Everybodys Doin It, Dale Cockrell
Everybodys Doin It, Dale Cockrell
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Everybody's Doin' It
Sex, Music, and Dance in New York, 1840-1917

Author: Dale Cockrell

Narrator: Jonathan Todd Ross

Unabridged: 8 hr 20 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 08/13/2019


Synopsis

Everybody's Doin' It is the eye-opening story of popular music's seventy-year rise in the brothels, dance halls, and dives of New York City. It traces the birth of popular music, including ragtime and jazz, to convivial meeting places for sex, drink, music, and dance. Whether coming from a single piano player or a small band, live music was a nightly feature in New York's spirited dives, where men and women, often black and white, mingled freely—to the horror of the elite.

This rollicking demimonde drove the development of an energetic dance music that would soon span the world. The Virginia Minstrels, Juba, Stephen Foster, Irving Berlin and his hit "Alexander's Ragtime Band," and the Original Dixieland Jass Band all played a part in popularizing startling new sounds.

Musicologist Dale Cockrell recreates this ephemeral underground world by mining tabloids, newspapers, court records of police busts, lurid exposés, journals, and the reports of undercover detectives working for social-reform organizations, who were sent in to gather evidence against such low-life places. Everybody's Doin' It illuminates the how, why, and where of America's popular music and its buoyant journey from the dangerous Five Points of downtown to the interracial black and tans of Harlem.

About Dale Cockrell

Dale Cockrell is professor emeritus of musicology at Vanderbilt University and a research associate of the University of the Free State (South Africa). His Demons of Disorder won the C. Hugh Holman Award. He lives in Vermont and New York City.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Bill

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter. — John Keats If Keats is right, then the music Dale Cockrell introduces us to here—as raucous, untutored, and wild as it may have been—must be the sweetest of all. This is a wonderful little book. It is brief, scholarly, clearly written, a......more

Goodreads review by Rama

Boogie Nights: Domestic Revolution in 19th century New York Author Dale Cockrell focuses on music and popular dance forms to narrate the social history of Manhattan in the late nineteenth- and early-twentieth century. It is a historical study of popular music and dance that identifies a connection b......more

Goodreads review by Erin

Interesting little slice of pop culture americana research. I enjoyed all the drawings and anecdotes, especially. Really gives you an inside look into culture of big city common people......more

Goodreads review by Emily

Did you know that 1 in 3 musicians in New York within the scope of this book played in environments and locations with connections to commercialized sex? I definitely didn’t before this book lol. This is a fascinating look at the human condition, reform, social and cultural history, the history of g......more