Chasin' the Truth: the Lost Historiography of American Vernacular Music

By Jeremy Yudkin


In the introduction to his magisterial history of American music, America's Musical Life: A History (2001), Richard Crawford pays tribute to the pioneering work of Gilbert Chase, whose America's Music: From the Pilgrims to the Present first appeared in 1955. and in the foreword to the 1987 edition of Chase's book, Crawford tells in more detail how Chase came to be influenced by oscar Sonneck's work on American secular music of the eighteenth century and Charles Seeger's theoretical studies of musicology, which were based on the study of unwritten music and on the social and cultural aspects of music-making. Chase himself wrote: "My own work in american music owes its initial impetus to the example of oscar Sonneck in history and the influence of Charles Seeger in theory."