Vaudeville Melodies: Popular Musicians and Mass Entertainment in American Culture, 1870-1929

Gebhardt, Nicholas

ISBN 10: 022644869X / ISBN 13: 9780226448695

Published by University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2017

About this Item

A nice, solid copy. ; 8.9 X 6 X 0.5 inches; 179 pages.

Seller Inventory # 330418

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Vaudeville Melodies: Popular Musicians and Mass Entertainment in American Culture, 1870-1929
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press, Chicago
• Publication Date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 022644869X
• ISBN 13: 9780226448695
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: Near Fine
• Seller catalogs:
  • music studies
  • American History

About this title

Synopsis

If you enjoy popular music and culture today, you have vaudeville to thank. From the 1870s until the 1920s, vaudeville was the dominant context for popular entertainment in the United States, laying the groundwork for the music industry we know today.

In Vaudeville Melodies, Nicholas Gebhardt introduces us to the performers, managers, and audiences who turned disjointed variety show acts into a phenomenally successful business. First introduced in the late nineteenth century, by 1915 vaudeville was being performed across the globe, incorporating thousands of performers from every branch of show business. Its astronomical success relied on a huge network of theatres, each part of a circuit and administered from centralized booking offices. Gebhardt shows us how vaudeville transformed relationships among performers, managers, and audiences, and argues that these changes affected popular music culture in ways we are still seeing today. Drawing on firsthand accounts, Gebhardt explores the practices by which vaudeville performers came to understand what it meant to entertain an audience, the conditions in which they worked, the institutions they relied upon, and the values they imagined were essential to their success.

About the Author

Nicholas Gebhardt is professor of jazz and popular music studies at Birmingham City University, UK. He is the coeditor of The Cultural Politics of Jazz Collectives and the author of Going For Jazz: Musical Practices and American Ideology, the latter also published by the University of Chicago Press.