Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, and Rudy Vallee—these cultural icons whose fame spanned all the important mass media, also played a vital role in the origin and development of the crooning tradition. Crooning represented one of the most important musical styles of the twentieth century, intermingling with jazz and fronting the big band craze of the thirties and forties. Crooners spurred the rise of radio as home staple and the Golden Age of film musicals. When commercial television became a viable commodity, crooners anchored perhaps the first TV programming innovation, the variety show. It took the cataclysmic aesthetic and cultural changes ushered in by rock 'n' roll in the 1950s to finally bring crooners down from their pedestal. The Rise of the Crooners examines the historical trends and events that led to the emergence of the crooning style. Ian Whitcomb, a successful popular music vocalist himself for almost 40 years, provides a personal perspective on this phenomenon. The lives and careers of six pioneers of the style—Bing Crosby, Russ Columbo, Gene Austin, Rudy Vallee, Johnny Marvin, and Nick Lucas—are covered at length. With the exception of one entry devoted to Crosby—possibly the greatest entertainer of the past century—these biographies (appended by lengthy bibliographies and discographies) are more thorough and up-to-date than any treatment in print about these seminal artists.

The crooner Rudy Vallée's soft, intimate, and sensual vocal delivery simultaneously captivated millions of adoring fans and drew harsh criticism from those threatened by his sensitive masculinity. Although Vallée and other crooners reflected the gender fluidity of late-1920s popular culture, their challenge to the Depression era's more conservative masculine norms led cultural authorities to stigmatize them as gender and sexual deviants. In Real Men Don't Sing Allison McCracken outlines crooning's history from its origins in minstrelsy through its development as the microphone sound most associated with white recording artists, band singers, and radio stars. She charts early crooners’ rise and fall between 1925 and 1934, contrasting Rudy Vallée with Bing Crosby to demonstrate how attempts to contain crooners created and dictated standards of white masculinity for male singers. Unlike Vallée, Crosby survived the crooner backlash by adapting his voice and persona to adhere to white middle-class masculine norms. The effects of these norms are felt to this day, as critics continue to question the masculinity of youthful, romantic white male singers. Crooners, McCracken shows, not only were the first pop stars: their short-lived yet massive popularity fundamentally changed American culture.

Amore is Mark Rotella's celebration of the "Italian decade"—the years after the war and before the Beatles when Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, Dean Martin, and Tony Bennett, among others, won the hearts of the American public with a smooth, stylish, classy brand of pop. In Rotella's vivid telling, the stories behind forty Italian American classics (from "O Sole Mio," "Night and Day," and "Mack the Knife" to "Volare" and "I Wonder Why") show how a glorious musical tradition became the sound track of postwar America and the expression of a sense of style that we still cherish. Rotella follows the music from the opera houses and piazzas of southern Italy, to the barrooms of the Bronx and Hoboken, to the Copacabana, the Paramount Theatre, and the Vegas Strip. He shows us the hardworking musicians whose voices were to become ubiquitous on jukeboxes and the radio and whose names—some anglicized, some not—have become bywords for Italian American success, even as they were dogged by stereotypes and prejudice. Amore is the personal Top 40 of one proud son of Italy; it is also a love song to Italian American culture and an evocation of an age that belongs to us all.

This informative two-volume set provides readers with an understanding of the fads and crazes that have taken America by storm from colonial times to the present. Entries cover a range of topics, including food, entertainment, fashion, music, and language. Why could hula hoops and TV westerns only have been found in every household in the 1950s? What murdered Russian princess can be seen in one of the first documented selfies, taken in 1914? This book answers those questions and more in its documentation of all of the most captivating trends that have defined American popular culture since before the country began. Entries are well-researched and alphabetized by decade. At the start of every section is an insightful historical overview of the decade, and the set uniquely illustrates what today's readers have in common with the past. It also contains a Glossary of Slang for each decade as well as a bibliography, plus suggestions for further reading for each entry. Students and readers interested in history will enjoy discovering trends through the years in such areas as fashion, movies, music, and sports.

The love song is timeless. From its beginnings, it has been shaped by bohemians and renegades, slaves and oppressed minorities, prostitutes, immigrants and other excluded groups. But what do we really know about the origins of these intimate expressions of the heart? And how have our changing perceptions about topics such as sexuality and gender roles changed our attitudes towards these songs? In Love Songs: The Hidden History, Ted Gioia uncovers the unexplored story of the love song for the first time. Drawing on two decades of research, Gioia presents the full range of love songs, from the fertility rites of ancient cultures to the sexualized YouTube videos of the present day. The book traces the battles over each new insurgency in the music of love--whether spurred by wandering scholars of medieval days or by four lads from Liverpool in more recent times. In these pages, Gioia reveals that the tenderest music has, in different eras, driven many of the most heated cultural conflicts, and how the humble love song has played a key role in expanding the sphere of individualism and personal autonomy in societies around the world. Gioia forefronts the conflicts, controversies, and the battles over censorship and suppression spurred by such music, revealing the outsiders and marginalized groups that have played a decisive role in shaping our songs of romance and courtship, and the ways their innovations have led to reprisals and strife. And he describes the surprising paths by which the love song has triumphed over these obstacles, and emerged as the dominant form of musical expression in modern society.

The Eras Tour is a historical exploration of the progress and evolution of art over time. The tour is structured as a chronological journey through the various epochs of art, from the prehistoric era to the contemporary era. It is a comprehensive overview of the cultural, social, and technological innovations that have led to the creation of the unique art forms we enjoy today. The tour also highlights how the various eras interconnect with one another, showcasing how interpretations and theories have changed over time and how they have influenced art as a whole. Visitors on The Eras Tour will learn about prehistoric art and its significance in the evolution of human cognition and communication. The tour will then move on to explore ancient civilizations of Greece and Rome, showcasing how they mastered the skills of art, sculpture, and painting. The Eras Tour also looks at the Renaissance that saw the birth of the individualistic and humanistic ideals that shook up the art world. Finally, the tour will lead to modern art, where artists seek to push the envelope and challenge conventional views of art. The Eras Tour provides an immersive and enlightening experience that uncovers the mysteries and wonders that fuelled the evolution of art throughout human history.

Film Music in the Sound Era: A Research and Information Guide offers a comprehensive bibliography of scholarship on music in sound film (1927–2017). Thematically organized sections cover historical studies, studies of musicians and filmmakers, genre studies, theory and aesthetics, and other key aspects of film music studies. Broad coverage of works from around the globe, paired with robust indexes and thorough cross-referencing, make this research guide an invaluable tool for all scholars and students investigating the intersection of music and film. This guide is published in two volumes: Volume 1: Histories, Theories, and Genres covers overviews, historical surveys, theory and criticism, studies of film genres, and case studies of individual films. Volume 2: People, Cultures, and Contexts covers individual people, social and cultural studies, studies of musical genre, pedagogy, and the industry. A complete index is included in each volume.

What can a cultural history of the heartthrob teach us about women, desire, and social change? From dreams of Prince Charming or dashing military heroes, to the lure of dark strangers and vampire lovers; from rock stars and rebels to soulmates, dependable family types or simply good companions, female fantasies about men tell us as much about the history of women as about masculine icons. When girls were supposed to be shrinking violets, passionate females risked being seen as "unbridled," or dangerously out of control. Change came slowly, and young women remained trapped in double-binds. You may have needed a husband in order to survive, but you had to avoid looking like a gold-digger. Sexual desire could be dangerous: a rash guide to making choices. Show attraction too openly and you might be judged "fast" and undesirable. Education and wage-earning brought independence and a widening of cultural horizons. Young women in the early twentieth century showed a sustained appetite for novel-reading, cinema-going, and the dancehall. They sighed over Rudolph Valentino's screen performances, as tango-dancer, Arab tribesman, or desert lover. Contemporary critics were sniffy about "shop-girl" taste in literature and in men, but as consumers, girls had new clout. In Heartthrobs, social and cultural historian Carole Dyhouse draws upon literature, cinema, and popular romance to show how the changing position of women has shaped their dreams about men, from Lord Byron in the early nineteenth century to boy-bands in the early twenty-first. Reflecting on the history of women as consumers and on the nature of fantasy, escapism, and "fandom," she takes us deep into the world of gender and the imagination. A great deal of feminist literature has shown women as objects of the "male gaze": this book looks at men through the eyes of women.

This reader collects primary documents on the phonograph, cinema, and radio before WWII to show how Americans slowly came to grips with the idea of recorded and mediated sound. Through readings from advertisements, newspaper and magazine articles, popular fiction, correspondence, and sheet music, one gains an understanding of how early-20th-century Americans changed from music makers into consumers.

2022 Association for Recorded Sound Collections Awards for Excellence—Certificate of Merit in the category of Best Historical Research in Recorded Rock and Popular Music Ten songs, from “Bill Bailey, Won’t You Please Come Home” (1902) to “You Made Me Love You” (1913), ignited the development of the classic pop ballad. In this exploration of how the style of the Great American Songbook evolved, Michael G. Garber unveils the complicated, often-hidden origins of these enduring, pioneering works. He riffs on colorful stories that amplify the rising of an American folk art composed by innovators both famous and obscure. Songwriters, and also the publishers, arrangers, and performers, achieved together a collective genius that moved hearts worldwide to song. These classic ballads originated all over the nation—Louisiana, Colorado, Illinois, Michigan—and then the Tin Pan Alley industry, centered in New York, made the tunes unforgettable sensations. From ragtime to bop, cabaret to radio, new styles of music and modes for its dissemination invented and reinvented the intimate, personal American love ballad, creating something both swinging and tender. Rendered by Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, and a host of others, recordings and movies carried these songs across the globe. Using previously underexamined sources, Garber demonstrates how these songs shaped the music industry and the lives of ordinary Americans. Besides covering famous composers like Irving Berlin, this history also introduces such little-known figures as Maybelle Watson, who had to sue to get credit and royalties for creating the central content of the lyric for “My Melancholy Baby.” African American Frank Williams contributed to the seminal “Some of These Days” but was forgotten for decades. The ten ballads explored here permanently transformed American popular song.