Skip Nav Destination
Refiguring American Music
Real Men Don't Sing: Crooning in American Culture
Duke University Press
Copyright:
This content is made freely available by the publisher. It may not be redistributed or altered. All rights reserved.
ISBN electronic:
978-0-8223-7532-6
Publication date:
2015
Book Chapter
Putting Over a Song: Crooning, Performance, and Audience in the Acoustic Era, 1880–1920
-
Published:September 2015
This chapter establishes the historical context and conditions for crooning’s increasing centrality in American popular music, specifically its development from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when it was used to describe the sound made by mammies and mothers, to its use as a term of courtship in the 1910s and 1920s. The industrial developments and social dynamics that enabled and accompanied this evolution are discussed: the shift from minstrelsy to vaudeville; the rise of Tin Pan Alley’s new publishing model and changes in song content to increasingly focus on the romantic and erotic; the role of black song writers...
This content is only available as PDF.
You do not currently have access to this chapter.
Advertisement