Early Popular Music in Australia: Roots, Diversity and Directions (as a downloadable pdf)
Early Popular Music in Australia: Roots, Diversity and Directions by John Whiteoak
Lyrebird Press, The University of Melbourne
Representing thirty years of research and writing on popular music in Australia, the eleven articles selected for this volume examine how both urban and country musicians adapted a variety of transnational genres, from blackface and black minstrelsy to ragtime, jazz, brass band, circus, “German band”, Latin, “Gypsy”, hillbilly and country and western music. Given that much of this music was unwritten and often improvised, heard in rotundas, showgrounds, circus tents, balls, civic receptions and nightclubs, this research draws on an imaginative range of sources, including personal reminiscences, rare sheet music and recordings. Always entertaining and accessible, Early Popular Music in Australia uncovers extraordinary musicianship, remarkable collaborations and a vein of homespun larrikinism to significantly broaden and enrich our understanding of the Australian cultural landscape in the century before rock and pop.
CONTENTS
1 Demons of discord down under: "Jump Jim Crow" and "Australia's first jazz band"
2 A good black music story? Black American stars in Australian musical entertainment before "jazz"
3 "Jazzing" and Australia's first jazz band
4 The development of Australian circus music
5 "Pity the bandless towns": Banding in Australian rural communities before World War II
6 What were the "German bands" of pre-World War I Australian street life?
7 Popular music, militarism, women and the early brass band
8 Some more bagels and bongos: The Jewish Latin connection in Australian popular and light music history
9 Italian Australian musicians, "Argentino" tango bands and the Australian tango band era
10 Ginger Meggs meets the peanut vendor: "Tropical" Hispanic music and dance in Australian popular entertainment, 1930s–1960s
11 Hillbilly, cowboy and western music as urban popular entertainment
John Whiteoak is an Adjunct Professor attached to the Sir Zelman Cowen School of Music and Performance, Monash University, with a widely diverse performance background. His publications include Playing Ad Lib: Improvisatory Music in Australia 1836–1970 (1999), the Currency Companion to Music in Australia (2003, as co-general editor) and “Take Me to Spain”: Australian Imaginings of Spain through Music and Dance (2019).
This product (AMR022E) is a downloadable pdf (ISBN: 9780734038067). A paperback version (AMR022) is also available ISBN: 9780734038050 (paperback). ISSN: 1325 5266. Publication date: January 2026
