The crooner Rudy Vallée's soft, intimate, and sensual vocal delivery simultaneously captivated millions of adoring fans and drew harsh criticism from those threatened by his sensitive masculinity. Although Vallée and other crooners reflected the gender fluidity of late-1920s popular culture, their challenge to the Depression era's more conservative masculine norms led cultural authorities to stigmatize them as gender and sexual deviants. In Real Men Don't Sing Allison McCracken outlines crooning's history from its origins in minstrelsy through its development as the microphone sound most associated with white recording artists, band singers, and radio stars. She charts early crooners’ rise and fall between 1925 and 1934, contrasting Rudy Vallée with Bing Crosby to demonstrate how attempts to contain crooners created and dictated standards of white masculinity for male singers. Unlike Vallée, Crosby survived the crooner backlash by adapting his voice and persona to adhere to white middle-class masculine norms. The effects of these norms are felt to this day, as critics continue to question the masculinity of youthful, romantic white male singers. Crooners, McCracken shows, not only were the first pop stars: their short-lived yet massive popularity fundamentally changed American culture.

Congregational music can be an act of praise, a vehicle for theology, an action of embodied community, as well as a means to a divine encounter. This multidisciplinary anthology approaches congregational music as media in the widest sense - as a multivalent communication action with technological, commercial, political, ideological and theological implications, where processes of mediated communication produce shared worlds and beliefs. Bringing together a range of voices, promoting dialogue across a range of disciplines, each author approaches the topic of congregational music from his or her own perspective, facilitating cross-disciplinary connections while also showcasing a diversity of outlooks on the roles that music and media play in Christian experience. The authors break important new ground in understanding the ways that music, media and religious belief and praxis become ’lived theology’ in our media age, revealing the rich and diverse ways that people are living, experiencing and negotiating faith and community through music.

Singing has been a characteristic behaviour of humanity across several millennia. Chorus America (2009) estimated that 42.6 million adults and children regularly sing in one of 270,000 choruses in the US, representing more than 1:5 households. Similarly, recent European-based data suggest that more than 37 million adults take part in group singing. The Oxford Handbook of Singing is a landmark text on this topic. It is a comprehensive resource for anyone who wishes to know more about the pluralistic nature of singing. In part, the narrative adopts a lifespan approach, pre-cradle to senescence, to illustrate that singing is a commonplace behaviour which is an essential characteristic of our humanity. In the overall design of the Handbook, the chapter contents have been clustered into eight main sections, embracing fifty-three chapters by seventy-two authors, drawn from across the world, with each chapter illustrating and illuminating a particular aspect of singing. Offering a multi-disciplinary perspective embracing the arts and humanities, physical, social and clinical sciences, the book will be valuable for a broad audience within those fields.

Introduction - Archiving America: sound technology and musical representation - Opera cut short: from the castrato to the film fragment - Selling jazz short: Hollywood and the fantasy of musical agency - Opers and jazz in the score: toward a new spectatorship - Conclusion.

The legacy of Black queer composer, arranger, and pianist Billy Strayhorn (1915–1967) hovers at the edge of canonical jazz narratives. Queer Arrangements explores the ways in which Strayhorn's identity as an openly gay Black jazz musician shaped his career, including the creative roles he could assume and the dynamics between himself and his collaborators, most famously Duke Ellington, but also iconic singers such as Lena Horne and Ella Fitzgerald. This new portrait of Strayhorn combines critical, historically-situated close readings of selected recordings, scores, and performances with biography and cultural theory to pursue alternative interpretive jazz possibilities, Black queer historical routes, and sounds. By looking at jazz history through the instrument(s) of Strayhorn's queer arrangements, this book sheds new light on his music and on jazz collaboration at midcentury.

The historical and cultural context of fame in the twenty-first century Today, celebrity culture is an inescapable part of our media landscape and our everyday lives. This was not always the case. Over the past century, media technologies have increasingly expanded the production and proliferation of fame. Celebrity explores this revolution and its often under-estimated impact on American culture. Using numerous precedent-setting examples spanning more than one hundred years of media history, Douglas and McDonnell trace the dynamic relationship between celebrity and the technologies of mass communication that have shaped the nature of fame in the United States. Revealing how televised music fanned a worldwide phenomenon called “Beatlemania” and how Kim Kardashian broke the internet, Douglas and McDonnell also show how the media has shaped both the lives of the famous and the nature of the spotlight itself. Celebrity examines the production, circulation, and effects of celebrity culture to consider the impact of stars from Shirley Temple to Muhammad Ali to the homegrown star made possible by your Instagram feed. It maps ever-evolving media technologies as they adeptly interweave the lives of the rich and famous into ours: from newspapers and photography in the nineteenth century, to the twentieth century’s radio, cinema, and television, up to the revolutionary impact of the internet and social media. Today, mass media relies upon an ever-changing cast of celebrities to grab our attention and money, and new stars are conquering new platforms to build their adoring audiences and enhance their images. In the era of YouTube, Snapchat, and reality television, fame may be fleeting, but its impact on society is profound and lasting.

This book explores jazz as a cultural lodestone and source of critical inquiry for over a century.

The opening decades of the twentieth century witnessed a profound transformation in the history of modern sound media, with workers in U.S. film, radio, and record industries developing pioneering production methods and performance styles tailored to emerging technologies of electric sound reproduction that would redefine dominant forms and experiences of popular audio entertainment. Focusing on broadcasting's initial expansion during the 1920s, Making Radio explores the forms of creative labor pursued for the medium in the period prior to the better-known network era, assessing their role in shaping radio's identity and identifying affinities with parallel practices pursued for conversion-era film and phonography. Tracing programming forms adopted by early radio writers and programmers, production techniques developed by studio engineers, and performance styles cultivated by on-air talent, it shows how radio workers negotiated a series of broader industrial and cultural pressures to establish best practices for their medium that reshaped popular forms of music, drama, and public oratory and laid the foundation for a new era of electric sound entertainment.

The Routledge International Handbook of Gender Beliefs, Stereotype Threat, and Teacher Expectations presents, for the first time, the work of leading researchers exploring the synergies and interrelationships between these fields, and provides a catalytic platform for advancing theory, practice, policy and research from an integrated perspective. An understanding of how gender beliefs, stereotype threat, and teacher expectations interrelate is vital to creating safe, equitable, and encouraging learning spaces. The collection summarises how gender beliefs, stereotype threat, and teacher expectations act in association to influence gendered student achievement, engagement, and self-beliefs, and suggests ways toward rectifying their negative effects. The chapters are organised into four sections: Gender Beliefs, Identity, Stereotypes, and Student Futures Stereotype Threat Teacher Expectations Synergies and Solutions By examining synergies and solutions shared between the three fields, this book creates more meaningful, consistent, and permanent approaches to achieving gender identity safety, gendered scholastic equity, well-being, and positive futures for students. This comprehensive publication brings together cutting-edge research at the intersection of gender beliefs, stereotype threat, and teacher expectations. It is an essential reference for researchers and postgraduate students in education and gender studies as well as educational, social, and developmental psychology.