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F. Scott Fitzgerald named it, Louis Armstrong launched it, Paul Whiteman and Fletcher Henderson orchestrated it, and now Arnold Shaw chronicles this fabulous era in The Jazz Age. Spicing his account with lively anecdotes and inside stories, he describes the astonishing outpouring of significant musical innovations that emerged during the "Roaring Twenties"--including blues, jazz, band music, torch ballads, operettas and musicals--and sets them against the background of the Prohibition world of the Flapper.
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As Shaw correctly states, no single volume covers the history of black popular music in its entirety, and most studies have focused on the white mainstream. American pop music is in fact a blend of black and white musical influences that can be better understood if explored from a black perspective. Shaw examines five key black stylesminstrelsy, spirituals, ragtime, jazz, and bluesanalyzing the origins and developments of each, profiling important artists and songs, and exploring the "white synthesis." Often the "synthesis" has amounted to little more than a soulless white imitation of inspired black stylistic innovations.
Traces the development of rock music from its introduction in the mid-1950's to today's electronic forms and considers its social and psychological implications.
The decade that transformed the pop scene, the 1950s, are here recreated in an authoritative history. From the death of Tin Pan Alley to the birth of rock and roll, Arnold Shaw has captured a wide range of characters - Col Tom Parker, Sam Phillips, Perry Como, Mitch Miller, Dick Clark, Hank Williams, Fats Domino, Little Richard, James Brown, Fabian and dozens of others all set against a background of hula hoops, singing chipmunks, teen-age love and a young singer named Elvis Presley. Written with wit, this history of a contradictory decade - repressed and oversexed - will correct anyone who thinks this was an age of conformity.
The weekly source of African American political and entertainment news.
In this exuberant sequel to his prize-winning The Jazz Age, Arnold Shaw captures virtually every aspect of popular music during the Depression. Here is a colorful year-by-year chronicle of music in the '30s, blended with chapters on broader topics--the jazz clubs on Swing Street, the Big Band boom--and spiced with interviews with major figures (such as Burton Lane and Lionel Hampton), who bring a vibrant first-hand feel to the narrative. Readers visit every corner of the music scene. We watch as the Hollywood musical takes off, highlighted by the brilliant Busby Berkeley and the luminous partnership of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. We read about the incredible popularity of radio shows suc...
The penultimate novel in the Strangers and Brothers series takes Goya’s theme of monsters that appear in our sleep. The sleep of reason here is embodied in the ghastly murders of children that involve torture and sadism.