When the Swedish concert singer Jenny Lind toured the U.S. in 1850, she became the prototype for the modern pop star. Meanwhile, her manager, P.T. Barnum, became the prototype for another figure of enduring significance: the pop culture impresario. Starting with Lind's fabled U.S. tour and winding all the way into the twenty-first century, Live Music in America surveys the ongoing impact and changing conditions of live music performance in the U.S. It covers a range of historic performances, from the Fisk Jubilee Singers expanding the sphere of African American music in the 1870s, to Benny Goodman bringing swing to Carnegie Hall in 1938, to 1952's Moondog Coronation Ball in Cleveland - arguably the first rock and roll concert - to Beyoncé's boundary-shattering performance at the 2018 Coachella festival. More than that, the book details the roles played by performers, audiences, media commentators, and a variety of live music producers (promoters, agents, sound and stage technicians) in shaping what live music means and how it has evolved. Live Music in America connects what occurs behind the scenes to what takes place on stage to highlight the ways in which live music is very deliberately produced and does not just spontaneously materialize. Along the way, author Steve Waksman uses previously unstudied archival materials to shed new light on the origins of jazz, the emergence of rock 'n' roll, and the rise of the modern music festival.
Preface and Acknowledgments Introduction: Toward a History of Liveness 1. Selling the Nightingale: Jenny Lind, P.T. Barnum, and the Management of the American Crowd 2. Staging the Spiritual: The Fisk Jubilee Singers and the Postbellum Public Sphere 3. Economies of Performance: Tony Pastor, Ernest Hogan, and the Emergence of Vaudeville 4. Remaking Liveness: The Social Geography of Early Jazz 5. Culture High and Low: Reinventing Concert Music 6. The Perfect Package: Rock 'n' Roll Concerts in the 1950s 7. Crowds, Chaos, and Community: Music Festivals from Newport to New Orleans 8. The Politics of Scale: Arenas, Stadiums, and the Industrialization of Liveness 9. Staging Hip-Hop: Race, Rap, and the Remapping of Musical Performance Conclusion: A Homecoming Index
"Steve Waksman is Elsie Irwin Sweeney Professor of Music at Smith College, Massachusetts. His publications include the books Instruments of Desire: The Electric Guitar and the Shaping of Musical Experience (1999), and This Ain't the Summer of Love: Conflict and Crossover in Heavy Metal and Punk (2009), the latter of which was awarded the 2010 Woody Guthrie Award for best scholarly book on popular music by the U.S. chapter of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM-US). With Reebee Garofalo, he is the co-author of the sixth edition of the rock history textbook, Rockin' Out: Popular Music in the U.S.A. (2014), and with Andy Bennett, he co-edited the SAGE Handbook of Popular Music (2015). His essays have appeared in such collections as the Cambridge Companion to the Guitar, Listen Again: A Momentary History of Pop, Metal Rules the Globe, and The Relentless Pursuit of Tone: Timbre and Popular Music. On WRSI radio, The River in Western Massachusetts, he can be heard as the ""Doctor of Rock,"" offering bits of popular music history in support of Black History Month and Women's History Month."
Reviews for Live Music in America: A History from Jenny Lind to Beyoncé
Documenting American live music history, Steve Waksman tours archives from Jenny Lind to Beyonce, vaudeville circuits to open-air festivals. Our theaters and arenas, he shows, became the other place (alongside recordings) for new cultural forms to seek social ratification. This is the Springsteen at the Meadowlands of music books: a sweeping testimonial. * Eric Weisbard, author of Top 40 Democracy and Songbooks: The Literature of American Popular Music * I've spent countless hours of my music-critic life absorbing music in the company of strangers-in tiny clubs and ornate theaters, on muddy fields and in sports arenas. Until now, no book has existed that fully documents the complexity and impact of music's live side. From the antebellum craze over touring Swedish opera star Jenny Lind to Beyonce's Movement for Black Lives-powered 2018 Homecoming celebration, Steve Waksman illuminates the ways live music has not merely reflected but shaped the American body politic. This is the kind of book you won't want to put down unless you're running out to a show. * Ann Powers, author of Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black and White, Body and Soul in American Music *
- Winner of Finalist, 2023 PROSE Award.
- Winner of Shortlisted, 2023 Ralph J Gleason Music Book Award Finalist, 2023 PROSE Award.
- Winner of Winner, Music in American Culture Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Music of the United States, American Musicological Society Finalist, 2023 PROSE Award.
