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Not Even Past

Sky Pilot, How High Can You Fly

by Nathan Stone  I started going to camp in 1968. We were still just children, but we already had Vietnam to think about. The evening news was a body count. At camp, we didn’t see the news, but we listened to Eric Burdon and the Animals’  Sky Pilot while doing our beadwork with Father Pekarski. […]

Turbo-folk: Pop Music in the Crucible of Balkan History

Kicking off our new series on digital history projects, Dr. Vladislav Beronja, a professor in the UT Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies, tells us about a class project to build a website on Balkan pop music. By Vladislav Beronja Turbo-folk—a mixture of pounding electronic beats and trilled vocals—can be heard blasting from cafés, taxis, […]

Three-year-olds on the world stage

By Nathan Stone When I was very small, I lived six blocks from the Santa Fe Opera.  Our home was in the Tesuque Village, which is really just a country road that runs alongside the Tesuque Creek just north of Santa Fe, with twenty tiny cul-de-sacs stretching up into the alluvial crannies of the southern […]

Demystifying “Cool:” A Brief History

by Kate Grover  When I was nineteen, I was bestowed with some of the highest praise a person can receive. It happened at a rehearsal for The Vagina Monologues (go figure…) when some cast members I hadn’t met approached me for the first time: “You’re Kate, right? Cool Kid Kate?” “What?” “Cool Kid Kate. There’s […]

Getz/Gilberto Fifty Years Later: A Retrospective

Album cover of Getz/Gilberto by Stan Getz and Joao Gilberto featuring Carlos Jobim

Getz/Gilberto was not North America’s first encounter with bossa nova, the lyrical fusion of samba and cool jazz emanating from the smoky nightclubs, recording studios, and performance halls of Rio de Janeiro in the mid-1950s. Yet the eight-track LP was by far the most successful.

Great Books on Early Twentieth-Century Popular Music

Recent years have seen a real flowering of scholarship about the popular music of the early twentieth century.  Here are a few of my favorites—and a little something extra.

 

Sounds of the Past #2

“In the Baggage Coach Ahead” is a great example of the sentimental ballads that became popular in the United States during the 1890s. The classic ballads were maudlin tearjerkers, narrative tales of lost love or dead mothers designed to pull at the heartstrings.

Sounds of the Past

Interested in popular music and the music industry in the early twentieth century? The Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project at the University of California at Santa Barbara has built perhaps the most useful archive on the planet for you. 

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