Richard Crawford

Richard Crawford built a career as a historian and editor of American music, alongside decades as a University of Michigan professor. An Introduction to America’s Music, written with Larry Hamberlin, surveys folk, popular, and classical traditions rather than treating them as separate histories. W. W. Norton’s third edition moves from Puritan psalmody and Indigenous traditions through minstrelsy, blues, jazz, rock, and contemporary musical theater, connecting repertory to migration, technology, commerce, race, and social change. Crawford’s broader scholarship helped establish American music as a rigorous academic field. He served as a founding editor-in-chief of Music of the United States of America and as president of the American Musicological Society. Hamberlin, a Middlebury College scholar of popular music, extended the textbook through later repertories and teaching materials. Together they built a chronological introduction around close attention to representative pieces, giving students both historical narrative and practical ways to hear how American musical styles developed.