Hearing the Americas

FAIN: MN-268896-20

George Mason University (Fairfax, VA 22030-4444)
Michael O'Malley (Project Director: June 2019 to March 2024)

Production of a website interpreting the early history of recorded popular music from the 1890s to 1925.

Hearing the Americas will be a website that makes the early history of recorded popular music accessible and understandable to non-specialists. It will provide historical and musical contextualization for digitized recordings from the 1890s-1925 available in the Library of Congress’s (LC) National Jukebox and the University of California at Santa Barbara’s (UCSB) Cylinder Audio Archive. By incorporating sheet music, photographs, advertisements, biographical information on artists, explanations of genres, as well as musical annotations, the site will help users interpret the recordings, while illuminating three key humanities themes: the history of capitalism and technology; the transnational origins of American music; and the musical construction of race. Multiple entry points through thematic questions, as well as song, artist and genre pages, will encourage self-guided exploration and engage an audience of music fans, musicians, and music history enthusiasts.

Associated Products

Hearing the Americas (Web Resource)
Title: Hearing the Americas
Author: Mathew Karush
Author: Michael O'Malley
Abstract: The website is at link: https://hearingtheamericas.org/s/the-americas/page/welcome "Hearing the Americas explores the first decades of recorded music, revealing how ideas about genre, race, and nation were formed in the transnational circulation of people and records. We focus on the United States and Latin America, whose vibrant musical interactions originated in the African diaspora and were reactivated in new ways by the advent of the record industry. Our goal is to overcome the barriers of time and technology to make this music easier to hear, appreciate, and understand. In this period, the broad genres we tend to take for granted, like blues, jazz, folk, country, or Latin, didn’t yet exist. Record companies were still figuring out how to market recorded music, and they looked for novel ways to re-package earlier conventions. For example, a record marketed as a “blues” in 1914 might sound like a marching band playing a tango. We want to make sense of these strange-sounding records."
Year: 2022
Primary URL: http://hearingtheamericas.org/s/the-americas/page/about
Primary URL Description: Hearing the Americas explores the first decades of recorded music, revealing how ideas about genre, race, and nation were formed in the transnational circulation of people and records. We focus on the United States and Latin America, whose vibrant musical interactions originated in the African diaspora and were reactivated in new ways by the advent of the record industry. Our goal is to overcome the barriers of time and technology to make this music easier to hear, appreciate, and understand. In this period, the broad genres we tend to take for granted, like blues, jazz, folk, country, or Latin, didn’t yet exist. Record companies were still figuring out how to market recorded music, and they looked for novel ways to re-package earlier conventions. For example, a record marketed as a “blues” in 1914 might sound like a marching band playing a tango. We want to make sense of these strange-sounding records. Modern genre conventions often depend on some idea of racial or folk authenticity

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