Framing Reading Intro

Like the previous module on Asian American music, this one covers a category whose internal diversity is enormous. People whose grandparents and great-grandparents arrived in the United States at different times, from radically different places, speaking different languages, practicing different religions, and meeting very different American receptions when they arrived are all "European American" by some present-day reckoning. A nineteenth-century Ulster Scots farming family in the Tennessee hills, a Jewish family from a shtetl in Russian-controlled Poland setting up on the Lower East Side in 1905, an Italian Catholic family in a Bronx tenement in 1920, and a German-speaking refugee composer fleeing Nazi Europe in 1938 are all "white" today. They were not all white in the same way at the same time, and they were not always white at all. The consolidation of these groups into a single "Caucasian" category happened gradually, through specific political and legal events, over the same decades the music this module covers was being made. The whiteness this module covers is an outcome these communities arrived at, and the music was made on the way there rather than from inside it.

The traditions this module covers are distinct. The Ulster Scots ballad and dance music tradition that became Appalachian folk and then country and bluegrass; the Eastern European Jewish songwriting tradition that became Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, and the Brill Building; the Italian, Irish, Polish, and other working-class Catholic traditions that flowed through urban doo-wop, rock and roll, and the heartland rock of the late 1970s; and the central and Eastern European tradition of classical training that, transplanted to the United States by mid-century refugees and their American-born students, helped produce the synthesizer-based electronic music that reshaped American popular sound from the late 1960s onward. What these traditions share is the long, often-uncomfortable American process by which their carriers came to be understood as "white," and a sustained, often-unequal dialogue with African American music that runs through every one of them. Module 5 is the cultural-roots module where the category itself is hardest to hold steady, and the listening guides take that instability as a feature rather than a problem.

Whiteness as a process

The most influential single book on this topic is Matthew Frye Jacobson's Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race, published in 1998, which traces what Jacobson calls a "political history of whiteness" through three periods. From 1790 to 1840, the United States naturalization law restricted citizenship to "free white persons" and that category was understood, in Jacobson's reading, to mean essentially Anglo-Saxons, with everyone else either excluded or grudgingly accepted. From 1840 to 1924, mass immigration from Ireland, Germany, Italy, Greece, Russia, Poland, and elsewhere fractured the category: the dominant nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century scientific racism divided Europeans into competing "races" (Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, Mediterranean, Slavic, Hebrew, Alpine, Nordic) arranged in a hierarchy, with Anglo-Saxons on top. From 1924 forward, after the National Origins Act drastically restricted immigration from southern and eastern Europe, the various European "races" were gradually reconsolidated into the single "Caucasian" category that twentieth-century Americans came to take for granted.

This is not a neat story. It does not say that any group of European immigrants was ever treated as Black people were treated; the racial regime of slavery, segregation, and anti-Black violence operated on a different and more brutal axis. Even the most embattled European immigrant groups had legal access to citizenship, to property, to public space, and to mobility that Black Americans were systematically denied. What the whiteness-as-process scholarship establishes is that among Americans understood as not-Black, the racial category was unstable and politically constructed, and the immigrants the term "European American" now covers came in at different rungs and rose at different speeds. The dominant racial position at the top of that hierarchy through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century belonged to Anglo-Saxon Protestants, the descendants of the early English colonial settlers who controlled most of the major American institutions (the federal and state governments, the universities, the major newspapers and magazines, the banks, and the industrial corporations) and who set the terms by which later European immigrant groups were racialized on arrival. The two largest northern European Protestant immigrant groups of the nineteenth century, German Protestants and Scandinavian Lutherans, integrated into this Anglo-Saxon Protestant coalition relatively quickly and often participated in its racial logic against more recently arrived European groups; the cartoonist Thomas Nast, a German Protestant immigrant who became Harper's Weekly's most famous illustrator in the 1860s and 1870s, drew dozens of simianized anti-Irish-Catholic caricatures that became the textbook examples of nineteenth-century American nativist art. Irish Catholics arriving during the famine years of the 1840s were depicted in those cartoons and in similar mainstream Anglo-Protestant publications as racial inferiors, and were targets of nativist mob violence (the 1844 anti-Catholic riots in Philadelphia, the 1855 Bloody Monday riots in Louisville, anti-Irish hiring discrimination throughout the second half of the century). Italian immigrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries faced a similar racialization, led by the same Anglo-Protestant establishment and joined, by then, by earlier-arriving Irish and German Americans positioning themselves toward the top of the hierarchy: anti-Italian mob violence in New Orleans, Tampa, and other cities, alongside widespread employment, housing, and educational discrimination. Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe faced anti-Semitic exclusion from hotels, neighborhoods, professions, and universities through the middle of the twentieth century, exclusions enforced by Anglo-Protestant gatekeepers (Harvard's quota system on Jewish admissions, instituted under President A. Lawrence Lowell in 1922 and copied by Yale, Columbia, and Princeton over the following decade, is the canonical case) and not seriously dismantled until after the Second World War.

All of this happened above a floor that almost everyone in the story participated in. Anti-Black racism was the constant of American public life across the entire period this module covers, and the European immigrant groups who were themselves racialized as not-fully-white often accelerated their consolidation into the white category by joining the anti-Black violence and exclusion that defined that category's bottom edge. The 1863 New York City Draft Riots, in which Irish Catholic mobs (themselves the recent targets of nativist violence) lynched Black New Yorkers in the streets and burned the Colored Orphan Asylum, are the most cited example, but the pattern recurs across the period. Becoming white in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century America was, for the European immigrant groups this module covers, partly a process of being received into the racial coalition that ran the country and partly a process of taking up that coalition's hostility to the people the coalition defined itself against. David Roediger's The Wages of Whiteness (1991) and Noel Ignatiev's How the Irish Became White (1995) are the standard scholarly accounts of how that second process worked.

The point of laying this out is not to flatten distinctions between groups or to argue that European immigrant suffering matched the structural racism leveled at Black Americans, Indigenous peoples, or Asian Americans (it did not). The point is that the people who made the music this module covers were, at the time they were making it, often racialized in ways the present-day "European American" frame does not capture. When Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers recorded "Why Do Fools Fall in Love" in 1955, the group's two Puerto Rican members were navigating a racial situation that would not have allowed them to call themselves white in any straightforward way, and the group's Italian American audience-base in mid-century New York was itself less than fully white in the racial logic that had shaped the city a generation earlier. When Carole King and Gerry Goffin wrote "Up on the Roof" for the Drifters in 1962, they were Jewish songwriters working in an industry that, two decades earlier, had still operated under explicit anti-Semitic exclusions in adjacent industries (banking, law, medicine). When Bruce Springsteen wrote "The River" in 1979 and 1980, he was writing as the American-born son of an Irish-Italian Catholic family from Freehold, New Jersey, working from a tradition of white working-class identity that depended in part on the postwar GI Bill, the Federal Housing Administration's redlining policies, and the union-shop industrial economy of the Northeast and Midwest, all of which had functioned to consolidate the various European-immigrant groups into a single "white" working class while explicitly excluding Black Americans from the same benefits. The whiteness this module covers is, in every case, a whiteness with a date and a route.

Four threads

The five anchor tracks in this module trace four distinct threads through the European American story. The threads overlap and cross-pollinate, but each has its own migration history, its own institutional infrastructure, and its own dialogue with the rest of the American musical landscape.

The Ulster Scots ballad tradition

Beginning in the early eighteenth century and accelerating through the middle of that century, large numbers of Protestant settlers from the lowlands of Scotland and the north of Ireland (the Ulster Scots, also called "Scots-Irish" in much American scholarship) crossed the Atlantic and moved south and west through Pennsylvania into the Appalachian backcountry. By the time of the American Revolution, the Ulster Scots were one of the largest non-English white populations in the colonies, and they were heavily concentrated in what would become West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, eastern Tennessee, southwestern Virginia, and western North Carolina, the region the twentieth century came to call Appalachia. They brought with them an oral ballad tradition that ran back through Scotland and the north of England and that included narratives of murder, betrayal, exile, supernatural visitation, and aristocratic catastrophe; they brought fiddle dance music, unaccompanied hymn singing, and the basic instrumental and vocal grammars that would, over the next two centuries, be reshaped into Appalachian old-time music, country music, and bluegrass.

The "ballad-hunting" expeditions of the early twentieth century, conducted by figures like Cecil Sharp (working in Appalachia in 1916, 1917, and 1918 with Olive Dame Campbell and his protégé Maud Karpeles), produced a substantial scholarly record of the Ulster-Scots-derived material that had survived, sometimes in forms older than what could still be heard in the British Isles. Sharp and his collaborators leaned on the ballad collection compiled by the Harvard professor Francis James Child, whose English and Scottish Popular Ballads (published in five volumes from 1882 to 1898) catalogued 305 narrative ballads with their textual variants; ballads that survived in Appalachia were and are referred to as "Child ballads" with their Child catalogue numbers. Sharp's published collections, the most important of which is English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians (1917, expanded 1932), gave the early-twentieth-century American folk movement and, later, the 1960s folk revival a shared canon to draw from. The track this module anchors on the Ulster Scots thread (Joan Baez singing "Mary Hamilton," Child ballad 173, on her 1960 self-titled debut album) is a folk-revival recording reaching back through Sharp's collections to the Scottish source.

The Sharp narrative also has problems, and recent scholarship has pushed hard against parts of it. Sharp consistently undercounted the Scottish (versus English) origins of the material he collected, and his project was substantially shaped by his guides' decisions to lead him toward white-identified mountain communities while the Black, Indigenous, and multiracial musical communities of the same region went under-documented. The banjo, central to the Appalachian sound by Sharp's time, was an instrument of African origin reconstructed from West African prototypes by enslaved Black musicians, then taken up by white minstrel performers from the 1830s onward and later by white Appalachian musicians who often had no idea of its history. The Appalachian musical tradition the Ulster Scots narrative wraps up neatly was always, in fact, a hybrid, and "Mary Hamilton" appears in this module as one strand inside a larger weave rather than the whole tapestry.

The Eastern European Jewish songwriting tradition

Between approximately 1881 and 1924, more than two million Jewish immigrants left the Russian Empire, Russian-controlled Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, and adjacent regions for the United States, driven by waves of state-sanctioned anti-Jewish violence (pogroms) that began in earnest after the 1881 assassination of Czar Alexander II and continued into the 1920s, and by the broader poverty and legal restriction Jewish life in the Russian Empire's Pale of Settlement entailed. Most of these immigrants settled initially in New York City, with the largest concentration on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Their American-born and immigrant children entered the entertainment industries in disproportionate numbers, partly because so many other industries (banking, law, medicine, academia, much of corporate America) were closed to Jews by formal or informal anti-Semitic exclusion through the 1930s and 1940s, and partly because the entertainment industries (vaudeville, sheet music publishing, the new film business, the new recording business) were themselves new enough to be open to outsiders.

The first institutional home for the music this immigrant generation made was the Yiddish theater. By 1900 New York City was the world center of Yiddish theater. By 1925 the strip of Second Avenue running south from 14th Street, in what is now the East Village, housed more than a dozen Yiddish-language theaters and was known as the "Yiddish Broadway" or "Yiddish Rialto"; at its peak the district drew hundreds of thousands of theatergoers a year, sustained Yiddish-language press and radio infrastructure, and supported a robust ecosystem of cafes, music stores, sheet-music publishers, and the first theatrical union in the United States (the Hebrew Actors Union, founded in 1899). The repertoire combined translated European drama and operetta with original Yiddish-language musicals built around the four major Second Avenue composers (Joseph Rumshinsky, Abraham Ellstein, Sholom Secunda, and Alexander Olshanetsky), most of whom drew their early musical training from cantorial music (the sung liturgical tradition of the synagogue) before moving into theatrical composition. Both Irving Berlin and George Gershwin grew up inside this district. Berlin's father was a cantor; the Gershwin family lived for years at 91 Second Avenue, in the heart of the Yiddish Theatre District, and the brothers regularly attended the local Yiddish theaters as children. The musical sensibilities of the next generation of songwriters were not abstract products of immigration; they came out of a specific neighborhood, a specific theatrical tradition, and a specific set of synagogue and stage musical models the children grew up hearing.

The corner of West 28th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues in Manhattan, where most of the major sheet-music publishing houses concentrated in the 1890s and early 1900s, came to be called Tin Pan Alley, and the term came to mean both that physical block and the larger sheet-music-driven popular song industry of which it was the center. Irving Berlin and George Gershwin became the two best-known figures of a Tin Pan Alley songwriting generation that included Jerome Kern, Harold Arlen (born Hyman Arluck, the son of a cantor), Harry Von Tilzer (born Aaron Gumbinsky), Doc Pomus, the Gershwin brothers' frequent collaborator Yip Harburg, Sammy Cahn, and a long list of others, almost all of them Jewish sons and daughters of Eastern European immigrants. The composer Cole Porter, the rare non-Jewish songwriter who broke through into the same commercial tier, told Richard Rodgers his secret for writing successful "American" music was to "write Jewish tunes."

The Tin Pan Alley songbook was constantly drawing on Black American musical material, sometimes in straightforward exchange and sometimes through the framework of blackface minstrelsy that had dominated American popular entertainment through the nineteenth century. As Rachel Rubin and Jeffrey Melnick argue in Immigration and American Popular Culture, the Tin Pan Alley story is impossible to tell without the Jewish-immigrant component, and impossible to tell honestly without acknowledging that the songbook's commercial success ran on the appropriation of Black American music, often through the racist performance frameworks of minstrelsy. Berlin's "Alexander's Ragtime Band" (1911) and Gershwin's "Swanee" (1919, made famous by Al Jolson) made their authors household names by relying on audiences hearing the songs as recognizably Black; Jolson's 1927 film The Jazz Singer, the first feature-length film with synchronized dialogue sequences, told a story about a Jewish cantor's son rebelling against his father's tradition by performing American popular music in blackface, a story the film's broadly Jewish audience and its broadly white American audience read as triumphant assimilation but which, to a present-day viewer, reads as the openly racist work of minstrelsy that it is. Jeffrey Melnick's A Right to Sing the Blues (1999) is the standard scholarly account of how the broader Tin Pan Alley exchange worked.

Tin Pan Alley as a sheet-music-publishing industry began to give way in the late 1920s to a new institutional center, the Broadway musical theater. The pivot is usually located at Show Boat, the Kern and Hammerstein adaptation of Edna Ferber's 1926 novel that opened at the Ziegfeld Theatre on December 27, 1927 (less than three months after The Jazz Singer premiered on October 6). Up to Show Boat, Broadway musicals had largely been revues, operettas, and vaudeville-derived assemblages in which the songs were the point and the plot was a holding container; Show Boat integrated music into a serious narrative about race, miscegenation law, alcoholism, and family rupture, with songs that grew out of character and situation rather than serving as standalone numbers. The work is uncomfortable in ways that twenty-first-century revivals have had to confront and rewrite (the original opening chorus contained the n-word; the Black characters were originally written for white actors in blackface in some early productions; the musical's racial politics are at once unprecedented and condescending), and it is at the same time the work that made it possible for the next generation of Broadway composers to try the integrated book musical form. The second pivot, the one that established the Rodgers-and-Hammerstein integrated-musical formula as the Broadway standard, came on March 31, 1943, with the premiere of Oklahoma! at the St. James Theatre, the first collaboration of Richard Rodgers (who had previously worked with Lorenz Hart) and Oscar Hammerstein II (Kern's Show Boat collaborator). Oklahoma! ran for 2,212 performances, won a special Pulitzer Prize in 1944, and became the model for the postwar Broadway musical. The Rodgers and Hammerstein run that followed (Carousel 1945, South Pacific 1949, The King and I 1951, The Sound of Music 1959) defined Broadway through the 1950s and produced the bulk of what later came to be called the Great American Songbook, a body of work jazz singers, jazz instrumentalists, and pop singers from Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald forward have been performing and reinterpreting for the eight decades since.

The Brill Building era of the late 1950s and early 1960s, in which a new generation of mostly young, mostly Jewish songwriters working in cubicle-like offices at 1619 Broadway and the nearby 1650 Broadway wrote pop singles for Black and white vocal groups and singers, is the direct descendant of the Tin Pan Alley and Broadway lines together. The principal institutional engine was Aldon Music, founded by Don Kirshner and Al Nevins in May 1958 and housed at 1650 Broadway across the street from the Brill Building proper, which at its peak employed eighteen songwriters working in piano-equipped cubicles. Nearly all the major Brill Building songwriters were Jewish New Yorkers writing in a tradition that ran back through Berlin and Gershwin to the cantorial and Yiddish-theater music of their grandparents' generation. The track this module anchors on the Brill Building thread (the Drifters' recording of Goffin and King's "Up on the Roof," released in late 1962) sits squarely in that lineage.

Italian, Irish, and Polish urban Catholic working-class traditions

The third thread runs through the urban Catholic working-class neighborhoods that the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century mass migrations from southern and eastern Europe produced in the cities of the Northeast and Midwest. Italian immigration peaked between 1880 and 1924 (about four million people in that span, mostly from southern Italy and Sicily); Irish Catholic immigration ran in earlier waves, peaking with the famine years of the 1840s and continuing through the rest of the nineteenth century; Polish, Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, and other central and eastern European Catholic immigration also peaked in the 1880-1924 window. The neighborhoods these immigrants settled in (Brooklyn and the Bronx in New York; the South Side of Chicago; South Philadelphia; the working-class wards of Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Newark, and Jersey City) became the settings for a long American working-class musical tradition that ran from the nineteenth-century brass-band and accordion music of immigrant social clubs through the mid-century Italian American crooner tradition and the racially mixed street-corner doo-wop of the 1950s, both of which fed the consolidation of rock and roll in the late 1950s and 1960s, and on into the 1970s heartland rock that this module's closing track anchors.

The mid-century crooner tradition is the first major American popular form to come substantively out of these neighborhoods. Crooning as a vocal style emerged at the end of the 1920s, when the carbon and condenser microphones built for radio broadcasting and electrical recording made it possible for a singer to be heard across a hall (or, more importantly, across a national radio audience) without the projected, theatrical delivery the unamplified pre-war stage had required. Bing Crosby, an Irish American singer from Tacoma, Washington, was the first major figure to build a career around the new technology, and the relaxed, conversational, behind-the-microphone style he developed in the early 1930s became the template every later crooner worked from. The Italian American singers who took up that template (Russ Columbo in the early 1930s, in direct rivalry with Crosby; Frank Sinatra from his Tommy Dorsey years in 1940 forward; Tony Bennett from 1951 forward) brought to it two additional resources their own communities had carried across the Atlantic: the Italian operatic bel canto tradition of long, sustained, emotionally rendered vocal line, and the Neapolitan popular-song tradition (the canzone napoletana of "O Sole Mio," "Torna a Surriento," "Funiculì, Funiculà") that southern Italian immigrants had grown up with at home. The result was an American popular vocal style at once intimate (the microphone), conversational (Crosby's contribution), and lyrical (the Italian operatic and Neapolitan inheritance), and it dominated American popular singing from the late 1930s through the early 1960s.

The crooners' relationship to African American music is at the center of the style's history. Sinatra and Bennett were both formed substantially by Black jazz singing, and both said so publicly across their careers. Sinatra's 1958 essay "The Way I Look at Race" in Ebony magazine names Billie Holiday as "the greatest single musical influence on me," and Sinatra's earlier civil-rights record (the 1945 short film The House I Live In, his refusal to play segregated venues, his insistence on integrated bills through the 1940s and 1950s) was substantial for a major popular entertainer of his generation. Bennett joined the third 1965 Selma to Montgomery march at Harry Belafonte's direct invitation, performed for the marchers from a stage built of coffin crates and plywood the night before the march reached the Alabama State Capitol, and remained a public civil-rights advocate for the rest of his life. The crooner repertoire itself was substantially the Great American Songbook material of the previous Tin Pan Alley and Broadway thread (Berlin, the Gershwins, Porter, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Arlen), much of it written in dialogue with the Black jazz idiom (the previous section's main point); the crooners interpreted that repertoire through Italian operatic and Neapolitan vocal sensibilities and through their own continuous absorption of Black jazz phrasing, particularly Holiday's behind-the-beat back-phrasing. The Italian American crooner voice that ran from Crosby's 1932 hits through Sinatra's Capitol records of the 1950s through Bennett's 1962 "I Left My Heart in San Francisco" is, like the Songbook itself, inseparable from its Black sources.

The doo-wop subgenre, which emerged in the racially mixed working-class urban neighborhoods of New York City, Philadelphia, and other Northeastern cities in the early 1950s, is the second major popular form this thread carries. The groups who recorded doo-wop were often integrated in ways that had no parallel in mainstream American life of the same period. Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, the group on Track 1 of this module, included three Black members and two Puerto Rican members; Dion and the Belmonts came up out of the same Italian American Bronx neighborhoods that produced Bennett a generation earlier; Black, Italian, Irish, and Puerto Rican singers across Harlem, the Bronx, Brooklyn, and South Philadelphia traded vocal arrangements, harmony approaches, and street-corner audiences across what was, in mid-1950s mainstream American culture, supposedly a hard color line. The doo-wop story is, at one and the same time, a Black music story and a Puerto Rican music story (which Module 3 carries) and an Italian, Irish, and Polish American urban working-class story; this module picks up the last of those threads while keeping the first two visible.

The crooner and doo-wop branches both fed the consolidation of rock and roll in the late 1950s and 1960s, and both fed the heartland rock that closes this module. The Bruce Springsteen track on Track 5 (the title track of his 1980 double album The River) carries this thread forward into the late-1970s deindustrialization of the Northeastern and Midwestern cities the immigrant generations had built their working-class lives in; Springsteen has consistently named both the Italian American crooner tradition (Sinatra above all) and the urban doo-wop and R&B he heard on the radio as a Jersey teenager as foundational for his own vocal and arrangement instincts. The thread that begins with brass-band and accordion music in immigrant social clubs ends, on this module's anchor lineup, with a 1980 song about a marriage that had to happen too early and an industrial economy that did not last.

The synthesizer pioneers

The fourth thread is harder to gather under a single ethnic-immigration frame than the other three are, and that is itself part of what makes it useful for Module 5. Through the middle of the twentieth century, the United States became the world center of electronic music research and production, partly because of the wartime and postwar migration of European musicians, engineers, and physicists to American universities and industrial-research labs, and partly because of a homegrown American tradition of tinkerer-engineer music-making that ran from Thaddeus Cahill's 1897 Telharmonium through Leon Theremin's 1928 patent for the theremin to John Cage's 1939 Imaginary Landscape No. 1. By the mid-1960s, the engineer Robert Moog (Polish-Jewish maternal heritage, born in New York in 1934) was building the first commercially viable voltage-controlled modular synthesizers in his shop in Trumansburg, New York; the engineer Don Buchla was building parallel instruments on the West Coast; Vladimir Ussachevsky and Otto Luening were running the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center; Milton Babbitt was working with the RCA Mark II synthesizer at the same center.

The synthesizer figure this module anchors on, Wendy Carlos, was born in Pawtucket, Rhode Island in 1939, studied music and physics at Brown University, and went to Columbia for graduate work in composition with Ussachevsky in the early 1960s. Carlos's debut album, Switched-On Bach, released by Columbia Records in October 1968, did three things at once that none of the prior American electronic-music tradition had done together. It made fully realized recordings of canonical Western classical works (selections by Bach) on the Moog synthesizer at a level of finish that demonstrated, for the first time at this scale, that the new instrument could produce real performances of real music rather than abstract sound effects; it sold to a popular audience in numbers no electronic-music recording had ever approached, eventually being certified platinum and topping the Billboard Classical chart for three years; and it functioned, in Robert Moog's own later account, as the demonstration that opened the door for synthesizers to enter rock, pop, R&B, soul, disco, and every subsequent popular-music genre that took them up. The track this module anchors on the synthesizer thread is the closing piece of Switched-On Bach, Carlos's electronic realization of Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 in G major.

Carlos came out as a transgender woman in a 1979 interview, and reissues of her recordings after that point have credited her as Wendy Carlos rather than the Walter Carlos under whom Switched-On Bach was originally released. She is one of the most consequential trans figures in twentieth-century American music. Her own statements over the years have asked, consistently and clearly, that the music be the center of any serious account of her work and that her transition not be made into the story; this module follows that wish. Carlos's significance in the musical-technology history of American popular music is enormous on its own terms, and the listening guide for Track 4 stays mostly on the music.

What this module leaves out

Five anchor tracks cannot cover the European American popular tradition. The lineup this module follows makes a particular argument (that whiteness is a process, that the four threads above are distinct in their cultural roots even as they all run in dialogue with African American music, and that the tracks chosen show the threads at consequential historical moments), and the choices the lineup makes leave out a great deal. Several paths are worth naming, because each is a defensible and rich subject for the final project ahead of you.

Country music is one of the major European American popular traditions and is not anchored on this module. It is anchored elsewhere in the course at Module 1, where Hank Williams's "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" (1949) carries the country thread for the methodology reading. Module 5 picks up the Ulster Scots ballad ancestor of Williams's lineage through the 1960s folk revival and Joan Baez's "Mary Hamilton" rather than through commercial country directly. Students interested in the commercial country tradition (Williams forward through Loretta Lynn, Merle Haggard, Dolly Parton, Garth Brooks, Kacey Musgraves, contemporary Nashville) have abundant material for the final project, and the folk-revival generation that Module 5 anchors (Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, Phil Ochs, Buffy Sainte-Marie) is also abundant final-project territory.

Elvis Presley is also not on an anchor track in this module, by design. He does not fit any of the four European-immigrant cultural-roots threads the module traces: his musical formation runs through Black Southern gospel, R&B, and blues (Module 2's territory). Elvis is the canonical case of the racial economics of mid-twentieth-century American popular music: a poor white Southerner whose musical voice was inseparable from Black Memphis and Mississippi sources, whose 1954 Sun Records breakthrough came under producer Sam Phillips's stated project of finding a white singer who could sing Black material for white audiences, whose commercial breakthrough depended on a recording industry that paid him substantially more for Black-derived material than it paid the Black artists who originated it (Big Mama Thornton's 1952 "Hound Dog" and Crudup's "That's All Right" are the two canonical cases; both originating artists died in poverty), and whose reception then severed the white star from the Black sources in ways that have been argued over ever since.

Polka, the German and central European dance music that became a major American working-class tradition through the early and middle twentieth century, does not appear on an anchor track. Polka had its own commercial recording industry (Vocalion's polka catalog, Columbia's polka subsidiary, Dana Records, Jay Jay Records), its own radio circuit, and its own substantial postwar audience among Polish, German, Czech, Slovak, and Slovenian Americans, with regional centers in Chicago, Cleveland, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, and Milwaukee. Frankie Yankovic's "Just Because" sold over a million copies in 1948. The Polish American "Polka Hall of Fame" in Cleveland, the Grammy polka category that ran from 1986 to 2008, and the Polish American "polka mass" liturgical tradition all mark the genre's institutional standing in the second half of the twentieth century.

The German and Eastern European Jewish art-music tradition that came across with the wave of refugees fleeing Nazi Europe in the 1930s reshaped twentieth-century American popular music in ways this module does not anchor. Arnold Schoenberg, Kurt Weill, Erich Korngold, Hanns Eisler, Ernst Krenek, and dozens of less-famous figures arrived between 1933 and 1941, settled mostly in New York and Los Angeles, and worked across film scoring (Korngold at Warner Bros., the Hollywood golden-age sound; Eisler's Hollywood scores before his 1948 deportation as a target of the House Un-American Activities Committee), musical theater (Weill on Broadway after 1935 with Lady in the Dark, One Touch of Venus, Street Scene), pedagogy (Schoenberg at UCLA, Krenek at Vassar and Hamline), and politically committed art music. Their American students (Lou Harrison, John Cage, Milton Babbitt, Pauline Oliveros) carried the influence into postwar American art music.

Punk rock of the 1970s is not on an anchor track here, but it is one of the clearer through-lines for the urban-immigrant working-class material this module has been tracing. American punk consolidated in mid-1970s New York, around the Bowery dive bar CBGB (opened December 1973 by Hilly Kristal at 315 Bowery, originally meant for country and bluegrass), where Television began playing weekly in April 1974 and the Patti Smith Group, the Ramones, Blondie, and Talking Heads followed across 1974 and 1975. The musical premise was a deliberate refusal of the technically polished arena rock of the same moment: short and fast songs, three chords, no extended solos, deliberately unpolished voice and instrument, an ethos of do-it-yourself production and self-released records that opened the form to musicians who had no commercial-music infrastructure behind them. The Ramones (Italian American and Jewish American Queens, the canonical urban-Catholic-and-Jewish-working-class punk band), Patti Smith (Catholic working-class New Jersey), Television, the New York Dolls, Blondie, Suicide, and Richard Hell came out of the same New York neighborhoods Threads 2 and 3 of this module trace; the parallel London scene of 1976 and 1977 (the Sex Pistols, the Clash, Buzzcocks, the Slits, X-Ray Spex) was a major influence on what came next.

Hardcore in the early 1980s was the next phase: faster, more aggressive, more politically explicit, more committed to the do-it-yourself infrastructure of independent labels and self-promoted shows. The three foundational scenes were Los Angeles (Black Flag, formed 1976, on Greg Ginn's SST Records; the Germs, the Dead Kennedys, the Circle Jerks), Washington DC (the Bad Brains, formed 1977, four Black musicians of Jamaican descent who had been jazz fusion players and who blended reggae with hardcore at impossibly fast tempos; Minor Threat, formed 1980 by Ian MacKaye and Jeff Nelson on their Dischord Records, the source of the straight-edge ethos), and the Bay Area, with smaller hardcore scenes also in Boston, New York, and Minneapolis. Fugazi, MacKaye's post-Minor-Threat band formed in 1987 and active until 2003, ran on Dischord's deliberately anti-commercial economic model (low ticket prices, no merchandise markup, no major-label deals) and is the canonical example of the political seriousness with which the hardcore scene treated questions of how music should be made and sold. Several major final-project arcs run out of this material: the New York and London punk scenes themselves, the Bad Brains as a Black-led punk band whose racial position the standard punk history tends to obscure, the straight-edge subculture that came out of DC hardcore, the independent-label infrastructure of Dischord, SST, and Alternative Tentacles, the development of post-hardcore in the late 1980s and 1990s, and the New York hardcore scene's overlap with thrash metal in the late 1980s.

Riot grrrl in the early 1990s, a feminist punk movement centered in Olympia, Washington and Washington DC (Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, Heavens to Betsy, Sleater-Kinney coming slightly later in 1994 forward), grew partly out of the hardcore network above and was one of the more influential developments in 1990s American underground rock; the broader 1990s indie-rock scene that ran on labels like Matador, Sub Pop, Merge, K Records, and Touch and Go (Yo La Tengo, Pavement, Sonic Youth, Pixies, Built to Spill, Liz Phair, Cat Power, Modest Mouse) is also off this module's lineup and is well-documented final-project territory. The contemporary Americana genre, which came up in the 1990s and 2000s alongside the indie-rock scene, gave the Ulster Scots ballad inheritance one of its most vital extensions: the work that ran from Uncle Tupelo and Wilco through Gillian Welch, Iris DeMent, the O Brother Where Art Thou? soundtrack, and forward into the contemporary work of Kacey Musgraves and Brandi Carlile (the latter two also overlapping with mainstream country) is the place where the folk-revival tradition Track 2 anchors and the commercial country tradition Module 1 anchors keep talking to each other.