Presents a history of R&B music in the United States, profiles the genre's most notable past and present stars, and features song and album suggestions.

"Why has music so often served as an accomplice to transcendent expressions of gender? Why did the query "is he musical?" become code, in the twentieth century, for "is he gay?" Why is music so inherently queer? For Sasha Geffen, the answers lie, in part, in music's intrinsic quality of subliminal expression, which, through paradox and contradiction, allows rigid gender roles to fall away in a sensual and ambiguous exchange between performer and listener....

"THE MEANING OF SOUL discusses Black resilience and innovation through soul music and soul logic. Emily Lordi analyzes soul music and musicians from the 1960s, the 1970s, and after, bridging the different valences of soul as a way of moving through the world. The book encompasses soul's racial-political meanings while being sensitive to the details of the music and small details that shaped artists' lives and their relationship to soul. Chapter 1...

With a claim on artists from Jimmie Rodgers to Jason Isbell, Americana can be hard to define, but you know it when you hear it. John Milward s Americanaland is filled with the enduring performers and vivid stories that are at the heart of Americana. At base a hybrid of rock and country, Americana is also infused with folk, blues, R&B, bluegrass, and other types of roots music. Performers like Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Ray Charles, and Gram Parsons used...

"Listening to Bob Dylan seeks to reposition music and musical performance as central, essential aspects of Bob Dylan's art. Countering the tendency on the part of many scholars, journalists, fans, and casual listeners to regard Dylan primarily or even exclusively as a poet, or as a writer of lyrics, Starr presents Dylan's work as a complete package and a personal, unique synthesis of words, music, and performance. Starr aims to provide an unpretentious...

The first time Lynn Melnick listened to a Dolly Parton song in full, she was 14 years old, in the triage room of a Los Angeles hospital, waiting to be admitted to a drug rehab program. Already in her young life as a Jewish teen in the 1980s, she had been the victim of rape, abuse, and trauma, and her path to healing would be long. But in Parton’s words and music, she recognized a fellow survivor. In this powerful, incisive work of social and self-exploration,...

"Margo Price is from Aledo, in western Illinois; she's a Midwest farmer's daughter who moves to Nashville to become a musician. She waits tables, busks on the street, plays open mics, and talks to her uncle, Bob Fischer, a songwriter for dozens of country music legends. Uncle Bob's advice is to throw away her TV and do nothing but write. So, discouraged but determined, she does. Price writes constantly, but she's also trying to meet industry people...