Tick composes textured account of American music history

 

Matthews Distinguished Professor Judith Tick.
CRAIG BAILEY

 

Judith Tick lifts her 800- page tome “Music in the USA” and quickly leafs to a story of the song “Gypsie Laddie.” Taught to an American soldier by a Scot captured near Princeton, N.J., in 1777, the ballad lived on through Revolutionary War — and indeed through centuries — despite soldier Elisha Bostwick’s prediction that the newly learned ballad “must die with me.”

The lyrics, which appear in the book, were incorporated in part in Bob Dylan’s song “Blackjack Davey.”

Flipping to another section of the volume, which is both a textbook and a “browser,”

Ella Fitzgerald’s personality comes alive through snippets of an autobiography by jazz pianist Oscar Peterson as he recalls how he got to know the “little signs and mannerisms” that telegraphed exactly what Ella was feeling. He writes, “The first slight side glance accompanied by a sort of half-laugh. Meaning: What was that change or that line that you played behind me?”

The anecdotes, the stories, and firsthand accounts of the way so many tendrils of music interweave throughout the history of American music makes her seventh book unique in the world of music literature.

“It’s the only book of its kind,” Tick says. “It’s both a textbook, and a book that can be picked up and browsed.”

When Tick set out to compile the guide that links the words of composers, performers, writers and ordinary people, she did so with the goal of offering fresh information, told uniquely. “Students get so much mediated material that we’ve all become submerged with other people’s opinions and other people’s responses to events,” Tick says. “The stories in this book demand your own response.”

Tick arranges the stories in a way she sees as similar to hanging an art exhibit, showing how one movement or story plays off or influences another. In one chapter about the music of the Vietnam War, an entry describes how important rock ’n’ roll was to the soldiers. Next to that is a very sophisticated entry discussing a classical piece written about the same war. “I use surprising juxtaposition,” she says.

The book uses about 300 different sources to weave a textured account of the music that has grown into American music.

Tick is a Matthews Distinguished Professor of music, a historian, and a pioneer in the study of women and music.

With this latest work, she wanted to do something different. “It’s eclectic,” she said.

The heft of the book should not deter readers, she adds. “It’s physically heavy, but it’s easy to read. It’s something you can easily pick up and browse.”

— Susan Salk