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On Kathleen E. R. Smith's God Bless America: Tin Pan Alley Goes To War, Matthew Hein
On Kathleen E. R. Smith's God Bless America: Tin Pan Alley Goes To War, Matthew Hein
Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture
[First paragraph]
When America's Top 40 starts counting down, are those best-sellers of popular music the results of clever top-down marketing ploys and mass-psyche machinations, or do those lists reflect vox populi, making itself heard with its purchasing dollars above the din of preplanned propaganda? Kathleen E.R. Smith doesn't seem to care. Perhaps it isn't her place to consider such possibly unsolvable questions. Smith's place, apparently, is to research the records in disarray that detail an interesting phenomenon: that of the top-down attempt to create and popularize a great American fight song (assuming the role Over There filled during WWI) …