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A voice without a face: popular music and the phonograph in the 1890s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 November 2008

Dave Laing
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Extract

While the rock'n'roll era, dance bands, country and the blues have been the subject of detailed and analytical histories, the 1890s, those formative years of music-recording, still await adequate and rigorous scrutiny. The standard (and only) history of the recording process remains Roland Gelatt's The Fabulous Phonograph, whose first edition appeared in 1955. But while Gelatt's foreword promisingly notes that ‘the history of the phonograph is at once the history of an invention, an industry and a musical instrument’, his book seldom rises above a journalistic narrative. It is also marred by an ill-concealed bias towards the classical repertoire and against popular musics.

Type
Research Article
Information
Popular Music , Volume 10 , Issue 1 , January 1991 , pp. 1 - 9
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

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