Series Foreword Abish sk some music fans, and they will tell you that genre labels are rub- and that imposing them on artists and pieces of music dimin- ishes the diversity of the work of performers, songwriters, instrumental composers, and so on. Still, in the record stores of old, in descriptions of radio-station formats (on-air and Internet), and at various stream- ing audio and download sites today, we have seen and continue to see music categorized by genre. Indeed, some genre boundaries are at least somewhat artificial, and it is true that some artists and some pieces of music transcend boundaries. But categorizing music by genre is a conve- nient way of keeping track of the thousands upon thousands of musical works available for listeners’ enjoyment it’s analogous to the difference between having all your documents on your computer’s home screen versus organizing them into folders. So, Greenwood’s Exploring Musi- cal Genres series is a genre- and performance group–based collection of books and e-books. The publications in this series will provide listeners with background information on the genre critical analysis of import- ant examples of musical pieces, artists, and events from the genre dis- cussion of must-hear music from the genre analysis of the genre’s impact on the popular culture of its time and on later popular-culture trends and analysis of the enduring legacy of the genre today and its impact on later musicians and their songs, instrumental works, and recordings. Each volume will also contain a bibliography of references for further reading. We view the volumes in the Exploring Musical Genres series as a go-to resource for serious music fans, the more casual listener, and everyone in between. The authors in the series are scholars, who probe into the details of the genre and its practitioners: the singers, instrumentalists,
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