From the acclaimed biographer of Keith Moon comes a vibrant picture of mid-20th-century New York and the ways in which its indigenous art, theater, literature, and political movements converge to create an original American sound.

A penetrating and entertaining exploration of New York’s music scene from Cubop through folk, punk, and hip-hop. From Tony Fletcher, the acclaimed biographer of Keith Moon, comes an incisive history of New York’s seminal music scenes and their vast contributions to our culture. Fletcher paints a vibrant picture of mid-twentieth-century New York and the ways in which its indigenous art, theater, literature, and political movements converged to create such unique music. With great attention to the colorful characters behind the sounds, from trumpet player Dizzy Gillespie to Tito Puente, Bob Dylan, and the Ramones, he takes us through bebop, the Latin music scene, the folk revival, glitter music, disco, punk, and hip-hop as they emerged from the neighborhood streets of Harlem, the East and West Village, Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Queens. All the while, Fletcher goes well beyond the history of the music to explain just what it was about these distinctive New York sounds that took the entire nation by storm.

Of all the changes that have swept across America in the past century, perhaps none have been as swift or dramatic as those that transpired in the 1960s. The United States entered the decade still flush with postwar triumphalism, but left it profoundly changed: shaken by a disastrous foreign war and unhinged by domestic social revolutions and countercultural movements that would define the nation’s character, politics, and policies for decades to come. The prevailing understanding of the 1960s traces its powerful shockwaves to 1968, a year of violent protests and tragic assassinations. But in The First Year of the Sixties, esteemed historian James T. Patterson shows that it was actually in 1965 that America truly turned a corner and entered the new, tumultuous era we now know as “The Sixties.” In the early 1960s, America seemed on the cusp of a golden age. Political liberalism, national prosperity, and interracial civil rights activism promised positive change for many Americans. Although the nation had been shocked by the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy, America’s fundamental traditions and mores remained intact. It was a time of consensus and optimism, and popular culture reflected this continuity. Young people dressed and behaved almost exactly as they did in the 1950s, and if the music and hairstyles of the British Invasion worried some conservative parents, these concerns were muted. At the beginning of 1965, Americans saw no indication that the new year would be any different. In January, President Johnson proclaimed that the country had “no irreconcilable conflicts.” Initially, events seemed to prove him right. The economy continued to boom, and the overwhelmingly Democratic Congress passed a host of historic liberal legislation, from the Voting Rights Act to Medicare and Medicaid to expansions of federal aid for education and the war on poverty. But Patterson shows that, even amidst these reassuring developments, American unity was unraveling. Turmoil erupted in the American South and overseas in the spring of 1965, with state troopers attacking civil rights demonstrators in Selma, Alabama and American combat troops rushing into Vietnam to protect American interests there. Many black leaders, meanwhile, were becoming disenchanted with nonviolence, and began advocating instead for African-American militancy. That summer, as anti-war protests reached a fever pitch, rioting exploded in the Watts area of Los Angeles; the six days of looting and fires that followed shocked many Americans and cooled their enthusiasm for the president’s civil rights initiatives, which—like his other “Great Society” programs—were also being steadily undermined by the costly and unpopular war in Vietnam. Conservative counterattacks followed, with Republicans like California gubernatorial candidate Ronald Reagan—and even some disillusioned Democrats—criticizing the President for mismanaging the war and expanding the federal government past its manageable limits. As Patterson explains, this growing pessimism permeated every level of society. By the end of 1965 the national mood itself had darkened, as reflected in a new strain of anti-establishment rock music by artists like the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, the Grateful Dead, and Jefferson Airplane. Their songs and lyrics differed dramatically from the much more staid recordings of contemporary acts like Frank Sinatra, Julie Andrews, and the Supremes, reflecting an alienation from mainstream American culture shared by an increasing number of young Americans. In The First Year of the Sixties, James T. Patterson traces the transformative events of this critical year, showing how 1965 saw an idealistic and upbeat nation derailed by developments both at home and abroad. An entire generation of Americans—as well as the country&r

On a snowy winter morning in 1961, Robert Zimmerman left Minnesota for New York City with a suitcase, guitar, harmonica and a few bucks in his pocket. Wasting no time upon arrival, he performed at the Cafe Wha? in his first day in the city, under the name Bob Dylan. Over the next decade the cultural milieu of Greenwich Village would foster the emergence of one of the greatest songwriters of all time. From the coffeehouses of MacDougal Street to Andy Warhol's Factory, Dylan honed his craft by drifting in and out of New York's thriving arts scenes of the 1960s and early ,70s. In this revised edition, originally published in 2011, author June Skinner Sawyers captures the thrill of how a city shaped an American icon and the people and places that were the touchstones of a legendary journey.

A thoroughly researched study of the origins of the New York City punk scene, focusing on Television and their extraordinary debut record.

San Francisco and the Long 60s tells the fascinating story of the legacy of popular music in San Francisco between the years 1965-69. It is also a chronicle of the impact this brief cultural flowering has continued to have in the city – and more widely in American culture – right up to the present day. The aim of San Francisco and the Long 60s is to question the standard historical narrative of the time, situating the local popular music of the 1960s in the city's contemporary artistic and literary cultures: at once visionary and hallucinatory, experimental and traditional, singular and universal. These qualities defined the aesthetic experience of the local culture in the 1960s, and continue to inform the cultural and social life of the Bay Area even fifty years later. The brief period 1965-69 marks the emergence of the psychedelic counterculture in the Haight-Ashbury neighbourhood, the development of a local musical 'sound' into a mainstream international 'style', the mythologizing of the Haight-Ashbury as the destination for 'seekers' in the Summer of Love, and the ultimate dispersal of the original hippie community to outlying counties in the greater Bay Area and beyond. San Francisco and the Long 60s charts this period with the references to received historical accounts of the time, the musical, visual and literary communications from the counterculture, and retrospective glances from members of the 1960s Haight community via extensive first-hand interviews. For more information, read Sarah Hill's blog posts here: http://blogs.cardiff.ac.uk/musicresearch/2014/05/15/san-francisco-and-the-long-60s http://blogs.cardiff.ac.uk/musicresearch/2014/08/22/city-scale/ http://blogs.cardiff.ac.uk/musicresearch/2015/07/21/fare-thee-well/

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 approximately 1,000 song recordings from 1889 to the present, telling the stories behind the songs, recordings, performers, and songwriters. From the Victorian parlor ballad and ragtime hit at the end of the 19th century to today’s rock classics, the Encyclopedia progresses through a parade popular music styles, from jazz to blues to country Western, as well as the important but too often neglected genres of ethnic and world music, gospel, and traditional folk. This book is the ideal research tool for lovers of popular music in all its glorious variety.