No single volume can capture the entire scope of the music, but a good one to start with is Nick Tosches’ Where Dead Voices Gather.

So many of the prewar musicians that I admired, obscure and famous, all had experience playing in the medicine shows. This included black songsters like Frank Stokes and Pink Anderson, as well as seminal country artists like Jimmie Rodgers and Gene Autry. Even Hank Williams played the medicine shows.

Wax tablets were the standard erasable surfacefrom antiquity to the Renaissance: one or more boards, often bound togetherin a codex form, were coated in wax to be inscribed with a stylus then erased forreuse.7 In early modern England one could also purchase pocket-sized writingtablets featuring paper that had been treated so as to offer a rigid writing surfaceon which markings made with the accompanying metal stylus could be erasedwith a little moisture.8 The slate blackboard is also attested in Europe in musicinstruction in the sixteenth century, sized either for group or for personal use(as is still the case today), and was used at least by the eighteenth century in theteaching of astronomy. The sand tray, a board or slab spread with a fine layer ofsand that one inscribed with a stick and could easily erase, was another long-lived medium: used in ancient Babylon and medieval Islam for calculations andin Europe principally for children and artists learning to write or sketch down tothe Victorian period.9 None of these temporary notes have left any traces, exceptthrough extant higher- order notes made from them.

La Funk Mob was the project of Hubert Blanc-Francard AKA Boom Bass and Philippe Zdar Cerboneschi. Ultimately, La Funk Mob led to Cassius. 

Binstock: You once referred to computing as pop culture. Kay: It is. Complete pop culture. I’m not against pop culture. Developed music, for instance, needs a pop culture. There’s a tendency to over-develop. Brahms and Dvorak needed gypsy music badly by the end of the nineteenth century. The big problem with our culture is that it’s being dominated, because the electronic media we have is so much better suited for transmitting pop-culture content than it is for high-culture content. I consider jazz to be a developed part of high culture. Anything that’s been worked on and developed and you [can] go to the next couple levels. Binstock: One thing about jazz aficionados is that they take deep pleasure in knowing the history of jazz. Kay: Yes! Classical music is like that, too. But pop culture holds a disdain for history. Pop culture is all about identity and feeling like you’re participating. It has nothing to do with cooperation, the past or the future—it’s living in the present. I think the same is true of most people who write code for money. They have no idea where [their culture came from]—and the Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs.

Going to One Wedding Brings on Another?

Maria Anna (called Marianne and nicknamed Nannerl) was – like her younger brother – a child prodigy. The children toured most of Europe (including an 18-month stay in London in 1764-5) performing together as “wunderkinder”. There are contemporaneous reviews praising Nannerl, and she was even billed first. Until she turned 18. A little girl could perform and tour, but a woman doing so risked her reputation.