American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to Mp3includes Two CDs [With 2 CDs]

I've been teaching University courses in popular music for over 35 years, and I've looked at all the textbooks (there were none when I began teaching). Indeed, I've been asked by publishers to be an outside reviewer for a number of them, including this book. This is the best on the market, hands-down. It is well-organized, highly readable, with intelligent analyses of well-selected examples. It brings in recent scholarly work in the field of popular music studies without getting bogged down in postmodern cultural studies lingo. The high price goes with the territory; it includes two CD's, and there are lots of photos (which cost money to put in a book). My only complaint is that the coverage of pre-rock and roll pop is fairly brief (though it is well-informed); since this is the period that interests me the most, I wish there were more, but I imagine there was pressure from the publishers to focus on rock and roll and what followed after.