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Just as American culture has been constructed by people of many ethnicities, roots music in America is multicultural in nature. This volume presents influential musical cultures from throughout the multicultural history of American vernacular song.

Over its history, country music has evolved from parochial scenes in the US South with little-known local talents, to a multimillion dollar business boasting superstar musicians. This volume examines country music as it developed in the US, from the first country-music radio broadcasts of the 1920s, to the contemporary Nashville sound.

Chicago became a center of freewheeling jazz in the 1920s with the efforts of Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver, and Louis Armstrong, while classic jazz and swing took root in New York City in the '30s and '40s behind Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, and Benny Goodman, the King of Swing.

American folk music has provided a narrative thread to the fibre of the US since its earliest days. Forms ranging from New England sea shanties to Pennsylvania Dutch worksongs helped shape life in the Northeast. Appalachian ballads evolved in the South, as did slave spirituals that served as codes for the Underground Railroad.