Live Music in America: A History from Jenny Lind to Beyonce

Jenny Lind toured the U.S. in 1850, becoming the prototype for the modern pop star, and her manager, P.T. Barnum, became the prototype for the pop culture impresario. Live Music in America surveys the ongoing impact and changing conditions of live music performance in the U.S., covering a range of historic performances and the roles played by performers, audiences, media commentators, and live music producers in shaping what live music means and how it has evolved.

Format: Hardback
Length: 656 pages
Publication date: 14 November 2022
Publisher: Oxford University Press Inc

When the Swedish concert singer Jenny Lind toured the United States 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 United States. 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 the 1952 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.

Weight: 1164g
Dimension: 162 x 244 x 46 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780197570531