The study of popular music has a problem: because of its focus on commercial actors, it cannot account for ways in which people make music outside commercial parameters and the ways in which that music then helps form a community or an individual's identity. And because consumer markets seem to favor them, the central character in studies of popular music tends to be men, typically white unless the subject is American blues music where black men can be the focus. That is, unless John and Alan Lomax or John Hammond “discovered” the musician, then the focus shifts back to those white male folklorists and promoters. Not everyone agrees that this is a problem, of course, but for popular-music studies to return to its root meaning – that popular music should be all people's music and include musicking that exists outside commercial boundaries in formal and informal settings – scholars must rethink how we study music making.

One way to do this is to focus on the places that are musical rather than on people who are musical. It may be a rather obvious statement to make, but music's mental and physical geographies are important in understanding musicians, audiences and specific historical eras and the changes musicking undergoes when those physical, chronological and mental spaces change. These three books, all published in 2019, examine various geographies, especially the ways in which place helps determine sound. They do so with three different kinds of music making: singing voices, lyrics, and open-tuned, finger-plucked guitar performances. The authors’ approach suggests some ways of moving beyond the white commercial musical innovator even as their work addresses overlapping chronologies; physical and mental geographies of identity, class, creativity and race; and, to some extent, gender.

Among these three books, the most satisfying response to examining popular music outside commercial boundaries is Kevin Fellezs's Listen but Don't Ask Question, from Duke University Press. He deploys a strong ethnographic approach to uncover a Hawaiian folk guitar movement that migrated around the Pacific Rim, evolving in response to specific colonial experiences in Hawaii, California, and Japan. A Columbia University associate professor of music and African American and African diaspora studies, Fellezs's rich, thoughtful evaluation of Hawaiian slack key guitarists evaluates the ways guitarists perform and produce “a polycultural belonging, not identity per se” (6). Fellezs acts as both a recipient and an omniscient observer of Hawaiian (mainly Oahu), Japanese (centered in Tokyo) and Californian (tangentially, San Francisco) slack key guitarists, arguing for a transpacific music that he both represents and interprets. Indeed, while he says that the book is not about his own identity and its formation, the book begins in his parents’ San Francisco kitchen – with his Japanese mother and his Hawaiian father – where Fellezs learned about his extended ‘ohana. ‘Ohana might have meant family to Disney, à la “Lilo and Stitch,” but to diasporic Hawaiians and reinforced by slack key guitars, ‘ohana is that emotional bond between people that transcended mere biology, merging and enveloping those who longed for another place that was not right here. A glossary of Hawaiian and Japanese terms accompanies the book as Fellezs decided to teach his readers the language rather than using an English vocabulary for all of his discussions.

Slack key guitars, Fellezs acknowledges, became popular in the nineteenth century when Portuguese cowboys brought guitars with them to rural island areas, where Hawaiians, typically men, but sometimes women, learned how to play them in an open-tuned, finger-plucked style, called slack key or kī hōʻalu. This made the slack key guitar, during its renaissance in the 1970s, both “impure” and, ultimately, native, and its working-class performers not commercial artists but authentic performers who did not sell their music. It challenged the image of Hawaii as the submissive female in colonial imagery, caught between Japan and the United States. Commerce was thus not the point, but this meant that access to sources was difficult, requiring Fellezs's ethnographic approach.

Four Hawaiian terms root the book's four (of six) chapters: kuleana or responsibility; aloha or love; ‘ohana or extended family; and pono or holistic balance. He roots the discussion of these four words that challenge a history and historiography that tends to place Hawaii as an isolated way station between the United States’ and Japan's imperialist concerns, arguing that Hawaii “is central to the power dynamics within the greater Oceania” (8, original emphasis). In the kuleana chapter, for example, Fellezs argues that slack key guitarists, when they mentored new guitarists, required students to be silent and imitate those onstage, hence the title Listen but Don't Ask Question. “Kumus,” or mentors from your ‘ohana, expect strict obedience in order to pass the “real Hawaiian feeling” (55), the one where Hawaii is a strategic actor in transpacific relations rather than a submissive partner.

This does not mean that commercial pop music should be avoided. Stephanie Vander Wel's Hillbilly Maidens, Okies, and Cowgirls, published in the University of Illinois's Music in American Life series, focusses on different musical actors, namely women, rooting her study in urban areas and the migrants to those spaces. In her interdisciplinary examination of female singing voices specifically, Vander Wel, an associate professor of music at the University of Buffalo, argues that voices were products of their geographies where the audience expected the performers to sound a specific way. She argues that performing women's “compelling performances engendered a distinct vision of womanhood with a mosaic of musical and theatrical expressions that intertwined conventions of the past with contemporary rhythms” (2). In her capable hands, the singing voice and other musical acts linked white working-class women to dominant gendered norms, often in tension with those more middle-class conventions.

The book is divided into three parts that roughly follow the chronology and structure established by other scholars. A specific geography roots each section: Chicago's National Barn Dance and WLS radio in the 1930s and 1940s, California country music in the 1940s and 1950s, and the Nashville sound in the 1950s. Each chapter, again following established norms in country music scholarship, examines one female performer's biography, using it as a pinhole to see other performers constructing these new geographies, musical experiences (e.g. the honky-tonk) and gender conventions. Lulu Belle Wiseman and Patsy Montana are reflective of country music as Chicago's diverse audiences, many of them migrants from across the globe, tuned in. Carolina Cotton and Rose Maddox are exemplars of country music's California moment as migrants, especially southern ones, moved to good jobs on the West Coast and longed for the music of home. Kitty Wells and her challenges against honky-tonks as masculine space and the marketing of respectability to working-class audiences represent Nashville as it emerged as the center of country music making. The narrative moves from radio stage to silver screen to the television set in determining how women's voices reflected their moment onstage. But more than a pinprick to see other performers, Vander Wel is intent on bringing the audience's voices into her study, seeing the ways their experiences of dislocation and loss shaped female performers’ music.

Two things make this book different from its predecessors. First, Vander Wel adds a new set of sources to her analysis: Hollywood movies that featured musicians like Patsy Montana. Music migrates from radio stage to the silver screen in this case. But she also links vocal timbre to the changing locality of country music in ways that make the musical geography of country music more transparent. Within this particular group of books, she is also the only one to examine musical practices as a gendered space. Rose Maddox's vocals, for example, merged a burlesque version of the hillbilly rube with an “open-throated singing style” (14) that referenced southern singing traditions. This sound helped shift barn dance radio vocal conventions from Patsy Montana's earlier yodeling about western plains where Americans could be free from devastating economic downturns. In this way, vocal timbre became a “sonic form of cultural agency” (182) when used by various musicians using different vocal forms. (For full disclosure, I also published a book on country music women in 2008 in the University of Illinois's Music in American Life series which published Vander Wel's book.)

Do these innovative approaches mean that more traditional studies are obsolete? Perhaps, but the emphasis on geographic roots can provide some substance to what radio scholar Michael Lasser calls the great American songbook in his City Songs and American Life (2019). The host of the WXXI's (Rochester, NY) radio program “Fascinatin’ Rhythm: Songs from the Great American Songbook,” Lasser won a Peabody Award for the show and has incorporated much of the radio show scripts and purposes into the book. While it purports to be a scholarly work, it does not engage with other scholars, and in fact is more of a memoir of his radio program than an engaged evaluation of what he argues is the American songbook.

And yet this book is about the geography of music, specifically New York City, which he argues is the center of all things musical between 1900 and 1950. Focussing on the music created in Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, and Harlem, Lasser analyzes lyrics in a list-y way to find an “urban sensibility” (2) at the root of his great American songbook, where black jazz musicians and Jewish songwriters heard each other's music across color lines and created a musical response, later displayed on Broadway's stages. That response became a great American songbook (I would argue it was one of many great American songbooks) that addressed significant moments in the first half of the twentieth century. Writers like Irving Berlin, Florenz Ziegfield, Cole Porter, Cab Calloway, Fats Waller, and Jerome Kern wrote classic songs like “(Let's Do It) Let's Fall in Love” (Porter); “Harlem Madness” (Ager and Yellen); and Ira Berlin's “Pack Up Your Sins and Go to the Devil” that emerged from this combination of uptown and midtown.

Dominant themes reflected historical times as technology transformed music making. Cars, flappers, and economic downturns all appear in lyrics while still rooted in New York City. But with the introduction of radio and records, Lasser argues, Americans became “music consumers” rather than “music makers” as they purchased sentimental songs, songs about cuddling, and, still later, music about missing loved ones away at war. It ends with World War II with a focus on women who worked assembly lines while their men were away at war and purchased music about missing their men.

By locating this American songbook in New York City, he provides a version of a New York state of mind that he conflates with an American state of mind. But Lasser misses the ways in which that songbook traveled on railroad cars across the country via vaudeville circuits and traveling musicians who encountered local sounds and musics that eventually made their way back to Tin Pan Alley's and Harlem's ears. In other words, local American musical practices, formed away from commerce, caught the ears of traveling musicians who carried the sounds with them across the nation. This is capably demonstrated in M. Allison Kibler's Rank Ladies (1999), for example. Moreover, the actual places where musical innovation occurred need some broadening, for example to brothels, where these creative spaces produced substantial new sounds, as Dale Cockrell's Everybody's Doin’ It (2019) argued. Lasser's ideas also show their age in that historians, musicologists and others have been breaking down canonic-like musics for decades now. His book thus attempts to reinforce a battered canon that really does need to be broken down and become more fluid. But Lasser does provide a potential access point to everyday music making, but as an audience member himself. If one reads his book as a report on one listener's experience with this music rather than as a definitive study of what makes an American musical canon, this book gives us access to one person's interactions with music from a different time.

These three authors point to ways in which geographic space, both actual and imagined, might move popular music studies beyond the hit record that soars to number 1 on a sales chart. As Fellezs suggests, this will be hard, requiring new research methodologies and walking across established musical boundaries. It will also require that all music makers, male and female, be examined. Moreover, it will require reimagining books with older approaches to find the ways they might contribute to understanding music making in all of its various spaces, albeit by asking different questions. In this way, popular music, the music made outside commercial barriers but always in relation to pop, can secure some better intellectual space in ethnomusicological circles.