If you have gone hunting for early American music, you probably came across warhorses like 17th-century psalms, “Yankee Doodle” and other Revolutionary songs, maybe William Billings’s extremely popular “Chester” (don’t know this last one? Watch a very earnest John Adams sing it here). All of these can make for excellent musical examples to enliven a class or conference presentation (and I’ll write about music for both those scenarios in the future). However, sometimes listening to recordings of psalms or military marches feels too much like eating a virtuous salad, and not enough like eating ice cream. My survey of recordings is completely unscientific—happily, there is far too much diversity in early American music to provide anything like comprehensive coverage in a blog post—but it seems to me that there is a dearth of albums that are meant for pleasure rather than instruction. Continue reading →