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Live Music in America provides the first dedicated survey of music history in the United States as seen through the lens of live performance, offering readers a wide-ranging social and cultural history of American music that touches on race, class, gender, and debates over cultural value.
About the author
Steve Waksman is Elsie Irwin Sweeney Professor of Music at Smith College, Massachusetts. His publications include the books Instruments of Desire: The Electric Guitar and the Shaping of Musical Experience (1999), and This Ain't the Summer of Love: Conflict and Crossover in Heavy Metal and Punk (2009), the latter of which was awarded the 2010 Woody Guthrie Award for best scholarly book on popular music by the U.S. chapter of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM-US). With Reebee Garofalo, he is the co-author of the sixth edition of the rock history textbook, Rockin' Out: Popular Music in the U.S.A. (2014), and with Andy Bennett, he co-edited the SAGE Handbook of Popular Music (2015). His essays have appeared in such collections as the Cambridge Companion to the Guitar, Listen Again: A Momentary History of Pop, Metal Rules the Globe, and The Relentless Pursuit of Tone: Timbre and Popular Music. On WRSI radio, The River in Western
Massachusetts, he can be heard as the "Doctor of Rock," offering bits of popular music history in support of Black History Month and Women's History Month.
Summary
Live Music in America provides the first dedicated survey of music history in the United States as seen through the lens of live performance, offering readers a wide-ranging social and cultural history of American music that touches on race, class, gender, and debates over cultural value.
Additional text
Live Music in America: A History from Jenny Lind to Beyoncé, Waksman clarifies many of the significant developments and acknowledges many well-known and lesser-known individuals who enabled the live-music industry to progress, and like the recording industry, to transform US culture. His compelling history would be an excellent addition to any high school, public, or university library-and will appeal to anyone interested in live music in the US, as well as the history of US music, music technology, and the music industry. Waksman has done an admirable job of taking a complicated topic and making it comprehensible.
