The practice of segregated union locals, common in the American Federation of Musicians (AFM) during the first half of the twentieth century, led to racial confrontation in San Francisco. In 1934, black Local 648 sued its much larger counterpart, Local 6, which had attempted to control all musical employment in the Bay Area. Though Local 648 eventually withdrew its suit, its charter was revoked and black musicians were placed in “subsidiary” status. A new “colored local” (669) was chartered in 1946 and worked alongside Local 6 until the state forced amalgamation in 1960. Many other segregated locals did not merge until the late 1960s or early 1970s.

The saga of Locals 6, 648, and 669 brings into focus the complex social and economic forces buffeting the working musician in the early twentieth century. Racialist attitudes in the US labor movement, mirrored in the musicians' union, forced blacks to organize separately and accept lower wages in order to secure employment. The AFM, for its part, was constrained by its dedication to local autonomy. Black union musicians were themselves divided—torn between outrage at their second-class status and the apparent benefits of working for change from within the organization.

The New Orleans hot jazz vocal trio the Boswell Sisters was one of the leading ensembles of the 1930s. Enormously popular with audiences, the Boswells were also recognized by colleagues and peers to be among the finest singers, instrumentalists, and arrangers of their day. Many jazz historians remember them as the first successful white singers who truly “sounded black,” yet they rarely interrogate what “sounding black” meant for the Boswells, not only in technical or musical terms but also as an expression of the cultural attitudes and ideologies that shape stylistic judgments. The Boswells' audience understood vocal blackness as a cultural trope, though that understanding was simultaneously filtered through minstrelsy's legacy and challenged by the new entertainment media. Moreover, the sisters' southern femininity had the capacity to further contexualize and “color” both their musical output and its reception. This essay examines what it meant for a white voice to sound black in the United States during the early 1930s, and charts how the Boswells permeated the cultural, racial, and gender boundaries implicit in both blackness and southernness as they developed their collective musical voice.

Jazz pianist McCoy Tyner's improvisation on the theme “Bessie's Blues,” recorded with the John Coltrane Quartet in 1964, exemplifies the traditional Afrodiasporic performance practice of “apart playing.” A formulation of the art historian Robert Farris Thompson, apart playing occurs whenever individual performers enact different, complementary roles in an ensemble setting. For interpretative purposes, the concept helps to provide a cultural context for certain pitch-based formal devices, such as substitute harmonies and playing “outside” an underlying chord or scale, which Tyner uses in the course of his solo.

This is the inaugural volume of a series of four designed to give a vivid and rounded sense of the vibrant energy that impelled American twentieth-century music. A must-read for anyone who cares about the foundations of that music, Composers' Voices from Ives to Ellington: An Oral History of American Music contains a series of transcriptions from interviews housed at Yale University in their archives of the oral history of American music (OHAM). These interviews were conducted either directly with those composers—Ives, Eubie Blake, Copland, Gershwin, Cowell, Varèse, Ellington, and others—who collectively shaped our nation's music in the first decades of the twentieth century or with others who knew them firsthand. The latter range from persons we might expect (fellow musicians, family members, and business associates) to those who leap from the page as wonderful surprises—for example, Ives's barber! Rarely have five hundred pages of musicological text contained such richness of information combined with such liveliness of presentation. So candid are these interviews, so electric in rhythm, preserving the “jumpiness” of live speech, that it is hard to put the book down.

Brian Wilson Presents Smile. Our Prayer/Gee, Heroes and Villains, Roll Plymouth Rock, Barnyard, Old Master Painter/You are My Sunshine, Cabin Essence, Wonderful, Song For Children, Child is Father of the Man, Surf's Up, I'm in Great Shape/I Wanna Be Around/Workshop, Vega-Tables, On a Holiday, Wind Chimes, Mrs. O'Leary's Cow, In Blue Hawaii, Good Vibrations. Brian Wilson, vocals and keyboards, with accompanying musicians. Produced and arranged by Brian Wilson. Booklet includes song lyrics and notes by David Leaf. Nonesuch 79846-2, 2004.

McNally's Row of Flats: Irish American Songs of Old New York by Harrigan and Braham. By Mick Moloney. McNally's Row of Flats. Are you There Moriarity. The Regular Army-O. Patrick's Day Parade. Danny by my Side. Get Up Jack John Sit Down. Dad's Dinner Pail. Never Take the Horseshoe From the Door. I Never Drink Behind the Bar. The Babies on Our Block. The Mulligan Guard. Old Boss Barry. Such an Education Has My Mary Ann. Maggie Murphy's Home. Compass 4426, 2006.

Backstage at the Grand Ole Opry is one of my favorite places in Nashville. After checking in at the security desk, guests are free to wander the maze of hallways that connect the historic dressing rooms. Onstage, guests crowd into seats between the musicians and the red country-barn backdrop, watching the bustle of the show as the curtain rises and falls between segments. Announcers read famous slogans in advertising copy; legendary singers in sequins and rhinestones chat with up-and-coming performers in the wings; the Carol Lee Singers and house band keep the music humming along. Headliners take the stage and crack jokes with the audience, who, in turn, applaud their approval at the beginning of favorite songs. Square dancers kick up their heels while fans gather at the footlights to snap scrapbook pictures. The live broadcasts of the Grand Ole Opry on WSM, on the air continuously since 1925, represent a collision of country's past and present in a beloved, nostalgic, and slightly chaotic performance tradition.

In reviewing and packing my musicological library in preparation for a move, I came across documentation for a variety of studies and projects from the late 1970s and early 1980s that were based upon an electronic future for musical scholarship. Twenty years ago, such pioneering musicologists as Ian Bent, Barry S. Brook, Jan LaRue, and William Malm were assembling large searchable databases of writings, music, and instruments, even as theorists like Mario Baroni, Allen Forte, and Arthur Wenk were exploring computer technology to analyze and devise “grammars” of melodic construction and to identify and compare pitch-class sets. In those pre-Oakland (barely pre-Contemplating Music) days of the American Musicological Society, the gathering of such sources was considered an honorable practice—indeed, we owe the eminently useful RILM to the perspicacious Brook. While these collections of data ostensibly were to enable comprehensiveness in study and serve the purposes of comparative analysis, they ultimately did not lead to interpretation, not at least of the critical type that Joseph Kerman and later Lawrence Kramer and Susan McClary were advocating.