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These materials are found within the Olin Library's collections and include books, e-books, DVDs, and other formats that can be checked out with your R-card.
Selected Books
Blues Legacies and Black Feminism by
From one of this country's most important intellectuals comes a brilliant analysis of the blues tradition that examines the careers of three crucial black women blues singers through a feminist lens. Angela Davis provides the historical, social, and political contexts with which to reinterpret the performances and lyrics of Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday as powerful articulations of an alternative consciousness profoundly at odds with mainstream American culture. The works of Rainey, Smith, and Holiday have been largely misunderstood by critics. Overlooked, Davis shows, has been the way their candor and bravado laid the groundwork for an aesthetic that allowed for the celebration of social, moral, and sexual values outside the constraints imposed by middle-class respectability. Through meticulous transcriptions of all the extant lyrics of Rainey and Smith--published here in their entirety for the first time--Davis demonstrates how the roots of the blues extend beyond a musical tradition to serve as a conciousness-raising vehicle for American social memory. A stunning, indispensable contribution to American history, as boldly insightful as the women Davis praises, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism is a triumph.
Call Number: ML3521 .D355 1999ISBN: 0679771263Publication Date: 1999-01-26
A City Called Heaven by
In A City Called Heaven, Robert M. Marovich follows gospel music from early hymns and camp meetings through its growth into the sanctified soundtrack of the city's mainline black Protestant churches. Marovich mines print media, ephemera, and hours of interviews with artists, ministers, and historians--as well as relatives and friends of gospel pioneers--to recover forgotten singers, musicians, songwriters, and industry leaders. He also examines the entrepreneurial spirit that fueled gospel music's rise to popularity and granted social mobility to a number of its practitioners. As Marovich shows, the music expressed a yearning for freedom from earthly pains, racial prejudice, and life's hardships. Yet it also helped give voice to a people--and lift a nation. A City Called Heaven celebrates a sound too mighty and too joyous for even church walls to hold.
Call Number: ML3187 .M36 2015ISBN: 9780252039102Publication Date: 2015-03-03
Democracy of Sound by
Democracy of Sound is the first book to examine music piracy in the United States from the dawn of sound recording to the rise of Napster and online file-sharing. It asks why Americans stopped thinking of copyright as a monopoly - a kind of necessary evil-and came to see intellectual propertyas sacrosanct and necessary for the prosperity of an "information economy." Recordings only became eligible for federal copyright in 1972, following years of struggle between pirates, musicians, songwriters, broadcasters, and record companies over the right to own sound.Beginning in the 1890s, the book follows the competing visions of Americans who proposed ways to keep obscure and noncommercial music in circulation, preserve out-of-print recordings from extinction, or simply make records more freely and cheaply available. Genteel jazz collectors swapped and copiedrare records in the 1930s; radicals pitched piracy as a mortal threat to capitalism in the 1960s, while hip-hop DJs from the 1970s onwards reused and transformed sounds to create a freer and less regulated market for mixtapes. Each challenged the idea that sound could be owned by anyone. Theconflict led to the contemporary stalemate between those who believe that "information wants to be free" and those who insist that economic prosperity depends on protecting intellectual property.The saga of piracy also shows how the dubbers, bootleggers, and tape traders forged new social networks that ultimately gave rise to the social media of the twenty first century. Democracy of Sound is a colorful story of people making law, resisting law, and imagining how law might shape the futureof music, from the Victrola and pianola to iTunes and BitTorrent.
Call Number: KF3035 .C86 2013ISBN: 9780199858224Publication Date: 2013-04-05
Liner Notes for the Revolution by
Winner of the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award, Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Winner of the American Book Award, Before Columbus Foundation Winner of the PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Award Winner of the MAAH Stone Book Award A Pitchfork Best Music Book of the Year A Rolling Stone Best Music Book of the Year "Brooks traces all kinds of lines, finding unexpected points of connection...inviting voices to talk to one another, seeing what different perspectives can offer, opening up new ways of looking and listening by tracing lineages and calling for more space." --New York Times An award-winning Black feminist music critic takes us on an epic journey through radical sound from Bessie Smith to Beyoncé. Daphne A. Brooks explores more than a century of music archives to examine the critics, collectors, and listeners who have determined perceptions of Black women on stage and in the recording studio. How is it possible, she asks, that iconic artists such as Aretha Franklin and Beyoncé exist simultaneously at the center and on the fringe of the culture industry? Liner Notes for the Revolution offers a startling new perspective on these acclaimed figures--a perspective informed by the overlooked contributions of other Black women concerned with the work of their musical peers. Zora Neale Hurston appears as a sound archivist and a performer, Lorraine Hansberry as a queer Black feminist critic of modern culture, and Pauline Hopkins as America's first Black female cultural commentator. Brooks tackles the complicated racial politics of blues music recording, song collecting, and rock and roll criticism. She makes lyrical forays into the blues pioneers Bessie Smith and Mamie Smith, as well as fans who became critics, like the record-label entrepreneur and writer Rosetta Reitz. In the twenty-first century, pop superstar Janelle Monae's liner notes are recognized for their innovations, while celebrated singers Cécile McLorin Salvant, Rhiannon Giddens, and Valerie June take their place as cultural historians. With an innovative perspective on the story of Black women in popular music--and who should rightly tell it--Liner Notes for the Revolution pioneers a long overdue recognition and celebration of Black women musicians as radical intellectuals.
Call Number: ML3556 .B74 2021ISBN: 9780674052819Publication Date: 2021-02-23
St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture by
The St. James Encyclopedia Of Popular Culture, 2nd ed., updates and augments the over ten-year-old first edition. It includes 3, 036 signed essays (300 of them new), alphabetically arranged, and written or reviewed by subject experts and edited to form a consistent, readable, and straightforward reference. The entries cover topics and persons in major areas of popular culture: film; music; print culture; social life; sports; television and radio; and art and performance (which include theater, dance, stand-up comedy, and other live performance). The entries analyze each topic or persons significance in and relevance to American popular culture; in addition to basic factual information, readers will gain perspective on the cultural context in which the topic or person has importance.
Call Number: Online AccessISBN: 9781558628472Publication Date: 2013-05-07
The Storyteller by
The #1 New York Times Bestseller * Named one of Variety's Best Music Books of 2021 * Included in Audible's Best of The Year list * A Business Insider Best Memoirs of 2021 * One of NME's Best Music Books of 2021 So, I've written a book. Having entertained the idea for years, and even offered a few questionable opportunities ("It's a piece of cake! Just do 4 hours of interviews, find someone else to write it, put your face on the cover, and voila!") I have decided to write these stories just as I have always done, in my own hand. The joy that I have felt from chronicling these tales is not unlike listening back to a song that I've recorded and can't wait to share with the world, or reading a primitive journal entry from a stained notebook, or even hearing my voice bounce between the Kiss posters on my wall as a child. This certainly doesn't mean that I'm quitting my day job, but it does give me a place to shed a little light on what it's like to be a kid from Springfield, Virginia, walking through life while living out the crazy dreams I had as young musician. From hitting the road with Scream at 18 years old, to my time in Nirvana and the Foo Fighters, jamming with Iggy Pop or playing at the Academy Awards or dancing with AC/DC and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, drumming for Tom Petty or meeting Sir Paul McCartney at Royal Albert Hall, bedtime stories with Joan Jett or a chance meeting with Little Richard, to flying halfway around the world for one epic night with my daughters...the list goes on. I look forward to focusing the lens through which I see these memories a little sharper for you with much excitement.
Call Number: ML420.G864 A3 2021ISBN: 9780063076099Publication Date: 2021-10-05
Streaming Media
You can also search through Olin's streaming media databases to access films and albums not available elsewhere.
- Films on Demand This link opens in a new window
Films On Demand is a comprehensive, curriculum-focused video subscription providing unlimited access to thousands of videos. With over 26,000 titles and counting, Films on Demand includes Oscar, Emmy, and Peabody award–winning documentaries and A-list performances spanning the arts.
- Kanopy Streaming Video This link opens in a new window
Provides access to videos that can be streamed and viewed instantly. Collections include feature films, educational documentaries, and rare archival footage on a variety of topics.
Videos available in Kanopy that are not part of the library’s collection can be requested, but there are added costs associated for the Library budget for each film. For this reason, requests will be reviewed and some may be denied or delayed. - Music Online: Listening This link opens in a new windowMusic Online: Listening is a multidisciplinary collection of audiovisual content from over 500 producers and distributors around the world. TIP Click on Browse Subjects, then expand American Studies to find Blues, African American Music, R&B, and more.
Browsing the Shelves
The majority of music books are stored on the 3rd floor, while Oversize books can be found on the 1st floor.
Books are arranged by subject within these sections:
M Music (General)
ML Literature on music
ML 385-429 are Biographies of musicians
MT Instruction and study (of music)