Johnny Cash, Loretta Lynn, and Merle Haggard, leading authorities offer full and colorful portraits of the personal lives and careers of nineteen artists--with special emphasis on their styles, repertoires, and significance. Introducing this cavalcade of singers and musicians is a chapter on early pioneers like Fiddlin' John Carson and Carl T. Sprague, while the concluding chapter, 'A Shower of Stars, ' takes a look at popular entertainers of the past fifty years.  (less)

redoubtable Oxford Companion to English Literature to the fascinating Oxford Companion to the Mind, these browsable volumes have long been acclaimed as goldmines of information, capturing in thousands of entries the essence of a particular field of interest.brNow comes the newest addition to the Companion series, The Oxford Companion to Popular Music, encompassing in one alphabetic sequence all that is notable within this vast subject, everything from jazz, reggae, blues, and calypso, to Broadway musicals, rock and roll, and country western. There are hundreds of biographical entries on such diverse figures as John Philip Sousa and Ma Rainey, Fred Astaire and Joan Baez, Josef Lanner (the Father of the Viennese Waltz) and Mistinguett, Otis Redding and Prince. The great Broadway writers, performers, and musicals (including plot outlines) are all here: Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern; South Pacific, West Side Story, Show Boat, Porgy and Bess; Mary Martin, Ethel Merman, Fanny Brice, Robert Preston. It covers rock groups from The Beatles, to Led Zeppelin, to Talking Heads; jazz figures such as Fats Waller, Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Bix Beiderbecke, and Louis Armstrong; folk singers such as Bob Dylan, Judy Collins, Joni Mitchell, and Arlo Guthrie; and country western figures such as Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, Tammy Wynette, Merle Haggard, and Johnny Cash. Not the least important feature is the many informative essays on particular genres of popular music, from operetta and waltz, to vaudeville and blues, to brass band and gospel. In the article Popular Song (USA), for instance, Gammond traces our popular musical heritage from Yankee-Doodle, to Jump, Jim Crow (a popu?é™™™™™šÿ¾Û€  (less)

she becomes a famous country music singer in the 1970s.  (less)

blues, jazz, and country to folk, big band, and rock and roll * The most recorded songs of all time * A guide to understanding the ""standard"" lingo * The evolution of popular music from Tin Pan Alley to contemporary musical theater, and more."  (less)

music at an early age and then disappeared from public view. Often their music was published before marriage or, in the case of nuns, before their final vows. Francesca Campana. was a composer, a keyboard player, and one of Rome's finest singers. Her collection, Arie a una, due, e tre voci, published in 1629 when she was a young woman, includes twelve pieces in a variety of styles. Three works from that collection included here reflect the diversity of her output. Barbara Strozzi, a well-known virtuoso singer, published eight books of music that include about one hundred pieces, primarily for voice. As a daughter of the poet Giulio Strozzi, she had access to Venetian intellectuals and artists, enabling her to study with the composer Francesco Cavalli and to pursue an active performing career. Antonia Bembo, another singer and student of Francesco Cavalli, wrote music that combined stylistic traits of her native Venice and her adopted country, France, with texts in three languages. The three early works from her first book of vocal compositions are included here: an Italian aria, a Latin motet, and a French air. The French virtuoso harpsichordist Elizabeth-Claude Jacquet de la Guerre began her career as a child prodigy. She composed works for voice, chamber groups, and solo instruments. La Guerre served in the court of Louis XIV and was praised for the sophisticated level of her musical thinking. German princess Sophie Elisabeth, Duchess ofBrunswick and Luneburg, also led a privileged life. Although a very religious woman, she wrote music for and participated in court festivities. In addition, she was a prodigious writer of religious poetry. The first woman in English history to publish music under her own name was Mary Harvey, the Lady Dering. Her three extant songs, two of which are included here, are settings of poetry by her husband, Edward Dering, a Parliamentary politician. This volume also includes an unusual example of music notation from Diacinta Fedele's collection of Italian villanelle, published in 1628. The folk poetry is accompanied by alfabeto tablature to be strummed on the Spanish guitar. Many women composers in the 17th century were nuns. Isabella Leonarda was recognized as a singer and composer in the Ursuline convent, which she entered in 1636, and where music was an important aspect of the celebrated festivals. Leonarda's published works, of which nearly two hundred survive, span a period of sixty years; most of her compositions appeared after she was fifty years old. Maria Xaveria Peruchona, another Italian nun who joined an Ursuline convent, published only one collection of music when she was about twenty-three years old. She is more typical of women composers of the time. C  (less)

Ole Opry. When he died aged 29, he was country music's biggest star."  (less)

record companies nurtured distinctly American music: jazz, blues, gospel, country, rhythm and blues, and rock 'n' roll. These companies, run on shoestring budgets, were on the fringe of mainstream culture. Louis Armstrong, Hank Williams, James Brown, Roy Orbison, and other musicians brought regional American styles to a world audience and won enduring fame for themselves. But often forgotten are the colorful owners of small record labels who first recorded these musicians and helped to popularize their sound before the dominant, more bureaucratic competitors knew what had happened.PRick Kennedy and Randy McNutt bring alive the glory days of the independent labels and their colorful founders, many of whom were interviewed for this book. Sometimes these men were visionaries. Ross Russell, a record-store owner in Los Angeles in the mid-1940s, risked his last dollar to create Dial Records because he was convinced that an obscure jazz saxophonist named Charlie Parker was creating a music revolution with his bebop jazz. Sam Phillips in Memphis had recorded white country and black R&B singers in the early 1950s, so he knew exactly what he was looking for when a shy, teenaged Elvis Presley walked into his storefront studio in 1954 and asked to make a record.POther owners had little appreciation for the music but were street-smart entrepreneurs. The white-owned race labels of the 1920s, for example, recognized a black consumer market thatthe recording business had previously ignored. Operating out of such cities as Houston, Memphis, Cincinnati, and New Orleans, these savvy business people promoted regional sounds that were to reverberate around the world.PBut influencing the development of music wasn't what these recor@$úáG®{ÿ¾Û€  (less)