A01=Nicholas Gebhardt
audience
Author_Nicholas Gebhardt
behind the scenes
biography
cabaret
Category=AVC
celebrity
comedy
commodification
entertainment
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
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eq_music
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eq_non-fiction
fame
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history
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music industry
musical theater
musicians
nonfiction
performance
performers
performing arts
popular culture
profile
revues
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television
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variety show
vaudeville
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Product details
- ISBN 9780226448695
- Weight: 340g
- Dimensions: 16 x 23mm
- Publication Date: 22 Mar 2017
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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If you enjoy popular music and culture today, you have vaudeville to thank. From the 1870s until the 1920s, vaudeville was the dominant context for popular entertainment in the United States, laying the groundwork for the music industry we know today. In Vaudeville Melodies, Nicholas Gebhardt introduces us to the performers, managers, and audiences who turned disjointed variety show acts into a phenomenally successful business. First introduced in the late nineteenth century, by 1915 vaudeville was being performed across the globe, incorporating thousands of performers from every branch of show business. Its astronomical success relied on a huge network of theatres, each part of a circuit and administered from centralized booking offices. Gebhardt shows us how vaudeville transformed relationships among performers, managers, and audiences, and argues that these changes affected popular music culture in ways we are still seeing today.
Drawing on firsthand accounts, Gebhardt explores the practices by which vaudeville performers came to understand what it meant to entertain an audience, the conditions in which they worked, the institutions they relied upon, and the values they imagined were essential to their success.
Nicholas Gebhardt is professor of jazz and popular music studies at Birmingham City University, UK. He is the author of The Cultural Politics of Jazz Collectives and Going For Jazz: Musical Practices and American Ideology, the latter also published by the University of Chicago Press.
