A well-researched and provocative look at the long-term, uneasy connections between race and music.
A study of three paradigm shifts in American pop and classical music.
Broyles, a professor of musicology at Florida State and former music critic for the Baltimore Sun, surmises that the 1840s, 1920s, and 1950s were significant decades, thanks in large part to the intersection of race, technology, and new ways of thinking about and performing music. The 1840s marked the rise of minstrelsy, a product of American racial tensions as well as “the first popular genre that was distinctly American.” That decade also saw the arrival of the first serious classical symphonies in a country whose public “did not consider music art.” In the 1920s, the explosion of phonograph recordings and commercial radio sparked the growth of jazz, blues, and country music. In the 1950s, the commingling of genres and the rise of car radios meant American teens were drawn to an ever widening crop of R&B and rock artists. In Broyles’ estimation, the decade’s key transformational rock figure wasn’t Elvis Presley but Johnnie Ray, a white crooner who cut his teeth in Black Detroit supper clubs and had a knack for country and R&B styles. In the classical realm, avant-garde works by Pierre Boulez and John Cage set the stage for decades of experiments to come. Though this is a scholarly work, it’s highly readable, with plenty of surprising detours. For example, the polka was an enormously influential genre in the 1840s, even if one nabob wished to find its inventor and “scrape him to death with [an] oyster shell.” Broyles is skilled at exploring the ways that, from the minstrelsy days on, racial lines often crossed despite labels’ and chart-makers’ attempts to separate them. Every decade likely could support the author’s argument, but these three make for engaging reading.
A well-researched and provocative look at the long-term, uneasy connections between race and music.Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2024
ISBN: 9780393634204
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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