Academic publishing often forces one into the unappreciated but necessary job of Killjoy. It comes with the territory of challenging convention and shoveling the cultural/historical b.s. out of the barn. Having […]
Category: music
Q&A with Blues Unlimited editor Mark Camarigg
Mark Camarigg is publications manager and former assistant editor for Living Blues Magazine and chairs The Center for the Study of Southern Culture’s annual Blues Symposium at The University of Mississippi. […]
Gary B. Reid named Bluegrass Print/Media Person of the Year
Congratulations to Gary B. Reid, author of The Music of the Stanley Brothers, who was named Bluegrass Print/Media Person of the Year by the International Bluegrass Music Association (IBMA). Gary Reid was […]
Q&A with Becoming Beautiful author Joanna Bosse
Joanna Bosse is an associate professor of ethnomusicology and dance studies at Residential College in the Arts and Humanities at Michigan State University. She answered some questions about her book […]
Throwbacklist Thursday
The University of Illinois Press thinks country and western music hung the moon. Our list of C&W books reads like a who’s who of that musical form’s rhinestone-studded history. You want singers? […]
The Man That Got Away
Harold Arlen wrote the soundtrack to long nighttime walks on wet streets, to the staring contests we hold with memory out of the windows of our lonely room, to the melancholy […]
The King of the Cannibal Islands
Pirates. They have a bad reputation. The robbing. The kidnapping. The walking of planks. But how about the positive things pirates have done? The contributions to fashion. The government-sanctioned predatory […]
Throwbacklist Thursday
George Hamilton IV departed the world two years ago today. Unrelated to the actor and tanning phenomenon of the same name, IV, as he was sometimes called, ambled out of […]
From Cincinnati to Grizzly Flats
Today marks an auspicious day in music history: the first recorded performance of Stephen Foster’s “Oh! Susannah,” the earliest hit song in U.S. history. Foster’s smash debuted in a Pittsburgh saloon. […]
Bird’s birthday brings celebration to Kansas City
On August 29, 1920 Charles Parker, Jr. was born in Kansas City, Kansas. As Chuck Haddix writes in Bird: The Life and Music of Charlie Parker, the jazz icon’s launching […]
UIP adds the Journal of Mormon History
The University of Illinois Press is welcoming the Journal of Mormon History as the newest addition to the journals program. The Mormon History Association (MHA) is currently in its 50th […]
Survey Says!: The King Is Dead
This week marks the anniversary of the death (?) of Elvis Presley, a transformative cultural figure of the twentieth or any other century. If you have memories of that afternoon in 1977, […]