Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series
About the Book Series
Popular musicology embraces the field of musicological study that engages with popular forms of music, especially music associated with commerce, entertainment and leisure activities. The Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series aims to present the best research in this field. Authors are concerned with criticism and analysis of the music itself, as well as locating musical practices, values and meanings in cultural context. The focus of the series is on popular music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with a remit to encompass the entirety of the world’s popular music.
Critical and analytical tools employed in the study of popular music are being continually developed and refined in the twenty-first century. Perspectives on the transcultural and intercultural uses of popular music have enriched understanding of social context, reception and subject position. Popular genres as distinct as reggae, township, bhangra, and flamenco are features of a shrinking, transnational world. The series recognizes and addresses the emergence of mixed genres and new global fusions, and utilizes a wide range of theoretical models drawn from anthropology, sociology, psychoanalysis, media studies, semiotics, postcolonial studies, feminism, gender studies and queer studies.
The British Folk Revival
2nd Edition
By Michael Brocken
August 26, 2022
Almost 20 years ago Michael Brocken created from his doctoral research, what became both a seminal and contested volume concerning the social mores surrounding the British Folk Revival up to that point in time: The British Folk Revival 1944–2002. In this long-overdue second edition he revisits not ...
Another Song for Europe: Music, Taste, and Values in the Eurovision Song Contest
1st Edition
By Ivan Raykoff
May 30, 2022
The Eurovision Song Contest is famous for its camp spectacles and political intrigues, but what about its actual music? With more than 1,500 songs in over 50 languages and a wide range of musical styles since it began in 1956, Eurovision features the most musically and linguistically diverse ...
Driving Identities: At the Intersection of Popular Music and Automotive Culture
1st Edition
By Ken McLeod
December 13, 2021
Driving Identities examines long-standing connections between popular music and the automotive industry and how this relationship has helped to construct and reflect various socio-cultural identities. It also challenges common assumptions regarding the divergences between industry and art, and ...
The Tragic Odes of Jerry Garcia and The Grateful Dead: Mystery Dances in the Magic Theater
1st Edition
By Brent Wood
December 13, 2021
The Tragic Odes of Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead is a multifaceted study of tragedy in the group’s live performances showing how Garcia brought about catharsis through dance by leading songs of grief, mortality, and ironic fate in a collective theatrical context.This musical, literary, and ...
Beggars Banquet and the Rolling Stones' Rock and Roll Revolution: ‘They Call My Name Disturbance'
1st Edition
Edited
By Russell Reising
August 02, 2021
The Rolling Stones’ Beggars Banquet is one of the seminal albums in rock history. Arguably it not only marks the advent of the ‘mature’ sound of the Rolling Stones but lays out a new blueprint for an approach to blues-based rock music that would endure for several decades. From its title to the ...
Women in the Studio: Creativity, Control and Gender in Popular Music Sound Production
1st Edition
By Paula Wolfe
January 04, 2021
The field of popular music production is overwhelmingly male dominated. Here, Paula Wolfe discusses gendered notions of creativity and examines the significant under-representation of women in studio production. Wolfe brings an invaluable perspective as both a working artist-producer and as a ...
Legacies of Ewan MacColl: The Last Interview
1st Edition
By Giovanni Vacca, Allan F. Moore
September 30, 2020
Ewan MacColl is widely recognized as a key figure in the English folk revival, who tried to convey traditional music to a mass audience. Dominant in the movement during the 1950s and much of the 1960s, his position has come under attack in more recent years from some scholars. While it would be ...
Litpop: Writing and Popular Music
1st Edition
By Rachel Carroll, Adam Hansen
September 30, 2020
Bringing together exciting new interdisciplinary work from emerging and established scholars in the UK and beyond, Litpop addresses the question: how has writing past and present been influenced by popular music, and vice versa? Contributions explore how various forms of writing have had a crucial ...
Popular Music Matters: Essays in Honour of Simon Frith
1st Edition
By Lee Marshall, Dave Laing
September 30, 2020
Simon Frith has been one of the most important figures in the emergence and subsequent development of popular music studies. From his earliest academic publication, The Sociology of Rock (1978), through to his recent work on the live music industry in the UK, in his desire to ’take popular music ...
Post-War French Popular Music: Cultural Identity and the Brel-Brassens-Ferré Myth
1st Edition
By Adeline Cordier
September 30, 2020
Jacques Brel, Georges Brassens and Léo Ferré are three emblematic figures of post-war French popular music who have been constantly associated with each other by the public and the media. They have been described as the epitome of chanson, and of 'Frenchness'. But there is more to the trio than a ...
Status Quo: Mighty Innovators of 70s Rock
1st Edition
By Andrew Cope
September 30, 2020
Status Quo were one of the most successful, influential and innovative bands of the 1970s. During the first half of the decade, they wrote, recorded and performed a stream of inventive and highly complex rock compositions, developed 12 bar forms and techniques in new and fascinating ways, and ...
The History of Live Music in Britain, Volume II, 1968-1984: From Hyde Park to the Hacienda
1st Edition
By Simon Frith, Matt Brennan, Martin Cloonan, Emma Webster
September 30, 2020
To date, there has been a significant gap in work on the social history of music in Britain from 1950 to the present day. The three volumes of Live Music in Britain address this gap and do so through a unique prism—that of live music. The key theme of the books is the changing nature of the live ...