Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments
Introduction: Toward a History of Liveness 1. Selling the Nightingale: Jenny Lind, P.T. Barnum, and the Management of the American Crowd
2. Staging the Spiritual: The Fisk Jubilee Singers and the Postbellum Public Sphere
3. Economies of Performance: Tony Pastor, Ernest Hogan, and the Emergence of Vaudeville
4. Remaking Liveness: The Social Geography of Early Jazz 5. Culture High and Low: Reinventing Concert Music
6. The Perfect Package: Rock 'n' Roll Concerts in the 1950s
7. Crowds, Chaos, and Community: Music Festivals from Newport to New Orleans
8. The Politics of Scale: Arenas, Stadiums, and the Industrialization of Liveness
9. Staging Hip-Hop: Race, Rap, and the Remapping of Musical Performance Conclusion: A Homecoming Index

About the Author

Steve Waksman is Elsie Irwin Sweeney Professor of Music at Smith College, Massachusetts. His publications include the books Instruments of Desire: The Electric Guitar and the Shaping of Musical Experience (1999), and This Ain't the Summer of Love: Conflict and Crossover in Heavy Metal and Punk (2009), the latter of which was awarded the 2010 Woody Guthrie Award for best scholarly book on popular music by the U.S. chapter
of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM-US). With Reebee Garofalo, he is the co-author of the sixth edition of the rock history textbook, Rockin' Out: Popular Music in the U.S.A. (2014), and with Andy Bennett, he
co-edited the SAGE Handbook of Popular Music (2015). His essays have appeared in such collections as the Cambridge Companion to the Guitar, Listen Again: A Momentary History of Pop, Metal Rules the Globe, and The Relentless Pursuit of Tone: Timbre and Popular Music. On WRSI radio, The River in Western Massachusetts, he can be heard as the "Doctor of Rock," offering bits of popular music history in support of Black History Month and Women's History Month.

Reviews

Throughout, Waksman tilts the frame of music history and changes the image utterly. Open Live Music in America to any of its 692 pages and something will catch your interest. There are endless parallels with the music business of today, at every stage of the journey.
*Pollstar*

Documenting American live music history, Steve Waksman tours archives from Jenny Lind to Beyoncé, vaudeville circuits to open-air festivals. Our theaters and arenas, he shows, became the other place (alongside recordings) for new cultural forms to seek social ratification. This is the Springsteen at the Meadowlands of music books: a sweeping testimonial.
*Eric Weisbard, author of Top 40 Democracy and Songbooks: The Literature of American Popular Music*

I've spent countless hours of my music-critic life absorbing music in the company of strangers—in tiny clubs and ornate theaters, on muddy fields and in sports arenas. Until now, no book has existed that fully documents the complexity and impact of music's live side. From the antebellum craze over touring Swedish opera star Jenny Lind to Beyoncé's Movement for Black Lives-powered 2018 Homecoming celebration, Steve Waksman illuminates the ways live music has not merely reflected but shaped the American body politic. This is the kind of book you won't want to put down unless you're running out to a show.
*Ann Powers, author of Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black and White, Body and Soul in American Music*

Waksman makes a powerful case for how indispensable and vital live music has been for the human experience.
*Wendy Fonarow, Journal of Popular Music Studies*

This is a monumental book, dazzling in its ambition and breadth.
*Martin Cloonan, Popular Music*

This is a timely book,... Extensively documented, this is a definitive resource on the evolution of live music in the US. Essential. All readers.
*Choice*

Extensively documented, this is a definitive resource on the evolution of live music in the US.
*R. J. Phillips, CHOICE*

Collective experience concertgoers share, this history recognizes the significant roles of those who work behind the scenes choosing performance venues, promoting concerts, designing stage and sound elements, and otherwise supporting live performances.
*P. D. Sanders, Choice*

This history recognizes the significant roles of those who work behind the scenes choosing performance venues, promoting concerts, designing stage and sound elements, and otherwise supporting live performances.
*Choice*

Live Music in America: A History from Jenny Lind to Beyoncé, Waksman clarifies many of the significant developments and acknowledges many well-known and lesser-known individuals who enabled the live-music industry to progress, and like the recording industry, to transform US culture. His compelling history would be an excellent addition to any high school, public, or university library-and will appeal to anyone interested in live music in the US, as well as the history of US music, music technology, and the music industry. Waksman has done an admirable job of taking a complicated topic and making it comprehensible.
*Chris Durman, Notes: the Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association.*