Author : Armond Fields
Publisher : McFarland
Page : 217 pages
File Size : 13,49 MB
Release : 2007
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0786430540
"Pastor made contributions to the success of American vaudeville as a songwriter, variety performer, and theater owner. From his early success as the owner of Tony Pastor's Opera House to his role as "Little Man Tony", this work offers a look at Pastor'sr
Author : JoAnne O'Connell
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 497 pages
File Size : 40,54 MB
Release : 2016-09-29
Category : Music
ISBN : 1442253878
The Life and Songs of Stephen Foster offers an engaging reassessment of the life, politics, and legacy of the misunderstood father of American music. Once revered the world over, Foster’s plantation songs, like “Old Folks at Home” and “My Old Kentucky Home,” fell from grace in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement due to their controversial lyrics. Foster embraced the minstrel tradition for a brief time, refining it and infusing his songs with sympathy for slaves, before abandoning the genre for respectable parlor music. The youngest child in a large family, he grew up in the shadows of a successful older brother and his president brother-in-law, James Buchanan, and walked a fine line between the family’s conservative politics and his own pro-Lincoln sentiments. Foster lived most of his life just outside of industrial, smoke-filled Pittsburgh and wrote songs set in a pastoral South—unsullied by the grime of industry but tarnished by the injustice of slavery. Rather than defining Foster by his now-controversial minstrel songs, JoAnne O’Connell reveals a prolific composer who concealed his true feelings in his lyrics and wrote in diverse styles to satisfy the changing tastes of his generation. In a trenchant reevaluation of his NewYork Bowery years, O’Connell illustrates how Foster purposely abandoned the style for which he was famous to write lighthearted songs for newly popular variety stages and music halls. In the last years of his life, Foster’s new direction in songwriting stood in the vanguard of vaudeville and musical comedy to pave the way for the future of American popular music. His stylistic flexibility in the face of evolving audience preferences not only proves his versatility as a composer but also reveals important changes in the American music and publishing industries. An intimate biography of a complex, controversial, and now neglected composer, The Life and Songs of Stephen Foster is an important story about the father of American music. This invaluable portrait of the political, economic, social, racial, and gender issues of antebellum and Civil War America will appeal to history and music lovers of all generations.
Author : Elsie Irwin Sweeney Professor of Music Steve Waksman
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 705 pages
File Size : 17,35 MB
Release : 2022-09-13
Category : Music
ISBN : 0197570534
When the Swedish concert singer Jenny Lind toured the U.S. in 1850, she became the prototype for the modern pop star. Meanwhile, her manager, P.T. Barnum, became the prototype for another figure of enduring significance: the pop culture impresario. Starting with Lind's fabled U.S. tour and winding all the way into the twenty-first century, Live Music in America surveys the ongoing impact and changing conditions of live music performance in the U.S. It covers a range of historic performances, from the Fisk Jubilee Singers expanding the sphere of African American music in the 1870s, to Benny Goodman bringing swing to Carnegie Hall in 1938, to 1952's Moondog Coronation Ball in Cleveland - arguably the first rock and roll concert - to Beyoncé's boundary-shattering performance at the 2018 Coachella festival. More than that, the book details the roles played by performers, audiences, media commentators, and a variety of live music producers (promoters, agents, sound and stage technicians) in shaping what live music means and how it has evolved. Live Music in America connects what occurs behind the scenes to what takes place on stage to highlight the ways in which live music is very deliberately produced and does not just spontaneously materialize. Along the way, author Steve Waksman uses previously unstudied archival materials to shed new light on the origins of jazz, the emergence of rock 'n' roll, and the rise of the modern music festival.
Author : Parker Zellers
Publisher :
Page : 938 pages
File Size : 49,94 MB
Release : 1981
Category : Music-halls (Variety-theaters, cabarets, etc.)
ISBN :
Author : Anthony Slide
Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
Page : 649 pages
File Size : 46,20 MB
Release : 2012-03-12
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 1617032506
The Encyclopedia of Vaudeville provides a unique record of what was once America's preeminent form of popular entertainment from the late 1800s through the early 1930s. It includes entries not only on the entertainers themselves, but also on those who worked behind the scenes, the theatres, genres, and historical terms. Entries on individual vaudevillians include biographical information, samplings of routines and, often, commentary by the performers. Many former vaudevillians were interviewed for the book, including Milton Berle, Block and Sully, Kitty Doner, Fifi D'Orsay, Nick Lucas, Ken Murray, Fayard Nicholas, Olga Petrova, Rose Marie, Arthur Tracy, and Rudy Vallee. Where appropriate, entries also include bibliographies. The volume concludes with a guide to vaudeville resources and a general bibliography. Aside from its reference value, with its more than five hundred entries, The Encyclopedia of Vaudeville discusses the careers of the famous and the forgotten. Many of the vaudevillians here, including Jack Benny, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Jimmy Durante, W. C. Fields, Bert Lahr, and Mae West, are familiar names today, thanks to their continuing careers on screen. At the same time, and given equal coverage, are forgotten acts: legendary female impersonators Bert Savoy and Jay Brennan, the vulgar Eva Tanguay with her billing as “The I Don't Care Girl,” male impersonator Kitty Doner, and a host of “freak” acts.
Author : Laura MacDonald
Publisher : Springer
Page : 540 pages
File Size : 24,16 MB
Release : 2017-03-25
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 1137433086
This handbook is the first to provide a systematic investigation of the various roles of producers in commercial and not-for-profit musical theatre. Featuring fifty-one essays written by international specialists in the field, it offers new insights into the world of musical theatre, its creation and its promotion. Key areas of investigation include the lives and works of producers whose work is part of a US and worldwide musical theatre legacy, as well as the largely critically-neglected role of the musical theatre producer in the making, marketing, and performance of musicals. Also explored are the shifting roles of producers in musical theatre and their popular portrayals, offering a reader-friendly collection for fans, scholars, students, and practitioners of musical theatre alike.
Author : David M. Sutera
Publisher : Scarecrow Press
Page : 185 pages
File Size : 20,85 MB
Release : 2014-01-09
Category : Sports & Recreation
ISBN : 0810891786
Over the last couple of decades, minor league baseball games have shown substantial attendance figures, with more than forty-one million spectators in both 2010 and 2011. With all the high-tech, live-streaming, fast-paced entertainment available to consumers, what is it about minor league baseball that still holds appeal with today’s audiences? With access to major league games broadcast on countless cable networks, what draws fans to small stadiums to watch obscure players struggle to make the big time? Sports historian David M. Sutera set out to answer these questions by visiting fourteen minor league baseball parks around the country. In Vaudeville on the Diamond, Sutera discusses the lure of minor league baseball with fans, players, and team representatives, examining how teams have survived and thrived in today’s competitive entertainment world. Combining interviews with game-day observations, Sutera argues that minor league baseball’s key to survival lies in the creation of on- and off-field attractions that invoke the traditions of vaudeville with their unique and quirky spectacle. From inviting fans to participate in dizzy bat competitions and races against the mascot to featuring Star Wars theme nights and monkeys riding border collies, teams have created a multifaceted form of entertainment that transcends the game itself. Part study and part travelogue, Vaudeville on the Diamond features numerous photographs of on-field entertainment, showcasing the vaudevillian side of minor league baseball. A light-hearted and engaging look at the minor leagues, this book will appeal not only to scholars and students of popular culture, sports and leisure studies, and sports management but to all fans of baseball and minor league sports.
Author : Parker Zellers
Publisher :
Page : 190 pages
File Size : 28,89 MB
Release : 1971
Category : Entertainers
ISBN :
Author : Richard Anthony Baker
Publisher : Pen and Sword
Page : 304 pages
File Size : 23,97 MB
Release : 2014-05-31
Category : History
ISBN : 1783831189
The music hall ...had no place for reticence; it was downright, it shouted, it made noise, it enjoyed itself and made the people enjoy themselves as well.' W.J. MACQUEEN POPE??Music Hall lies at the root of all modern popular entertainment. With stars such as Marie Lloyd, Harry Lauder and Dan Leno, it reached its glorious, brassy height between 1890 and the First World War. In the first book on this subject for many years, Richard Anthony Baker whisks us off on a colourful and nostalgic tour of the rise and fall of British music hall.??At the beginning of the nineteenth century people sang traditional songs in taverns for entertainment. This was so popular that rooms started to be added to inns for shows to be staged, and, before long, songs were being specially composed and purpose-built theatres were springing up everywhere. ??Britain's working class had, for the first time, its own form of public entertainment and its own breed of stars. The colour and vitality attracted serious writers and artists, as well as the future Edward VII, and music hall became simultaneously the haunt of the working classes and the avant-garde.??Including stories of a clergyman who wrote music-hall sketches, a hall in Glasgow where luckless entertainers were pulled off stage by a long hooked pole, and Cockney dictionaries that helped Americans understand touring British performers, this book is a hugely engaging slice of social history, rich in humour, tragedy and bathos.??As featured on BBC Radio Lincolnshire and in the Sunderland Echo.
Author : Janet Muir
Publisher : Andrews UK Limited
Page : 188 pages
File Size : 25,54 MB
Release : 2014-06-26
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 1909183547
Everyone on deck! All hands on deck! Fire! Fire! Bring the hose quick! As the steamship lurched in the heavy seas, Harry Braham grabbed what clothes he could and struggled with the other terrified passengers to climb the ladders. On deck, with the rain lashing down and the wind howling, he gripped the rails of the ship tightly, trying to stay upright. With horror he saw the flames leaping high in the hold and he thought his time had come. It was June 1891. A music-hall star famous for his comic songs and his ability to ‘pull mugs', Harry - a seasoned traveler - was on his way from New York to his home in London, after a busy season appearing in a play by W H Crane. As the crew prepared the lifeboats, Harry looked back at his life - his apprenticeship with the Royal Christy Minstrels, his acclaimed tours of Australia and the USA, and his marriage to the vivacious but temperamental singer Lizzie Watson. Was this to be the end? In this well-researched and lively biography, full of fascinating social background, Janet Muir (Harry Braham's great-great-niece) brings to life the world of the Victorian music-hall and traces Harry’s career from minstrelsy through to ‘legitimate’ theatre and finally to moving pictures, where he landed a part in D W Griffith’s Birth of a Nation.
