Breaking Records: 100 Years of Hits

Description

IBreaking Records gives a narrative history of American popular music and the pop music industry. Organised by decade, each chapter gives an overview of the major developments, technologically, commercially, and musically, for all types of popular music making. Technological developments, from the birth of radio and the phonograph to MP3 and burning CDs, are discussed in relation to how they affected musicians and the industry itself. Key performers and their major hits are profiled by decade. This is a compelling story of how business and art have interacted, and sometimes clashed, through a century of new musical developments.

William Ruhlmann is a well-known writer on American popular music, and a regular contributor to several journals and trade magazines devoted to pop music history and culture. He was a consulting editor to Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, Centennial Edition, and has authored several books on popular music performers, including Barbra Streisand and Chicago. He resides in New York City.

"When music critics and fans debate such lofty imponderables as "the greatest records of all time" or "the most influential artists ever," they are necessarily referring to the vast library of recorded sound produced during the 20th Century. Few writers have the knowledge or wherewithal to take on a span of time that delivered everyone from Louis Armstrong to Miles Davis, Robert Johnson to Led Zeppelin, Bing Crosby to the Beatles and onward--Ellington to Elvis, Hank to Hendrix, Coltrane to Cobain. William Ruhlmann has managed, in a single volume, to encapsulate virtually the entire history of recorded popular music, from the age of the wax cylinder to the advent of the MP3. It's a truly remarkable tale, told in lively, informative prose that encourages discovery and compels the reader to marvel."-Jeff Tamarkin, author of "Got a Revolution: The Turbulent Flight of Jefferson Airplane