This book examines the interplay between recorded music and social, political, and economic forces in the United States in the era of the phonograph's rise and decline as the dominant medium of popular recorded sound, from the appearance of the first commercial recordings to the postwar years when the industry yielded its primacy to newer forms of mass media.
William Howland Kenney is Professor of History and American Studies at Kent State University. He is also a jazz clarinetist and the author of Chicago Jazz: A Cultural History (OUP, 1993).
