Summoned out of his quiet retirement by Wyatt Earp, former Pinkerton Charlie Siringo of prohibition-era Los Angeles becomes entangled in a conspiracy involving a powerful corrupt politician.

Many associate early western music with the likes of Roy Rogers and Gene Autry, but America’s first western music craze predates these “singing cowboys” by decades. Written by Tin Pan Alley songsters in the era before radio, the first popular cowboy and Indian songs circulated as piano sheet music and as cylinder and disc recordings played on wind-up talking machines. The colorful fantasies of western life depicted in these songs capitalized on popular fascination with the West stoked by Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows, Owen Wister’s novel The Virginian, and Edwin S. Porter’s film The Great Train Robbery. The talking machine music industry, centered in New York City, used state-of-the-art recording and printing technology to produce and advertise songs about the American West. Talking Machine West brings together for the first time the variety of cowboy, cowgirl, and Indian music recorded and sold for mass consumption between 1902 and 1918. In the book’s introductory chapters, Michael A. Amundson explains how this music reflected the nostalgic passing of the Indian and the frontier while incorporating modern ragtime music and the racial attitudes of Jim Crow America. Hardly Old West ditties, the songs gave voice to changing ideas about Indians and assimilation, cowboys, the frontier, the rise of the New Woman, and ethnic and racial equality. In the book’s second part, a chronological catalogue of fifty-four western recordings provides the full lyrics and history of each song and reproduces in full color the cover art of extant period sheet music. Each entry also describes the song’s composer(s), lyricist(s), and sheet music illustrator and directs readers to online digitized recordings of each song. Gorgeously illustrated throughout, this book is as entertaining as it is informative, offering the first comprehensive account of popular western recorded music in its earliest form.

In its 114th year, Billboard remains the world's premier weekly music publication and a diverse digital, events, brand, content and data licensing platform. Billboard publishes the most trusted charts and offers unrivaled reporting about the latest music, video, gaming, media, digital and mobile entertainment issues and trends.

A DIRECTORY ONLY OF COUNTRY MUSIC ARTISTS AND THEIR NOSTALGIC BACKING GROUPS FROM THE 1920s TO THE PRESENT

In its 114th year, Billboard remains the world's premier weekly music publication and a diverse digital, events, brand, content and data licensing platform. Billboard publishes the most trusted charts and offers unrivaled reporting about the latest music, video, gaming, media, digital and mobile entertainment issues and trends.

George-Warren offers the first serious biography in which Gene Autry the legend becomes a flesh-and-blood man--with all the passions, triumphs, and tragedies of a flawed icon.

Timothy E. Wise presents the first book to focus specifically on the musical content of yodeling in our culture. He shows that yodeling serves an aesthetic function in musical texts. A series of chronological chapters analyzes this musical tradition from its earliest appearances in Europe to its incorporation into a range of American genres and beyond. Wise posits the reasons for yodeling's changing status in our music. How and why was yodeling introduced into professional music making in the first place? What purposes has it served in musical texts? Why was it expunged from classical music? Why did it attach to some popular music genres and not others? Why does yodeling now appear principally at the margins of mainstream tastes? To answer such questions, Wise applies the perspectives of critical musicology, semiotics, and cultural studies to the changing semantic associations of yodeling in an unexplored repertoire stretching from Beethoven to Zappa. This volume marks the first musicological and ideological analysis of this prominent but largely ignored feature of American musical life. Maintaining high scholarly standards but keeping the general reader in mind, the author examines yodeling in relation to ongoing cultural debates about singing, music as art, social class, and gender. Chapters devote attention to yodeling in nineteenth-century classical music, the nineteenth-century Alpine-themed song in America, the Americanization of the yodel, Jimmie Rodgers, and cowboy yodeling, among other topics.