Overthrowing the conventional pieties of mainstream jazz and rock history, Elijah Wald traces the evolution of popular music through developing tastes, trends and technologies - including the role of records, radio, jukeboxes and television - to give a fuller, more balanced account of thebroad variety of music that captivated listeners over the course of the twentieth century. Wald revisits original sources - recordings, period articles, memoirs, and interviews - to highlight how music was actually heard and experienced over the years. In a refreshing departure from more typical histories, he focuses on the world of working musicians and ordinary listeners rather thanstars and specialists. He looks at the evolution of jazz as dance music, and rock 'n' roll through the eyes of the screaming, twisting teenage girls who made up the bulk of its early audience. Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, and the Beatles are all here, butWald also discusses less familiar names like Paul Whiteman, Guy Lombardo, Mitch Miller, Jo Stafford, Frankie Avalon, and the Shirelles, who in some cases were far more popular than those bright stars we all know today, and who more accurately represent the mainstream of their times. | How The Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll by Elijah Wald, Paperback | Indigo Chapters