Hello everyone: it's 8:30am on a Saturday morning here in Australia, and so I've just woken up. Here is an annotated bibliography I prepared earlier!

Pre-1950s pop music:

Donald Clarke, 1995, The Rise And Fall Of Popular Music (Penguin)

Ben Yagoda, 2015, The B Side: The Death Of Tin Pan Alley and the Rebirth of the Great American Song (Riverhead)

Jon Savage, 2008, Teenage: The Creation Of Youth 1875-1945 (Pimlico)

Clarke's book is a fairly standard take on the jazz-influenced forms of popular music that were popular in the first half of the 20th century. It's a bit one-eyed and quite dismissive of rock music (the last chapter is titled 'The Abdication of a Generation'). Yagoda's book focuses on the 'Great American Songbook' (i.e., the songs that are on all those recent Rod Stewart or Michael Buble albums) and how that rose and fell and what it means now - it's a good contextualisation and explanation of the biases of someone like Clarke. Jon Savage's book Teenage looks at the pre-history of the idea of the teenager as the consumer which led to the rise of teen idols and the marketing of things like Beatlemania.

The blues:

Greil Marcus, 1997, Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes (Holt)

Elijah Wald, 2004, Escaping The Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues (Amistad)

Marybeth Hamilton, 2008, In Search Of The Blues (Basic Books)

Ted Gioia, 2008, The Delta Blues (WW Norton)

In the 2000s there was a trend towards strongly revisionist takes on the blues - Wald and Hamilton qualify here - which aimed to dispel what is essentially the baby boomer myth-making about the blues which ends up in the standard rock history (though Greil Marcus's Invisible Republic is focused on old folk rather than the old blues, it is probably as detailed a take on the baby boomer myth-making around ye olde authenticity as exists). Gioia's book, broadly, pushes back against the revisionists, arguing that the bluesmen themselves were making and exploiting myths of their own that the baby boomers latched onto in some different ways.

Rock'n'Roll and Guitar Groups:

Charlie Gillett, 1996, The Sound Of The City: The Rise Of Rock And Roll (3rd. ed) (Da Capo)

Robert Palmer, 1996, Dancing In The Street: Rock'n'Roll History (BBC Books)

Walter Everett, 2008, The Foundations Of Rock: From "Blue Suede Shoes" to "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes" (Oxford University Press)

Elijah Wald, 2009, How The Beatles Destroyed Rock And Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music (Oxford University Press)

Mark Lewisohn, 2014, The Beatles: Tune In (Little Brown)

Jon Covach and Andrew Flory, 2015, What's That Sound: An Introduction to Rock and its History (4th ed.) (WW Norton)

Charlie Gillett's The Sound Of The City is a pretty exhaustive and definitive look at the early years of rock and roll recordings, its influences, and the various different regional variations on the music. There's something of a tendency to say that rock and roll is just white people playing black music, and there are absolutely elements of truth to that, but it's somewhat more complicated, and Gillett's book explains why very well. The Covach and Flory book is the standard textbook for pop history classes (my wife who's taught undergrad level pop history classes uses it). Walter Everett's book is more music-focused in a technical way than history focused, per se, but because a history of pop is inevitably a history of different genres rising and falling to some extent, it's a good, scholarly guide to the characteristics of different rock styles and what makes something psychedelic rock versus rockabilly, for example.

Wald's book, like his Robert Johnson book, is a revisionist take on standard rock and roll history (the kind you get in, say, Robert Palmer's Dancing In The Street, a quite well made tie-in book for an extensive BBC documentary series), which argues that the rock'n'roll of the 1950s is a substantially different beast to the rock music of the 1960s, which took the music to a fairly radically different place (thus the title). Because of the huge influence of the Beatles, they're part of the story, and Mark Lewisohn's Tune In is probably the most exhaustively researched and methodical Beatles biography out there - it covers the Beatles up until the end of 1962, and made some news by unearthing facts that haven't been unearthed before, despite the enormous market glut of Beatles biographies that already existed.

Special thanks to Eric Hacke, Elm, Andrew Stead, William Ryan, Stuart Gorman, Bill Rubin, Will Raybould, Sarah Gilbert, Mark Katerberg, Vlad, and Max M. for their generous support of the podcast through the AskHistorians Patreon. And thanks to all our new supporters as well!

A big thanks as well to /u/hillsonghoods for a great gab with a superb soundtrack.

Really great podcast guys!! I especially liked the parts about how this music reflected the racial divide in the US and thought it was really cool how you played the different versions of songs to showcase the emphasis on vocals vs. the emphasis on the whole package. Definitely made me want to listen to more songs of the era as well.