"An excellent addition to . . . ethnomusicological studies of nontraditional music in America." -- Choice "A well-deserved look at the musical world of immigrant Jews, who, in finding and creating an expressive medium for self-identity, helped shape and give life to American popular culture." -- Ethnomusicology "Employing the tools of the ethnomusicologist and the social historian, Slobin has produced an important and highly readable account of the formation and function of a little-studied aspect of American popular culture." -- Journal of American Studies

Music in American Life. Index.

Stowe traces the evolution of sacred music from colonial times to the present, from the Puritans to Sun Ra, and shows how these cultural encounters have produced a rich harvest of song and faith.

The music of clarinetists Naftule Brandwein and Dave Tarras is iconic of American klezmer music. Their legacy has had an enduring impact on the development of the popular world music genre.

Describes the early years of the songwriter, who, only a few years after he immigrated to the United States, began writing a series of hit songs that helped to Americanize the musical theater and its audience

Jon Stratton provides a pioneering work on Jews as a racialized group in the popular music of America, Britain and Australia during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Rather than taking a narrative, historical approach the book consists of a number of case studies, looking at the American, British and Australian music industries. Stratton's primary motivation is to uncover how the racialized positioning of Jews, which was sometimes similar but often different in each of the societies under consideration, affected the kinds of music with which Jews have become involved. Stratton explores race as a cultural construction and continues discussions undertaken in Jewish Studies concerning the racialization of the Jews and the stereotyping of Jews in order to present an in-depth and critical understanding of Jews, race and popular music.