Music in Oregon: Portland and Beyond - Paperback

by Peter Blecha (Author)

Two centuries of Oregon's homegrown music history are explored and documented in this new retrospective.

Rare photographs evoke bygone days, digging deep into the area's rich folk and country roots; old-timey 1890s brass bands; Roaring Twenties dance orchestras; 1950s jazzniks, rockabilly cats, and doo-wop groups; 1960s "Louie Louie"- fueled garage rockers andpsychedelic hippie bands; 1970s blues dudes and punk pioneers; 1980s New Wave artistes, metalheads, hip-hop heroes, and pop stars; and Oregon's quirky post-grunge, alt-rock, and Americana movements. Discover how a scrappy backwoods region built a fiercely independent music scene that has produced scores of beloved musicians along with gold and platinum record award-winning stars.

Author Biography

Peter Blecha has directed the Northwest Music Archives historical preservation project since 1982 and served as a staff historian with the Historylink.org online encyclopedia since 2001. An award-winning author and lifelong musician, he was also a founding senior curator at Seattle's Museum of Pop Culture. Blecha has been acknowledged as "the premier expert in his chosen field" (Seattle Weekly, 1988) and "the leading expert on Northwest music" (Vintage Guitar, 2000). As a mere lad way back in 1964, he bought the "Louie Louie" 45 by Portland's Kingsmen--and things have never really been quite the same since.