Recorded Music in American Life The Phonograph and Popular Memory, 1890-1945

Have records, compact discs, and other sound reproduction equipment merely provided American listeners with pleasant diversions, or have more important historical and cultural influences flowed through them? Do recording machines simply capture what's already out there, or is the music somehow transformed in the process of documentation and dissemination? How would our lives be different without these machines? Such questions arise when we stop taking for granted both the phenomenon of recorded music and the phonograph itself.

William Howland Kenney is Professor of History and American Studies at Kent State University. He is also a jazz clarinetist and the author of Chicago Jazz: A Cultural History (OUP, 1993).