{"title":"American Popular Music Series","description":"\u003cp\u003eDive into the heart of American music history with this essential series. From blues to rock 'n' roll, explore the artists, sounds, and stories that shaped a nation's soundtrack. Start your musical journey here.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"talking-machine-west-book-michael-a-amundson-9780806156040","title":"Talking Machine West","description":"Written by Tin Pan Alley songsters in the era before radio, the first popular cowboy and Indian songs circulated as piano sheet music and as cylinder and disc recordings played on wind-up talking machines. Gorgeously illustrated throughout, this book offers the first comprehensive account of popular western recorded music in its earliest form.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50362788610321,"sku":"CIN080615604XG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/080615604X.jpg?v=1767355395"},{"product_id":"nashville-s-songwriting-sweethearts-book-bobbie-malone-9780806164861","title":"Nashville's Songwriting Sweethearts","description":"You might not know the names of Boudleaux and Felice Bryant, but you know their music. Arriving in Nashville in 1950, the songwriting duo became the first full-time independent songwriters in that musical city. Bobbie Malone and Bill Malone recount how Boudleaux and Felice began their partnership as itinerant musicians living in a trailer home.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50468302815505,"sku":"CIN0806164867VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51007546229009,"sku":"NIN9780806164861","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51606044180753,"sku":"CIN0806164867G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0806164867.jpg?v=1767348447"},{"product_id":"woody-guthrie-s-modern-world-blues-book-will-kaufman-9780806157610","title":"Woody Guthrie's Modern World Blues","description":"Mention Woody Guthrie, and people who know the name are likely to think of the \"\"Okie Bard,\"\" dust storms behind him, riding a boxcar or walking a red-dirt road, a battered guitar strapped to his back. But unlock Guthrie from the confines of rural folk and Hollywood mythology, as Will Kaufman does here, and you'll find an abstract painter and sculptor who wrote about atomic energy and Ingrid Bergman and developed advanced theories of dialectical materialism and human engineering - in short, a folk singer who was deeply engaged with the art, ideas, and issues of his time.   Guthrie may have been born in the Oklahoma hills, but his most productive years were spent in the metropolitan centers of Los Angeles and New York. Machines and their physics were among his favorite metaphors, fast cars were his passion, and airplanes and even flying saucers were his frequent subjects. His career-long immersion in radio, recording, and film inspired trenchant observations concerning mass media and communication, and he contributed to modern art as a prolific abstract painter, graphic artist, and sculptor.   This book explores how, through multiple artistic forms, Guthrie thought and felt about the scientific method, atomic power, and war technology, as well as the shifting dynamics of gender and race. Drawing on previously unpublished archival sources, Kaufman brings to the fore what Guthrie's insistently folksy popular image obscures: the essays, visual art, letters, verse, fiction, and voluminous notebook entries that reveal his profoundly modern sensibilities.   Woody Guthrie emerges from these pages as a figure whose immense artistic output reflects the nation's conflicted engagement with modernity. Capturing the breathtaking social and technological changes that took place during his extraordinarily productive career, Woody Guthrie's Modern World Blues offers a unique and much-needed new perspective on a musical icon.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":50554735755537,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50554736509201,"sku":"GOR013995258","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0806157615.jpg?v=1767350462"},{"product_id":"mapping-woody-guthrie-book-will-kaufman-9780806161785","title":"Mapping Woody Guthrie","description":"I ain't got no home, I'm just a-roamin' round,\"\" Woody Guthrie lamented in one of his most popular songs. A native of Oklahoma, he was still in his teens when he moved to Pampa, Texas, where he experienced the dust storms that would play such a crucial role in forming his identity and shaping his work. He later joined thousands of Americans who headed to California to escape the devastation of the Dust Bowl. There he entered the West Coast stronghold of the Popular Front, whose leftward influence on his thinking would continue after his move in 1940 to New York, where the American folk music renaissance began when Guthrie encountered Pete Seeger and Lead Belly.   Guthrie kept moving throughout his life, making friends, soaking up influences, and writing about his experiences. Along the way, he produced more than 3,000 songs, as well as fiction, journalism, poetry, and visual art, that gave voice to the distressed and dispossessed. In this insightful book, Will Kaufman examines the artist's career through a unique perspective: the role of time and place in Guthrie's artistic evolution.   Guthrie disdained boundaries - whether of geography, class, race, or religion. As he once claimed in his inimitable style, \"\"There ain't no such thing as east west north or south.\"\" Nevertheless, places were critical to Guthrie's life, thought, and creativity. He referred to himself as a \"\"compass-pointer man,\"\" and after his sojourn in California, he headed up to the Pacific Northwest, on to New York, and crossed the Atlantic as a merchant marine.   Before his death from Huntington's disease in 1967, Guthrie had one more important trip to take: to the Florida swamplands of Beluthahatchee, in the heart of the South. There he produced some of his most trenchant criticisms of Jim Crow racism - a portion of his work that scholars have tended to overlook.   To map Guthrie's movements across space and time, the author draws not only on the artist's considerable recorded and published output but on a wealth of unpublished sources - including letters, essays, song lyrics, and notebooks - housed in the Woody Guthrie Archives in Tulsa, Oklahoma. This trove of primary documents deepens Kaufman's intriguing portrait of a unique American artist.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":50697284059409,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":50697286025489,"sku":"NGR9780806161785","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52620296388881,"sku":"NLS9780806161785","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0806161787.jpg?v=1767347498"},{"product_id":"mapping-woody-guthrie-book-will-kaufman-9780806189680","title":"Mapping Woody Guthrie","description":"“I ain’t got no home, I’m just a-roamin’ round,” Woody Guthrie lamented in one of his most popular songs. A native of Oklahoma, he was still in his teens when he moved to Pampa, Texas, where he experienced the dust storms that would play such a crucial role in forming his identity and shaping his work. He later joined thousands of Americans who headed to California to escape the devastation of the Dust Bowl. There he entered the West Coast stronghold of the Popular Front, whose leftward influence on his thinking would continue after his move in 1940 to New York, where the American folk music renaissance began when Guthrie encountered Pete Seeger and Lead Belly.   Guthrie kept moving throughout his life, making friends, soaking up influences, and writing about his experiences. Along the way, he produced more than 3,000 songs, as well as fiction, journalism, poetry, and visual art, that gave voice to the distressed and dispossessed. In this insightful book, Will Kaufman examines the artist’s career through a unique perspective: the role of time and place in Guthrie’s artistic evolution.   Guthrie disdained boundaries—whether of geography, class, race, or religion. As he once claimed in his inimitable style, “There ain’t no such thing as east west north or south.” Nevertheless, places were critical to Guthrie’s life, thought, and creativity. He referred to himself as a “compass-pointer man,” and after his sojourn in California, he headed up to the Pacific Northwest, on to New York, and crossed the Atlantic as a merchant marine.   Before his death from Huntington’s disease in 1967, Guthrie had one more important trip to take: to the Florida swamplands of Beluthahatchee, in the heart of the South. There he produced some of his most trenchant criticisms of Jim Crow racism—a portion of his work that scholars have tended to overlook.   To map Guthrie’s movements across space and time, the author draws not only on the artist’s considerable recorded and published output but on a wealth of unpublished sources—including letters, essays, song lyrics, and notebooks—housed in the Woody Guthrie Archives in Tulsa, Oklahoma. This trove of primary documents deepens Kaufman’s intriguing portrait of a unique American artist.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51007630115089,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51007633457425,"sku":"NIN9780806189680","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52127177474321,"sku":"NLS9780806189680","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0806189681.jpg?v=1767352133"},{"product_id":"czech-songs-in-texas-book-frances-barton-9780806168876","title":"Czech Songs in Texas","description":"On any weekend in Texas, Czech polka music enlivens dance halls and drinking establishments as well as outdoor church picnics and festivals. The songs heard at these venues are the living music of an ethnic community created by immigrants who started arriving in Central Texas in the mid-nineteenth century from what is now the Czech Republic. Today, the members of this community speak English but their songs are still sung in Czech.  Czech Songs in Texas includes sixty-one songs, mostly polkas and waltzes. The songs themselves are beloved heirlooms ranging from ceremonial music with origins in Moravian wedding traditions to exuberant polkas celebrating the pleasures of life. For each song, the book provides music notation, and the Czech lyrics are set side-by-side with English translation. Then, an essay explores the song’s European roots, its American evolution, and the meaning of its lyrics and lists notable performances and recordings. In addition to the songs and essays, Frances Barton provides a chapter on the role of music in the Texas Czech ethnic community, and John K. Novok surveys Czech folk and popular music in its European home.   The book both documents a specific musical inheritance and serves as a handbook for learning about a culture through its songs. As folklorist and polka historian James P. Leary writes in his foreword, “Barton and Novak take us on a poetic, historical, and ethnographic excursion deep into a community’s expressive heartland. Their Czech Songs in Texas just might be the finest extant annotated anthology of any American immigrant\/ethnic group's regional song tradition.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51007647154449,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51007650496785,"sku":"NIN9780806168876","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0806168870.jpg?v=1767351997"},{"product_id":"nashville-city-blues-book-james-talley-9780806191751","title":"Nashville City Blues","description":"For many diehard music fans and critics, Oklahoma-born James Talley ranks among the finest of American singer-songwriters. In this engaging, down-to-earth memoir, Talley recalls the highs and lows of his nearly fifty-year career in country music.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51007663014161,"sku":"NIN9780806191751","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51398187483409,"sku":"CIN0806191759VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52411231240465,"sku":"GOR014518399","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52677654151441,"sku":"NLS9780806191751","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0806191759.jpg?v=1767348946"},{"product_id":"traveler-book-bobbie-malone-9780806190624","title":"Traveler","description":"For five decades, as a singer, musician, songwriter, and producer, Tim O’Brien has ceaselessly explored the vast American musical landscape. While Appalachia and Ireland eventually became facets of the defining myth surrounding him and his music, he has digested a broad array of roots styles, reshaping them to his own purposes. Award-winning biographer Bobbie Malone and premier country music historian Bill C. Malone have teamed again, this time to chronicle O’Brien’s career and trace the ascent of Hot Rize and its broadening and enrichment of musical traditions.   At the beginning of that career, O’Brien moved from his native West Virginia to the Rocky Mountain West. In just a few years, he became the lead singer, mandolin and fiddle player, and principal songwriter of beloved 1980s bluegrass band Hot Rize. Seeking to move beyond bluegrass, he next went to Nashville. O’Brien’s success in navigating the shoals of America’s vast reservoir of folk musical expressions took him into the realm of what is now called Americana.   The core of Tim O’Brien’s virtuosity is his abiding and energetic pursuit of the next musical adventure. As a traveler, he has ranged widely in choosing the next instrument, song, style, fellow musicians, or venue. Written with O’Brien’s full cooperation and the input of family, friends, colleagues, and critics, Traveler provides the first complete, behind-the-scenes picture of a thoroughly American self-made musical genius—the boy who grew up listening to country artists at the WWVA Wheeling Jamboree and ended up charting a new course through American music.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51007689523473,"sku":"NIN9780806190624","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":53461326954769,"sku":"CIN0806190620VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0806190620.jpg?v=1767355599"},{"product_id":"rising-son-volume-10-book-hank-reineke-9780806192871","title":"Rising Son Volume 10","description":"One of America’s most beloved folk singers, Arlo Guthrie was at the pinnacle of his fame in the late 1960s and early 1970s with his best-selling album Alice’s Restaurant and his iconic appearance at Woodstock. Yet Guthrie’s career as a musician, humorist, and storyteller extends far beyond his years in the celebrity spotlight. Rising Son: The Life and Music of Arlo Guthrie, written by award-winning author Hank Reineke, recounts the veteran musician’s second act, from the early 1980s to the present. Featuring extensive reflections and commentary from Guthrie himself, this book is the only authorized biography of the renowned folk singer.   As a modern-day troubadour drawn to experimentation, Arlo Guthrie has also carried forward the traditions inherited from his legendary father, Woody Guthrie. Rising Son examines Arlo’s role in preserving Woody’s legacy of social protest and examines his collaborations with his father’s friend Pete Seeger. The book also highlights the contributions of Guthrie’s mother, Marjorie Mazia Guthrie, a dancer with the Martha Graham Company and the Guthrie family’s first archivist.   Drawing on substantial research, the author traces Guthrie’s efforts to free himself from corporate oversight of his music and art. In 1983, Guthrie created his own label, Rising Son Records, to reissue titles from his back catalog and create new music. Guthrie speaks frankly about record company blues and music industry tangles, offering lively accounts of the people he met and the places he performed. The narrative takes several detours, with Guthrie sharing memories written in the spirt of his signature shaggy-dog storytelling style.  Rising Son also illuminates the spiritual journey of a restless pilgrim: a man devoted to exploring and synthesizing the most benevolent principles of charity and kindness as practiced by different religious traditions. “What I’ve tried to do,” Guthrie has reflected, “is to use live music to change people’s lives.” This definitive biography invites new appreciation for Arlo Guthrie’s remarkable career as a musician, storyteller, and humanitarian activist.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51007789400337,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51007792120081,"sku":"NIN9780806192871","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51602477416721,"sku":"CIN0806192879G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0806192879.jpg?v=1767354907"},{"product_id":"sing-me-back-home-book-bill-c-malone-9780806155869","title":"Sing Me Back Home","description":"For over fifty years, Bill C. Malone has researched and written about the history of country music. Today he is celebrated as the foremost authority on this distinctly American genre. This new collection brings together his significant article-length work from a variety of sources, including essays, book chapters, and record liner notes. Sing Me Back Home distills a lifetime of thinking about country and southern roots music.   Malone offers the heartfelt story of his own working-class upbringing in rural East Texas, recounting how in 1939 his family's first radio, a battery-powered Philco, introduced him to hillbilly music and how, years later, he went on to become a scholar in the field before the field formally existed. Drawing on a hundred years of southern roots music history, Malone assesses the contributions of artists such as William S. Hays, Albert Brumley, Joe Thompson, Jimmie Rodgers, Johnny Gimble, and Elvis Presley. He also explores the intricate relationships between black and white music styles, gospel and secular traditions, and pop, folk, and country music.   Author of many books, Malone is best known for his pioneering volume County Music, U.S.A., published in 1968. It ranks as the first comprehensive history of American country music and remains a standard reference. This compilation of Malone's shorter - and more personal - essays is the perfect complement to his earlier writing and a compelling introduction to the life's work of America's most respected country music historian.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51421714940177,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51421715595537,"sku":"CIN0806155868G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0806155868.jpg?v=1767348052"},{"product_id":"woody-guthrie-s-modern-world-blues-volume-3-book-will-kaufman-9780806194875","title":"Woody Guthrie's Modern World Blues Volume 3","description":"Mention Woody Guthrie, and people who know the name are likely to think of the “Okie Bard,” dust storms behind him, riding a boxcar or walking a red-dirt road, a battered guitar strapped to his back. But unlock Guthrie from the confines of rural folk and Hollywood mythology, as Will Kaufman does here, and you’ll find an abstract painter and sculptor who wrote about atomic energy and Ingrid Bergman and developed advanced theories of dialectical materialism and human engineering—in short, a folk singer who was deeply engaged with the art, ideas, and issues of his time.   Guthrie may have been born in the Oklahoma hills, but his most productive years were spent in the metropolitan centers of Los Angeles and New York. Machines and their physics were among his favorite metaphors, fast cars were his passion, and airplanes and even flying saucers were his frequent subjects. His career-long immersion in radio, recording, and film inspired trenchant observations concerning mass media and communication, and he contributed to modern art as a prolific abstract painter, graphic artist, and sculptor.   This book explores how, through multiple artistic forms, Guthrie thought and felt about the scientific method, atomic power, and war technology, as well as the shifting dynamics of gender and race. Drawing on previously unpublished archival sources, Kaufman brings to the fore what Guthrie’s insistently folksy popular image obscures: the essays, visual art, letters, verse, fiction, and voluminous notebook entries that reveal his profoundly modern sensibilities.   Woody Guthrie emerges from these pages as a figure whose immense artistic output reflects the nation’s conflicted engagement with modernity. Capturing the breathtaking social and technological changes that took place during his extraordinarily productive career, Woody Guthrie’s Modern World Blues offers a unique and much-needed new perspective on a musical icon.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52468379844881,"sku":"CIN0806194871VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52659953500433,"sku":"NLS9780806194875","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780806194875.jpg?v=1767349607"},{"product_id":"taking-a-chance-on-love-book-george-harwood-phillips-9780806164359","title":"Taking a Chance on Love","description":"When his friend George Gershwin persuaded Vladimir Dukelsky to change his name to Vernon Duke, what the music world already knew became apparent to the public at large - the man had two musical personas - one as a composer, the other as a tunesmith. One wrote highbrow music, the other lowbrow. Yet the two sides complemented each other. Neither could function without the other.   Born and classically trained in imperial Russia, Vladimir Dukelsky (1903-1969) fled the Bolshevik Revolution with his family, discovered American popular music in cosmopolitan Constantinople, and pursued his budding interest to New York before his passion for classical music drew him to Paris, where the impresario Serge Diaghilev hired him to compose a ballet for the Ballets Russes.  Taking a Chance on Love immerses us in Duke's dizzying globe-hopping and genre-swapping, as financial concerns and musical passions drive him from composing symphonies to writing songs, from brilliant successes to Broadway flops, and from performing with classical performers to writing books and articles. Throughout, as he crisscrosses the landscape of American music, collaborating with lyricists such as Howard Dietz, Ira Gershwin, and Sammy Cohn, the incomparable Vernon Duke emerges clearly from these pages: sometimes charming, sometimes infuriating, always entertaining.   Although Vernon Duke has entered the canon of American standards with such songs as \"\"Taking a Chance on Love,\"\" \"\"I Can't Get Started,\"\" and \"\"April in Paris,\"\" little is known about the composer with two personas. Taking a Chance on Love brings the intriguing double life of Dukelsky\/Duke back into the spotlight, restoring a chapter to the history of the Great American Songbook and to the story of twentieth-century music.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52586313253137,"sku":"NLS9780806164359","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780806164359.jpg?v=1767356472"},{"product_id":"nashville-city-blues-book-james-talley-9780806191775","title":"Nashville City Blues","description":"For many diehard music fans and critics, Oklahoma-born James Talley ranks among the finest of American singer-songwriters. In this engaging, down-to-earth memoir, Talley recalls the highs and lows of his nearly fifty-year career in country music.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52664904941841,"sku":"NLS9780806191775","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":53027511992593,"sku":"CIN0806191775G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780806191775.jpg?v=1767353506"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/american-popular-music-series-book-series.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}