Between the two World Wars, innovative forms of music and dance helped a newly urbanised population cope with the increased mechanisation of modern life. Grand spectacles such as the Ziegfeld Follies and the movies of Busby Berkeley reflected the American ethos of mass production, while big band swing captured the power and rhythmic flow of an expanding industrial soundscape.

In Swinging the Machine, Joel Dinerstein reenvisions American modernity by arguing that African American vernacular culture provided the primary means of aesthetic adaptation to the accelerated tempo of the "machine age". From blues singers and boogie-woogie pianists who stylized train sounds, to tap dancers and lindy hoppers who brought mechanical rhythms onto the human body, black artists created a popular modernism that has endured as a permanent feature of American life.

JOEL DINERSTEIN is Woodrow Wilson Fellow in the Department of English at Ithaca College.

CONTENTS:
Introduction: Bodies and Machines
1. The Tempo of Life is Out of Control ... and then Righted
2. The Jazz Train and American Musical Modernity
3. African American Modernism and the Techno-Dialogic: From John Henry to Duke Ellington
4. Swinging the Machines: Big Bands and Streamliner Trains
5. The Standardized White Girl in the Pleasure Machine: The Ziegfeld Follies and Busby Berkeley's 1930s Musicals
6. Tap Dancers Rap Back at the Machine
7. America's National Folk Dance: The Lindy Hop
8. The World of Tomorrow... in the Groove: Swinging the New York World's Fair, 1939-1940
Conclusion: The Continuing Importance of Swinging the Machine

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