ABSTRACT
This chapter identifies bodies of received wisdom in operation across both academic and journalistic writing about popular music—sometimes emanating from the same authors. This approach is understood as necessarily limiting, in canonical terms, but also as offering a buttressing of items of “faith” in terms of the perceived truthfulness or exactitude regarding received stories about American popular music, particularly from the postwar period. At this juncture, the chapter introduces the eight tendencies identified as shaping and structuring such narratives of received wisdom.
