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American Song and Struggle from Columbus to World War II Will Kaufman. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022. xviii + 511 pp. Illustrations. Index. ISBN: 978-1-31653-433-7.
From time to time publications have appeared dealing with popular music in America on a grand cross-temporal scale, sweeping across many successive periods of social, political, and cultural history. Sigmund Spaeth's now very dated A History of Popular Music in America, published shortly after the Second World War, is an early example. Quite different are Charles Hamm's Yesterdays and Daniel Kingman's American Music-. A Panorama, both first published in 1979, for while they each discussed various forms and genres of American music, they were together early examples of scholarly work that took popular music seriously, thus signalling the advent of popular music studies. Will Kaufman's new book follows in this tradition, covering as it does over five hundred years of American popular music and constituting a welcome addition to a now well-established field, but at the same time it differs from the examples just cited in that it has one single and abiding feature: its focus on song and struggle. This provides a unifying focus from start to finish and so avoids the...