Features interviews of Sam Wooding, Benny Waters, Joe Tarto, Bud Freeman, Jimmy McPartland, Freddie Moore, and Jabbo Smith, and Bix Beiderbecke's letters to his family.

Here in their own words are Frederick Douglass, George Jackson, Chief Joseph, Martin Luther King Jr., Plough Jogger, Sacco and Vanzetti, Patti Smith, Bruce Springsteen, Mark Twain, and Malcolm X, to name just a few of the hundreds of voices that appear in Voices of a People's History of the United States, edited by Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove. Paralleling the twenty-four chapters of Zinn's A People's History of the United States, Voices of a People’s History is the long-awaited companion volume to the national bestseller. For Voices, Zinn and Arnove have selected testimonies to living history—speeches, letters, poems, songs—left by the people who make history happen but who usually are left out of history books—women, workers, nonwhites. Zinn has written short introductions to the texts, which range in length from letters or poems of less than a page to entire speeches and essays that run several pages. Voices of a People’s History is a symphony of our nation’s original voices, rich in ideas and actions, the embodiment of the power of civil disobedience and dissent wherein lies our nation’s true spirit of defiance and resilience.

Introduction. On Radio, Red Music, and Revolution -- Sound, Technology, and Culture in French Indochina -- Battle of the Airwaves during the First Indochina War -- Songs of the Golden Age in the Democratic Republic -- National Radio in the Reform Era -- Studio Production in Contemporary Vietnam -- Conclusion. Nostalgia for the Past, Hope for the Future.

This book expands the discourse on the Harlem Renaissance into more recent crucial areas for literary scholars, college instructors, graduate students, upper-level undergraduates, and Harlem Renaissance aficionados. These selected essays, authored by mostly new critics in Harlem Renaissance studies, address critical discourse in race, cultural studies, feminist studies, identity politics, queer theory, and rhetoric and pedagogy. While some canonical writers are included, such as Langston Hughes and Alain Locke, others such as Dorothy West, Jessie Fauset, and Wallace Thurman have equal footing. Illustrations from several books and journals help demonstrate the vibrancy of this era. Australia Tarver is Associate Professor of English at Texas Christian University. Paula C. Barnes is an Associate Professor of English at Hampton University.

In the late 1920s, Reverend A. W. Nix (1880–1949), an African American Baptist minister born in Texas, made fifty-four commercial recordings of his sermons on phonographs in Chicago. On these recordings, Nix presented vocal traditions and styles long associated with the southern, rural Black church as he preached about self-help, racial uplift, thrift, and Christian values. As southerners like Nix fled into cities in the North to escape the rampant racism in the South, they contested whether or not African American vocal styles of singing and preaching that had emerged during the slavery era were appropriate for uplifting the race. Specific vocal characteristics, like those on Nix’s recordings, were linked to the image of the “Old Negro” by many African American leaders who favored adopting Europeanized vocal characteristics and musical repertoires into African American churches in order to uplift the modern “New Negro” citizen. Through interviews with family members, musical analyses of the sounds on Nix’s recordings, and examination of historical documents and relevant scholarship, Terri Brinegar argues that the development of the phonograph in the 1920s afforded preachers like Nix the opportunity to present traditional Black vocal styles of the southern Black church as modern Black voices. These vocal styles also influenced musical styles. The “moaning voice” used by Nix and other ministers was a direct connection to the “blues moan” employed by many blues singers including Blind Willie, Blind Lemon, and Ma Rainey. Both Reverend A. W. Nix and his brother, W. M. Nix, were an influence on the “Father of Gospel Music,” Thomas A. Dorsey. The success of Nix’s recorded sermons demonstrates the enduring values African Americans placed on traditional vocal practices.

During the Jazz Age and Great Depression, radio broadcasters did not conjure their listening public with a throw of a switch; the public had a hand in its own making. The Listener's Voice describes how a diverse array of Americans—boxing fans, radio amateurs, down-and-out laborers, small-town housewives, black government clerks, and Mexican farmers—participated in the formation of American radio, its genres, and its operations. Before the advent of sophisticated marketing research, radio producers largely relied on listeners' phone calls, telegrams, and letters to understand their audiences. Mining this rich archive, historian Elena Razlogova meticulously recreates the world of fans who undermined centralized broadcasting at each creative turn in radio history. Radio outlaws, from the earliest squatter stations and radio tube bootleggers to postwar "payola-hungry" rhythm and blues DJs, provided a crucial source of innovation for the medium. Engineers bent patent regulations. Network writers negotiated with devotees. Program managers invited high school students to spin records. Taken together, these and other practices embodied a participatory ethic that listeners articulated when they confronted national corporate networks and the formulaic ratings system that developed. Using radio as a lens to examine a moral economy that Americans have imagined for their nation, The Listener's Voice demonstrates that tenets of cooperation and reciprocity embedded in today's free software, open access, and filesharing activities apply to earlier instances of cultural production in American history, especially at times when new media have emerged.

Looks at African Americans in the radio industry and at stations focusing on the African American market.

The first opportunity to read--and hear--interviews with and about great American composers and musicians of the early twentieth century.

Opera in the Jazz Age: Cultural Politics in 1920s Britain explores the interaction between opera and popular culture at a moment when there was a growing imperative to categorize art forms as "highbrow," "middlebrow," or "lowbrow." In this provocative and timely study, Alexandra Wilson considers how the opera debate of the 1920s continues to shape the ways in which we discuss the art form, and draws connections between the battle of the brows and present-day discussions about elitism.

F. Scott Fitzgerald named it, Louis Armstrong launched it, Paul Whiteman and Fletcher Henderson orchestrated it, and now Arnold Shaw chronicles this fabulous era in The Jazz Age. Spicing his account with lively anecdotes and inside stories, he describes the astonishing outpouring of significant musical innovations that emerged during the "Roaring Twenties"--including blues, jazz, band music, torch ballads, operettas and musicals--and sets them against the background of the Prohibition world of the Flapper. The jazz age set the sound of popular music into the 1950s. It included the flowering of improvised music by such artists as Armstrong, Bix Benderbecke, and Duke Ellington; the maturation and Americanization of the Broadway musical theatre; the explosion of the arts celebrated in the Harlem Renaissance; the rise of the classical blues singers starting with Mamie Smith and climaxing with Bessie Smith; the evolution of ragtime into stride piano; the spread of "speakeasy" night life and the emergence of the Cabaret singers; the musical creativity of a whole range of composers and songwriters including Kern, Gershwin, Berlin, Youmans, Rodgers and Hart, and Cole Porter, whom Shaw calls Song Laureate of the Roaring 20s. Here is a lively account of all these significant developments and personalities. A bibliography, detailed discography, and two informative lists--songs of the 20s in Variety's Golden 100 and films featuring singers and songwriters of the era--round out the book.