| Vaudeville Melodies: Popular Musicians and Mass Entertainment in American Culture, 1870-1929 Contributor(s): Gebhardt, Nicholas (Author) |
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ISBN: 022644855X ISBN-13: 9780226448558 Publisher: University of Chicago Press OUR PRICE: $98.01 Product Type: Hardcover - Other Formats Published: March 2017 |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Music | History & Criticism - General - History | United States - 19th Century - History | United States - 20th Century |
| Dewey: 792.709 |
| LCCN: 2016034775 |
| Physical Information: 0.7" H x 6.1" W x 9.1" (0.90 lbs) 208 pages |
| Themes: - Chronological Period - 19th Century - Chronological Period - 20th Century |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: If you enjoy popular music and culture today, you have vaudeville to thank. From the 1870s until the 1920s, vaudeville was the dominant context for popular entertainment in the United States, laying the groundwork for the music industry we know today. In Vaudeville Melodies, Nicholas Gebhardt introduces us to the performers, managers, and audiences who turned disjointed variety show acts into a phenomenally successful business. First introduced in the late nineteenth century, by 1915 vaudeville was being performed across the globe, incorporating thousands of performers from every branch of show business. Its astronomical success relied on a huge network of theatres, each part of a circuit and administered from centralized booking offices. Gebhardt shows us how vaudeville transformed relationships among performers, managers, and audiences, and argues that these changes affected popular music culture in ways we are still seeing today. Drawing on firsthand accounts, Gebhardt explores the practices by which vaudeville performers came to understand what it meant to entertain an audience, the conditions in which they worked, the institutions they relied upon, and the values they imagined were essential to their success. |
Contributor Bio(s): Gebhardt, Nicholas: - Nicholas Gebhardt is professor of jazz and popular music studies at Birmingham City University, UK. He is the coeditor of The Cultural Politics of Jazz Collectives and the author of Going For Jazz: Musical Practices and American Ideology, the latter also published by the University of Chicago Press. |