American Popular Culture Commons^™

African-American Poetry, Music, And Politics, Tyler H. Macdonald

Honors Theses

The 2016 decision to award songwriter and musician Bob Dylan the Nobel Prize in Literature sparked a worldwide debate on the relationship between music and poetry and raised many questions about music’s place in literary canon. However, this debate is nothing new. Questions about the relationship between music and poetry have long been debated. Some scholars believe the two disciplines should be studied separately, while others prefer to consider the connections between the two.

My project begins with a question: if Bob Dylan’s songs can be considered poetry, what other forms of music might also be considered poetry? Rap implements …

On Vinyl: Revival & Survival, Thom Leavy

Capstones

As a record collector and journalist, I take stock of what they mean to me while searching to better understand the “Vinyl Revival” of the past decade. I meet and pick at people who’ve worked with the medium at its height, its demise, and today. We talk about what digitization has done and will do to music, and what vinyl means to them.

https://readymag.com/u29439050/onvinyl/

Springsteen: In The American Tradition, Alex Mcdonough

Faculty Curated Undergraduate Works

Springsteen’s music serves as a platform for not only the working poor, but also the pariahs of American society. Like other classic American singer-songwriters, Springsteen uses his music to explore tragedy in the American life, imbuing each song with a quiet, sometimes darkly humorous humanity. Through his songs, Springsteen has defined an altogether different type of American story, one that weaves tragedy, comedy, and the tedious minutiae of daily life. Springsteen considers each element of every story he tells to be distinct and important in its own way, creating a sense of purpose for even the lowest of the low.

Hensley, Jennifer Lynn (Fa 351), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Folklife Archives Finding Aids

Finding aid and full-text scan of paper (Click on “Additional Files” below) for Folklife Archives Project 351. Paper titled "The Music Barn" in which Lynn Hensley discusses the founding of The Music Barn, a local music venue in Warren County, Kentucky. Hensley's main informant is Joe Marshall, a country music artist, community organizer, and owner of The Music Barn.

Fox, Randy (Fa 350), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Folklife Archives Finding Aids

FFinding aid and full-text scan of paper (Click on “Additional Files” below) for Folklife Archives Project 350. Paper titled "Fiddle About: Ed Carnes-Contest Fiddler" in which Randy Fox charts the history of fiddle playing and the rise of "contest fiddling" during the traditional music revival in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Fox's main informant is Ed Carnes, an old-time fiddler who won the Kentucky State Fiddle Championship in 1981. Carnes details his beginnings as a fiddler, the recording of his fiddle-tunes album, and his travels across the country to different fiddling contests.

Chronology And Itinerary Of The Career Of Will Marion Cook: Materials For A Biography, Peter M. Lefferts

Glenn Korff School of Music: Faculty Publications

Will Marion Cook (1869-1944) devoted his creative life to the musical stage as composer, conductor, arranger, orchestrator, producer, director, violinist, pianist, librettist and lyricist, as well as making important contributions as an author and educator. One of the foremost American musicians of his generation, and regarded by many in the African American community of his day as its leading composer, he was, in contemporary eyes, an eccentric, irascible genius of great heart. This document assembles a chronology of the principal public events of his life.

A biography of Will Marion Cook by Marva Carter, Swing Along (2008) is an excellent …

Springsteen's Oppressed Working Class, Kaylee Bumpus

Faculty Curated Undergraduate Works

Bruce Springsteen’s exploration through the lives of oppressed working class people has been a prevalent theme throughout the four decades of his musicianship. This paper will discuss the motivations, methods, and impact of the blue collar characters that Springsteen writes about in his songs. The characters from specific songs will be analyzed and placed into one of three categories: law-abiding working class citizens, dreamers attempting to flee desolation, or sympathetic criminals. Specific examples will be used from some of Bruce Springsteen’s more well-known songs, such as “Thunder Road”, “Born to Run”, “The River”, and “Born in the U.S.A.”, and other …

[Review Of] Cuban Underground Hip Hop: Black Thoughts, Black Revolution, Black Modernity, Anne Fountain

Faculty Publications

[Review of] Cuba - Cuban Underground Hip Hop: Black Thoughts, Black Revolution, Black Modernity. By Tanya L. Saunders . Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015. Pp. 390. $90.00 cloth; $29.95 paper.

Reimagining The Collective: Black Popular Music And Recording Studio Innovation, 1970-1990, Will Fulton

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines developments in the production practices of black popular music in the recording studio from 1970 to 1990. The year 1970 marked a transition in the recording practice of popular music that had a distinct impact on styles marketed as R&B, soul, and funk. Multitracking in the 1950s and 1960s had paved the way for a transformed production process, one initiated by Les Paul’s and Sidney Bechet’s overdubbing experiments in the 1940s. The collective sound of instrumentalists and vocalists heard on records no longer resulted from live-to-tape recordings of group performances, but was increasingly the product of constructed …

Countdown, Howard Schaap

Faculty Work Comprehensive List

No abstract provided.

The Parton Paradox: A History Of Race And Gender In The Career Of Dolly Parton, Lindsey L. Hammers

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

With a career that has spanned over five decades, country music artist Dolly Parton has continually redefined her image and her music to remain relevant. By incorporating the musical and lyrical stylings of disco and other popular music genres into her songs, Parton moved beyond music’s color line to increase her popularity as an artist. This thesis shows how Parton established a distinct career that catered to different audiences as she traversed the musical color line and repackaged what feminism looked like to country music fans during the Women’s Movement of the 1960s. Placing Parton’s actions in conversation with music’s …

A Long Strange Trip Through The Evolution Of Fan Production, Fan-Branding, And Historical Representation In The Grateful Dead Online Archive, Anna Richardson

Masters Theses

This study explores how a digital music archive tells the story and contributes to the public memory of cult bands. Utilizing the Grateful Dead Archive Online (GDAO) as the primary data source, the researcher obtained a population of 26,835 items and categorized them by the production method of fan or band, item type, era, and logo. Content analysis illustrated themes within the archive in relation to the fannish production and activity within the fandom of the Grateful Dead. The span of this specific fandom spreads across five decades and sheds light onto the ways in which the fandom surrounding cult …

“Calypso”—Harry Belafonte (1956), Judith E. Smith

American Studies Faculty Publication Series

Harry Belafonte, the Harlem-born son of poor undocumented Jamaican immigrants, an untrained singer whose heart was set on becoming an actor, made music history with “Harry Belafonte: Calypso.” This record was the very first by a solo performer to sell a million copies, holding the top spot on “Billboard’s” pop album charts for an unprecedented 31 weeks (in addition, 58 weeks in the top ten, 99 weeks among the top 100). The higher-ups at RCA had doubted the commercial potential of a thematically unified recording of “island and Calypso songs,” but the “Calypso” record, released at the end of May …

Harbison, Kay (Fa 874), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Folklife Archives Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Folklife Archives Project 874. Paper titled: “Uncle Bozo Carver: World’s Oldest Living Country Musician and Entertainer.” Project details the life of Noble “Uncle Bozo” Carver as an entertainer. Project includes lengthy interview, lists of songs, and some stanzas.

Chronology And Itinerary Of The Career Of J. Tim Brymn Materials For A Biography, Peter M. Lefferts

Glenn Korff School of Music: Faculty Publications

James Timothy Brymn (1873-1945), a composer, conductor, and arranger, was one of the cohort of top African American dance band and theatre orchestra leaders active in Chicago and New York who became Army bandleaders in WWI. In the first decade of the 20th century, he was acknowledged as a pre-eminent master of ragtime and one of the premiere song writers of America. Brymn was the author of one of the first published blues (1912), the author of some of the first published tangos (in 1913 and 1914), the author of one of the first published jazz numbers (1917), and the …

Movements, Music, And Meaning: A Comparative Analysis Of Cultural Narratives In Vietnam Era And Post-9/11 Anti-War Music, Jonathan Nathaniel Redman

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the presence of widely circulating cultural narratives in the lyrics of approximately eighty anti-war songs from the Vietnam and post-9/11 eras. Unlike prior movements and music research, this thesis privileges culture over movements and views movements as cultural antennae both picking up on trends and cultural narratives, and broadcasting their own altered cultural meanings back into the “cultural airways.” It sees music as a cultural medium which acquires cultural meanings from its surroundings, alters those meanings, synthesizes new ones, and perpetuates old ones. Drawing on comparative and narrative analysis approaches informed by grounded theory techniques, this thesis …

Whitefield's Music: Moorfields Tabernacle, The Divine Musical Miscellany (1754), And The Fashioning Of Early Evangelical Sacred Song, Stephen A. Marini

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

Evangelical hymnody was the most significant form of popular sacred song in eighteenth-century Anglo-America. John and Charles Wesley built their Methodist movement on it, but little is known about the music of their great collaborator and eventual rival, George Whitefield (1714-1770). The essential sources of Whitefield's music are the development of ritual song at his Moorfields Tabernacle in London, his Collection of Hymns for Social Worship (1753) prepared for that congregation, and a little-known tunebook called The Divine Musical Miscellany (1754) that contains the first and definitive repertory of music known to be sung at Moorfields. This essay recovers Whitefield's …

Graverobber, Individualized Chorus: The Greek Chorus Reinterpreted In Repo! The Genetic Opera, Grace Markulin

The Downtown Review: An Interdisciplinary Journal Written and Peer-Reviewed by Mandel Honors College Students at Cleveland State University

The rock opera film Repo! The Genetic Opera (2008) provides its audience with details regarding the film’s setting and perspectives on the morality of the film’s plot through the character Graverobber, whose sung dialogue expresses this information. Graverobber’s penchant for scene-setting and moralizing within the film classifies the character as a Greek chorus according to the parameters of the Greek chorus in antiquity and modern interpretations of the chorus in twentieth-century musical theater, but the character’s visual distinctiveness, preexisting relationship with an established character, and prominent use of solo vocal lines throughout his sung dialogue demonstrates a degree of individuation …

Who Can Afford To Improvise? James Baldwin And Black Music, The Lyric And The Listeners [Table Of Contents], Ed Pavlic

Literature

More than a quarter-century after his death, James Baldwin remains an unparalleled figure in American literature and African American cultural politics. In Who Can Afford to Improvise? Ed Pavlić offers an unconventional, lyrical, and accessible meditation on the life, writings, and legacy of James Baldwin and their relationship to the lyric tradition in black music, from gospel and blues to jazz and R&B. Based on unprecedented access to private correspondence, unpublished manuscripts and attuned to a musically inclined poet’s skill in close listening, Who Can Afford to Improvise? frames a new narrative of James Baldwin’s work and life.

The route …

Raymond E. Jackson And Segregation In The American Federation Of Musicians, 1900-1944, Lance Boos

History Theses

In 1944, the American Federation of Musicians abolished the practice of subsidiary local chapters, granting autonomous charters to the twelve chapters of African American musicians who were bound to a white parent chapter in their respective cities. While most black musicians in the AFM were organized in “separate but equal” chapters, those under subsidiary status were obligated to pay dues to the white local but generally had no access to union offices, voting rights in union elections, control over booking of and payment for jobs, or representation at the national convention. This change was prompted by years of advocacy by …

I Want To Be In That Number: A Song Profile Of "When The Saints Go Marching In", Gregory H. Jacks

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

“When the Saints Go Marching In” has never been subject to a sustained study of its origins, disseminations, and current manifestations. A study like this, focused on a song’s perceptions via various viewpoints through time, is typically referred to as a song profile; a form of reception history specifically concentrated on a single musical composition. “When the Saints Go Marching In,” also known as “Saints” or “The Saints,” is an African-American spiritual typically listed as a traditional in most songbooks without a composer.[1] I have laid out this paper into four sections, one for each period of the song’s …

“Ab-Soul’S Outro,” “Hiiipower,” And The Vernacular: Kendrick Lamar’S Rap As Literature, Tyler S. Bunzey

Senior Honors Theses

Kendrick Lamar’s “Ab-Soul’s Outro” and “HiiiPower” employ complex patterns of Signifyin(g), testifyin’, and other classical African-American literary tropes in order to construct a nuanced style. Lamar creates a double-voiced text not only within his narrative, but also within the form itself. Lamar plays on rap's unique status in African-American literature as an oral text; it is an extension of the vernacular. Through this oral text, Lamar decentralizes the Eurocentric focus of classical interpretation and qualification of literature to a new Afrocentric perspective that privileges the oral text. These raps are complex, wrapped up in their current context along with a …

Resurrecting The Hip-Hop And Christian Cultures: Lecrae's Unashamed Use Of The Rap Narrative, Persona, And Language, Marci Swank

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

Hip-hop and Christian cultures do not overlap too often, or do they? As a rapper, Lecrae is able to share his narrative through his lyrical content, which includes his Christian faith. This thesis examines the history of hip-hop, Lecrae’s personal influences, and the overarching movement within the two cultures. Lecrae’s persona, use of the hiphop and Christian platforms, and rhetorical decisions reveal him as an example of how the American culture both resists and embraces the less-likely artist. Some view Lecrae as the one bringing hip-hop back to its original origins, but others believe that he is tainting both cultures …

For The Love Of Music: A Story Of Organizational Culture And Change, Malii Brown

Capstone Collection

For the Love of Music: A Story of Organizational Culture and Change is an examination of culture and possibilities for change at an organization that manages one top-tier, U.S. classical music orchestra. The research was carried out for the purpose of making and refining meaning from collective employee experiences at a canon cultural organization whose practices reflect and influence our society beyond the context of music. The inquiry at the heart of the work is, ‘How does the organizational culture of the subject organization, Orchestra, Inc.[1], affect its readiness for organizational change?’ The research methodology consisted of organizational culture assessments …

Second Lines, Story Circles, And Freedom Songs: A Call And Response, Ann-Meredith Wootton

Capstone Collection

Community Is Survival

In New Orleans, all the grandmothers tell the story about the live oaks. Our roots don't grow deep into the swamp, but they grow wide – weaving, growing, and binding together with all of the surrounding trees, so that when the hurricane winds come, we will not fall. Together we can stand up against the strongest Gulf force winds (and the many faces of the Cradle to Prison Pipeline) – pushing, pulling, and leaning on one another when we need – and survive to see another day.

Live oaks also carry the story tradition of being a …

Rave Reviews The History Of Akron's Tuesday Musical, Thomas Bacher, Cynthia Harrison, Sharon Cebula

University of Akron Press Publications

The Tuesday Musical Club was founded in 1887 by thirteen young Akron women who had an overwhelming desire to share their love of music. With further support of Gertrude Penfield Seiberling, the wife of industrialist Frank Seiberling, the organization grew like many other musical organizations across the country. Unlike similar clubs, the Akron-based entity continued to expand and is one of a very few that have survived. Among the artists who have appeared as a part of the rich history of Akron's Tuesday Musical Organization are Vladimir Horowitz, Artur Rubinstein, Yehudi Menuhin, Yascha Heifetz, Glenn Gould, Van Cliburn, Isaac Stern, …

"Listen To The Wild Discord": Jazz In The Chicago Defender And The Louisiana Weekly, 1925-1929, Sarah A. Waits

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

This essay will use the views of two African American newspaper columnists, E. Belfield Spriggins of the Louisiana Weekly and Dave Peyton of the Chicago Defender, to argue that though New Orleans and Chicago both occupied a primary place in the history of jazz, in many ways jazz was initially met with ambivalence and suspicion. The struggle between the desire to highlight black achievement in music and the effort to adhere to tenets of middle class respectability play out in their columns. Despite historiographical writings to the contrary, these issues of the influence of jazz music on society were …

Resisting The "Sound Of Muzak": Alienating Effects In Conceptual Progressive Music, Bryan Michael Mcculley-Mendoza

Theses Digitization Project

This study was to showed how popular music is used to create passive consumers driven by a need for instant gratification, rather than objective, active listeners. It then discusses how "conceptual progressive music", demonstrated my Porcupine Tree and Pink Floyd rebels against this mass culture nature.

Louis Armstrong, Gene H. Anderson

Music Faculty Publications

Despite his lifelong claim of 4 July 1900 as his birthday, Armstrong was actually born on 4 August 1901 as recorded on a baptismal certificate discovered after his death. Although calling himself “Louis Daniel Armstrong” in his 1954 autobiography, he denied knowledge of his middle name or its origin. Nevertheless, evidence of “Daniel” being a family name is strong: Armstrong's paternal great-great-grandfather, a third generation slave brought from Tidewater Virginia for sale in New Orleans in 1818, was named Daniel Walker, as was his son, Armstrong's great-grandfather. The latter's wife, Catherine Walker, sponsored her great-grandson's baptism at the family's home …

Unlocking The Paradox Of Christian Metal Music, Eric S. Strother

Theses and Dissertations--Music

In 1984, Stryper released its first album The Yellow and Black Attack and introduced audiences to a different kind of heavy metal. Instead of lyrics about sex, alcohol, and Satan, Stryper sang about Jesus, salvation, and God. While there were a number of fans ready for this change more were not. Members of the Church as well as members of the metal subculture were in agreement that Christianity and heavy metal were incompatible. Despite these objections, however, more bands emerged, and Christian metal became a significant genre within the Christian music industry. These bands presented Christian-oriented lyrics within the full …