4 INTRODUCTIONdefend its subgenre against others, whether arguing the relative merits of dark
ambient and experimental dub or defending psychobilly from the proponents
of cow punk.
But such overenthusiastic categorizing distorts the picture of how most peo-
ple in the United States actually experience music. In truth, hardly anyone is
holed up in one tiny subgenre. In fact, the meaning of the term genre is itself dif-
fi cult to pin down. Does it describe the sound of the music, or how it functions in
society (church music, dance music, etc.)? Or does it have more to do with who is
making and listening to it? By any of these measures, the boundaries of genres
are permeable, to say the least.
Most of us encounter many different kinds of music in our daily lives. W hat’s
more, most of us enjoy more than one kind of music; if you don’t believe that,
check your friends’ playlists—even the most diehard metalhead or techno lover
will have a few surprising outliers. Moreover, as suggested by the prevalence of
hyphens and slashes in the names of the AllMusic categories, music genres do
not exist in a vacuum but are constantly interacting with one another. That’s
because musicians tend to enjoy the company of other musicians, both socially
and professionally, and are inclined to listen to each other’s work. It is these
interconnections and interactions that we the authors fi nd fascinating about
America’s music.
For that reason, this book approaches music making in the United States as
one unifi ed, albeit highly variegated, culture. The best way to understand our
nation’s music, we feel, is by studying its historical development across the cen-
turies. It is true, of course, that certain divisions may be drawn within American
music—if not 440 subgenres, then at least the three broad categories of classical,
popular, and folk music that we have adopted as the underlying typology of this
book. But even here, as we will explore in later chapters, those distinctions have
more to do with the contrasting goals and ideals, both social and aesthetic, of the
musicians creating the music and the audiences listening or dancing to it than
with hard-and-fast stylistic boundaries. And sometimes the similarities between
musical styles are more important than any surface differences.
The organization of this book, then, is roughly chronological, dealing fi rst
with the time from the arrival of Europeans through the Civil War, then the
period between that war and the end of World War I, the decades between the
two world wars, and fi nally the decades from the 1940s to the present. Although
some individual chapters may focus on only one of the three broad categories
of music, classical, popular, or folk, to the momentary exclusion of the other
two, neighboring chapters guarantee that none of the categories stays out of
the reader’s attention for long. Treated in this way, American music can be seen
to be characterized, throughout its history, by lively interactions between folk,
popular, and classical spheres. American music, in fact, is much like the type
of cooking preferred by the hero of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Huck doesn’t care for meals in which “everything was cooked by itself.” Better,
he says, to cook everything in one big pot: “In a barrel of odds and ends it is dif-
ferent; things get mixed up, and the juice kind of swaps around, and the things
go better.”
This book examines how musical juices kind of swap around. We’re with
Huck.172028_00b_001-017_INTRO_r3_ko.indd 4 23/01/13 9:47 AM