In December 1943, an all–African American cast starred in the Broadway premiere of Carmen Jones, Oscar Hammerstein II's adaptation of Georges Bizet's Carmen. When Hammerstein began work on Carmen Jones a month after Pearl Harbor, in January 1942, Porgy and Bess was just being revived. Hammerstein's 1942 version of Carmen, set in a Southern town and among African Americans, shows the influence of the revised version of Porgy and Bess, with Catfish Row echoed in a cigarette factory in South Carolina and the Hoity Toity night club. It took Hammerstein more than eighteen months to find a producer, and when the show opened by the end of 1943, the setting in a parachute factory and urban Chicago reflected new priorities brought on by wartime changes. Commercially one of the most successful musical plays on Broadway during its run of 503 performances, Carmen Jones offers a window on the changing issues of culture, class, and race in the United States during World War II. New archival evidence reveals that these topics were part of the work's genesis and production as much as of its reception. This article contextualizes Carmen Jones by focusing on the complex issues of war, race, and identity in the United States in 1942 and 1943.

“The Irish came early and often to America,” quipped musicologist Charles Hamm in his landmark book Yesterdays: Popular Song in America. Although the largest waves of immigration occurred during the years of the potato famines in the 1840s and 1850s, the process began long before then and continues to the present day, albeit with many ebbs and flows in the stream. Today nearly 36.5 million people in the United States claim Irish ancestry.

This article explores the discourse of authenticity, which has become central to our understanding of twentieth-century folk music revivals in the United States. The process of musical revival, that is, the self-conscious restoration of musical systems deemed in danger of decline or extinction, has been closely tied to perceptions of exactly what constitutes authentic, or genuine, folk tradition. The term tradition, like authenticity, is a slippery concept based on a self-conscious interpretation and selective editing of the past. The complex mechanism of cultural editing that undergirds the authentication process is fleshed out by focusing on the efforts of one band, the New Lost City Ramblers. During the 1960s the Ramblers introduced northern audiences to what they judged to be authentic southern string-band and bluegrass styles at a time when the urban revival was dominated by popular and artsy interpreters of folk music. The Ramblers' struggles to render accurately southern rural instrumental and singing styles, while maintaining their own distinctive sound, offer insight into the challenges authenticity posed for mid-century folk musicians and their urban audiences, and continues to pose for scholars and cultural workers today.

Scholarship on American composer Harry Partch (1901–74) has long focused on the composer's use of Greek musical ideals as the basis of his aesthetic, but little attention has been paid to China, a nation with which Partch had familial ties and with which he claimed an affinity. Using Partch's published writings, along with unpublished manuscripts, letters, and interviews, this article repositions China's role in the development of Harry Partch's music and aesthetic. By surveying his early experiences with Cantonese opera, his early expositions of his theoretical thinking, and his first full-scale composition, a setting of seventeen poems by Li Po, it demonstrates that China symbolized an alternative path. China's musical traditions were tied directly to the spoken word and featured integration of the arts through ritual, and thus for Partch presented a way to renew Western music. Through the Chinese musical quotations that reside in several of his works, the article also shows that, despite his later protests to the contrary, Chinese music both informed and shaped his music. Finally, it suggests that only by exploring the implications of China in his music can we fully understand Partch's compositional aesthetic.

In 1956 entertainer Sammy Davis, Jr., attempted to organize the music industry in a campaign against juvenile delinquency, using musical public service announcements to encourage teens to stay on the right side of the law. Although popular with the public and some industry insiders, Davis's idea failed, officially because of opposition from the Recording Industry Association of America. Although Davis's campaign went nowhere, we argue that this episode provides an important illustration of the need to broaden our understanding of cultural policy studies in the context of American music history. Specifically, we argue for an approach to policy analysis that draws on poststructuralist historiography to capture the forms that cultural policy takes in the United States, including the specific factors of race, intra-industry struggles, and the persona of Sammy Davis, Jr., himself, a pivotal figure who has been largely neglected by music historians despite embodying many of the key cultural tensions of postwar U.S. society. By examining the case of Sammy Davis, Jr., vs. Juvenile Delinquency, we can achieve a better understanding of how U.S. music, U.S. culture, and cultural policy intersect.

Supporting a new methodology for the study of classic American popular songs, this article offers a history of both the print editions and recorded versions of “Some of These Days” (1910) by Shelton Brooks. This saga commences with a hitherto unanalyzed precursor to Brooks's famous song that shares nearly the same opening words and melody, the 1905 “Some o' Dese Days” by Frank Williams. It continues through nine major print editions and numerous recorded performances, of which this study examines forty-six, including ten as the theme song for Sophie Tucker. Performers are clearly influenced by both performed and printed variations; more surprisingly, print editions are also influenced by performers. Thus, Tin Pan Alley songs are best viewed as products of collaboration within a community of songwriters, publishers, and performers. Brooks fills “Some of These Days” with compositional details that are conducive to effective performance variations. This elusive intrinsic adaptability represents, for 1910, a modern, innovative quality and is central to any understanding of this song genre. Oft-neglected, such early popular standards—poised at the juncture of musical cultures, oral and print, amateur and professional, live and mediatized—help the critical historian pinpoint aspects that make this repertoire valuable.

Henry Ford's interest in reviving the dances of his youth and publicizing old fiddlers was a major media phenomenon of the 1920s. The claims of one fiddler became the source of the often repeated, but erroneous, assertion that Ford sponsored a national fiddlers' contest, which in turn has become a part of country music lore. This article, based mostly on archival sources and newspapers, attempts to describe the particular musical and dance traditions that interested Ford, his personal activities and ambitions in this area, his motivations, and the larger popular interest in the subject itself.

Ryan's Mammoth Collection is a compendium of fiddle tunes assembled by William Bradbury Ryan. Originally published in Boston in 1883 by Elias Howe, Jr., it has remained in print in one form or another ever since. It has been used as a source of tunes by many generations of fiddlers in different stylistic traditions, but its value as a descriptive document of the repertoire of late-nineteenth-century Boston, particularly the Irish community in that city, has largely been overlooked. Ryan, rather than Capt. Francis O'Neill of Chicago, should be regarded as the first great documentarian of Irish traditional music in the United States.

From January to May 1965 the University of Michigan Jazz Band traveled extensively in Latin America for the State Department's Cultural Presentations Program. This tour serves as a case study through which we can see the far-reaching effects of cultural diplomacy. The State Department initially envisioned its cultural and informational programs as one-way communication that brought ideas from the United States to new places; yet the tours changed not only audiences, but also the musicians themselves and even the communities to which the musicians returned. Both archival and oral history evidence indicate that the Michigan jazz band's tour succeeded in building vital imagined connections across international borders. The nature of these connections demonstrates that the cold war practice of pushing culture across borders for political purposes furthered cultural globalization—even though the latter process is often regarded by scholars as a phenomenon that began only after the end of the cold war. The jazz band's tour highlights the essential role of music and musicians in fostering new transnational sensibilities in the politicized context of the cold war.

U.S. choral societies typically formalize themselves as secular organizations analogous to symphony orchestras and opera companies. Yet choral societies differ from symphonic or operatic organizations because almost all choruses depend on volunteer singers. Part of what attracts singers into choruses is a sometimes unacknowledged affinity between the religious traditions of liberal Christians and Jews and the culture of choral singing as practiced in formally secular choral societies. The liberal tradition in religion encourages a habitus toward music that might be called a “sense of liturgy”: The interpretation of musical works historically and collectively, rather than as didactic works addressed to an individual. Although many canonical choral works are Christian in content, liberal religion encourages distancing mechanisms that allow people from other faith traditions, or none at all, to engage with these works. In short, the posture of artistic autonomy often found within formally secular choral societies, in which there is no overt religious test for membership, owes part of its genesis to the religious habits of liberal Christians and Jews. The present article explores this affinity by drawing on ethnomusicological fieldwork among choral singers in New England, as well as published accounts of a 1996 controversy over the performance of religious music by a public school choir in Utah.

Francis O'Neill, one of the towering figures of Irish traditional music, was among the first to collect and publish Irish dance music. His compilations form the most complete glimpse into Irish musical practice at the turn of the twentieth century and are still regarded as the definitive source for traditional tunes. Three recent publications on O'Neill and his times throw light on his life, his passion for the music, and his legacy among today's traditional music community.

In April 1993 the Knitting Factory, a small nightclub in Lower Manhattan, hosted a five-day music festival titled “Radical New Jewish Culture.” This event was part of a multifaceted creative endeavor undertaken during the 1990s by composer/improvisers on New York City's downtown music scene and dubbed “Radical Jewish Culture” by its main protagonist, saxophonist John Zorn. RJC brought Jewish music and heritage into the purview of a polycultural experimentalist scene shaped by jazz, rock, free improvisation, and avant-garde concert music. Artists downtown also engaged in an animated “conversational community” that spilled over into interviews, program notes, liner notes, and essays. RJC was especially productive as a conceptual framework from which to interrogate the relationship between musical language and the semiotics of sound. Two pieces serve here as case studies: “¡Bnai!” an Israeli “pioneer song” as interpreted by the No Wave band G-d Is My Co-Pilot, and “The Mooche,” a Duke Ellington/Bubber Miley composition as interpreted by pianist Anthony Coleman's Selfhaters Orchestra.

At the dawn of the twentieth century and the height of the Recording Age, Irish American musicians began to record Irish traditional music on both commercial and subcommercial recordings. Circulated within the diaspora during a changing sense of Irish identity and sent home to a nationalist revival, these recordings had a profound impact on both traditional performance practices and modes of transmission. Quickly accepted by many at the heart of the tradition, these recordings were used by practitioners to bridge vast geographic distances and solidify vital lines of communication, allowing the diaspora to engage actively with the larger tradition.

The McNulty Family was known as the royal family of Irish entertainers. They were the hottest Irish entertainment act on the East Coast, and perhaps in all of North America, from the 1930s through the 1950s. Ann “Ma” McNulty was the leader; her son Peter played the violin and piano, sang, and danced; and her daughter Eileen sang and danced. They also acted and performed skits to accompany their songs and comedy routines. Their shows were a high-energy, fast-paced type of vaudeville event. Ann Burke was born in Kilteevan, County Roscommom, Ireland, in 1887 and emigrated to the United States in 1910. She married John McNulty in 1914 and was a widow by 1928. This emigrant, who played the melodeon, and her two talented children started to entertain people to make a living. At the height of their career in the early 1940s, in addition to appearing at several venues every week, they had two radio shows, wrote a weekly column for the Irish Advocate newspaper, and had released about eighty recordings. Their vaudeville style was an excellent compliment to their talents, where acting and dancing were part of the delivery of a song or comedy routine.