Other voices hidden histories of Liverpool's popular music scenes, 1930s-1970s - Brocken, Michael (Ashgate, 2010)
Includes bibliographical references and index
Looking back, not through : an overview : 'Beatlesology' and historicism -- Antediluvian images? : popular music and parochial space in inter-war Liverpool -- Jazz, the Cavern, and skiffle -- Oral histories, public and private spaces : the partially-hidden histories of Joe Flannery and Gardner Road, 1961-62 -- I like your hat : country music and Liverpool -- Some other guys : R & B in Liverpool -- 'Mist over the Mersey' : folk scenes on Merseyside -- Cabaret : reality amid the fake -- Taste-makers, reception, word-of-mouth
"Other Voices exists as a history of the disparate and now partially hidden musical strands that contributed to Liverpool's musical countenance. It is also a critique of Beatles-related institutionalized popular music mythology. Via a critical historical investigation of several thus far partially hidden popular music activities in pre- and post-Second World War Liverpool, Michael Brocken reveals different yet intrinsic musical and socio-cultural processes from within the city of Liverpool. By addressing such 'scenes' as those involving dance bands, traditional jazz, folk music, country and western, and rhythm and blues, together with a consideration of partially hidden key places and individuals, and Liverpool's first 'real' record label, an assemblage of 'other voices' bears witness to an 'other', seldom discussed, Liverpool." "By doing so, Bracken - born and raised in Liverpool - asks questions about not only the historicity of the Beatles-Liverpool narrative, but also about the absence of historiography concerning disparate popular music activity within the city of Liverpool. In turn, he questions Liverpool's image as a 'music' city - what does this latter expression really mean? And 'from what genres of music does this apparently 'natural' musical font spring? Such questions ultimately bear crucially on issues relating to scenes, locality, race and identity, and periodization: all matters currently of great interest to the popular music researcher; in turn the veracity of institutionalized popular music histories is also brought into question."--Jacket