Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 1 of 1
Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
“All The Evil Music Has:” Musical Representations Of The Vamp In Interwar American Popular Media, Martha Schulenburg
“All The Evil Music Has:” Musical Representations Of The Vamp In Interwar American Popular Media, Martha Schulenburg
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation explores the vamp as a symbol of sociosexual deviance in film and American popular music of the 1910s and ‘20s. Abbreviated from vampire, “vamp” came to be used as a term for sexually voracious and predatory women in the early 20th century. Following the unprecedented success of the 1915 film A Fool There Was, vamps then became a staple in American popular media. My project examines the process of remediation and cultural dissemination at the dawn of mass media via the vamp in music. Vamps were pervasive in cinematic accompaniment, vaudeville, jazz, and Tin Pan Alley …