Books in the Refiguring American Music series

The life story of the outstanding jazz vocalist Sathima Bea Benjamin sheds light on South African jazz history, women in jazz, and American music as a transnational art form.

Celeste Day Moore traces the popularity of African American music in postwar France to outline how it came to signify both state power and liberation for Francophone audiences throughout the world.

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.

Anthony Reed takes the recorded collaborations between African American poets and musicians such as Amiri Baraka, Jayne Cortez, Cecil Taylor, and Charles Mingus to trace the overlaps between experimental music and poetry and the ways in which intellectuals, poets, and musicians define black sound as a radical aesthetic practice.

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.

Examining the work of Aretha Franklin, Nina Simone, Solange Knowles, Flying Lotus, and others, Emily J. Lordi proposes a new understanding of soul, showing how it came to signify a belief in black resilience enacted through musical practices.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Roll With It is a firsthand account of the contradictory lives of New Orleans brass-band musicians. They are celebrated as cultural icons within the music scene; outside it, they are treated as faceless black males-subject to poverty, racial marginalization, and urban violence.

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.

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

Contending that the music is not a knowable entity but a spectrum of dynamic practices that elude definition, Alexandra T. Vazquez models a new way of writing about music and the meanings assigned to it.

In Tropical Renditions Christine Bacareza Balance examines how the performance and reception of post-World War II Filipino and Filipino American popular music provide crucial tools for composing Filipino identity, publics, and politics as well as challenge dominant racial stereotypes.

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.

Using a theoretical framework built on Lacan and Foucault, Licia Fiol-Matta traces the careers of four iconic female Puerto Rican singers to explore how their voices, performance style, physical appearance, and subject matter of their songs challenged social and cultural norms.

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

An analysis of the emergence, reception, and legacy of fusion, experimental music that emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s as musicians combined jazz, rock, and funk in new ways.

Geoffrey Baker traces the trajectory of the Havana hip hop scene from the late 1980s to the present and analyzes its partial eclipse by reggaeton.

An ethnography exploring the aesthetics and politics of South Asian American (desi) hip hop artists.

A study of the creation of jazz, swing, and R & B music within the multicultural, multiethnic terrain of Los Angeles

Tracing the rise of a large and influential network of country fan clubs, this title highlights the significant promotional responsibilities assumed by club organizers until the early 1970s, when many of their tasks were taken over by professional publicists.

Cultural and literary study of the construction of racial and artistic identity in soul cover albums of three popular artists--Aretha Franklin, Al Green, and Phoebe Snow.

A cultural history describing how folklore studies and the music industry helped to create a "musical color line" in the South, associating certain genres with particular racial and ethnic identities.

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.