Books about Minstrelsy from Amazon.com

In American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MP3, Second Edition, Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman examine popular music in the United States from its beginnings into the 21st century, offering a comprehensive look at the music, the cultural history of the times, and the connections between them. Using well-chosen examples, insightful commentaries, and an engaging writing style, this text traces the development of jazz, blues, country, rock, Motown, hip-hop, and other popular styles, highlighting the contributions of diverse groups to the creation of distinctly American styles. It combines an in-depth treatment of the music itself--including discussions of stylistic elements and analyses of musical examples--with solid coverage of the music's attendant historical, social, and cultural circumstances. The authors incorporate strong pedagogy including numerous boxed inserts on significant individuals, recordings, and intriguing topics; coverage of early American popular music; and a rich illustration program. Detailed listening charts explain the most important elements of recordings discussed at length in the text. The charts are complemented by two in-text audio CDs and--new to this edition--an iMix published at iTunes, which makes most of the songs immediately available to students and instructors.
Features of the Second Edition
* Integrates full color throughout
* Provides more coverage of women artists, with new material on women in rock 'n' roll in Chapter 8 and a box on Queen Latifah in Chapter 14
* Reorganizes the discussion of post-1970s music: disco is now included with mainstream 70s pop, while hip-hop is treated in two chapters (12 and 14) in order to emphasize its significance and diversity
* Adds new material on the recent alternative country music explosion
* Includes new developments in music technology in the thoroughly revised concluding chapter
* Offers revised and more vivid visual elements, including more than 100 new photos (most in full color) and an illustrated timeline
* Provides redesigned listening guides, enhanced by an iMix published at iTunes (accessible at www.oup.com/us/popmusic)
* Supplemented by a Companion Website at www.oup.com/us/popmusic (containing both student and instructor resources) and an Instructor's Manual and a Computerized Test Bank on CD
* FREE with the purchase of this book: a 6-month subscription to Grove Music Online (www.grovemusic.com)--a $180 value
Remarkably accessible, American Popular Music, Second Edition, is ideal for courses in American Popular Music, the History of Popular Music, Popular Music in American Culture, and the History of Rock 'n' Roll. Its welcoming style and warm tone will captivate readers, encouraging them to become more critically aware listeners of popular music..
Price: $56.20 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Joel Walker Sweeney was, in essence, the Elvis Presley of the 1840s. A professional banjo player, Sweeney introduced mainstream America to a music (and musical instrument) which had its roots in the transplanted black culture of the southern slave. Sweeney, an Irish-American born midway between Richmond and Lynchburg, Virginia, sampled African American music at a young age. He then added more traditional southern sounds to the music he heard, in essence creating a new musical form. The only avenue available to a professional banjo player was that of traveling minstrelsy shows and it was this route which Sweeney used to bring his music to the attention of the public. Beginning with the banjo's introduction to America and Great Britain, the book provides an overview of early banjo music. The volume then discusses the evolution of American minstrelsy (i.e., black face) and the opportunities it provided for artists such as Sweeney. Correcting previous fallacies and misconceptions (such as Sweeney's supposed development of the five-string banjo), the work discusses Sweeney's roots, his music and his contribution to the physical development of the instrument. An appendix contains a performance chronology. The work is also indexed..
Price: $31.50 [Notify me when price goes down.]

For over two centuries, America has celebrated the very black culture it attempts to control and repress, and nowhere is this phenomenon more apparent than in the strange practice of blackface performance. Born of extreme racial and class conflicts, the blackface minstrel show sometimes usefully intensified them. Based on the appropriation of black dialect, music, and dance, minstrelsy at once applauded and lampooned black culture, ironically contributing to a "blackening of America." Drawing on recent research in cultural studies and social history, Eric Lott examines the role of the blackface minstrel show in the political struggles of the years leading up to the Civil War. Reading minstrel music, lyrics, jokes, burlesque skits, and illustrations in tandem with working-class racial ideologies and the sex/gender system, Love and Theft argues that blackface minstrelsy both embodied and disrupted the racial tendencies of its largely white, male, working-class audiences. Underwritten by envy as well as repulsion, sympathetic identification as well as fear--a dialectic of "love and theft"--the minstrel show continually transgressed the color line even as it enabled the formation of a self-consciously white working class. Lott exposes minstrelsy as a signifier for multiple breaches: the rift between high and low cultures, the commodification of the dispossessed by the empowered, the attraction mixed with guilt of whites caught in the act of cultural thievery..
Price: $34.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The history of American popular music provides crucial insights into the establishment of a distinctively American culture. Authors Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman examine popular music in the United States from its beginnings to the end of the 20th century, furthering our understanding of the relationship between music, culture, and social identity. Using well-chosen examples, insightful, up-to-date commentaries, and an engaging writing style, American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MTV poses such questions as: Why do people make and listen to music? What do they want from it? What does it give them? Numerous listening examples (corresponding to the 2-CD package that accompanies the text) prompt readers to listen closely to popular music and to learn about its history and the people and institutions that have produced it.
American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MTV integrates detailed discussions of particular popular songs and recordings with a thoughtful consideration of the broader historical and cultural context. Other distinctive features include a rich illustration program, strong pedagogy including numerous boxed inserts, inclusion of earlier American popular music, and well-organized listening charts with lyrics. Themes such as the multicultural roots of popular styles, the development of musical technology, and the operations and strategies of the music industry unify the text. This book is an ideal text for courses in American Studies, Cultural Studies, Popular Culture, and Music. Its accessible style and warm tone will captivate students and other readers, encouraging them to become more critically aware listeners of popular music.
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Price: $23.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Cedric J. Robinson offers a new understanding of race in America through his analysis of theater and film of the early twentieth century. He argues that economic, political, and cultural forces present in the eras of silent film and the early "talkies" firmly entrenched limited representations of African Americans. Robinson's analysis marks a new way of approaching the intellectual, political, and media racism present in the beginnings of American narrative cinema..
Price: $22.50 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The Last “Darky” establishes Bert Williams, the comedian of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, as central to the development of a global black modernism centered in Harlem’s Renaissance. Before integrating Broadway in 1910 via a controversial stint with the Ziegfeld Follies, Williams was already an international icon. Yet his name has faded into near obscurity, his extraordinary accomplishments forgotten largely because he performed in blackface. Louis Chude-Sokei contends that Williams’s blackface was not a display of internalized racism nor a submission to the expectations of the moment. It was an appropriation and exploration of the contradictory and potentially liberating power of racial stereotypes.

Chude-Sokei makes the crucial argument that Williams’s minstrelsy negotiated the place of black immigrants in the cultural hotbed of New York City and was replicated throughout the African diaspora, from the Caribbean to Africa itself. Williams was born in the Bahamas. When performing the “darky,” he was actually masquerading as an African American. This black-on-black minstrelsy thus challenged emergent racial constructions equating “black” with African American and marginalizing the many diasporic blacks in New York. It also dramatized the practice of passing for African American common among non-American blacks in an African American–dominated Harlem. Exploring the thought of figures such as Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, and Claude McKay, Chude-Sokei situates black-on-black minstrelsy at the center of burgeoning modernist discourses of assimilation, separatism, race militancy, carnival, and internationalism. While these discourses were engaged with the question of representing the “Negro” in the context of white racism, through black-on-black minstrelsy they were also deployed against the growing international influence of African American culture and politics in the twentieth century..
Price: $18.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

As the blackface minstrel show evolved from its beginnings in the American Revolution to its peak during the late 1800s, its frenetic dances, low-brow humor, and lively music provided more than mere entertainment. Indeed, these imitations and parodies shaped society's perceptions of African Americans-and of women-as well as made their mark on national identity, policymaking decisions, and other entertainment forms such as vaudeville, burlesque, the revue, and, eventually, film, radio, and television. Gathered here are rare primary materials-including firsthand accounts of minstrel shows, minstrelsy guides, jokes, sketches, and sheet music-and the best of contemporary scholarship on minstrelsy..
Price: $23.35 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The songs, dances, jokes, parodies, spoofs, and skits of blackface groups such as the Virginia Minstrels and Buckley's Serenaders became wildly popular in antebellum America. Behind the Burnt Cork Mask not only explores the racist practices of these entertainers but considers their performances as troubled representations of ethnicity, class, gender, and culture in the nineteenth century. William J. Mahar's unprecedented archival study of playbills, newspapers, sketches, monologues, and music engages new sources previously not considered in twentieth-century scholarship. More than any other study of its kind, Behind the Burnt Cork Mask investigates the relationships between blackface comedy and other Western genres and traditions; between the music of minstrel shows and its European sources; and between "popular" and "elite" constructions of culture. By locating minstrel performances within their complex sites of production, Mahar offers a significant reassessment of the historiography of the field. Behind the Burnt Cork Mask promises to redefine the study of blackface minstrelsy, charting new directions for future inquiries by scholars in American studies, popular culture, and musicology..
Price: $21.48 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Blackface minstrelsy is associated particularly with popular culture in the United States and Britain, though it was also known in other Anglophone countries such as South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, and was even adopted in colonial and postcolonial contexts such as Egypt and West Africa. Despite the continual two-way flow of performers, troupes and companies across the Atlantic, there is little in Britain to match the scholarship of blackface studies in the States. This book concentrates on the distinctively British trajectory of minstrelsy.The historical study and cultural analysis of minstrelsy is important because of the significant role it played as a form of song, music and theatrical entertainment in the development of popular culture in Britain since the nineteenth century. Minstrelsy had a marked impact on popular music, dance and other aspects of popular culture, both in Britain and the United States. Its impact in the United States also fed into significant song and music genres that were then assimilated in Britain, from ragtime and jazz onwards, but prior to these influences, minstrelsy in Britain developed many distinct features and was adapted to operate within various conventions, themes and traditions in British popular culture. Pickering therefore provides a convincing counter-argument to the assumption among writers in the United States that blackface was exclusively American and its British counterpart purely imitative.It can be seen that minstrelsy went considerably beyond its entertainment value, whether this is considered theatrically, musically, comedically or choreographically. Jokes at the expense of black people and demeaning racial stereotypes of blacks were integral to minstrel entertainment, and along with other aspects of the form created a cultural low-Other that offered confirmation of white racial ascendancy and imperial dominion around the world. The book will attend closely to how this influence on colonialism and imperialism operated and proved ideologically so effective. But British minstrelsy cannot be reduced to its racist and imperialist connections. Enormously important as those connections are, Pickering demonstrates the complexity of the subject by insisting that the minstrel show and minstrel performers be understood also in terms of their own theatrical dynamics, talent and appeal..
Price: $89.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Titled after "Tom-Mania," the name a British newspaper gave to the international sensation attending the 1852 novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, this study looks anew at the novel and the songs, plays, sketches, translations, and imitations it inspired. In particular, Sarah Meer shows how the theatrical mode of blackface minstrelsy, the slavery question, and America's emerging cultural identity affected how Uncle Tom's Cabin was read, discussed, dramatized, merchandized, and politicized here and abroad. Until Uncle Tom's Cabin, Meer says, little truly common ground existed on which the United States and Britain could debate slavery. In addition to cutting across class, gender, and national lines, the novel tapped into a huge, preexisting transatlantic appetite for blackface performance. Even as it condemned slavery, however, Uncle Tom's Cabin was ambiguous about racial equality, and it portrayed blacks in demeaning ways. This gave copycat novels and minstrel stagings leeway to stray from Harriet Beecher Stowe's intentions. Minstrel-show versions in particular had a huge influence on later incarnations of the Uncle Tom story, converting the character into "a comic, or worse, a proslavery stooge" - a scorned figure in our popular memory. To look at how and why Uncle Tom's Cabin "both advocated emancipation and licensed a plethora of racist imitators," Meer places it in the context of contemporary minstrel sketches, melodramas, songs, jokes, newspaper commentaries, slave narratives, travel writing, proslavery novels, and even Uncle Tom merchandise like china figurines and wall-paper. She goes on to discuss Harriet Beecher Stowe's travelogue Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands and her second novel, Dred. The publication of each unleashed the political energies of Uncle Tom's Cabin and its revisions yet again..
Price: $19.75 [Notify me when price goes down.]