In 1895, East Topsham's Charles Ross Taggart set his sights on becoming a traveling musical humorist. His uproarious ventriloquist and musical performances brought rave reviews in his Vermont community. He was soon thrust into the world of the lyceum and Chautauqua circuits, journeying far and wide across North America. His forty-three-year career spanned some of America's most exciting and most difficult times, and his folk performances--especially his beloved "Old Country Fiddler"--brought smiles to all who experienced them. He was also an innovator in the entertainment industry, recording his music and humor, as well as appearing in one of the first "talkie" films. Discover the remarkable story of "The Man from Vermont" who helped Americans forget their troubles when they needed it most with his mimicry, stories and fiddling.

Between 1895 and 1920, the United States saw a sharp increase in commercial sound recording, the first mass medium of home entertainment. As companies sought to discover what kinds of records would appeal to consumers, they turned to performance forms already familiar to contemporary audiences--sales pitches, oratory, sermons, and stories. In A Most Valuable Medium, Richard Bauman explores the practical problems that producers and performers confronted when adapting familiar oral genres to this innovative medium of sound recording. He also examines how audiences responded to these modified and commoditized presentations. Featuring audio examples throughout and offering a novel look at the early history of sound recording, A Most Valuable Medium reveals how this new technology effected monumental change in the ways we receive information.

Merging scholarly insight with a professional guitarist's sense of the musical life, Yankee Twang delves into the rich tradition of country & western music that is played and loved in the mill towns and cities of the American northeast. Scholar and musician Clifford R. Murphy draws on a wealth of ethnographic material, interviews, and encounters with recorded and live music to reveal the central role of country and western in the social lives and musical activity of working-class New Englanders. As Murphy shows, an extraordinary multiculturalism sets New England country and western music apart from other regional and national forms. Once segregated at work and worship, members of different ethnic groups used the country and western popularized on the radio and by barnstorming artists to come together at social events, united by a love of the music. Musicians, meanwhile, drew from the wide variety of ethnic musical traditions to create the New England style. But the music also gave--and gives--voice to working-class feeling. Murphy explores how the Yankee love of country and western emphasizes the western, reflecting the longing of many blue collar workers for the mythical cowboy's life of rugged but fulfilling individualism. Indeed, many New Englanders use country and western to comment on economic disenfranchisement and express their resentment of a mass media, government, and Nashville music establishment that they believe neither reflects their experiences nor considers them equal participants in American life.

In Segregating Sound, Karl Hagstrom Miller argues that the categories that we have inherited to think and talk about southern music bear little relation to the ways that southerners long played and heard music. Focusing on the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth, Miller chronicles how southern music—a fluid complex of sounds and styles in practice—was reduced to a series of distinct genres linked to particular racial and ethnic identities. The blues were African American. Rural white southerners played country music. By the 1920s, these depictions were touted in folk song collections and the catalogs of “race” and “hillbilly” records produced by the phonograph industry. Such links among race, region, and music were new. Black and white artists alike had played not only blues, ballads, ragtime, and string band music, but also nationally popular sentimental ballads, minstrel songs, Tin Pan Alley tunes, and Broadway hits. In a cultural history filled with musicians, listeners, scholars, and business people, Miller describes how folklore studies and the music industry helped to create a “musical color line,” a cultural parallel to the physical color line that came to define the Jim Crow South. Segregated sound emerged slowly through the interactions of southern and northern musicians, record companies that sought to penetrate new markets across the South and the globe, and academic folklorists who attempted to tap southern music for evidence about the history of human civilization. Contending that people’s musical worlds were defined less by who they were than by the music that they heard, Miller challenges assumptions about the relation of race, music, and the market.

Before radio and sound movies, early 20th century performers and lecturers traveled the nation providing entertainment and education to Americans thirsty for culture. These "chautauquas" brought politicians, activists, scholars, musical ensembles and theatrical productions to remote communities. A conduit for global perspectives and progressive ideas, these gatherings introduced issues like equal suffrage, prohibition and pure food laws to rural America. This book explores an overlooked yet influential movement in U.S. history, capturing the vagaries of speakers' and performers' lives on the road and their reception by audiences. Excerpts from lectures and plays portray a vibrant circuit that in a single summer drew 20 million in more than 9,000 towns.