Popular Music and Jazz, 1900-1950

On the evening of March 8, 2014, I became the most envied person in the Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Marriott Heritage Ballroom (perhaps the whole of Lancaster County). For my own part, I snoozed. But there on the nightstand, my cell phone danced with texts of more energetic colleagues: Sherrie, you won the Grove! Where the @#! are you? It seemed I had hit the jackpot in the SAM 2.0 raffle. In (quite literally) the blink of an eye, I had gone from a run-of-the-mill scholar of American music with pretty much the same books on the shelf as others with my particular set of research interests, to one of the few people on the planet to own the entire eight-volume AmeriGrove II. In that same life-changing momentas I learned the next morningI had also become the person least able to politely decline John Koegel's invitation to contribute to this multipart review.