The Woody Guthrie Award – A book award from the US branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music
2010 Woody Guthrie Award Winner
Steve Waksman. This Ain’t the Summer of Love: Conflict and Crossover in Heavy Metal and Punk. University of California Press.
Honorable mentions:
Annie Randall. Dusty! Queen of the Postmods. Oxford University Press.
David Suisman. Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music. Harvard University Press.
Elijah Wald. How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music. Oxford University Press.
PRESS RELEASE: Steve Waksman has been named the winner of the 2010 Woody Guthrie Award for This Ain’t the Summer of Love: Conflict and Crossover in Heavy Metal and Punk (University of California Press), announced Barry Shank, president of IASPM-US. The award was presented on Saturday in Cincinnati at the Hilton Cincinnati Netherland Plaza during the annual IASPM-US conference.
The Woody Guthrie Book Award committee, which was comprised of Anahid Kassabian (University of Liverpool), David Brackett (McGill University) and David Shumway (Carnegie Mellon University), considered 22 books for the award that recognizes the most distinguished English language monograph in popular music studies published during 2009.
“The committee voted unanimously for this book, praising its combination of rich historical research and insightful critical analysis of music and performance,” said David Shumway, chair of the committee. “Waksman successfully makes connections between two genres usually understood to have little to do with each other, and in so doing significantly revises the history of recent popular music.”
Waksman is associate professor of music and American studies at Smith College in Northampton, Mass. His research and teaching interests are in the history of U.S. popular music and popular culture during the 19th and 20th centuries, with particular focus on music technology, the musical production of identity, and live music performance in the public sphere. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota.
Waksman is also the author Instruments of Desire: The Electric Guitar and the Shaping of Musical Experience (Harvard University Press, 1999). Waksman’s essays on the guitar have appeared in the Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World and The Cambridge Companion to the Guitar, among other publications, and in 2008 he was the keynote speaker at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s American Music Masters conference honoring the legacy of Les Paul. In 1998, his dissertation on the electric guitar won the Ralph Henry Gabriel Prize awarded by the American Studies Association.
During the IASPM-US conference, Woody Guthrie Book Award honorable mentions were given to:
-Annie J. Randall for Dusty! Queen of the Postmods (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
“Randall offers a distinctive approach to the study of a single figure, including enough biographical information, but embedding it in a wide range of approaches that bring out her cultural significance,” Shumway said;
-David Suisman for Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music (Cambridge: Harvard University Press).
“An original rethinking of the advent of recording and the establishment of the industry that argues convincingly that the recording industry is historically at the heart of the cultural industry and which establishes the beginnings of the permeation of everyday life with music,” Shumway said;
-and Elijah Wald for How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
“An informative, enjoyable, and largely original history of 20th Century popular music in the U.S.,” Shumway said. “It manages to be both a significant scholarly contribution that combines readability with solid historiography.”
2009 Woody Guthrie Award Winner
Alejandro Madrid. Nor-tec Rifa! Electronic Dance Music from Tijuana to the World. Oxford University Press.
Honorable mentions:
Charles Hiroshi Garrett. Struggling to Define a Nation: American Music and the Twentieth Century. University of California Press.
Marybeth Hamilton. In Search of the Blues. Basic Books.
PRESS RELEASE: Alejandro L. Madrid has been named the winner of the 2009 Woody Guthrie Award for Nor-Tec Rifa! Electronic Dance Music from Tijuana to the World (Oxford University Press), announced Beverly Keel, president of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music-US.
The award was presented Saturday at Loyola University in New Orleans during the annual IASPM-US conference.
Honorable mentions were awarded to Marybeth Hamilton for In Search of the Blues (Basic) and Charles Hiroshi Garrett for Struggling to Define a Nation: American Music and the Twentieth Century (University of California).
The 2009 Woody Guthrie Award committee, which was comprised of Heidi Feldman, Cheryl Keyes and Steve Waksman, considered 21 books for the award that recognizes the most distinguished English language monograph in popular music studies published during 2008.
Madrid is a musicologist and cultural theorist whose research focuses on the intersection of modernity, tradition and globalization in music and expressive culture from Mexico, the U.S.-Mexico border, and the circum-Caribbean. In 2005 Alejandro received the prestigious Casa de las Américas Musicology Prize Prize for his book Sounds of the Modern Nation: Music, Culture, and Ideas in Post-Revolutionary Mexico. He is also co-editor of Postnational Musical Identities: Cultural Production, Distribution and Consumption in a Globalized Scenario (2007). Madrid is associate professor of Latin American and Latino studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Madrid’s book impressed the committee for its sophisticated blend of ethnographic research and theoretical analysis, and for its deft application of the “border studies” paradigm that has occupied scholars of the U.S. and Latin America in recent years, according to Waksman, the committee chairman.
Hamilton is Reader in American History at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research interests include the social and cultural history of the United States and the history of popular culture, as well as the history of sexuality and the history of the human sciences. She is also the author of When I’m Bad I’m Better: Mae West, Sex, and American Entertainment (1995). Hamilton’s book won favor for its insightful revisionist account of the cultural significance of the blues, the depth of historical research and the mix of accessibility and complexity found in the book’s method of analysis, Waksman said.
Garrett is an associate professor of musicology at the University of Michigan. His research and teaching interests focus primarily on 20th-century music, American music, jazz, popular music, music and racial/ethnic representation, and cultural theory. He is a past recipient of several major prizes, including the Howard Mayer Brown Fellowship and the Alvin H. Johnson AMS-50 Dissertation Fellowship from the American Musicological Society as well as the 2002 Mark Tucker Award from the Society of American Music. Garrett’s book was impressive for its scope and ambition as a study of a diverse range of musicians and musical styles that cumulatively shed new light on the complicated nature of “American” musical identities, Waksman said.
“Madrid’s work presents an exemplary combination of ethnographic detail and theoretical rigor, applied to the activities of an electronic music collective situated in Tijuana, Mexico,” Waksman said. “It is one of the strongest works to date pursuing the contemporary paradigm of ‘border studies’ in a popular music context, and also marks a significant contribution to scholarship on electronic dance music and to the ways in which popular musicians and music fans negotiate their way through the experience of globalization.
“Madrid’s primary subjects, the musicians who formed the Nortec Collective in 1999 and continued its activities into the first decade of the 21st Century, use state-of-the-art music technologies to recast traditional musical styles of Northern Mexico into new, hybrid forms of musical expression. For Madrid, their location in Tijuana – a city that is defined by its proximity to the U.S./Mexico border and its status as a destination for tourists – marks their activity as a quintessential expression of the distinct cultural pressures and possibilities that reside in borderland areas.
“Madrid interprets the sounds created by the Nortec Collective with great nuance and insight,” Waksman said. “But he also goes well beyond the surface of their recorded works. His years of fieldwork, interviewing members of the Collective and their fans, allows him to create a multi-layered portrait of this musical movement as it was being created and as it responded to new cultural developments. He devotes considerable attention to the local conditions of musical production in Tijuana, offering a rich portrait of the city’s club life. Importantly, he also pays attention to the processes through which the Collective’s work circulated beyond Tijuana and entered global networks of musical consumption and distribution.
“Throughout, Madrid draws upon the theoretical work of such figures as Benjamin, Zizek, Deleuze and Guattari to raise larger questions about the ways in which music exists as an aural embodiment of the changing relationships between local and global forms of subjectivity. The Guthrie award committee congratulates Alejandro Madrid for producing such an excellent work of scholarship that intervenes in a number of important critical conversations.
2008 Woody Guthrie Award Winner
Ingrid Monson. Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call Out to Jazz and Africa.
PRESS RELEASE: Dr. Ingrid Monson has been given the Woody Guthrie Book Award 2008 for “Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call Out to Jazz and Africa.” The award was presented during the 2009 IASPM-US conference in San Diego.
Painstakingly researched, “Freedom Sounds” is a concourse into the complex interplay between music, racial tensions and artistic innovation during the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, according to the book award committee that was comprised of chair Barbara Fox and members Larry Witzleben and Trudy Mercadal.
“Monson examines the recasting of jazz in terms of prejudicial hardships such as reverse racism, playing to segregated audiences in the 1950s and African-American self-determination of the 1950s and 1960s,” the committee noted. “In addition, her work includes the ethos of the cold war, reaction to African musical expression and diasporic sensibilities in light of America’s infamous reputation for racial prejudice. Monsay clearly documents governmental support for jazz to be used as a ‘Utopian dream come true.’ ”Her thorough research on sensibilities in America and the struggle to right itself in crisis are illuminated in her presentation of such events as the funding of State Department tours in 1956, desegregation of the American Federation of Musicians, economic strategies of empowerment and African nationalism,” the committee said. “The result is a compelling work that presents theoretical and cultural criticism in a complex era. Her research, archival listings and ample footnotes provide a wealth of information for future scholars by delineating without oversimplifying this impact on jazz history. “We congratulate Dr. Monson on her exploration of the interplay between music, politics and ethos during this critical time in jazz history.”
Dr. Monson is the Quincy Jones Professor of African-American Music at Harvard. According to Harvard’s website, Professor Monson specializes in jazz, African American music, and music of the African diaspora. She is also the author of “Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction”, which won the Sonneck Society’s Irving Lowens award for the best book published on American music in 1996.
She is also editor of “The African Diaspora: A Musical Perspective” (2000). This collection of essays presents musical case studies from various regions of the African diaspora that engage with the broader interdisciplinary discussions about race, gender, politics, nationalism, and music. Contributors include Akin Euba, Veit Erlmann, Eric Charry, Lucy Dur‡n, Jerome Harris, Travis Jackson, Gage Averill, and Julian Gerstin.
She has published articles in Ethnomusicology, Critical Inquiry, World of Music, Journal of the American Musicological Society, and Women and Music. She is also a trumpet player.
She earned her Ph.D. and M.A. in Musicology from New York University, her B.M. from New England Conservatory of Music, and her B.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Economics.
Previous Woody Guthrie Award Winners
2007 - Heidi Feldman. Black Rhythms of Peru: Reviving the African Musical Heritage in the Black Pacific. Wesleyan University Press.
2006 - Steven F. Pond. Head Hunters: The Making of Jazz’s First Platinum Album. University of Michigan Press
Honorable Mentions: Paul Austerlitz, Jazz Consciousness: Music, Race, and Humanity (Wesleyan University Press); Lisa Rhodes, Electric Ladyland: Women and Rock Culture (University of Pennsylvania Press); and Daniel Goldmark, Tunes for ‘Toons: Music and the Hollywood Cartoon (University of California Press)
2005 - Bryan McCann. Hello, Hello Brazil: Popular Music in the Making of Modern Brazil. Duke University Press.
Honorable Mention: Tim Lawrence. Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970-1979. Duke University Press.
2004 - Guthrie Ramsey. Race Music: Black Cultures From Bebop to Hip-Hop. University of California Press.
2003 - Bernard Gendron. Between Monmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant Garde. University of Chicago Press.
2002 – CO-WINNERS: Gary Giddins. Bing Crosby: A Pocketful Of Dreams: The Early Years 1903-1940. Back Bay Books; Theodore Gracyk. I Wanna Be Me: Rock Music and the Politics of Identity. Temple University Press (Sound Matters Series).
2001- Norman Stolzoff. Wake the Town and Tell the People: Dancehall Culture In Jamaica. Duke University Press.
2000 - Adelaida Reyes. Songs of the Caged, Songs of the Free: Music and the Vietnamese Experience. Temple University Press.
Runner up: Steve Waksman. Instruments of Desire: The Electric Guitar and the Shaping of Musical Experience. Harvard University Press.
1999 - Frances R. Aparicio. Listening to Salsa: Gender, Latin Popular Music, and Puerto Rican Cultures. Wesleyan University Press/University Press of New England.
Runner up: Daniel Cavicchi. Tramps Like Us: Music and Meaning among Springsteen Fans. Oxford University Press.
1998 - Scott DeVeaux. The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History. University of Califonia Press.
1997 - Paul Théberge. Any Sound You Can Imagine: Making Music/Consuming Technology. Wesleyan University Press.
