REVOLUTIONS IN AMERICAN MUSIC Three Decades That Changed a Country and Its Sounds

This detailed and well-organized account of American music's most prominent evolutionary decades--the 1840s, 1920s, and 1950s-- provides a fascinating overview of the way popular music changed in response to a variety of factors over the past 180 years. While artists arriving from Europe were influential at the start of the 1800s, music also came to change because of well-established ethnic groups, the visceral power of American culture in the 1920s, and the unmistakable impact of jazz and popular Black artists on pop music in the 1950s. John McLain's enunciation patterns keep everything clear. Although they don't have enough dramatic variation to highlight the broad thematic shifts in this rich cultural history, his baritone pitch patterns sound natural and pleasing in themselves. T.W. © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine [Published: AUGUST 2024]