Showing titles in History & Criticism

This collection of uplifting, informative stories behind your favorite hymns will warm your heart and revitalize your worship. Each entry comes with the hymn's full text and musical score. Perfect for devotions, sermon demonstrations, bulletin inserts, and introducing congregational hymns, each hymn story includes information about the author, composer, the tune's name, and scriptural basis.

This Is Our Music, declared saxophonist Ornette Coleman's 1960 album title. But whose music was it? At various times during the 1950s and 1960s, musicians, critics, fans, politicians, and entrepreneurs claimed jazz as a national art form, an Afrocentric race music, an extension of modernist innovation in other genres, a music of mass consciousness, and the preserve of a cultural elite. This original and provocative book explores who makes decisions about the value of a cultural form and on what basis.

Howard Bloom - called “the greatest press agent that rock and roll has ever known” by Derek Sutton, the former manager of Styx, Ten Years After, and Jethro Tull - is a science nerd who knew nothing about popular music. But he founded the biggest PR firm in the music industry and helped build or sustain the careers of our biggest rock legends, including Michael Jackson, Prince, Bob Marley, Bette Midler, Billy Joel, Billy Idol, Chaka Khan, and 100 more. What was he after? He was on a hunt for the gods inside of you and me.

The Allman Brothers Band’s Brothers and Sisters was not only the band’s best-selling album at over seven million copies sold, it was also a powerfully influential release, both musically and culturally, one whose influence continues to be profoundly felt.

Sampling - incorporating found sound and manipulating it into another form entirely - has done more than any musical movement in the 20th century to maintain a continuum of popular music as a living document and, in the process, has become one of the most successful (and commercial) strains of postmodern art. Bring That Beat Back traces the development of this transformative pop-cultural practice from its origins in the turntable-manning, record-spinning hip-hop DJs of 1970s New York through 40 years of musical innovation and reinvention.  

Reflective and expansive, Mirror in the Sky situates Stevie Nicks as one of the finest songwriters of the twentieth century. This biography from distinguished music historian Simon Morrison examines Nicks as a singer and songwriter before and beyond her career with Fleetwood Mac, from the Arizona landscape of her childhood to the strobe-lit Night of 1000 Stevies celebrations.

Jazz is a relatively new art form. It's melodic and harmonic language has evolved throughout the past 100 years from one great innovator passing on his discoveries to the next as a kind of artistic baton passing. The piano has always lead the harmonic language of jazz, so in order to truly understand the evolution of this music, one must understand the lineage of the music's greatest piano players. In this book, Richie Beirach provides his incisive and at times inside knowledge of these 10 great piano players who defined the language of jazz.

When it comes to Mariah Carey, star power is never in doubt. She has sold hundreds of millions of albums and cut more chart-topping hits than any other solo artist—ever. And she has that extraordinary five-octave vocal range. But there is more to her legacy than eye-popping numbers. Why Mariah Carey Matters examines the creative evolution and complicated biography of a true diva, making the case that, despite her celebrity, Carey’s musicianship and influence are insufficiently appreciated.

A tell-all biography of the epic in-fighting of the Grateful Dead in the years following band leader Jerry Garcia's death in 1995 The Grateful Dead rose to greatness under the inspired leadership of guitarist Jerry Garcia, but the band very nearly died along with him after his sudden death in...

In this behind-the-scenes look at the making of Fleetwood Mac's epic, platinum-selling double album, Tusk, producers and engineers Ken Caillat and Hernan Rojas tell their stories of spending a year with the band in their new million-dollar studio trying to follow up Rumours, the biggest rock album of the time. Following their massive success, the band continued its infamous soap opera when its musical leader and guitarist, Lindsey Buckingham, threatened to quit if he didn't get things his way....

A captivating oral history of the iconic music venue the Stone Pony and of the rise, fall, and rebirth of Asbury Park, New Jersey—featuring interviews with Bruce Springsteen, Steve Van Zandt, Southside Johnny, members of the E Street Band and Asbury Jukes, the Ramones, the Jonas Brothers, Jack...

It’s October 1977, and the Rolling Stones are in a Paris recording studio. They’re under siege. Keith Richards’s legal troubles after his arrest for heroin possession threaten the band’s future, and the broad consensus among rock aficionados is that the band will never again reach the heights of Exile on Main Street.

“Paul is dead.” It was the late 1960's, the Beatles hadn’t toured since 1966, and some truly bizarre indications began appearing, pointing to the unthinkable: Paul McCartney had been killed in a car accident and replaced by a look-alike. The Walrus Was Paul unearths every single clue from one of rock ’n’ roll’s most enduring puzzles and takes you on a magical mystery tour of baffling, yet fascinating, hints for solving this mystery.

No period in the history of rock music offered such an abrupt shift in prevailing tastes as the 1990s. While just a short while before, radio and MTV were clamoring for hair metal bands, suddenly alt-rockers such as Jane’s Addiction, Nine Inch Nails, Faith No More, Primus, Smashing Pumpkins, and of course, Nirvana, brought a sea change not just in what the most popular bands sounded like, but also in fashion, politics, and seemingly all aspects of pop culture.

Brought to you by Penguin. Wonderfully engaging, expansive and ambitious, Sound Tracks tells the history of our relationship with music in sixty detective stories, each focusing on the discovery of a musical instrument - or its fragments - in archaeological digs around the world. Taking us from...

In Black and Blur - the first volume in his sublime and compelling trilogy Consent Not to Be a Single Being - Fred Moten engages in a capacious consideration of the place and force of Blackness in African diaspora arts, politics, and life. In these interrelated essays, Moten attends to entanglement, the blurring of borders, and other practices that trouble notions of self-determination and sovereignty within political and aesthetic realms.  

Fleetwood Mac’s iconic album Rumours is more popular and acclaimed now than ever and attracts listeners across generations—Don’t Stop celebrates the album’s unlikely creation, surprising longevity, and enduring cultural impact. On January 1, 1975, struggling young singer-songwriter...

Kurt Cobain. GG Allin. Wendy O. Williams. Duane Allman. Travis Barker. Jimmy Page. Janis Joplin. Ozzy Osbourne. Chrissie Hynde. Dee Dee Ramone. Chris Cornell. Marc Bolan. Tommy Lee. Amy Winehouse. Jimi Hendrix. What do these artists all have in common? They’re rowdy rock stars whose over-the-top lifestyles spun out of control, landing them deep in Rock & Roll Nightmare territory. Rock & Roll Nightmares: True Stories, Volume 1 is a meticulously-researched, up-to-date, entertaining, and shocking book that rounds up the tragic tales from the 1960s to the present day.

R.E.M.'s debut album, released in 1983, was so far removed from the prevailing trends of American popular music that it still sounds miraculous and out of time today. J. Niimi tells the story of the album's genesis—with fascinating input from Don Dixon and Mitch Easter. He also investigates Michael Stipe's hypnotic, mysterious lyrics, and makes the case for Murmur as a work of Southern Gothic art.

Factory Records has become the stuff of legend. The histories of the label have been told from many perspectives, from visual catalogues and memoirs to exhibitions. Yet no in-depth history has ever been told from the perspectives of the women who were integral to Factory's cultural significance. Told entirely in their voices, I Thought I Heard You Speak is an oral history that reveals the true cultural reach of the label and its staying power in the twenty-first century.