Music America Pop-Up Exhibit Research Guide
We at the Bruce Springsteen Archives & Center for American Music at Monmouth University firmly believe that MUSIC is the most accessible prism through which to explore our shared history in advance of the 250th anniversary of America's independence. Towards that end, this Research Guide accompanies the pop-up version of our "Music America" traveling exhibit. The "Music America" traveling exhibit, which features some 150 iconic objects from America's music history, opened at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidental Library and Museum in Austin, Texas, in February 2024, before beginning its travel to museums across the country. The traveling exhibit was designed for 3,000 square feet but can be adapted up or down. For rental inquires, email our Curator, Professor Melissa Ziobro, mziobro@monmouth.edu.
The pop-up version of the exhibit debuted at the New Jersey Education Association Convention in Atlantic City in November 2024 before traveling to schools, historical societies, libraries, and small museums throughout the Garden State. If you are interested in hosting the pop-up version of the exhibit, again, please email our Curator, Professor Melissa Ziobro, at mziobro@monmouth.edu. Costs are minimal. It consists of 8 33"W x 81"H retractable banner stands and, if you have bright sign players, an interactive "song bar."
Here, we are pleased to share materials that will allow a deeper dive into the "Music America" pop-up experience - from photos, to timelines, to playlists, to lesson plans, to featured artifacts, and more! Materials are arranged chronologically.
Let's Dive In!
Since the nation’s inception two and a half centuries ago, music has both shaped and reflected our national identity. Be it sacred or secular, urban or rural, folk or pop, classical or experimental, it all adds up to the soundtrack of our American story.
Click here to listen to leading authorities respond to questions about important themes in our nation’s musical history.
Click here for a playlist covering 250 years of American music - curated by BSACAM student worker Gianna DiAngelis. Additional playlists can be found below.
Suggested Further Readings:
Tara Browner, editor, Music of the First Nations: Tradition and Innovation in Native North America (Illinois: University of Illinois press, 2009).
Alice C. Fletcher, Indian Story and Song from North America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995.
Nicole Beaulieu Herder, editor, Best-Loved Negro Spirituals: Complete Lyrics to 178 Songs of Faith (New York: Dover Publication, 2001).
Featured Artifact:
In 1640, less than two years after landing in Massachusetts Bay, Stephen Daye printed The Whole Booke of Psalmes Faithfully Translated into English Metre, known as the Bay Psalm Book, the first book printed in what is now the United States. Learn more here, courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Click here to explore a playlist of music inspired by the 1600s - as curated by BSACAM student worker Daniel Esposito.
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Suggested Lesson Plans from Our Partners at TeachRock:
Click here for "Singing Democracy During the Second Great Awakening"
Suggested Further Readings:
John A. Chapman, A Collection of 18th and early 19th Century Drum Beatings (Independently Published, 2024).
Daniel Robert Laxer, Listening to the Fur Trade: Soundways and Music in the British North American Fur Trade, 1760-1840 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University press, 2022).
Laura Lohman, Hail Columbia: American Music and Politics in the Early Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).
Featured Artifact:
This edition of The American Harmony; or, Royal Melody Complete, in Two Volumes by William Tansur, Senior, was printed in Newbury-Port, Massachusetts, in 1771. It contains “A new and complete body of church-music, adapted to the most select portions of the Book of Psalms;” as well as a “new and select number of hymns, anthems, and canons, suited to several occasions; and many of them never before printed...” It was produced after the Boston Massacre in 1770 and several years before the Boston Tea Party in 1773. This artifact is currently featured in the traveling "Music America" exhibit courtesy of the Drew University Special Collections, Creamer Hymn Book Collection.
Click here to explore a playlist of music inspired by the 1700s - as curated by BSACAM student worker Daniel Esposito.
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Suggested Lesson Plans from Our Partners at TeachRock:
Click here for "The Banjo, Slavery, and the Abolition Debate"
Click here for "Almost Emancipated: Reconstruction"
Suggested Further Readings:
Billy Coleman, Harnessing Harmony: Music, Power, and Politics in the United States, 1788-1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020).
Glenda Goodman, Cultivated by Hand: Amateur Musicians in the Early American Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).
Irwin Silber, Songs of the Civil War (New York: Dover Publications, 1995).
Featured Artifact:
Several inventors were attempting to capture and replay sound in the latter decades of the nineteenth century when Thomas Edison invented the phonograph in 1877 in Menlo Park, New Jersey. In that version of the technology, tinfoil was wrapped around a cylinder. One needle carved vibrations from a voice onto the tinfoil. Another needle played them back. After just a few plays, the tinfoil fell apart. Later phonographs like this model from the turn of the twentieth century played wax cylinders, a more durable and commercially viable medium. The wax cylinders were sold with a slip of paper that identified the recording.
Wax cylinder recordings photographed with the “Music America” traveling exhibit at the LBJ Presidential Library and Museum in Austin Texas, August 2024.
Courtesy Radio Technology Museum at the InfoAge Science and History Museums, Camp Evans National Historic Landmark
Click here to explore a playlist of music inspired by the 1800s - as curated by BSACAM student worker Daniel Esposito.
Click here to explore a playlist of music inspired by the period 1900-1949 - as curated by BSACAM student worker Daniel Esposito.
Suggested Further Readings:
Thomas Hischak, The Tin Pany Alley Song Encyclopedia (Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2002).
Timothy Dean Taylor, et al, Music, Sound, and Technology in America: A Documentary History of Early Phonograph, Cinema, and Radio (North Carolina, Duke University Press, 2012).
Featured Artifact:
The Victor Talking Machine Company manufactured Victrolas, like this one made around 1911, that played discs, or records. These were considered an improvement over the earlier wax cylinders. Such technologies brought professional music into homes across the nation, making music a bigger part of Americans’ daily lives.
Victrola and ad photographed with the “Music America” traveling exhibit at the LBJ Presidential Library and Museum in Austin Texas, August 2024.
Courtesy Bruce Springsteen Archives & Center for American Music; Gift of the family of Lieutenant Colonel Louis C. Welch
Suggested Lesson Plans from Our Partners at TeachRock:
Click here for "New Perspectives on the Great Gatsby's Daisy Buchanan"
Click here for "The Birth of the Microphone"
Suggested Further Readings:
Ken Burns, et al, Jazz: A History of America's Music (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2000).
Nat Shapiro, et al, editors, Hear Me Talkin' to Ya: The Story of Jazz as Told by the Men who Made It (New York: Dover Publications, 1966).
Featured Artifact:
The 1920s has been called among the most creative of decades, musically speaking, but the era is often called “The Jazz Age” for that genre’s impact on culture. The flapper aesthetic perfectly illustrates this. Flappers, embracing all the excesses of the “Roaring 20s,” thumbed their noses at societal norms. That included wearing dresses, like this one, that were deemed shockingly short and bordering on indecent, compared to the floor-length skirts previously deemed socially acceptable.
Flapper dress photographed with the “Music America” traveling exhibit at the LBJ Presidential Library and Museum in Austin Texas, August 2024.
Courtesy Laurie Smith
Suggested Lesson Plans from Our Partners at TeachRock:
Click here for "Blues, Poetry, and the Harlem Renaissance"
Click here for "Identifying and Resisting Jim Crow with Words and Songs"
Suggested Further Readings:
Ronald Cohen, Depression Folk: Grassroots Music and Left-Wing Politics in 1930s America (North Carolina: Chapel Hill Press, 2016).
Sheryl Kaskowitz, A Chance to Harmonize: How FDR's Hidden Music Unit Sought to Save America from the Great Depression―One Song at a Time (New York: Pegasus Books, 2024).
Susanna Reich, Stand Up and Sing!: Pete Seeger, Folk Music, and the Path to Justice (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017).
Featured Artifact:
Billie Holiday was one of the greatest of all jazz singers. With unique vocal phrasing, Holiday poured pain and passion into her delivery, which captivated audiences and influenced everyone from Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett to Janis Joplin and Beyoncé.
Nicknamed “Lady Day,” Holiday made jazz history with her recordings of “God Bless the Child” and especially “Strange Fruit,” a haunting, deeply emotional song about lynching in the South recorded in 1939. “Strange Fruit” is often called the first civil rights protest song. Holiday suffered from substance abuse, which cut short her career and life. She died at age 44 in 1959.
Billie Holiday stole, on loan from an anonymous donor, photographed with the “Music America” traveling exhibit at the LBJ Presidential Library and Museum in Austin Texas, August 2024.
Suggested Lesson Plans from Our Partners at TeachRock:
Click here for "Radio Before Rock and Roll"
Click here for "WWII and the Shrinking of the Ensemble"
Suggested Further Readings:
Pamela Potter, et al, editors, Music in World War II: Coping with Wartime in Europe and the United States (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2020).
Sheldon Winkler, The Music of World War II: War Songs and Their Stories (New York: Merriam Press, 2017).
William Young and Nancy Young, Music of the World War II Era (Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2008).
Featured Artifact:
The military produced V-Discs from 1943, the height of World War II, through 1949 and shipped them overseas to boost morale. The letter “V” stood for “Victory.” Included on the V-Discs were radio broadcasts from the U.S. and recorded concerts. Over 800 discs were produced during the war years and beyond. Servicemen were glad to have the discs as they provided a musical link to home. Some V-Discs even included new music recorded by major artists; a ban on recording during the war years was lifted for the benefit of servicemen. The only caveat: the discs could not be sold.
The Bruce Springsteen Archives & Center for American Music received a donation of V-Discs as a gift of the family of Lieutenant Colonel Louis C. Welch.
Click here to explore a playlist of music inspired by the period 1950-2000 - as curated by BSACAM student worker Daniel Esposito.
Suggested Lesson Plans from Our Partners at TeachRock:
Click here for "Artists Protest McCarthyism"
Click here for "1950s American Society and Conformity"
Suggested Further Readings:
Steve Bergsman, All I Want Is Loving You: Popular Female Singers of the 1950 (Mississippi: University of Mississippi Press, 2023).
Jeff Gold, Sittin' In: Jazz Clubs of the 1940s and 1950s (New York: Harper, 2020).
Peter Guralnick and Colin Escott, The Birth of Rock 'n' Roll: The Illustrated Story of Sun Records and the 70 Recordings That Changed the World (California: Welden Owen, 2022).
Suggested Lesson Plans from Our Partners at TeachRock:
Click here for "Counterculture in the 1960s"
Click here for "The Impact of 1960s Anti-War Music"
Featured Artifact:
In a 1996 interview in Newsweek, Bruce Springsteen shared, “The drummer I had … Bart Haynes, and this fellow Walter Cichon, they both died in Vietnam when we were in our teens. I can still see them in their [Marine and Army] uniforms. Those are very powerful images. It still finds its way into my work.” It wasn’t the first time Bruce had discussed Bart, and it wouldn’t be the last. Much has been written, in both the scholarly and popular realms, about the Vietnam War’s influence on Springsteen’s work and his support of veterans’ issues, but far less ink has been spilled on the specifics of Bart Haynes’ short life and tragic death. While he is best known as the drummer in early Bruce band, The Castiles, Bart was also a caring young man who helped raise his younger sister as his parents struggled with alcoholism. He was a resilient young man, who threw himself a 16th birthday party because he knew his parents wouldn’t. He soon after volunteered for the military, like so many others with limited choices, seeking some control over their own destinies. Springsteen wrote about the last time he saw Bart in his memoir, remembering, “Rushing in one last afternoon, a goofy grin on his face, he told us he was going to Vietnam. He laughed and said he didn’t even know where it was. In the days before his ship-out, he’d sit one last time at the drums, in his full dress blues … taking one final swing at “Wipe Out,’” the drum piece of which he’d never quite mastered. And he never would. Bart was killed in action in Vietnam on October 22, 1967. One has to imagine he was on Springsteen’s mind when he later wrote the lyrics to 2014’s “The Wall,” which includes the lines:
I remember you in your Marine uniform laughin’, laughin’ at your ship out party
I read Robert McNamara says he’s sorry
Artifacts like this Purple Heart, photographed by Mark Krajnak and on long-term loan to the BSACAM from the New Jersey Vietnam Veterans Memorial Foundation in Holmdel, New Jersey, help us to understand both Bruce’s work and the impacts of broader societal conflicts like the Vietnam War.
Suggested Lesson Plans from Our Partners at TeachRock:
Click here for "The Origins of Disco"
Click here for "Female Singer-Songwriters of the 1970s"
Suggested Lesson Plans from Our Partners at TeachRock:
Click here for "Deadheads and Reagan's America in the 1980s"
Click here for "Music and the Berlin Wall During the Cold War"
Suggested Lesson Plans from Our Partners at TeachRock:
Click here for "Third Wave: Women's Rights and Music in the 1990s"
Click here for "Divergent Paths in the 1990s: Gangsta Rap and Conscious Hip Hop"
