One of the important sources I used in researching for my book MUSIC TITANS – 250 GREATEST RECORDING ARTISTS OF THE PAST 100 YEARS was Ted Gioia’s Music – A Subversive Historywhich argues that for most of recorded history, going back many centuries right up to our present day, the great musical breakthroughs usually come from outsiders, marginalized and oppressed people and communities, from rebels and troublemakers. Later, that music becomes accepted, some would say co-opted, by the mainstream, by the establishment and then new forms of rebellious, outsider music must emerge. For example, look at the role of African-Americans in the rise of Jazz, which started on the margins and later became America’s most popular genre in the late ‘20s, ‘30s, and early ‘40s, coming finally to Carnegie Hall, the secular temple of acceptable culture, in 1938 with Benny Goodman’s legendary concert with a racially integrated band. Or, take the emergence of rock & roll arising from so-called “race music” of the ‘40s, and pioneered in the ‘50s  by such Black artists as Little Richard and Chuck Berry before a poor white southerner, blending Black R&B and gospel, Elvis Presley, exploded into prominence; many forget how he was initially ridiculed by the likes of Steve Allen (popular highbrow TV host), called a threat by J Edgar Hoover’s FBI, and in league with the devil by conservative church leaders. Rockers like Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, and David Bowie were all viewed by the mainstream with deep suspicion and great alarm (for different reasons), only to be later honored with Kennedy Center Honors, White House medals, and the like. You can see the same pattern with so-called “hillbilly music” of artists like Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family up through Hank Williams and later such “poor girls” as Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton. Country music today is as mainstream as it gets. More recently we saw this played out with hip-hop, seen in the ‘80s and ‘90s as dangerous, violent, ugly, revolutionary music (if it was even recognized as music!) by the likes of Public Enemy, Tupac Shakur, and N.W.A, only to see Dr. Dre (formerly of N.W.A.), Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Kendrick Lamar and others headline the Super Bowl in 2022, with Kendrick back 3 years later.

MUSIC TITANS remains available at all major online sites, such as Amazon.