The Place of Music. - book review

The Place
of Music
Andrew Leyshon,
David Matless,
and George Revill,
eds.
1998; 326 pp.
$24.95
Guilford Press
www.guilford.com

This effort by British geographers to enlist cross-disciplinary dialogue on the place of music yields a dozen essays, among them "The Early Days of the Gramophone Industry in India," "... The Cultural Politics of Sound and Light in Los Angeles, 1965-1975," and "... Bilingual Terrain in Scottish Song." Why not? Scholars will find familiar theoretical ground a bit labored in places, but the book will be interesting and entertaining to the general reader who wants popular music writing other than TV chintz, the sociology of youth deviance, and how to rip off the dark others' exotic riffs. Timely, varied, smartly done. Worth considering as an intro to music scholarship with a cultural studies spin.

"[Woody] Guthrie's personal views and political attitudes, however, remained inherently complex. In the case of "This Land Is Your Land," for example, the original manuscript shows it to have been a six-verse song with a compassionate, strongly socialist message. Yet despite its composer's continuing reputation as a figure on the American left, he developed a four-verse rendition (verses 1-3 and 5) that stripped the song of an important part of its message. The so-called radical verses (4 and 6), with their references to the inequity of personal property and unemployment lines, were deliberately omitted. The popularity of the song in the postwar, and especially the post-McCarthy, period was thereby assured at the expense of some of its meaning. --JOHN R. GOLD, "FROM `DUST STORM DISASTER' TO `PASTURES OF PLENTY'"

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