Featuring work by journalists, music critics, scholars, and musicians themselves, this series aims to expand and challenge the way we think about American roots music genres, traditions, scenes, performers, and their ever-expanding contributions. Books in the series not only bring new perspective on familiar roots traditions like jazz, the blues, country, and folk music but also offer new and more diverse ways to consider where the roots of today’s American music lie, what stories are told about them, and who does the telling.
We particularly seek proposals from authors (or their representatives) for books meant to reach the music-loving public, but we also welcome submissions for work meant to intervene in scholarly and critical debates around American music culture. We will prioritize projects that are written accessibly, grounded in fresh interviews or archives, and engaged with broad critical or thematic questions as well as specific artists or singular moments.
Series Editor
David Menconi is a journalist, music critic, and author based in Raleigh, North Carolina. The 2019 North Carolina Piedmont Laureate, Menconi was a staff writer for twenty-eight years at the Raleigh News & Observer. He has also written for Rolling Stone, Billboard, Spin, and the New York Times, and he spent nearly a decade as editor for the American Music Series at the University of Texas Press. His most recent books are Oh, Didn’t They Ramble: Rounder Records and the Transformation of American Roots Music and Step It Up and Go: The Story of North Carolina Popular Music from Blind Boy Fuller and Doc Watson to Nina Simone and Superchunk both published by the University of North Carolina Press.
