Kenney examines the interplay between recorded music and the key social, political, and economic forces in America during the era of the phonograph's rise and decline as the dominant medium of popular recorded sound: from the appearance of the first commercial recordings to the postwar years when the industry became more complex and less powerful.
Have records, compact discs, and other sound reproduction equipment merely provided American listeners with pleasant diversions, or have more important historical and cultural influences flowed through them? Do recording machines simply capture what's already out there, or is the music somehow
transformed in the dual process of documentation and dissemination? How would our lives be different without these machines? Such are the questions that arise when we stop taking for granted the phenomenon of recorded music and the phonograph itself.
Now comes an in-depth cultural history of the phonograph in the United States from 1890 to 1945. William Howland Kenney offers a full account of what he calls "the 78 r.p.m. era"--from the formative early decades in which the giants of the record industry reigned supreme in the absence of radio, to
the postwar proliferation of independent labels, disk jockeys, and changes in popular taste and opinion. By examining the interplay between recorded music and the key social, political, and economic forces in America during the phonograph's rise and fall as the dominant medium of popular recorded
sound, he addresses such vital issues as the place of multiculturalism in the phonograph's history, the roles of women as record-player listeners and performers, the belated commercial legitimacy of rhythm-and-blues recordings, the "hit record" phenomenon in the wake of the Great Depression, the
origins of the rock-and-roll revolution, and the shifting place of popular recorded music in America's personal and cultural memories.
Throughout the book, Kenney argues that the phonograph and the recording industry served neither to impose a preferencefor high culture nor a degraded popular taste, but rather expressed a diverse set of sensibilities in which various sorts of people found a new kind of pleasure. To this end,
Recorded Music in American Life effectively illustrates how recorded music provided the focus
"In this comprehensive study, Kenney provides a long-overdue update of histories such as Roland Gelatt's The Fabulous Phonograph: From Tin Foil to High Fidelity...[he] asks innovative theoretical questions."--American Historical Review
