UI Press | Edward P. Comentale | Sweet Air: Modernism, Regionalism, and American Popular Song

Sweet Air

Modernism, Regionalism, and American Popular Song

Finding meaning in the clash of modern life and local, rural musical culture

Sweet Air rewrites the history of early twentieth-century pop music in modernist terms. Tracking the evolution of popular regional genres such as blues, country, folk, and rockabilly in relation to the growth of industry and consumer culture, Edward P. Comentale shows how this music became a vital means of exploring the new and often overwhelming feelings brought on by modern life. Comentale examines these rural genres as they translated the traumas of local experience--the racial violence of the Delta, the mass exodus from the South, the Dust Bowl of the Texas panhandle--into sonic form. Considering the accessibility of these popular music forms, he asserts the value of music as a source of progressive cultural investment, linking poor, rural performers and audiences to an increasingly vast network of commerce, transportation, and technology.

"Sweet Air is brilliant in its way of tracing the commercial genres of popular music from their purported regionalism to a deterritorialization made possible by modern technology. An original and engaging argument about regionalism and modernity."--Barbara Ching, author of Wrong's What I Do Best: Hard Country Music and Contemporary Culture

"With the potential to be enormously influential, Sweet Air addresses American popular song as a whole while offering a compelling reinterpretation of the rise of pop music as an expansion of vernacular modernism. This book will be warmly received by a wide variety of scholars in American studies, southern studies, musicology, and popular music."--Diane Pecknold, author of The Selling Sound: The Rise of the Country Music Industry

Edward P. Comentale is an associate professor of English at Indiana University and the author of Modernism, Cultural Production, and the British Avant-Garde.

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