New Jersey shaped folk revival music into an art form. The saga began with the bawdy tunes sung in colonial-era taverns and continued with the folk songs that echoed through the Pine Barrens. "Guitar Mania" became a phenomenon in the 1800s, and twentieth-century studio recordings in Camden were monumental. Performances by legendary artists like Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan spotlighted the state's folk revival movement and led to a flourishing community of folk organizations, festivals and open-mic nights at village coffeehouses. Author Michael Gabriele traces the evolution and living history of folk revival music in the Garden State and how it has changed the lives of people on stage and in the audience.

New Jersey shaped folk revival music into an art form. The saga began with the bawdy tunes sung in colonial-era taverns and continued with the folk songs that echoed through the Pine Barrens. "Guitar Mania" became a phenomenon in the 1800s, and twentieth-century studio recordings in Camden were monumental. Performances by legendary artists like Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan spotlighted the state's folk revival movement and led to a flourishing community of folk organizations, festivals and open-mic nights at village coffeehouses. Author Michael Gabriele traces the evolution and living history of folk revival music in the Garden State and how it has changed the lives of people on stage and in the audience.

Making the Scene in the Garden State explores New Jersey's rich musical heritage through stories about the musicians, listeners and fans who came together to create sounds from across the American popular music spectrum. From the beginnings of recording in Thomas Edison's factories to Bruce Springsteen's early years at the Upstage Club, and beyond, the book examines the sounds, sights and textures of music scenes in New Jersey.

The Reader's Guide to Music is designed to provide a useful single-volume guide to the ever-increasing number of English language book-length studies in music. Each entry consists of a bibliography of some 3-20 titles and an essay in which these titles are evaluated, by an expert in the field, in light of the history of writing and scholarship on the given topic. The more than 500 entries include not just writings on major composers in music history but also the genres in which they worked (from early chant to rock and roll) and topics important to the various disciplines of music scholarship (from aesthetics to gay/lesbian musicology).

The silver Airstreams and neon signs of the classic American diner brighten New Jersey's highways and Main Streets. But the intrinsic role they have played in the state's culture and industry for more than one hundred years is much more than eggs-over-easy and coffee. Diners are the state's ultimate gathering places--at any moment, high school students, CEOs, construction workers and tourists might be found at a counter chatting with the waitresses and line cooks. Jerseyans yearn for lost favorites like the Excellent Diner and Prout's Diner and still gather at beloved haunts like the Bendix and Tick Tock Diners. Although the industry is all but gone today, New Jersey was once the hub of diner manufacturing, making mobile eateries that fed hungry Americans as far away as the West Coast. Author Michael C. Gabriele offers this delicious history--collected from interviews with owners, patrons and experts--and indulges in many fond memories of New Jersey diners.

Navy Crazy is a different kind of war story depicting the backwardness of military medicine in the mid-1950s. A memoir of a young medical corpsman learning to survive on a locked psychiatric ward for Navy and Marine mental patients at the hospital on the U.S. Naval Base in Yokosuka, Japan from 1955-57. Rockland captures the ward's atmosphere, its flavor, its culture and its language. A raw personal history not filtered, not for the faint of heart.

Between 1959 and 1968, New England saw a folk revival emerge in more than fifty clubs and coffeehouses, a revolution led by college dropouts, young bohemians, and lovers of traditional music that renewed the work of the region's intellectuals and reformers. From Club 47 in Harvard Square to candlelit venues in Ipswich, Martha's Vineyard, and Amherst, budding musicians and hopeful audiences alike embraced folk music, progressive ideals, and community as alternatives to an increasingly toxic consumer culture. While the Boston-Cambridge Folk Revival was short-lived, the youthful attention that it spurred played a crucial role in the civil rights, world peace, and back-to-the-land movements emerging across the country. Fueled by interviews with key players from the folk music scene, I Believe I'll Go Back Home traces a direct line from Yankee revolutionaries, up-country dancers, and nineteenth-century pacifists to the emergence of blues and rock 'n' roll, ultimately landing at the period of the folk revival. Thomas S. Curren presents the richness and diversity of the New England folk tradition, which continues to provide perspective, inspiration, and healing in the present day.