Oxford University Press, USA, Date: 2003-11-27. Paperback. Good. 2003. Oxford University Press, USA ISBN 0195171772 9780195171778 [US]

ISBN10: 0195171772, ISBN13: 9780195171778, [publisher: Oxford University Press 2004-01-08] Softcover
[Wallingford, United Kingdom] [Publication Year: 2004]

ISBN10: 0195171772, ISBN13: 9780195171778, [publisher: Oxford University Press, USA, New York] Softcover Paperback. Have records, compact discs, and other sound reproduction equipment merely provided American listeners with pleasant diversions, or have more important historical and cultural influences flowed through them? Do recording machines simply capture what's already out there, or is the music somehow transformed in the dual process of documentation and dissemination? How would our lives be different without these machines? Such are the questions that arise when we stop taking for granted the phenomenon of recorded music and the phonograph itself.Now comes an in-depth cultural history of the phonograph in the United States from 1890 to 1945. William Howland Kenney offers a full account of what he calls "the 78 r.p.m. era"--from the formative early decades in which the giants of the record industry reigned supreme in the absence of radio, to the postwar proliferation of independent labels, disk jockeys, and changes in popular taste and opinion. By examining the interplay between recorded music and the key social, political, and economic forces in America during the phonograph's rise and fall as the dominant medium of popular recorded sound, he addresses such vital issues as the place of multiculturalism in the phonograph's history, the roles of women as record-player listeners and performers, the belated commercial legitimacy of ...
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