Overthrowing the conventional pieties of mainstream jazz and rock history, Elijah Wald traces the evolution of popular music through developing tastes, trends and technologies - including the role of records, radio, jukeboxes and television - to give a fuller, more balanced account of the broad
variety of music that captivated listeners over the course of the twentieth century.
Wald revisits original sources - recordings, period articles, memoirs, and interviews - to highlight how music was actually heard and experienced over the years. In a refreshing departure from more
typical histories, he focuses on the world of working musicians and ordinary listeners rather than stars and specialists. He looks at the evolution of jazz as dance music, and rock 'n' roll through the eyes of the screaming, twisting teenage girls who made up the bulk of its early audience. Duke
Ellington, Benny Goodman, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, and the Beatles are all here, but Wald also discusses less familiar names like Paul Whiteman, Guy Lombardo, Mitch Miller, Jo Stafford, Frankie Avalon, and the Shirelles, who in some cases were far more popular than those bright
stars we all know today, and who more accurately represent the mainstream of their times.
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Elijah Wald is a musician, writer and historian, whose books include Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues; Narcocorrido, about the modern Mexican ballads of drug trafficking; The Mayor of MacDougal Street (with Dave Van Ronk), and Global Minstrels: Voices of World
Music. He has taught music history at UCLA, and written for a variety of newspapers and magazines.
