Arts / Music / Pop Vocal

Who Did It First?: Great Pop Cover Songs and Their Original Artists

by Bob Leszczak

In Who Did It First?: Great Pop Cover Songs and Their Original Artists, the second volume in Bob Leszczak’s exciting Who Did It First? series, readers explore the hidden history of the most famous, indeed...

Living with the Dead: Twenty Years on the Bus with Garcia and the Grateful Dead

by Rock Scully & David Dalton

This memoir chronicles the Grateful Dead's seminal years: 1965-1985.

The New Broadway Song Companion: An Annotated Guide to Musical Theatre Literature by Voice Type and Song Style

by David P. DeVenney

This volume presents a comprehensive listing of the musical numbers from over 300 Broadway shows. Each song is annotated with the name of the character who sings it, the voice type, the exact vocal range, and...

Encyclopedia of Great Popular Song Recordings

by Steve Sullivan

The Encyclopedia of Great Popular Song Recordings, Volumes 1 and 2 covers the full range of popular music recordings with virtually unprecedented breadth and depth. In this 2-volume encyclopedia, Sullivan explores...

Yé-Yé Girls of '60s French Pop

by Jean-Emmanuel Deluxe & Lio

Yé-Yé means Yeah Yeah! and is best known as a style of '60s pop music heard in France and Québec.

The Rise of the Crooners: Gene Austin, Russ Columbo, Bing Crosby, Nick Lucas, Johnny Marvin and Rudy Vallee

by Jim Bedoian, Michael Pitts, Dick Carty & Frank Hoffmann et al.

The Rise of the Crooners examines the historical trends and events that led to the emergence of the crooning style. The lives and careers of six pioneers of the style-Bing Crosby, Russ Columbo, Gene Austin,...

Sing Us a Song, Piano Woman: Female Fans and the Music of Tori Amos

by Adrienne Trier-Bieniek

Sing Us a Song, Piano Woman: Female Fans and the Music of Tori Amos explores the many-layered relationships female fans build with feminist musicians in general and with Tori Amos, in particular. Using original...

Torch Singing: Performing Resistance and Desire from Billie Holiday to Edith Piaf

by Stacy Holman Jones

With an ethnographer's eye, Stacy Holman Jones provides a cultural critique of torch singing-describing the genre as a rich drama of passiveness, deception, desire, and resistance.

Wax Trash and Vinyl Treasures: Record Collecting as a Social Practice

by Dr Roy Shuker

This study examines the history of record collecting; profiles collectors and the collecting process; considers categories-especially music genres-and types of record collecting; and outlines and discusses the...

Lady Gaga: Behind the Fame

by Emily Herbert

A true original, Gaga found fame the hard way, playing the grimy bars and burlesque shows of New York City, before finally relocating to Los Angeles to begin work on what would become her debut album The Fame....

The Bitter End: Hanging Out at America's Nightclub

by Paul Colby

Colby, the owner of the Greenwich Village music and comedy venue for over a quarter of a century, shares his memories of Bob Dylan, Billy Joel, Woody Allen, George Carlin, Sarah McLachlan and many others who...

From Factory Girls to K-Pop Idol Girls

by Gooyong Kim & Douglas Kellner

Focusing on female idols’ proliferation in the South Korean popular music (K-pop) industry since the late 1990s, Gooyong Kim critically analyzes structural conditions of possibilities in contemporary popular...

Blue Notes and Sad Chords

by Brian Hebert

Listening to the Beatles' hit songs while looking at this book is like hearing them again for the first time.

This companion volume to the 27 chart topping hits found on the Beatles 1 CD allows you to see,...

Motor City Music

by Mark Slobin

This is the first-ever historical study across all musical genres in any American metropolis. Detroit in the 1940s-60s was not just "the capital of the twentieth century" for industry and the war effort, but...

Music and Words

by Patrick M. Patterson

Composer Nakayama Shimpei (1887-1952) wrote more than 300 popular songs in his lifetime. Most are still well known and recorded regularly. An entrepreneur, he found ways to create popular songs that powered...

Prince and the Purple Rain Era Studio Sessions

by Duane Tudahl & Questlove

Featuring even more groundbreaking, never-before-heard stories, the expanded edition of Duane Tudahl's book pulls back the paisley curtain to reveal the untold story of Prince’s rise from cult favorite to...

Memory Songs: A Personal Journey into the Music that Shaped the 90s

by James Cook

This is the story of a music-obsessed boy’s journey from his bedroom in Hitchin to the heart of nineties London just as Britpop is about to explode...

From James Cook’s early encounters with pop’s pioneers...

The Relentless Pursuit of Tone

by Robert Fink, Melinda Latour & Zachary Wallmark

The Relentless Pursuit of Tone: Timbre in Popular Music assembles a broad spectrum of contemporary perspectives on how "sound" functions in an equally wide array of popular music. Ranging from the twang of country...

Stars Fell on Stockton

by Brian K. Ashcroft

It is May 1962. The ‘phone rings. Brian, 15 year-old grammar-schoolboy and bass player in the Denvers, picks up the receiver. It is Sam Curtis, ex Road Manager of the Shadows, “How would you like to go to...

A Race of Singers

by Bryan K. Garman

When Walt Whitman published Leaves of Grass in 1855, he dreamed of inspiring a "race of singers" who would celebrate the working class and realize the promise of American democracy. By examining how singers...