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For more than thirty years, David Hajdu has been a leading critic, casting light on artists past and present and on culture high and low. The Night Before is a collection of his writing on music, comics, and popular culture, in which he brings historical perspective and a keen critical sensibility to unraveling underappreciated or misunderstood works. These essays encompass an extraordinarily wide range of artists—from Billie Holiday to Billie Eilish—and themes, from the wails for racial justice by the “blues queens” of the 1920s to the role of new technologies in the making of twenty-first-century pop hits.
In piercing but lively prose, Hajdu explores how women singers of three generations upended gendered expectations. With insatiable curiosity, he tackles topics from Bulgarian folk music to the cartoons of Roz Chast, and from the racially mixed roots of country music to the unhinged comic strip that foreshadowed Peanuts. Turning inward, Hajdu reflects on subjects such as his fascination with the Hudson River, whose waters flow in both directions. The Night Before reveals how the currents of art and culture run forward and backward too, uniting past, present, and future in a ceaseless conversation.
— Gayle Wald, author of This Is Rhythm: Ella Jenkins, Children's Music, and the Long Civil Rights Movement
The Night Before, Today, and Tomorrow
I. Music
Four Goddesses of the Billboard Charts
George Jones
Tony Bennett
Julius Eastman
Maria Schneider
Paul Simon
Arthur Russell
Alejandro Escovedo
Fred Hersch
Ted Hearne
Billie Holiday and Frank Sinatra
II. Books on Music
Bob Dylan’s The Philosophy of Modern Song
David Robertson’s W. C. Handy: The Life and Times of the Man Who Made the Blues
Donald Bogle’s Heat Wave: The Life and Career of Ethel Waters
Tom Nolan’s Three Chords for Beauty’s Sake: The Life of Artie Shaw
Stanley Crouch’s Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker
Carolyn Burke’s No Regrets: The Life of Edith Piaf
James Gavin’s Deep in a Dream: The Long Night of Chet Baker
Randall J. Stephens’s The Devil’s Music: How Christians Inspired, Condemned, and Embraced Rock ’ n’ Roll
Maria Golia’s Ornette Coleman: The Territory and the Adventure
James McBride’s Kill ’ Em and Leave: Searching for the Real James Brown
Ann Powers’s Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell
Richard Hilburn’s A Few Words in Defense of Our Country: The Biography of Randy Newman
David Weigel’s The Show That Never Ends: The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock
Dylan Jones’s David Bowie: A Life
Vivien Goldman’s Revenge of the She-Punks: A Feminist Music History from Poly Styrene to Pussy Riot
Jonathan Gould’s Burning Down the House: Talking Heads and the New York Scene That Transformed Rock
Patti Smith’s Bread of Angels
Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run
Cyndi Lauper’s Cyndi Lauper: A Memoir
Philip Glass’s Words Without Music
Daniel Okrent’s Stephen Sondheim: Art Isn’t Easy
John Seabrook’s The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory
III. Some Thoughts on the Beatles
“You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)”
Get Back
Philip Norman’s Paul McCartney: The Life
Paul McCartney’s The Lyrics
Growing Old Without John Lennon
IV. Comics
Percy Crosby and Skippy
Mad and the Movie Musical
Robert Crumb’s The Book of Genesis
Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers
Daniel Clowes
Adrian Tomine
Roz Chast’s Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?
Jason Lutes’s Berlin
V. Shorter Takes
Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues”
Kitty Wells and J. D. Miller
The Secret History of the Folk Anthem of Hungary
Bill Withers
Donald Shirley
William Parker
Sound Portraits from Bulgaria
Taylor Mac’s 24-Decade History of Popular Music
Mary Halvorson
Meow Meow
Hildur Guðnadóttir
Julia Wolfe’s Fire in My Mouth
Nathalie Joachim
Lil Naz X’s “Old Town Road”
Billie Eilish
Mary Kouyoumdjian
VI. Me
My Most Memorable Concert
My First Guitar
The River and Me
Who Owned That Book Before Me?
My Favorite Bar
VII. A Few Other Things
Hermes Pan
64 East Seventh Street
Are You a Certified Pop Genius?
Acknowledgments
Permissions
Index