Are You Dancing?

Showbands, Popular Music, and Memory in Modern Ireland

Rebecca S. Miller (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

290 Seiten

2025
Indiana University Press (Verlag)
978-0-253-07236-8 (ISBN)

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From the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, showbands were all the rage among Ireland's dancing audiences. Performing covers of rock 'n' roll and pop hits from American and British weekly Top 10 charts, they riveted their fans, dismayed many parish priests, and offered Irish youth a taste of modernism and pop culture from outside of Ireland.
In Are You Dancing?, Rebecca S. Miller tells the story of how these working-class bands brought new sounds and choreographies to the Irish and Northern Irish pop landscape. Both as a response to and an agent in Ireland's changing economic landscape, showbands quickly grew into a hugely lucrative commercial industry. At the same time, they nudged open doors for Irish women to take to the stage as pop stars, rewarded a generation of entrepreneurs, and created the template for Ireland's popular music industry. Miller draws upon interviews with more than 80 musicians, agents, managers, fans, and clergy, to reveal the vast interplay of social, economic, and cultural changes that ensued with the Irish showband era.
Drawing upon an extensive catalog of ethnographic and archival research, Miller presents an overlooked era of musical performances that revolutionized Irish entertainment.

Rebecca S. Miller is Professor of Music at Hampshire College, a public sector folklorist, and a traditional fiddler. She is the author of Carriacou String Band Serenade: Performing Identity in the Eastern Caribbean.

Acknowledgments
1. Introduction: Remembering the Showbands, Documenting Popular Music
2. "The Archbishop's Quadrille": The Church, The State, Dance Bands, and Céilís, 1925 to 1955
3. Origins: "The Band That Does the Show"
4. "Traveling Jukeboxes": Imitation, Translation, and Irishness
5. "Blarney Sounds": Making and Marketing the Showband Industry
6. Builders, Promoters, Managers, and Priests: Profiles of Showband Entrepreneurs
7. "Aching the Notes" and Challenging the Industry: Negotiating Gender on the Showband Stage
8. Hucklebucking Across the Waters: Irish Showbands in Diaspora
9. The End of the Showband Era
References
Index

Erscheinungsdatum	19.04.2025
Reihe/Serie	Irish Culture, Memory, Place
Zusatzinfo	1 color illus, 82 b&w illus.
Verlagsort	Bloomington, IN
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Gewicht	476 g
Themenwelt	Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Musik
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
	Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Kulturgeschichte
ISBN-10	0-253-07236-0 / 0253072360
ISBN-13	978-0-253-07236-8 / 9780253072368
Zustand	Neuware