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Also by Elijah Wald:

Dylan Goes Electric, July 2015
Hardcover / e-Book
The Blues, August 2010
Paperback
How The Beatles Destroyed Rock N Roll, June 2009
Hardcover
Riding with Strangers, May 2006
Hardcover

HOW THE BEATLES DESTROYED ROCK N ROLL
By: Elijah Wald

An Alternative History Of American Popular Music

Oxford University Press, USA
June 2009
On Sale: June 1, 2009
336 pages
ISBN: 0195341546
EAN: 9780195341546
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction

"There are no definitive histories," writes Elijah Wald, in this provocative reassessment of American popular music, "because the past keeps looking different as the present changes." Earlier musical styles sound different to us today because we hear them through the musical filter of other styles that came after them, all the way through funk and hiphop.

As its blasphemous title suggests, How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll rejects the conventional pieties of mainstream jazz and rock history. Rather than concentrating on those traditionally favored styles, the book traces the evolution of popular music through developing tastes, trends and technologies—including the role of records, radio, jukeboxes and television —to give a fuller, more balanced account of the broad variety of music that captivated listeners over the course of the twentieth century. Wald revisits original sources—recordings, period articles, memoirs, and interviews—to highlight how music was actually heard and experienced over the years. And in a refreshing departure from more typical histories, he focuses on the world of working musicians and ordinary listeners rather than stars and specialists. He looks for example at the evolution of jazz as dance music, and rock 'n' roll through the eyes of the screaming, twisting teenage girls who made up the bulk of its early audience. Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, and the Beatles are all here, but Wald also discusses less familiar names like Paul Whiteman, Guy Lombardo, Mitch Miller, Jo Stafford, Frankie Avalon, and the Shirelles, who in some cases were far more popular than those bright starswe all know today, and who more accurately represent the mainstream of their times.

Written with verve and style, How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll shakes up our staid notions of music history and helps us hear American popular music with new ears.

Media Buzz

On Point - August 5, 2010