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This book explores the role played by the devil figure within an evolving blues tradition. It pays particular attention to the lyrics of recorded blues songs, but it also seeks to tell a story about blues-invested southern lives. The first four chapters investigate, in sequence, the origins and meaning of the phrase "the devil's music" within black southern communities; the devil as a figure who empowers and haunts migrant black blueswomen in the urban North of the Jazz Age; the devil as a symbol of white maleficence and an icon for black southern bluesmen entrapped in the "hell" of the Jim Crow system; and the devil as shape-shifting troublemaker within blues songs lamenting failed romantic relationships. The fifth chapter is an extended meditation on the figure of Robert Johnson. It offers, in sequence, a new interpretation of Johnson's life and music under the sign of his mentor, Ike Zimmerman; a reading of Walter Hill's Crossroads (1986) that aligns the film with the racial anxieties of modern blues culture; and a narrative history detailing the way in which the townspeople of Clarksdale, Mississippi transformed a pair of unimportant side streets into "the crossroads" over a sixty-year period, rebranding their town as the devil's territory and Johnson's chosen haunt, a mecca for blues tourism in the contemporary Delta.

The role of folk music, broadly defined, during the trying years of the Great Depression in the United States, 1929–40, with a particular focus on the role of left-wing political groups and individuals. The government promoted a labor and cultural renaissance through the “alphabet stew” of federal programs, employing Charles Seeger, John and Alan Lomax, and numerous others in collecting folk music. Performers such as Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Pete Seeger, and many others connected vernacular music with commercial outlets such as concerts, record companies, and radio shows. Members of the Communist Party, in particular, used folk music to promote labor unions, civil rights, and a peace movement. Folk music remained a vital part of popular culture throughout the Depression years into World War II. There is a particular focus on the role that folk music played in the clash between capitalism and the emerging grassroots proletarian movements.

Following the creation of the United States, profound disagreements remained over how to secure the survival of the republic and unite its diverse population. In this pathbreaking account, Billy Coleman uses the history of American music to illuminate the relationship between elite power and the people from the early national period to the Civil War. Based on deep archival research in sources such as music periodicals, songbooks, and manuals for musical instruction, Coleman argues that a particular ideal of musical power provided conservative elites with an attractive road map for producing the harmonious union they desired. He reassesses the logic behind the decision to compose popular patriotic anthems like "The Star-Spangled Banner," reconsiders the purpose of early American campaign songs, and brings to life a host of often forgotten but fascinating musical organizations and individuals. The result is not only a striking interpretation of music in American political life but also a fresh understanding of conflicts that continue to animate American democracy.

How do you love and not like the same thing at the same time? This was the riddle that met Mississippi writer B. Brian Foster when he returned to his home state to learn about Black culture and found himself hearing about the blues. One moment, Black Mississippians would say they knew and appreciated the blues. The next, they would say they didn’t like it. For five years, Foster listened and asked: “How?” “Why not?” “Will it ever change?” This is the story of the answers to his questions. In this illuminating work, Foster takes us where not many blues writers and scholars have gone: into the homes, memories, speculative visions, and lifeworlds of Black folks in contemporary Mississippi to hear what they have to say about the blues and all that has come about since their forebears first sang them. In so doing, Foster urges us to think differently about race, place, and community development and models a different way of hearing the sounds of Black life, a method that he calls listening for the backbeat.

Since the nineteenth century, the distinct tones of kika kila, the Hawaiian steel guitar, have defined the island sound. Here historian and steel guitarist John W. Troutman offers the instrument's definitive history, from its discovery by a young Hawaiian royalist named Joseph Kekuku to its revolutionary influence on American and world music. During the early twentieth century, Hawaiian musicians traveled the globe, from tent shows in the Mississippi Delta, where they shaped the new sounds of country and the blues, to regal theaters and vaudeville stages in New York, Berlin, Kolkata, and beyond. In the process, Hawaiian guitarists recast the role of the guitar in modern life. But as Troutman explains, by the 1970s the instrument's embrace and adoption overseas also worked to challenge its cultural legitimacy in the eyes of a new generation of Hawaiian musicians. As a consequence, the indigenous instrument nearly disappeared in its homeland. Using rich musical and historical sources, including interviews with musicians and their descendants, Troutman provides the complete story of how this Native Hawaiian instrument transformed not only American music but the sounds of modern music throughout the world.

Contrary to popular belief, the roots of American country music do not lie solely on southern farms or in mountain hollows. Rather, much of this music recorded before World War II emerged from the bustling cities and towns of the Piedmont South. No group contributed more to the commercialization of early country music than southern factory workers. This book explores the origins and development of this music in the Piedmont's mill villages. It offers vivid portraits of a colorful cast of Piedmont millhand musicians, including Fiddlin' John Carson, Charlie Poole, Dave McCarn, and the Dixon Brothers, and considers the impact that urban living, industrial work, and mass culture had on their lives and music. Drawing on a broad range of sources, including rare 78-rpm recordings and unpublished interviews, the author reveals how the country music recorded between 1922 and 1942 was just as modern as the jazz music of the same era. The book celebrates the Piedmont millhand fiddlers, guitarists, and banjo pickers who combined the collective memories of the rural countryside with the upheavals of urban-industrial life to create a distinctive American music that spoke to the changing realities of the twentieth-century South.

This book is a love letter to the artists, scenes, and sounds defining North Carolina’s extraordinary contributions to American popular music. David Menconi spent three decades immersed in the state’s music, where traditions run deep but the energy expands in countless directions. Menconi shows how working-class roots and rebellion tie North Carolina’s Piedmont blues, jazz, and bluegrass to beach music, rock, hip-hop, and more. From mill towns and mountain coves to college-town clubs and the stage of American Idol, Blind Boy Fuller and Doc Watson to Nina Simone and Superchunk, Step It Up and Go celebrates homegrown music just as essential to the state as barbecue and basketball. Spanning a century of history from the dawn of recorded music to the present, and with sidebars and photos that help reveal the many-splendored glory of North Carolina’s sonic landscape, this is a must-read for every music lover.

Whose Blues is about the way in which we define, interpret, and make sense of the blues in a postmodern moment more than a century removed from the music's origins in the Deep South. If "Blues is black music," as some contemporary claimants insist, what should we make of the International Blues Challenge held annually in Memphis, with its all-comers mix of nationalities and ethnicities? If there's "No black. No white. Just the blues," as another familiar meme would have us believe, why do some Chicago blues people hear that proclamation not as a call to transracial fellowship, but as an aggressive attempt at cultural appropriation and the erasure of traumatic racial histories sounded by the music? In Whose Blues, author Adam Gussow, an award-winning blues scholar and blues harmonica player, surveys the contemporary blues scene and the long and tangled history out of which it emerged, keeping his eye out for the paradoxes--the "bad facts"-- that enable revisionist scholarship and unsettle conventional understandings. Using blues literature as a cultural anchor, Gussow also offers a plain-language introduction to the tradition's major writers and themes, including W. C. Handy, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and the Black Arts Movement.