Popular Music and Ethnography: An Introduction to Studies, from Musicology to Ethnomusicology and Beyond

This chapter looks at the potential of music to think through a range of issues and cultural experiences, from the self to the social. We consider four major sources of the contested origins and development of popular music ethnographies. Firstly, through the tradition of folk song collecting from Frances John Child and Cecil Sharp to Alan Lomax; secondly from within classical nineteenth century and contemporary twentieth century anthropology and ethnomusicology of non-western societies; thirdly within the urban ethnographic studies at the Chicago School of Sociology (1914-1943) and Second Chicago School from the 1950s; and finally, through the contemporary development of popular music studies, looking forward to the futures of popular music ethnography. This chapter upholds an active, and reflexive investment in ethnography that firmly places fieldwork at the heart of our popular music studies, and indeed makes clear the positionality and autoethnographic insights of the popular music researcher.