In Songbooks, critic and scholar Eric Weisbard offers a critical guide to books on American popular music from William Billings's 1770 New-England Psalm-Singer to Jay-Z's 2010 memoir Decoded. Drawing on his background editing the Village Voice music section, coediting the Journal of Popular Music Studies, and organizing the Pop Conference, Weisbard connects American music writing from memoirs, biographies, and song compilations to blues novels, magazine essays, and academic studies. The authors of these works are as diverse as the music itself: women, people of color, queer writers, self-educated scholars, poets, musicians, and elites discarding their social norms. Whether analyzing books on Louis Armstrong, the Beatles, and Madonna; the novels of Theodore Dreiser, Gayl Jones, and Jennifer Egan; or varying takes on blackface minstrelsy, Weisbard charts an alternative history of American music as told through its writing. As Weisbard demonstrates, the most enduring work pursues questions that linger across time period and genre-cultural studies in the form of notes on the fly, on sounds that never cease to change meaning.
Industry Reviews
"Entertaining scholarship! Entertaining criticism! What a revelation! Eric Weisbard is one of those rare writers who understands that in mirroring the music it addresses, literary analysis should provide pleasure as well as insights. With great verve, Songbooks provides both." -- David Ritz, co-composer, "Sexual Healing"
"Embracing the fact that there's no hearing any music without mediations of crosstalk, mythography, humbug, gatekeeping, and taste war, Eric Weisbard's exuberant and encyclopedic history of music writing delivers two and a half centuries of vernacular bounce-sheets of sound, if you will. Heroic, acutely discerning, compulsively readable, and bound to be enduringly useful." -- Eric Lott, author of * Black Mirror: The Cultural Contradictions of American Racism *
"Eric Weisbard is the rare critic who can pair a deep, intersectional, and breathtakingly intelligent survey of music writing with the nuance and joy of someone who has actually done the strange, difficult work of parsing sound on paper. Songbooks is an extraordinary look at how we try to make sense of the music that buoys and destroys us. It made me rethink what criticism can do, what music can do, and how both can change our lives." -- Amanda Petrusich, author of * Do Not Sell at Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World's Rarest 78 rpm Records *
"Weisbard reshuffles the canon, paying close attention to Black, gay and other voices that have often been pushed to the margins. . . . He doesn't penetrate his subjects so much as hurl himself at them and bounce off, like a bird smacking into a window. Weisbard falls to the ground, dusts himself off, then counts the intellectual change that's fallen from his pockets." -- Dwight Garner * New York Times *
"Weisbard's comprehensiveness means he may introduce many music fans to works they might not know otherwise. . . . A valuable literature review of American pop. . . ." * Kirkus Reviews *
"Weisbard's book will be required reading for all music critics and journalists." -- Henry Carrigan * No Depression *
"Could you perchance use an overview of everything that's been thought in the 50-plus years since rock critics turned popular music journalism into an intellectually and for a while economically viable enterprise? Songbooks is it, only it goes back a lot further-two and a half centuries. . . . An inspiring, provocative vision of the many ways popular music matters."
-- Robert Christgau
"Songbooks is the kind of book you keep picking up and dipping into for the rest of your life." -- Michaelangelo Matos * Rock and Roll Globe *
"Weisbard's book is a valuable resource for those who are interested in researching and learning more about the history of American popular music." -- Kristine Dizon * European Journal of American Studies *
"In 500-some pages that read like 200 - the writing is fluid, playful, funny, tough, fast on the eye - Weisbard lightly packs more critical judgment and original phrase-making into each of his two- or three-page chapters than most scholars can manage in 50. This is a literary history of American popular music, but it's also a map of the country so many other writers have marked out. . . . Songbooks is a great reference book, but before and after that it's a funhouse." -- Greil Marcus * Chronicle of Higher Education *
"Songbooks is a Herculean achievement of both research and tribute, a book that excavates and illuminates the intellectual history that it promises and so much more." -- Jack Hamilton * Journal of Popular Music Studies *
"... Serious students of American popular music will find the book a strong introduction to the literature and scholarship that have defined American popular music. Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty." * Choice *
"On more than one occasion, I was reminded of late-night conversations I have enjoyed at popular music conferences - witty, erudite, entertaining debates, in which a variety of connections and comparisons, explanations and opinions compete for attention, often straying from the original topic. . . . [T]he essays here illuminate the diverse histories and circumstances of popular song. In that regard, the essays here are not unlike the musics of the past two centuries to which they refer: revelatory, confusing, dynamic, irritating, rewarding, ephemeral, unexpected, disruptive and always provocative." -- Ian Inglis * Popular Music *
"[Weisbard's] task, distilling the American music experience into under 600 pages, is ambitious, and his efforts to incorporate a broad range of titles are noteworthy and commendable. . . . Weisbard's expertise, passion, and knowledge are undeniable." -- Gregory Stall * Library Journal *
"As a valuable resource for scholars of popular music, Songbooks should encourage more writers to enter the discussion. Eric Weisbard has now provided a guidebook to the sometimes chaotic but always vital conversation in popular music studies." -- Leigh H. Edwards * American Literary History *
"Songbooks takes us on a fascinating journey through an alternative American popular music history, written not just by experts, but by people usually at the fringes - women, people of color, practitioners, and non-academics. Reading this book from start to finish will give one the best overview of this journey, but the book is perhaps better enjoyed by just dipping in and skipping around as time or interest permits. This book is recommended for all readers interested in popular music and for library collections of popular music." -- Mary Huisman * Music Reference Services Quarterly *
