Tell Tchaikovsky the News: Rock ’n’ Roll, the Labor Question, and the Musicians’ Union, 1942–1968 - Tapa blanda

"Michael James Roberts has written a superlative book that places class and work squarely in the center of our understanding of rock music." -- Alex Sayf Cummings * Journal of Popular Music Studies * "Surpassing a simple account of class domination, working class resistance, or binary conflict, Tell Tchaikovsky the News weaves a historically rich tale of contradiction, cultural and economic intersection, and unexpected turns." -- William G. Roy * American Journal of Sociology * "Music history buffs this book, by Michael James Roberts, is for you. ... Roberts has written an interesting, well researched work that in retrospect is quite surprising to the average music listener." -- Leanne Weymans * M/C Reviews * "Roberts ... has produced a work that offers many insights. ... [I]t provides an excellent interdisciplinary approach to the subject at hand and comes with a comprehensive bibliography that a wide array of readers will relish." -- Michael T. Bertrand * Register of the Kentucky Historical Society * "A good look at rock music's impact and power in its earliest phases." -- Kenneth Bindas * Journal of American History * "Michael James Roberts outlines the American Federation of Musicians' systematic marginalization of rock and roll musicians in the 1950s and 1960s largely due to advancing recording technologies, shifting recording industries, morphing U.S. labor laws, and an idiomatic elitism." -- Kathryn Metz * ARSC Journal * "Both a compelling labor history . . . and a music history . . . Roberts supplies fascinating views into struggles within the AFM over a developing music industry and about a music revolution." -- R.A. Batch * Choice *

For two decades after rock music emerged in the 1940s, the American Federation of Musicians (AFM), the oldest and largest labor union representing professional musicians in the United States and Canada, refused to recognize rock 'n' roll as legitimate music or its performers as skilled musicians. The AFM never actively organized rock 'n' roll musicians, although recruiting them would have been in the union's economic interest. In Tell Tchaikovsky the News, Michael James Roberts argues that the reasons that the union failed to act in its own interest lay in its culture, in the opinions of its leadership and elite rank-and-file members. Explaining the bias of union members-most of whom were classical or jazz music performers-against rock music and musicians, Roberts addresses issues of race and class, questions of what qualified someone as a skilled or professional musician, and the threat that records, central to rock 'n' roll, posed to AFM members, who had long privileged live performances. Roberts contends that by rejecting rock 'n' rollers for two decades, the once formidable American Federation of Musicians lost their clout within the music industry.