Making Music Male
How did record collecting and stereophile culture come to exclude women as consumers and experts?
Reggae in Australia
In the 1970s, Willie Brim, a member of the Buluwai people, learned about Peter Tosh and Bob Marley from hippies who lived near his community. And the joy began.
“It’s Tight Like That”
A "dirty" song recorded by Georgia Tom and Tampa Red in 1928 launched the "hokum" blues.
Tape Heads
The Mellotron, an electronic keyboard of recorded samples, heralded the digital age, and its use in “Strawberry Fields Forever” changed pop music history.
Honey Cocaine’s Unexpected Cambodian Canadian Life Story
The Toronto rapper embraces a patois-inflected “bad gal” image to tell a deeply personal story about historical violence.
The Bossa Nova Craze
In the early 1960s, bossa nova was hugely popular in the US thanks to its reinvention as a social dance and its connections with upper-class culture.
Tech in the Classroom in the 1910s
American music teacher Frances E. Clark helped the Victor Corporation bring recorded music into classrooms, overcoming educators’ distrust of the technology.
The Flood Behind Bessie Smith’s “Back-Water Blues”
The Mississippi River flood that Smith allegedly memorialized happened weeks after she'd written and released her song. Where was the real “Back Water”?
Keeping Scores: Unearthing the Works of Black Women Composers
Black women composers have been active in the US since at least the mid-nineteenth century, yet they’re largely omitted from scholarship on women musicians.