also the story of a man from humble midwestern beginnings who went on to build the world’s largest independent music publishing firm, fostering the global reach of music that had previously been specialized, localized, and marginalized. Ralph Peer redefined the ways promising songs and performers were identified, encouraged, and promoted, rethought how far regional music might travel, and changed our very notions of what pop music can be. This enhanced e-book includes 49 of the greatest songs Ralph Peer was involved with, from groundbreaking numbers that changed the history of recorded music to revelatory obscurities, all linked to the text so that the reader can hear the music while reading about it.

Meeting Jimmie Rodgers
Meeting Jimmie Rodgers

Author: Barry Mazor

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2009-05-15

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 0199886865

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In Meeting Jimmie Rodgers, the first book to explore the deep legacy of "The Singing Brakeman" from a twenty-first century perspective, Barry Mazor offers a lively look at Rodgers' career, tracing his rise from working-class obscurity to the pinnacle of renown that came with such hits as "Blue Yodel" and "In the Jailhouse Now." As Mazor shows, Rodgers brought emotional clarity and a unique sense of narrative drama to every song he performed, whether tough or sentimental, comic or sad. His wistful singing, falsetto yodels, bold flat-picking guitar style, and sometimes censorable themes--sex, crime, and other edgy topics--set him apart from most of his contemporaries. But more than anything else, Mazor suggests, it was Rodgers' shape-shifting ability to assume many public personas--working stiff, decked-out cowboy, suave ladies' man--that connected him to such a broad public and set the stage for the stars who followed him. In reconstructing this far-flung legacy, Mazor enables readers to meet Rodgers and his music anew-not as an historical figure, but as a vibrant, immediate force.

Record Cultures
Record Cultures

Author: Kyle Barnett

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 2020-02-20

Total Pages: 333

ISBN-13: 0472124315

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Record Cultures tells the story of how early U.S. commercial recording companies captured American musical culture in a key period in both music and media history. Amid dramatic technological and cultural changes of the 1920s and 1930s, small recording companies in the United States began to explore the genres that would later be known as jazz, blues, and country. Smaller record labels, many based in rural or out of the way Midwestern and Southern towns, were willing to take risks on the country’s regional vernacular music as a way to compete with more established recording labels. Recording companies’ relationship with radio grew closer as both industries were on the rise, propelled by new technologies. Radio, which had become immensely popular, began broadcasting more recorded music in place of live performances, and this created profitable symbiosis. With the advent of the talkies, the film industry completed the media trifecta. The novelty of recorded sound was replacing film accompanists, and the popularity of movie musicals solidified film’s connections with the radio and recording industries. By the early 1930s, the recording industry had gone from being part of the largely autonomous phonograph industry to being major media industry of its own, albeit deeply tied to—and, in some cases, owned by—the radio and film industries. The triangular relationships between these media industries marked the first major entertainment and media conglomerates in U.S. history. Through an interdisciplinary and intermedial approach to recording industry history, Record Cultures creates new connections between different strands of media research. It will be of interest to scholars of popular music, media studies, sound studies, American culture, and the history of film, television, and radio.

Sounding the Color Line
Sounding the Color Line

Author: Erich Nunn

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2015-06-01

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 082034835X

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Sounding the Color Line explores how competing understandings of the U.S. South in the first decades of the twentieth century have led us to experience musical forms, sounds, and genres in racialized contexts. Yet, though we may speak of white or black music, rock or rap, sounds constantly leak through such barriers. A critical disjuncture exists, then, between actual interracial musical and cultural forms on the one hand and racialized structures of feeling on the other. This is nowhere more apparent than in the South. Like Jim Crow segregation, the separation of musical forms along racial lines has required enormous energy to maintain. How, asks Nunn, did the protocols structuring listeners' racial associations arise? How have they evolved and been maintained in the face of repeated transgressions of the musical color line? Considering the South as the imagined ground where conflicts of racial and national identities are staged, this book looks at developing ideas concerning folk song and racial and cultural nationalism alongside the competing and sometimes contradictory workings of an emerging culture industry. Drawing on a diverse archive of musical recordings, critical artifacts, and literary texts, Nunn reveals how the musical color line has not only been established and maintained but also repeatedly crossed, fractured, and reformed. This push and pull--between segregationist cultural logics and music's disrespect of racially defined boundaries--is an animating force in twentieth-century American popular culture.

The Country Music Reader
The Country Music Reader

Author: Travis D. Stimeling

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2015-01-02

Total Pages: 409

ISBN-13: 0190233737

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In The Country Music Reader Travis D. Stimeling provides an anthology of primary source readings from newspapers, magazines, and fan ephemera encompassing the history of country music from circa 1900 to the present. Presenting conversations that have shaped historical understandings of country music, it brings the voices of country artists and songwriters, music industry insiders, critics, and fans together in a vibrant conversation about a widely loved yet seldom studied genre of American popular music. Situating each source chronologically within its specific musical or cultural context, Stimeling traces the history of country music from the fiddle contests and ballad collections of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through the most recent developments in contemporary country music. Drawing from a vast array of sources including popular magazines, fan newsletters, trade publications, and artist biographies, The Country Music Reader offers firsthand insight into the changing role of country music within both the music industry and American musical culture, and presents a rich resource for university students, popular music scholars, and country music fans alike.

Sing Me Back Home
Sing Me Back Home

Author: Bill C. Malone

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2017-02-17

Total Pages: 370

ISBN-13: 0806158514

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For over fifty years, Bill C. Malone has researched and written about the history of country music. Today he is celebrated as the foremost authority on this distinctly American genre. This new collection brings together his significant article-length work from a variety of sources, including essays, book chapters, and record liner notes. Sing Me Back Home distills a lifetime of thinking about country and southern roots music. Malone offers the heartfelt story of his own working-class upbringing in rural East Texas, recounting how in 1939 his family’s first radio, a battery-powered Philco, introduced him to hillbilly music and how, years later, he went on to become a scholar in the field before the field formally existed. Drawing on a hundred years of southern roots music history, Malone assesses the contributions of artists such as William S. Hays, Albert Brumley, Joe Thompson, Jimmie Rodgers, Johnny Gimble, and Elvis Presley. He also explores the intricate relationships between black and white music styles, gospel and secular traditions, and pop, folk, and country music. Author of many books, Malone is best known for his pioneering volume County Music, U.S.A., published in 1968. It ranks as the first comprehensive history of American country music and remains a standard reference. This compilation of Malone’s shorter—and more personal—essays is the perfect complement to his earlier writing and a compelling introduction to the life’s work of America’s most respected country music historian.

Walking the Line
Walking the Line

Author: Thomas Alan Holmes

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2013-10-09

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 0739169688

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An insightful and wide-ranging look at one of America’s most popular genres of music, Walking the Line: Country Music Lyricists and American Culture examines how country songwriters engage with their nation’s religion, literature, and politics. Country fans have long encountered the concept of walking the line, from Johnny Cash’s “I Walk the Line” to Waylon Jennings’s “Only Daddy That’ll Walk the Line.” Walking the line requires following strict codes, respecting territories, and, sometimes, recognizing that only the slightest boundary separates conflicting allegiances. However, even as the term acknowledges control, it suggests rebellion, the consideration of what lies on the other side of the line, and perhaps the desire to violate that code. For lyricists, the line presents a moment of expression, an opportunity to relate an idea, image, or emotion. These lines represent boundaries of their kind as well, but as the chapters in this volume indicate, some of the more successful country lyricists have tested and expanded the boundaries as they have challenged musical, social, and political conventions, often reevaluating what “country” means in country music. From Jimmie Rodgers’s redefinitions of democracy, to revisions of Southern Christianity by Hank Williams and Willie Nelson, to feminist retellings by Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton to masculine reconstructions by Merle Haggard and Cindy Walker, to Steve Earle’s reworking of American ideologies, this collection examines how country lyricists walk the line. In weighing the influence of the lyricists’ accomplishments, the contributing authors walk the line in turn, exploring iconic country lyrics that have tested and expanded boundaries, challenged musical, social, and political conventions, and reevaluated what “country” means in country music.