This book looks at the uses of popular music in the newly-redefined category of the nostalgia game, exploring the relationship between video games, popular music, nostalgia, and socio-cultural contexts. History, gender, race, and media all make significant appearances in this interdisciplinary work, as it explores what some of the most critically acclaimed games of the past two decades (including both AAA titles like Fallout and BioShock, and more cult releases like Gone Home and Evoland) tell us about our relationship to our past and our future. Appropriated music is the common thread throughout these chapters, engaging these broader discourses in heterogeneous ways. This volume offers new perspectives on how the intersection between popular music, nostalgia, and video games, can be examined, revealing much about our relationship to the past and our hopes for the future.

Made in France: Studies in Popular Music serves as a comprehensive introduction to the history, sociology, and musicology of contemporary French popular music. The volume consists of essays by scholars of French popular music, and covers the major figures, styles, and social contexts of pop music in France. The book first presents a general description of the history and background of popular music in France, followed by essays that are organized into thematic sections: The Mutations of French Popular Music During the "Trente Glorieuses"; Politicising Popular Music; Assimilation, Appropriation, French Specificity; and From Digital Stakes to Cultural Heritage: French Contemporary Topics. Contributors: Christian Bethune Juliette Dalbavie Gerome Guibert Fabien Hein Olivier Julien Marc Kaiser Barbara Lebrun David Looseley Stephanie Molinero Anne Petiau Cecile Prevost-Thomas Vincent Rouze Catherine Rudent Matthieu Saladin Jedediah Sklower Raphael Suire Florence Tamagne

Emilia Barna is Assistant Professor at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. She is a founding member and Chair of IASPM Hungary, editor of Zenei Halozatok Folyoirat (Music Networks Journal), and Advisory Board Member of IASPM@Journal. Tamas Tofalvy is Assistant Professor at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. He was the founding Chair and is the current Vice-Chair of IASPM Hungary.

A new biography of one of the key composers of 20th-century American popular song and jazz,Eubie Blake: Rags, Rhythm and Race illuminates Blake's little-known impact on over 100 years of American culture. A gifted musician, Blake rose from performing in dance halls and bordellos of his native Baltimore to the heights of Broadway. In 1921, together with performer and lyricist Noble Sissle, Blake created Shuffle Along which became a sleeper smash on Broadway eventually becoming one of the top ten musical shows of the 1920s. Despite many obstacles Shuffle Along integrated Broadway and the road and introduced such stars as Josephine Baker, Lottie Gee, Florence Mills, and Fredi Washington. It also proved that black shows were viable on Broadway and subsequent productions gave a voice to great songwriters, performers, and spoke to a previously disenfranchised black audience. As successful as Shuffle Along was, racism and bad luck hampered Blake's career. Remarkably, the third act of Blake's life found him heraldedin his 90s at major jazz festivals, in Broadway shows, and on television and recordings. Tracing not only Blake's extraordinary life and accomplishments, Broadway and popular music authorities Richard Carlin and Ken Bloom examine the professional and societal barriers confronted by black artists from the turn of the century through the 1980s. Drawing from a wealth of personal archives and interviews with Blake, his friends, and other scholars,Eubie Blake: Rags, Rhythm and Race offers an incisive portrait of the man and the musical world he inhabited.

Made in Korea: Studies in Popular Music serves as a comprehensive and thorough introduction to the history, sociology, and musicology of contemporary Korean popular music. Each essay covers the major figures, styles, and social contexts of pop music in Korea, first presenting a general description of the history and background of popular music in Korea, followed by essays, written by leading scholars of Korean music, that are organized into thematic sections: History, Institution, Ideology; Genres and Styles; Artists; and Issues.

When Rodgers and Hart's Pal Joey opened at the Barrymore on Christmas day, 1940, it flew in the face of musical comedy convention. The characters and situation were depraved. The setting was caustically realistic. Its female lead was frankly sexual and yet not purely comic. A narratively-driven dream ballet closed the first act, begging audiences to take seriously the inner life and desires of a confirmed heel. Pal Joey: The History of a Heel presents a behind-the-scenes look at the genesis, influence, and significance of this classic musical comedy. Although the show appears on many top-ten lists surveying the Golden Age, it is a controversial classic; its legacy is tied both to the fashionable scandal that it provoked, and, retrospectively, to the uncommon attention it paid to characterization and narrative cohesion. Through an archive-driven investigation of the show and its music, author Julianne Lindberg offers insight into the historical moment during which Joey was born, and to the process of genre classification, canon formation, and the ensuing critical debates related to musical and theatrical maturity. More broadly, the book argues that the critique and commentary on class and gender conventions in Pal Joey reveals a uniquely American concern over status, class mobility, and progressive gender roles in the pre-war era.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Educationdraws together current thinking and practice on popular music education from empirical, ethnographic, sociological and philosophical perspectives. Through a series of unique chapters from authors working at the forefront of music education, this book explores the ways in which an international group of music educators each approach popular music education. Chapters discuss pedagogies from across the spectrum of formal to informal learning, including "outside" and "other" perspectives that provide insight into the myriad ways in which popular music education is developed and implemented. The book is organized into the following sections: - Conceptualizing Popular Music Education - Musical, Creative and Professional Development - Originating Popular Music - Popular Music Education in Schools - Identity, Meaning and Value in Popular Music Education - Formal Education, Creativities and Assessment Contributions from academics, teachers, and practitioners make this an innovative and exciting volume for students, teachers, researchers and professors in popular music studies and music education.

Popular music artists, as performers in the public eye, offer a privileged site for the witnessing and analysis of ageing and its mediation. The Late Voice undertakes such an analysis by considering issues of time, memory, innocence and experience in modern Anglophone popular song and the use by singers and songwriters of a 'late voice'. Lateness here refers to five primary issues: chronology (the stage in an artist's career); the vocal act (the ability to convincingly portray experience); afterlife (posthumous careers made possible by recorded sound); retrospection (how voices 'look back' or anticipate looking back); and the writing of age, experience, lateness and loss into song texts. There has been recent growth in research on ageing and the experience of later stages of life, focusing on physical health, lifestyle and psychology, with work in the latter field intersecting with the field of memory studies. The Late Voice seeks to connect age, experience and lateness with particular performers and performance traditions via the identification and analysis of a late voice in singers and songwriters of mid-late twentieth century popular music.

Made in Brazil: Studies in Popular Music serves as a comprehensive and thorough introduction to the history, sociology, and musicology of twentieth-century Brazilian popular music. The volume consists of essays by leading scholars and journalists of Brazilian music, and covers the major figures, styles, and social contexts of pop music in Brazil. Each essay provides adequate context so readers understand why the figure or genre under discussion is of lasting significance to Brazilian popular music. The book first presents a general description of the history and background of popular music in Brazil, followed by essays that are organized into thematic sections: Samba and Choro; History, Memory, and Representations; Scenes and Artists; and Music, Market and New Media.

In the mid 1920s, Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II wrote a song called "Ol' Man River" that combined the seriousness of a Negro spiritual with the crowd-pleasing power of a Broadway anthem. Inspired, according to Kern, by the voice of the African American singer Paul Robeson, "Ol' Man River" went on to great success in the Broadway musical Show Boat and became a signature song for Robeson, who turned the tune towards his own goals as an activist. But the story of "Ol' Man River" goes deeper than the curiosity of a song recorded by so many in so many different ways. For at the heart of Oscar Hammerstein's lyric is a clear-eyed vision of the black experience in American history. Anyone-black or white-who thought they should sing "Ol' Man River" has had to deal with the charged racial content of the song. Who Should Sing "Ol' Man River"? traces this aspect of "Ol' Man River's" course through American history, an at-times high-stakes journey where the African American struggle for dignity and equality came down to the lyrics of a popular song. However beyond Robeson and Show Boat, "Ol' Man River" also had a long and rich life in the world of popular music. An astonishing variety of singers and musicians from across the musical spectrum-from pop to jazz, opera to doo wop, rhythm and blues to gospel to reggae-all chose to perform or record it. Who Should Sing "Ol' Man River"?: The Lives of an American Song traces out the performance history of this remarkable song by listening closely to over two hundred recorded and filmed versions dating from the song's debut in 1927 to the present. Many famous pop singers made "Ol' Man River" a signature song; among them Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, and Judy Garland: white performers who took up a lyric told from the black perspective. Important jazz artists such as Bix Biederbecke, Duke Ellington, Dave Brubeck, Count Basie, and Keith Jarrett all played it. Opera singers-black and white, male and female-took it up as well. And a slew of surprising names from the first decades of rock and roll also recorded this inescapable tune, among them Sam Cooke, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, the Temptations, Cher, and Rod Stewart.

America's Songs II: Songs from the 1890's to the Post-War Years continues to tell the stories behind popular songs in our country's history, serving as a sequel to the bestselling America's Songs: Stories Behind the Songs of Broadway, Hollywood, and Tin Pan Alley. Beginning in 1890 and ending in post-war America, America's Songs II is a testament to the richness of popular music in the first half of the 20th century. This volume builds on the unique features of the first volume, delving deeper into the nature of the collaboration between well-known songwriters of the time but also shedding light on some of the early performers to turn songs into hits. The book's structure - a collection of short easy-to-read essays - allows the author to provide historical context to certain songs, but also to demonstrate how individual songs facilitated the popularity of specific genres, including ragtime, jazz, and blues, which subsequently reshaped the landscape of American popular music. America's Songs II: Songs from the 1890's to the Post-War Years will appeal to American popular music enthusiasts but will also serve as an ideal reference guide for students or as a supplement in American music courses.

Overturning the inherited belief that popular music is unrefined, Form as Harmony in Rock Music brings the process-based approach of classical theorists to popular music scholarship. Author Drew Nobile offers the first comprehensive theory of form for 1960s, 70s, and 80s classic rock repertoire, showing how songs in this genre are not simply a series of discrete elements, but rather exhibit cohesive formal-harmonic structures across their entire timespan. Though many elements contribute to the cohesion of a song, the rock music of these decades is built around a fundamentally harmonic backdrop, giving rise to distinct types of verses, choruses, and bridges. Nobile's rigorous but readable theoretical analysis demonstrates how artists from Bob Dylan to Stevie Wonder to Madonna consistently turn to the same compositional structures throughout rock's various genres and decades, unifying them under a single musical style. Using over 200 transcriptions, graphs, and form charts, Form as Harmony in Rock Music advocates a structural approach to rock analysis, revealing essential features of this style that would otherwise remain below our conscious awareness.

Holly Knight's singular music career included crafting a good part of the soundtrack to the MTV eighties with mega-hits for Tina Turner ("The Best"), Pat Benatar ("Love Is A Battlefield"), and Patty Smyth ("The Warrior")-songs that celebrated female empowerment and shaped pop and rock for years to come. "Holly Knight wrote some of the best and toughest songs for female artists. Her songs helped pave the way for women in rock. Not to mention a few dudes." -Patty Smyth As a writer and musician, Holly Knight worked hard and played hard with the likes of KISS, Rod Stewart, Bon Jovi, Aerosmith, and Heart. She showed the boys how it was done when many women were still struggling to get a foot in the door. Starting in the late 1970s in post-punk New York, Knight, a gifted keyboardist, joined the band Spider-which quickly ascended to buzzworthy status before things began to disintegrate. Fortunately, her song "Better Be Good to Me" found its way to Tina Turner and became the second single on her landmark solo album, Private Dancer, launching Holly into rarified air. Soon she was being sought out to write for other artists in search of the big hit or their lead single. Coinciding with the birth of MTV, Knight's powerful lyrics, hooks, and melodies became a staple on the channel as it exploded into a cultural force. "People who grew up in the eighties tell me that MTV was the soundtrack to their lives. Holly Knight deserves much of the credit. Few songwriters have written such a diverse collection of songs for such a broad range of superstars." -Alan Hunter But it was an often lonely journey to success. Not only was Holly a woman in a male-dominated industry that didn't welcome women warmly into the inner sanctum, she carried with her the baggage of a difficult childhood and a fraught relationship with her mother, the substance of which informed the themes that made her songs so anthemic. I Am the Warrior is a story of survival, perseverance, and triumph laced with ample amounts of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll. Backstage, onstage, in the studio, and on the road, this book is a revealing, bang-bang tale that welcomes you along for a look back at one of the most adventurous and colorful periods in music history. "I Am the Warrior takes readers on a wild ride through the eighties world of rock 'n' roll from a strong female's perspective. Songwriters Hall of Fame-inductee Holly Knight delivers the goods and stands out as a creative, gutsy woman who made her way through a field dominated by men, ultimately coming out on top. If you love music like I do, this is a must-read!" -Cassandra Peterson (AKA Elvira, Mistress of the Dark)

The definitive autobiography of Willie Nelson

"Unvarnished. Funny. Leaving no stone unturned."

. . . So say the publishers about this book I've written.

What I say is that this is the story of my life, told as clear as a Texas sky and in the same rhythm that I lived it.

It's a story of restlessness and the purity of the moment and living right. Of my childhood in Abbott, Texas, to the Pacific Northwest, from Nashville to Hawaii and all the way back again. Of selling vacuum cleaners and encyclopedias while hosting radio shows and writing song after song, hoping to strike gold.

It's a story of true love, wild times, best friends, and barrooms, with a musical sound track ripping right through it.

My life gets lived on the road, at home, and on the road again, tried and true, and I've written it all down from my heart to yours.

"Wonderful"-The New York Times. "Provocative, opinionated, and never dull"-Down Beat. "A singular book."-Studs Terkel. When it was first published, Alec Wilder's American Popular Song quickly became a classic and today it remains essential reading for countless musicians, lovers of American Song, and fans of Alec Wilder. Now, in a 50th anniversary edition, popular music scholar Robert Rawlins brings the book fully up-to-date for the 21st century. Whereas previous editions featured only piano scores, the format has been changed to lead sheet notation with lyrics, making it accessible to a wider readership. Rawlins has also added more than sixty music examples to help complete the chapter on Irving Berlin. One of the most fascinating features of the original edition was Wilder's inventive use of language, often revealing his strong and sometimes irreverent opinions. Wilder's prose remains relatively unaltered, but footnotes have been provided that clarify, elucidate, and even correct. Moreover, a new chapter has been added, discussing fifty-three songs by numerous composers that Wilder might have well included but was not able to. Songs by Ann Ronnell, Fats Waller, Jule Styne and many others are capped off with an examination of ten of Wilder's own songs.

'I will always believe in the strength we have as women.' As the queen of pop music since the glory days of Destiny's Child to her incredible solo career, Beyonce is one of the most inspiring and powerful women in music. The Little Book of Queen Bey is a collection of the most iconic quotes from a woman who needs no introduction. When it comes to self-love, empowerment and sisterhood, Beyonce has more wisdom than anybody. From how to be an independent woman to positive affirmations that will give you hope, The Little Book of Queen Bey is the perfect gift for fans of the goddess of pop. Prepare to be inspired.

Redefining Mainstream Popular Music is a collection of seventeen essays that critically examines the idea of the "mainstream" in and across a variety of popular music styles and contexts. Notions of what is popular vary across generations and cultures - what may have been considered alternative to one group may be perceived as mainstream to another. Incorporating a wide range of popular music texts, genres, scenes, practices and technologies from the United Kingdom, North America, Australia and New Zealand, the authors theoretically challenge and augment our understanding of how the mainstream is understood and functions in the overlapping worlds of popular music production, consumption and scholarship. Spanning the local and the global, the historic and contemporary, the iconic and the everyday, the book covers a broad range of genres, from punk to grunge to hip-hop, while also considering popular music through other mediums, including mash-ups and the music of everyday work life. Redefining Mainstream Popular Music provides readers with an innovative and nuanced perspective of what it means to be mainstream.

Perry Como put aside his career as a barber to become one of the top American crooners of the 20th century and also one of the first multimedia stars. His record sales exceeded 100 million. In 1948, Como was the first popular singer to cross over to television and The Perry Como Show became the benchmark for a broadcast music and variety show. Como's career illuminates developments in the music and television business in the middle of the last century. This biography features 73 photographs, a complete discography, a listing of all television appearances, and a year by year chronology of Perry Como's life from 1912 to 2001.

As a young girl toiling in a South Wales tin works, Dorothy Squires dreamt of being a singing star, but was ridiculed by all around her. At the tender age of sixteen she escaped the valleys and boarded a train for London. It was here that she met and fell in love with songwriter and band leader Billy Reid, the older man who was to make her a star. The pair became an international success, but the relationship foundered, and Dorothy found herself falling in love with the much younger Roger Moore, a struggling actor who she would spend all her time establishing as a star. Written by Dorothy's good friend Jonny Tudor, this fascinating first biography of a Welsh singing phenomenon is an unprecedented insight into the glitz and glamour of 1940s and '50s Hollywood and Dorothy's triumphant comeback in the 1960s and '70s.

Made in France: Studies in Popular Music serves as a comprehensive introduction to the history, sociology, and musicology of contemporary French popular music. The volume consists of essays by scholars of French popular music, and covers the major figures, styles, and social contexts of pop music in France. The book first presents a general description of the history and background of popular music in France, followed by essays that are organized into thematic sections: The Mutations of French Popular Music During the "Trente Glorieuses"; Politicising Popular Music; Assimilation, Appropriation, French Specificity; and From Digital Stakes to Cultural Heritage: French Contemporary Topics. Contributors: Christian Bethune Juliette Dalbavie Gerome Guibert Fabien Hein Olivier Julien Marc Kaiser Barbara Lebrun David Looseley Stephanie Molinero Anne Petiau Cecile Prevost-Thomas Vincent Rouze Catherine Rudent Matthieu Saladin Jedediah Sklower Raphael Suire Florence Tamagne

The two volumes of The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies consolidate an area of scholarly inquiry that addresses how mechanical, electrical, and digital technologies and their corresponding economies of scale have rendered music and sound increasingly mobile-portable, fungible, and ubiquitous. At once a marketing term, a common mode of everyday-life performance, and an instigator of experimental aesthetics, "mobile music" opens up a space for studying the momentous transformations in the production, distribution, consumption, and experience of music and sound that took place between the late nineteenth and the early twenty-first centuries. Taken together, the two volumes cover a large swath of the world-the US, the UK, Japan, Brazil, Germany, Turkey, Mexico, France, China, Jamaica, Iraq, the Philippines, India, Sweden-and a similarly broad array of the musical and nonmusical sounds suffusing the soundscapes of mobility.
Volume 1 provides an introduction to the study of mobile music through the examination of its devices, markets, and theories. Conceptualizing a long history of mobile music extending from the late nineteenth century to the present, the volume focuses on the conjunction of human mobility and forms of sound production and reproduction. The volume's chapters investigate the MP3, copyright law and digital downloading, music and cloud computing, the iPod, the transistor radio, the automated call center, sound and text messaging, the mobile phone, the militarization of iPod usage, the cochlear implant, the portable sound recorder, listening practices of schoolchildren and teenagers, the ringtone, mobile music in the urban soundscape, the boombox, mobile music marketing in Mexico and Brazil, music piracy in India, and online radio in Japan and the US.

After The Beatles stormed America, every Hollywood and European production company descended on London to be part of the new swinging scene... and they didn't leave until they'd signed up every able-bodied pop group or singer to appear in one of their films. A unique and carefully researched cultural history of UK film, TV and music in the swinging 60s. A time when no film or TV programme was without a group, singer or fantastic soundtrack - and London was briefly the film capital of the world. Containing individual summaries of over 120 films, covering everything from John Barry to Pink Floyd via Blow Up, the Electric Banana, Serge Gainsbourg, Magical Mystery Tour, David hemmings, Kubrick, Godard, Jodorowsdky and the London cast of Hair. With comprehensive listings of over 500 related features, documentaries, TV programmes and shorts, an unforgettable trip through the swinging 60s.

While ballads have been a cornerstone of popular music for decades, this is the first book to explore the history and appeal of these treasured songs. David Metzer investigates how and why the styles of ballads have changed over a period of more than seventy years, offering a definition of the genre and discussing the influences of celebrated performers including Frank Sinatra, Aretha Franklin, and Whitney Houston. The emotional power of the ballad is strongly linked to the popular mood of the time, and consequently songs can tell us much about how events and emotions were felt and understood in wider culture at specific moments of recent American history. Tracing both the emotional and stylistic developments of the genre from the 1950s to the present day, this lively and engaging volume is as much a musical history as it is a history of emotional life in America.