Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Weisbard, Eric

Titel

Songbook Historiography: Phases and Stages in the Literature of American Popular Music

Ist Teil von

• Reviews in American history, 2021-06, Vol.49 (2), p.338-359

Ort / Verlag

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2021

Quelle

Project MUSE: Universal journals

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Yet that book left out later sequences Armstrong had written on his time in Chicago, on his lifelong love of smoking weed. In the South, songbooks reflected the Second Great Awakening, with Billings psalmody now the shape-note singing of congregations who used, alongside bible, books such as B. F. White and E. J. King's The Sacred Harp (1844).3 The vernacular of a taped Armstrong solo could not yet be communicated, but what 19th-century songbooks did contain was a more distanced, rhetorical, mirroring of the vernacular: sentimentality. James Monroe Trotter's Music and Some Highly Musical People (1878), the first Black music study by a Black person, was ecumenical by necessity; John Lomax brought Texan white populism to Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads (1910); and Charles Harris's Tin Pan Alley-informed How to Write a Popular Song (1906) reveled in the cash-in.5 The Jazz Age It certainly was the jazz age for those writing music books in the 1920s and 1930s, but what was jazz? A "racket," popular music's first deliberate historian, Harvard-educated Gershwin biographer Isaac Goldberg called it, smiling.6 What had been vernacular words on a page or a stage was now the A Train mapping cities; transportable on record discs, radio, and screens; connected to Black-defined rhythms and a nation where, in a song that launched Tin Pan Alley king Irving Berlin, "Everybody's Doin' It Now."