You can’t have Women’s History Month without musician-genius Clara Rockmore (left in the photo). The appropriately named Rockmore was a master of the theremin, that haunting/creepy sound-maker that entered our consciousness through 1950s science fiction films, […]
Category: music
Anatomy of a Peggy Seeger classic
Excerpted from Peggy Seeger: A Life of Music, Love, and Politics, by Jean Freedman Peggy had written some mildly feminist songs, such as “Darling Annie,” about an equal partnership between […]
Release Party: Chinatown Opera Theater in North America, by Nancy Yunhwa Rao
The Chinatown opera house provided Chinese immigrants with an essential source of entertainment during the pre–World War II era. But its stories of loyalty, obligation, passion, and duty also attracted […]
200 Years of Illinois: Cheap Trick is big in Japan
February 7, 2017, marks the approximate, not to say the exact, date of a landmark in Illinois rock and roll. On this day (more or less) in 1979, the Rockford band […]
Sa-lute: Another award for “Funk the Erotic”
Awards season continues with one of our already-lauded books receiving another prize. L. H. Stallings‘s Funk the Erotic: Transaesthetics and Black Sexual Cultures has won the Alan Bray Memorial Book Award, […]
Release Party: May Irwin, by Sharon Ammen
May Irwin reigned as America’s queen of comedy and song from the 1880s through the 1920s. A genuine pop culture phenomenon, Irwin conquered the legitimate stage, composed song lyrics, and […]
Cole Porter on tour, sort of
Master songsmith Cole Porter is no longer around to play command performances or record duets with pop stars. But the music lives on. Yesterday Susan Forscher Weiss, an editor of […]
Sa-lute! Congratulations to music scholar Robert M. Marovich
Awards season in academic publishing is once again kind to the Press. A City Called Heaven: Chicago and the Birth of Gospel Music by Robert M. Marovich recently won a […]
Sa-lute! Congratulations to music scholar Stephen Wade
Laurie C. Matheson, Director of the Press, on the latest UIP award winner. Stephen Wade, author of The Beautiful Music All Around Us: Field Recordings and the American Experience, has […]
Sa-lute! Congratulations to bluegrass scholar Gary B. Reid
We are pleased to announce that The Music of the Stanley Brothers by Gary B. Reid has won Best Discography in the ARSC Awards for Excellence, awarded by the Association […]
Sa-lute! to The Man That Got Away
UIP author Walter Rimler has won the Timothy White Award for Outstanding Musical Biography in the pop music field for his book The Man That Got Away: The Life and Songs of […]
Throwbacklist Thursday: The original rock star
The Beatles catalog, not including various remixes and bootlegs and all the other whatnot of beloved musical outfits, comes in at 217 songs, about ten hours of music. Wolfgang Amadeus […]