San Antonio College Library

""Not since the late Leonard Bernstein has classical music had a combination salesman-teacher as irresistible as Kapilow."--Kansas City Star. Few people in recent memory have dedicated themselves as devotedly to the story of twentieth-century American music as Rob Kapilow, the composer, conductor, and host of the hit NPR music radio program, What makes it great? Now, in Listening for America, he turns his keen ear to the great American songbook, bringing...

Presents an overview of twentieth century popular music, documenting the careers of singers, composers, and lyricists from the 1920s through the 1960s, and the big bands and Broadway musicals that characterized the era.

Relating the blues to American social and literary history and Afro-American expressive culture, Houston A. Baker, Jr. offers the basis for a broader study of American culture at its "vernacular" level. With extensive reference to economic and historical facts and to the contributions of symbolic anthropology, Marxist criticism, semiotics, and deconstruction, he discusses, among others, Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, Zora Neale Hurston, Paul...