Songbooks: The Literature of American Popular Music (Duke University Press) offers a critical guide to books on American popular music from William Billings's 1770 New-England Psalm-Singer to Jay-Z's 2010 memoir Decoded. Drawing on his background editing the Village Voice music section, coediting the Journal of Popular Music Studies, and organizing the Pop Conference, Weisbard connects American music writing from memoirs, biographies, and song compilations to blues novels, magazine essays, and academic studies. The authors of these works are as diverse as the music itself: women, people of color, queer writers, self-educated scholars, poets, musicians, and elites discarding their social norms. Whether analyzing books on Louis Armstrong, the Beatles, and Madonna; the novels of Theodore Dreiser, Gayl Jones, and Jennifer Egan; or varying takes on blackface minstrelsy, Weisbard charts an alternative history of American music as told through its writing. As Weisbard demonstrates, the most enduring work pursues questions that linger across time period and genre—cultural studies in the form of notes on the fly, on sounds that never cease to change meaning.
Read the (long) table of contents and (short) introduction here: https://www.dukeupress.edu/Assets/PubMaterials/978-1-4780-1408-9_601.pdf
Bios:
Eric Weisbard is associate professor of American Studies at the University of Alabama and co-editor of Journal of Popular Music Studies. His books include the new Songbooks: The Literature of American Popular Music (Duke U Press, 2021); Top 40 Democracy: The Rival Mainstreams of American Music (U of Chicago Press, 2014), which won the Woody Guthrie Prize for best music book from IASPM-US; and Use Your Illusion I and II (2007) in the Bloomsbury 33 and 1/3 series. He organized the Pop Conference from its inception in 2002 through 2018, editing three books of conference writing: This Is Pop, Listen Again, and Pop When the World Falls Apart. At the museum Experience Music Project, he co-curated the exhibit “Disco: A Decade of Saturday Nights.” And before that, he was a rock critic: music editor of the Village Voice, record reviews editor for Spin, editor of the Spin Alternative Record Guide, and a writer for Spin, the Voice, and other alt-weeklies, plus the New York Times once in a while and, strangest of all, GQ. For that writer, see the material collected on Rock’s Backpages.
Ann Powers is NPR Music's critic and correspondent and the Nashville correspondent for WXPN’s World Café. She writes for NPR's music news blog, The Record, and she can be heard on NPR's newsmagazines and music programs. She is the author of Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black and White, Body and Soul in American Music (2017), which was selected as one of the best books of 2017 by the Wall Street Journal, No Depression, NPR, and Buzzfeed. Powers also co-wrote Tori Amos: Piece By Piece, with Amos, which was published in 2005. In 1999, Powers’s book Weird Like Us: My Bohemian America was published and selected a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times. She was the editor, with Evelyn McDonnell, of the 1995 book Rock She Wrote: Women Write About Rock, Rap, and Pop – considered a classic among music-writing anthologies -- and the editor of Best Music Writing 2010. In 2017 she co-founded NPR’s Turning the Tables, an ongoing project to recenter the popular music canon to be more inclusive of marginalized, underestimated and forgotten voices. The first season of the series won a Gracie Award from the Alliance for Women in Media. She lives in Nashville with her husband, Eric Weisbard, and their daughter Bebe, and is now at work both an anthology of her writings and a critical biography of Joni Mitchell.
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