Recorded Music in American Life: The Phonograph and Popular Memory, 1890-1945

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 288 pages
• Published by: Oxford University Press, USA; New Ed edition November 27, 2003
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0195171772
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0195171778
• Book Dimensions: 9 x 5.9 x 0.8 inches
• Weighs: 1 pounds

Product Review
"Kenney captures the imagination as he weaves together detail and insight, chronicling strains of elitism within the various recording companies and the adoption of jazz tunes and other popular music.This book is a must read for those interested in the recording industry or the History of popular music. It also sets a high standard for graduate students seeking to read works that incorporate great research technique and understanding with superb writing."--Journal of History

"Detailed studies of the phonograph and recorded music are seriously lacking. A book such as this is long overdue, and Kenney's work will open the field of study in a most appropriate and scholarly manner. This is a valuable and useful contribution to the study of American life."--Sam Brylawski; Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division; Library of Congress

"Recorded Music in American Life is thoroughly and thoughtfully documented.General readers will be impressed with the wide range of biographical information; musicologists and historians will marvel at the breadth of sociological, psychological, and popular-culture resources Kenney brings to bear on this fascinating topica model of interdisciplinary cultural research."--Notes

"At last someone has attempted to place the phonograph industry in the context of America's cultural life. This book provides the first systematic attempt at integrating the entertainment medium broadly into twentieth-century American life . . . makes claims that have been in need of debate for some time now."--Victor Greene, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

"A fascinating exploration of the topic and addition to the literature; highly recommended for all libraries."--Choice

"In this comprehensive study, Kenney provides a long-overdue update of histories such as Roland Gelatt's The magnificent Phonograph: From Tin Foil to High Fidelity[he] asks innovative theoretical questions."--American Historical Review

Book Description
Have records, compact discs, and other sound reproduction equipment merely provided American listeners with pleasant diversions, or have more important historical and cultural influences flowed through them? Do recording machines simply capture what's already out there, or is the music somehow transformed in the dual process of documentation and dissemination? How would our lives be different without these machines? Such are the questions that arise when we stop taking for granted the phenomenon of recorded music and the phonograph itself. Now comes an in-depth cultural History of the phonograph in the United States from 1890 to 1945. William Howland Kenney offers a full account of what he calls "the 78 r.p.m. era"--from the formative early decades in which the giants of the record industry reigned supreme in the absence of radio, to the postwar proliferation of independent labels, disk jockeys, and changes in popular taste and opinion. By looking at the interplay between recorded music and the key social, political, and economic forces in America during the phonograph's rise and fall as the dominant medium of popular recorded sound, he addresses such vital issues as the place of multiculturalism in the phonograph's history, the roles of women as record-player listeners and performers, the belated commercial legitimacy of rhythm-and-blues recordings, the "hit record" phenomenon in the wake of the Great Depression, the origins of the rock-and-roll revolution, and the shifting place of popular recorded music in America's personal and cultural memories. Throughout the book, Kenney argues that the phonograph and the recording industry served neither to impose a preference for high culture nor a degraded popular taste, but rather expressed a diverse set of sensibilities in which various sorts of people found a new kind of pleasure. To this end, Recorded Music in American Life effectively illustrates how recorded music provided the focus for active recorded sound cultures, in which listeners shared what they heard, and expressed crucial dimensions of their private lives, by way of their involvement with records and record-players. Students and scholars of American music, culture, commerce, and history--as well as fans and collectors interested in this phase of our rich artistic past--will find a great deal of thorough research and fresh scholarship to enjoy in these pages.

Reader Reviews
This is a very disappointing book, in part because the promise of the topic is so great. We really lack a full history of early American recorded sound. We have some excellent monographs, but a comprehensive history would combine the histories of (1) the development of the technology of the phonograph, (2) the companies that developed to sell recordings, and (3) the music as it was produced in that technological/institutional context. Such a combination would allow that early American recorded sound was shaped BOTH by corporate initiative and the lived cultures of the people who made and listened to the recordings. Alas, Kenney is of the "powerful white corporations control our minds" school of bad academic writing. Thus his book reaches the thunderously ignorant conclusion: "And so, with bebop, as with 1920s jazz, blues, hillbilly, and big band swing of the 1930s and 1940s, the recording industry...presented[ed] the sounds of the country's ethnic groups - but only in ways that reflected the companies' economic and political motives." [p. 201] Anyone with even a passing knowledge of the diversity of pre-war recording knows (a) corporations did try to channel music and musicians into recognizable (and in that sense limited) categories, and (b)they were only variably successful. Kenney denies the complexity of this dynamic and makes some conclusions that could only be written by a contemporary American academic. For example, "[W]hites also shaped the creation of blues records, and they created a distinctive, structurally rigid style..." [p. 134] Whites created the blues? Really? By the 1950s, then, Chicago was filled with black southern migrants listening to the "rigid" sounds of Muddy Waters, Howling Wolf, and others, because white corporations had put the zap on their minds. This is of course silly and paranoid. So, skip this academic exercise and hold out for a history that allows for the hardships and triumphs that mingle in American music. Comment | Permalink | (Report this)