Who is the Bill Bailey whose exploits were chronicled in song? How many popular songs have titles containing the words “moon,” “heart,” or “baby”? Where is the road to Mandalay? How many female names can you think of that have been mentioned in song titles? Discover this fascinating information and more about some of America's most known and loved popular songs in this delightful sampler. The Popular Song Reader contains over 200 short essays on the backgrounds of a wide variety of twentieth-century American popular songs. The witty and knowledgeable essays touch upon several hundred traditional-style pop songs as well as early rock compositions. The essays are filled with anecdotes, humor, irony, and even poetry that reflect the author's offbeat and somewhat irreverent manner, while also presenting a broad spectrum of American popular songs in their historical and cultural contexts. In addition to information about each song and its composer, the author also discusses how the song reflected society at the time and also how the song itself has influenced popular culture. Pop music fans will find this a highly entertaining and readable guide to the best American popular music of the twentieth century. Divided into five sections, the book covers popular songs from the Tin Pan Alley era (By the Light of the Silvery Moon, California, Here I Come, Let Me Call You Sweetheart, She'll Be Comin’Round the Mountain, and When Irish Eyes are Smiling), the swing/big band era (Don't Get Around Much Anymore, Heart and Soul, In the Mood, Stardust, and Stormy Weather), and the rock era (Chances Are, Good Vibrations, Love Me Tender, Misty, Rock Around the Clock, Stop! In the Name of Love, and The Twist). The Popular Song Reader provides new insights on all-time favorites from Broadway musicals, movies, and television including Ain't Misbehavin', Give My Regards to Broadway, My Funny Valentine, Aquarius, Cabaret, Luck Be a Lady, Mack the Knife, Don't Fence Me In, Over the Rainbow, Singin’in the Rain, and the theme songs from Star Wars , All in the Family, Cheers, and M*A*S*H.

Maps the changing nature of popular music and considers how popular music studies has expanded and developed to deal with these changes. The book discusses the participation of women in the industry, the changing role of gender and sexuality in popular music, and the role of technologies in production and distribution.

William Studwell has done it again! In The National and Religious Song Reader, the author presents more than 120 enjoyable and informative essays on national, patriotic, and religious songs from around the world. Readers will learn the answers to such questions as: Was "Dixie" actually first performed in New York City? Which 16th-century English composition is referred to by Shakespeare in The Merry Wives of Windsor? What well-known hymn was written by Martin Luther in 1529? And what is a waltzing matilda anyway? (Hint: It's not a dancing young lady.) Studwell's latest collection follows the form and style of his earlier works, The Popular Song Reader and The Christmas Carol Reader, as he relays interesting facts about each song through anecdotes, humor, poetry, and a generally lighthearted yet scholarly approach. In addition to information about each song and its composer, the author also discusses how the song reflected society at the time and how the song itself has influenced popular culture. The book is divided into four sections: American National Songs: armed forces songs, war songs, national anthems, national marches National Songs From Other Countries: songs from Canada, Mexico, England, Scotland, France, Italy, Germany, Russia, Ireland, Israel, Australia General Hymns: religious songs from the 17th century and earlier, and the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries Songs Associated With Religious Events: Easter, Thanksgiving, weddings, funerals The book's readable style is its most important quality as it makes it more approachable than a typical reference book. And vital to its usefulness as a reference book are the indexes--one by song title and another by person or group. Whether used primarily as an enjoyable reference or as an informative reader, The National and Religious Song Reader is bound to provide new insights into familiar songs for all music fans.

With its steel guitars, Opry stars, and honky-tonk bars, country music is an American original. Bringing together a wide range of scholars and critics from literature, communications, history, sociology, art, and music, this anthology looks at everything from the inner workings of the country music industry to the iconography of certain stars to the development of distinctive styles within the country music genre. 72 photos.

The Routledge Companion to Popular Music Analysis: Expanding Approaches widens the scope of analytical approaches for popular music by incorporating methods developed for analyzing contemporary art music. This study endeavors to create a new analytical paradigm for examining popular music from the perspective of developments in contemporary art music. "Expanded approaches" for popular music analysis is broadly defined as as exploring the pitch-class structures, form, timbre, rhythm, or aesthetics of various forms of popular music in a conceptual space not limited to the domain of common practice tonality but broadened to include any applicable compositional, analytical, or theoretical concept that illuminates the music. The essays in this collection investigate a variety of analytical, theoretical, historical, and aesthetic commonalities popular music shares with 20th and 21st century art music. From rock and pop to hip hop and rap, dance and electronica, from the 1930s to present day, this companion explores these connections in five parts: Establishing and Expanding Analytical Frameworks Technology and Timbre Rhythm, Pitch, and Harmony Form and Structure Critical Frameworks: Analytical, Formal, Structural, and Political With contributions by established scholars and promising emerging scholars in music theory and historical musicology from North America, Europe, and Australia, The Routledge Companion to Popular Music Analysis: Expanding Approaches offers nuanced and detailed perspectives that address the relationships between concert and popular music.

"A Complete History of Music for Schools, Clubs, and Private Reading" is a great source of information on the history of music from ancient times to publishing. This work aims to give an overall picture of how music evolved in the world. It traces the development of the musical art across different countries. Broken into 60 lessons, it will be great both as a class manual and as a reader's companion.

Take a seat and settle in—it’s a gigantic treasury of trivia and humor for our twenty-fifth (is that porcelain?) anniversary! IBPA Benjamin Franklin Award Gold Winner in Humor ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year Awards, Honorable Mention in Humor “Fully Loaded” is putting it mildly. This behemoth of a book is overflowing with incredible stories, surprising facts, weird news, little-known origins, forgotten history, fun wordplay, and everything else that millions of loyal fans have come to expect from the world’s best-selling bathroom reading series. As always, it’s divided by length: quickies for the reader on the go, medium-sized articles for those with a few minutes to spare, and extra-long pieces for those truly leg-numbing experiences. Here are just a few of the hundreds of topics loaded into this edition of America’s favorite source of fascinating information: * Forgotten Firsts * Dumb Crooks: Stoner Edition * Bizarre Japanese Video Games * The Kamikaze Instruction Manual * Our Lady of the Little Green Men * The Worst Fire in American History * The World’s Worst Business Decision * The New Year’s Eve Opossum Drop * Do Blondes Really Have More Fun? * Failed Doomsday Predictions * When Toilets Explode * and much, much more!

This book investigates the phenomenon of queering in popular music and video, interpreting the music of numerous pop artists, styles, and idioms. The focus falls on artists, such as Lady Gaga, Madonna, Boy George, Diana Ross, Rufus Wainwright, David Bowie, Azealia Banks, Zebra Katz, Freddie Mercury, the Pet Shop Boys, George Michael, and many others. Hawkins builds his concept of queerness upon existing theories of opacity and temporality, which involves a creative interdisciplinary approach to musical interpretation. He advocates a model of analysis that involves both temporal-specific listening and biographic-oriented viewing. Music analysis is woven into this, illuminating aspects of parody, nostalgia, camp, naivety, masquerade, irony, and mimesis in pop music. One of the principal aims is to uncover the subversive strategies of pop artists through a wide range of audiovisual texts that situate the debates on gender and sexuality within an aesthetic context that is highly stylized and ritualized. Queerness in Pop Music also addresses the playfulness of much pop music, offering insights into how discourses of resistance are mediated through pleasure. Given that pop artists, songwriters, producers, directors, choreographers, and engineers all contribute to the final composite of the pop recording, it is argued that the staging of any pop act is a collective project. The implications of this are addressed through structures of gender, ethnicity, nationality, class, and sexuality. Ultimately, Hawkins contends that queerness is a performative force that connotes futurity and utopian promise.

In this pathbreaking book, Allen Forte uses modern analytical procedures to explore the large repertoire of beautiful love songs written during the heyday of American musical theater, the Big Bands, and Tin Pan Alley. Covering the work of such songwriters as Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, and Harold Arlen, he seeks to illuminate this extraordinary music indigenous to America by revealing its deeper organizational characteristics. In so doing, he aims to establish it as a unique corpus of music that deserves more intensive study and appreciation by scholars and connoisseurs in the broader fields of American popular music and jazz. Expressing much of the traditional tonality associated with European music in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the love songs of the Golden Age are shown to draw on a rich variety of elements--popular harmony, idiomatic lyric-writing, and Afro-American dance rhythms. His analyses of such songs as "Embraceable You" or "Yesterdays" in particular exemplify his ability to convey the sublime, unpretentious simplicity of this great music.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Religion and Popular Music is the first comprehensive analysis of the most important themes and concepts in this field. Drawing on contemporary research from religious studies, theology, sociology, ethnography, and cultural studies, the volume comprises thirty-one specifically commissioned essays from a team of international experts. The chapters explore the principal areas of inquiry and point to new directions for scholarship. Featuring chapters on methodology, key genres, religious traditions and popular music subcultures, this volume provides the essential reference point for anyone with an interest in religion and popular music as well as popular culture more broadly. Religious traditions covered include Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Paganism and occultism. Coverage of genres and religion ranges from heavy metal, rap and hip hop to country music and film and television music. Edited by Christopher Partridge and Marcus Moberg, this Handbook defines the research field and provides an accessible entry point for new researchers in the field.