blues

Honkers and Shouters

The author of this book, Arnold Shaw (1909–1989) was a songwriter, pianist, composer, and music publisher who wrote a dozen books on 20th century pop music, including two books on Frank Sinatra and a biography of African American pop sensation Harry Belafonte. He founded the Arnold Shaw Popular Music Research Center at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in 1985 and taught there for a decade. This 600-page long guide to the history of R&B has eight parts, with seven chapters each. Those chapters are broken out into 25 sections each, which are called grooves.