ABSTRACT

The alluvial narrative reflects the laudable, although sometimes limited, assertion that the complex formal threads of American popular music bear analogies to the equally diverse texture of their national social fabric. In effect, this perspective could be thought of as the argument contained in the proposition of multiculturalism wrought in a musical key. The alluvial narrative proposes that the nation's copious genres and subspecies of performance constitute a body of individual rivulets or streams that follow a kind of common imperative to coalesce into a single body of water that eventually expels itself into the global cultural sea. The chapter explores this notion using examples drawn from contrasting styles and genres of American popular music selected from across the twentieth century.