Books in the Refiguring American Music series

In Songbooks veteran music critic and popular music scholar Eric Weisbard offers a critical guide to American popular music writing, from William Billings's 1770 New-England-Psalm-Singer to Jay-Z's 2010 memoir Decoded.

Maureen Mahon documents the major contributions African American women vocalists such as Big Mama Thornton, Betty Davis, Tina Turner, and Merry Clayton have made to rock and roll throughout its history.

Alex E. Chavez explores the contemporary politics of Mexican migrant cultural expression manifest in huapango arribeno, a musical genre from north-central Mexico that helps Mexicans build communities on both sides of the US border and give voice to the transnational migrant experience.

Examining singers Marian Anderson, Billie Holiday, and Jimmy Scott as well as vocal synthesis technology, Nina Sun Eidsheim traces the ways in which the voice and its qualities are socially produced and how listeners assign a series of racialized and gendered set of assumptions to a singing voice.

Allison McCracken charts the rise and fall of crooners between 1925 and 1934, showing how the backlash against crooners' perceived sexual and gender deviance created stylistically masculine norms for white male pop singers that continue to exist today.

Oliver Wang chronicles the history of the San Francisco Bay Area Filipino American mobile DJ scene of the late 1970s through the mid-1990s. He shows how DJ crews helped unify the Bay Area's Filipino American community, gave its members social status and brotherhood, and drew huge crowds.

The autobiography of the pianist, composer, and bandleader Randy Weston, one of the worlds most influential jazz musicians and a remarkable storyteller.

Focusing on the hemispheric circulation of South American musical cultures, Kirstie A. Dorr examines the spatiality of sound and the ways in which the sonic is bound to perceptions and constructions of geographic space, showing how people can use music and sound to challenge and transform dominant conceptions of place.

In Negro Soy Yo Marc D. Perry explores how Cuban raperos (black-identified rappers) in Havana craft notions of black Cuban identity and racial citizenship in the face of continuing racism and marginalization during an era in which the Cuban economy, society, and nationhood have been under constant flux.

Shows how musical acts and performances generate their own aesthetic and political force, creating, however fleetingly, a shared sense of the world among otherwise diverse listeners. This book argues that communities grounded in the act and experience of listening can give rise to new political ideas and expression.

Asserts that the labor issues in the music industry can stimulate insights about the political-economic and imaginative challenges currently facing working people of all kinds

Shana L. Redmond traces Paul Robeson's continuing cultural resonances in popular culture and politics, showing how he remains a vital force and presence for all those he inspired.

This fourth collection of poetry from the literary and cultural critic Fred Moten is an elegy to his mother and an inquiry into language, music, performance, improvisation, and the black radical tradition.

Drawing on his ethnographic research at powwow grounds and in recording studios, Christopher A. Scales examines the ways that powwow drum groups have utilized recording technology in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the unique aesthetic principles of recorded powwow music, and the relationships between drum groups and the Native music labels and recording studios.