Persistent Themes In Sound Recordings

During the past century recorded music has echoed from phonographs, jukeboxes, car radios, televisions, portable Walkmen, and contemporary digital devices. In addition to general listeners and record buyers, music scholars have taken interest in audio imagery and prominent themes in lyrics. This volume continues that academic tradition. However, it should be noted that rather than just naming isolated subjects in songs, this investigation probes for clusters of ideas that constitute important audio themes. This is the fourth of several volumes in the "Persistent Themes" Series being sponsored by The Paw Paw Press. Each volume examines a few highly important general themes by breaking them down into component topics and illustrating several recordings that constitute the framework for both the smaller topics and the over-arching themes. In an earlier volume, for example, the authors identified "Metropolitan Centers" as an important lyrical theme. They gathered hundreds of recordings that illustrate this theme and arranged these songs by topic, such as "Chicago", "Dancing Cities," "Detroit", "Hometown Reveries" "Kansas City", "Los Angeles", and so on. Thus the general theme was justified by the large number of recordings attributed to each of the related sub-topics.