Joe Rapolla, specialist professor and chair of the Music and Theatre Arts Department, and Kenneth Womack, Ph.D., professor of English and popular music, are the co-editors of a new academic journal, “AMP: American Music Perspectives,” published by Penn State University Press. Stuart Rosenberg, Ph.D., professor and chair of the Department of Management and Leadership in the Leon Hess Business School, is the managing editor of the journal.
“AMP” serves as the journal of record for the Bruce Springsteen Archives and Center for American Music, which preserves the legacy of Bruce Springsteen and celebrates the history of American music and its diversity of artists and genres. Eileen Chapman, director of the Bruce Springsteen Archives and Center for American Music, serves on the editorial board along with a host of distinguished cultural and academic luminaries including Bob Santelli ’73 HN ’14, founding executive director of the GRAMMY Museum in Los Angeles, and current director of Popular Music and Performing Arts at Oregon State University.
Articles in the inaugural issue include, “Hungry Hearts and Broken Dreams at the Springsteen Motel,” by Graley Herren; “Down at the Devil’s Crossroad: Romanticizing Robert Johnson,” by Jeffrey Roessner; “Unsettled Movement: Music, Migration, and Community from Calypso to Springsteen and Steinbeck,” by Robert McParland; “The Beatles’ 1964 Tour and Flipping Off Jim Crow,” by Chuck Gunderson; and “
The journal welcomes manuscripts from a variety of cultural and theoretical perspectives, while also considering traditional, biographical, historical, and archival studies of American music and its artists, composers, genres, and practitioners. “AMP” also welcomes interpretive analyses of American music, as well as manuscripts that investigate its sociocultural production, its political manifestations, and the history of the business practices and technological innovations associated with its development.
