About
I have been writing about popular music for almost ten years. My first book, Folk Music USA (2005), was a popular history of the American Folk Revival; I am currently finishing up an academic book for Scarecrow Press on women singer-songwriters in rock music during the 1990s.
My research in most of my work has focused on two areas: 1) how music–in both sound and words–reflects our everyday values, and 2) popular music aesthetics. In a sense, my approach to these two areas is not unlike that of a literary critic, first setting a historical backdrop, then providing detailed descriptions of songs and albums, and finally offering a reading to understand and evaluate the performer’s work. Writing about music is finally, I believe, a good way to think about music and what it means to us.
As I finish up my book of women’s singer-songwriters, I thought it might fun and useful to start a blog to generate new ideas for new projects. I also thought–since the blog will be public–that it would be interesting to see what other people had to say or add to these ideas. No Dice, then, is an experiment of sorts in another way of writing and thinking about music.
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Please feel free to contact me with any questions or comments. I am also available for speaking engagements on subject matter related to either book I have written, the folk revival and women in rock.
Ronald D. Lankford, Jr.
180 Cawthorne Street
Appomattox, VA 24522
rlankfordjr@jetbroadband.com
434-352-9342
