In the preface to this ground-breaking study, Steve Waksman tells us that he “began researching this book in the fall of 2008” (x). His journey through the history of live music in the United States thus started at the same time as mine through the history of live music in Britain. This was not, I think, purely coincidental. Both Waksman and I had academic backgrounds in rock studies; both of us had become uneasy that, in Waksman's words, “popular music scholars had treated the record industry as though it was the music industry writ large” (26). We both realized “that there was comparatively little work on live music as an industry or as a cultural phenomenon more generally” (26).
If, for both of us, “putting live music in the foreground [was to] see music history differently” (27), our histories had different tales to tell. We were studying different countries, of course, although Live Music in America can no more ignore the significance of European music, musicians, and entrepreneurs than the History of Live Music in Britain could ignore the significance of American music, musicians, and entrepreneurs. Other differences between our books reflect the pragmatics of academic research. My project was research council funded, the research proposal necessarily focused on a specific issue—changes in the business of live music promoters since 1950—and involved a research team. Our findings were published in three volumes, organized chronologically around “three eras of promotional activity.”Footnote 1 Waksman's project was an individual enterprise—and he is indeed an enterprising researcher, drawing on a magnificent range of archive material; his work was supported by sabbaticals, fellowships, and professorial research funds. His findings are presented in a single—if very large—volume, which covers the history of live music in America since 1850.
The result is a narrative tour de force. Waksman organizes his mass of material with infectious energy and delights deploying what he calls “creative juxtaposition … setting two seemingly disparate subjects in relation to each other to see how they might reveal something new” (28). His chapters are also organized chronologically, focusing on the people and issues specific to the time period discussed, but conceptually they develop through continual connections backward and forward. His book thus covers, chapter by chapter, Jenny Lind, P.T. Barnum, and the management of mid-nineteenth American crowds; the Fisk Jubilee Singers, George White, and the postbellum public sphere; Tony Pastor, Ernest Hogan, vaudeville, and the economies of performance; the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, Mamie Smith, dance floors, and the social geography of early jazz; Sol Hurok, Norman Granz, and the reinvention of concert music; Irvin Feld, Alan Freed, and the packaging of rock ‘n’ roll; the Newport and Woodstock Festivals, chaos, and community; Jerry Weintraub, Frank Barsalona, arenas, stadiums, and the political economy of scale; Russell Simmons, Jay-Z, race, rap, and the remapping of musical performance; Beyoncé, Coachella, and the control of public space.
As Waksman shows, the history of live music is not linear but involves, rather, something like the unraveling of a tapestry: Its threads are tangled up in different timelines. Live musical performances have always needed spaces in which musicians and audiences can gather; what changes is how those spaces are configured, what musicians play, and how audiences listen. There have always been concert organizers, but in ever-changing commercial, political, and technological circumstances. Musicians’ accounts of touring the United States are much the same, from Jenny Lind to the Rolling Stones, even as the means of travel, the design of the venues, and the technologies of stage craft had been transformed.
To begin with, then, Live Music in America is an instructive history of live music commerce in which Waksman describes the continuous interplay of supposedly different music worlds and the mutual dependence of live and mediated musical experiences. He shows the practical impossibility of treating classical and popular music commerce separately and draws attention to the overlapping stories of the various forms of vernacular American music. Waksman notes, for example, booking agent Dick Alen's comment that “the early rhythm and blues agents are the ones who invented the rock ‘n’ roll business of how to tour” (310). Also he quotes Def Jam records’ Russell Simmons saying thirty years later:
Once on the road, you meet all the record retailers and learn their business when your act stops by to sign autographs. When the act does radio interviews in cities they perform in, you meet all the radio programmers. So on tour you learn retail, radio marketing and promotion … All that stuff can't be learned inside a building, because when you work at a label you can only do one job at a time. The 1984 Fresh Fest tour was a triumph of being locked out of the building (504).
Waksman discusses the way Frank Barsalona (who launched his Premier Talent agency for the new generation of pop and rock acts in 1964) developed what is often taken to be a new sort of collaboration between agents, promoters, artists, and their managers in building the careers of rock acts and their audiences:
What I try to look for is an act like Foghat that is a terribly uncomplicated act, a high-energy act … There is no way that Foghat can antagonize anybody in the audience. There are people who might not like them, but they cannot bomb. So Foghat should play for as many people as possible. If they play for 10,000 people, they've got to have 2,000 like them and 200–300 who are fans. I think nothing of a new act, a good act, taking a good year-and-a-half to break (441).
Barsalona's thinking here echoes the thinking of his predecessors in vaudeville.
Even more interesting for Waksman is the history of the audience. In the introduction he explains that:
The importance of live music as a medium through which relations of power and inequality have been negotiated is a running concern in this book, which I see as an important counter to those who herald live music as an uncomplicated means for forging “togetherness” (27).
He examines the terms in which particular kinds of togetherness or belonging are felt by different audiences; he addresses the changes in what it means to listen to music. Early on he quotes a report in the Boston Globe on the audience response to the Fiske Jubilee Singers's performance at the 1872 World Peace Jubilee. This was, it seemed, “an assemblage who did not know whether they should wear the church-going face or the concert-going one” (101).
Later he describes the building of the Boston Symphony Hall (completed in 1900), the first concert venue to be designed with reference to the science of acoustics:
The emergence of the modern concert hall made that cultural divide [between highbrow and lowbrow] into something that had a concrete spatial dimension: classical music more and more happened in one sort of place designed to accommodate habits of listening that had arisen alongside the status that had become attached to it (231).
Waksman contrasts the effect of these new classical music temples on audience behavior with the effects on jazz audiences of the live jazz movement from spaces in which people danced to spaces in which people listened: “Jazz clubs were not built to foster aesthetic contemplation; they were far from being designed as temples of music” (268). Jazz club audiences certainly paid attention to the music but did so while drinking, socializing, and being entertained. The sound of jazz club music involved the noise of laughter, talk, and the clink of glasses. This combination, Waksman suggests, was another “soundscape of modernity, one that was not governed by scientific acoustics and the fetish of sonic perfection, but that required listening in a multi-sensory environment where distraction was all but inevitable” (268).
One issue here is how access was controlled. This was not simply a matter of the logistics (and cost) of getting the right number of people into the right number of seats. It also involved keeping the wrong sort of people out. Waksman's history features recurring examples of crowd trouble, violence, and mayhem. He quotes rock musician Perry Farrell saying, “what's cool about a crowd is that they instantly start to take over, wherever you are,” and adds:
This [Farrell's] vision has motivated much of the history of live music that I have surveyed in this book; the sense that when you bring a crowd of people together in conjunction with music, whether at a mass festival or in the confines of an intimate club, anything can happen (566).
Waksman started his project with the “conviction that live music is a defining element of American culture that has never really gotten its due” (24). It certainly gets its due here and in showing how the history of live music illuminates social history Waksman will, I hope, encourage social historians to pay it more attention. This is, in short, a book that lives up to its ambition. It should now take its place as an essential text for undergraduate courses on the history of popular and/or American music as well as becoming a source of research ideas for postgraduates for many years to come.
Simon Frith held the Tovey Chair of Music at the University of Edinburgh from 2005 to 2017. He is the author of Sound Effects (1981) and Performing Rites (1996) and his paper “Live Music Matters” was published in the Scottish Music Review in 2007. After completing the final volume of The History of Live Music in the UK he joined Martin Cloonan and John Williamson to edit Music Made in Scotland, published by Routledge in 2023.
