American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900-1950
Sign in to keep track of books you’ve read and want to read.
When Alec Wilder's American Popular Song first appeared, it was almost universally hailed—from The New York Times to The New Yorker to Down Beat—as the definitive account of the classic era of American popular music. It has since become the standard work of the great songwriters who dominated popular music in the United States for half a century. Now Wilder's classic is available again, with a new introduction by Gene Lees.
Read more
Uniquely analytical yet engagingly informal, American Popular Song focuses on the melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic qualities that distinguish American popular music and have made it an authentic art form. Wilder traces the roots of the American style to the ragtime music of the 1890s, shows how it was incorporated into mainstream popular music after 1900, and then surveys the careers of every major songwriter from World War I to 1950. Wilder devotes desparate chapters to such greats as Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, Cole Porter, and Harold Arlen. Illustrated with over seven hundred musical examples, Wilder's sensitive analyses of the most distinctive, creative, and original songs of this period reveal unexpected beauties in songs long forgotten and delightful subtleties in many familiar standards. The result is a definitive treatment of a strangely unsung and uniquely American art.
Liked American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900-1950? Here’s where I’d start.
These suit anyone who liked American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900-1950. Sign in and mark a few books for picks shaped around your own taste.
-
The '90s: The Inside Stories from the Decade That Rocked Shares music, nonfiction, biography -
Bobbie Gentry's Ode to Billie Joe Shares music, nonfiction, biography -
Fifty Sides of the Beach Boys: The Songs That Tell Their Story Shares music, nonfiction, biography -
Metallica Unbound Shares music, nonfiction, biography
