Most Popular Books by David Hajdu

A personal, idiosyncratic history of pop music traces the sheet-music era at the end of the nineteenth century and the invention of records through favorite chart-topping songs and the ways his mother shaped him as an aficionado.

“Arguably the finest biography yet written about a jazz musician . . . [It] will fascinate readers who have never heard a note of Strayhorn’s music.” —Joel E. Seigel, Washington City Paper A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award Billy Strayhorn (1915–67) was one of the greatest composers in the history of American music, the creator of a body of work that includes such standards as “Take the ‘A’ Train.” Yet all his life Strayhorn was overshadowed by his friend and collaborator Duke Ellington, with whom he worked for three decades as the Ellington Orchestra’s ace songwriter and arranger. A “definitive” corrective (USA Today) to decades of patchwork scholarship and journalism about this giant of jazz, David Hajdu’s Lush Life is a vibrant and absorbing account of the “lush life” that Strayhorn and other jazz musicians led in Harlem and Paris. While composing some of the most gorgeous American music of the twentieth century, Strayhorn labored under a complex agreement whereby Ellington took the bows for his work. Until his life was tragically cut short by cancer and alcohol abuse, the small, shy composer carried himself with singular style and grace as one of the few jazzmen to be openly homosexual. Lush Life has sparked an enthusiastic revival of interest in Strayhorn’s work and is already acknowledged as a jazz classic. “A book as beautiful and intelligent as its subject. David Hajdu has brought all my dear memories of Billy Strayhorn to life.” —Lena Horne “It is a mark of excellence of this biography that it leaves one wanting nothing so much as to listen to the music.” —Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post Book World

Heroes and Villains is the first collection of essays by David Hajdu'' award - winning author of The Ten - Cent Plague'' Positively 4th Street'' and Lush Life. Eclectic and controversial'' Hajdu''s essays take on topics as varied as pop music'' jazz'' th...

The story of how four young bohemians on the make - Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Mimi Baez, and Richard Farina - converged in Greenwich Village, fell into love, and invented a sound and a style that are one of the most lasting legacies of the 1960s When Bob Dylan, age twenty-five, wrecked his motorcycle on the side of a road near Woodstock in 1966 and dropped out of the public eye, he was recognized as a genius, a youth idol, and the authentic voice of the counterculture: and Greenwich Village, where he first made his mark as a protest singer with an acid wit and a barbwire throat, was unquestionably the center of youth culture. So embedded are Dylan and the Village in the legend of the Sixties--one of the most powerful legends we have these days--that it is easy to forget how it all came about. In Positively Fourth Street, David Hajdu, whose 1995 biography of jazz composer Billy Strayhorn was the best and most popular music book in many seasons, tells the story of the emergence of folk music from cult practice to popular and enduring art form as the story of a colorful foursome: not only Dylan but his part-time lover Joan Baez - the first voice of the new generation; her sister Mimi - beautiful, haunted, and an artist in her own right; and her husband Richard Farina, a comic novelist (Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me) who invented the worldliwise bohemian persona that Dylan adopted--some say stole--and made as his own. The story begins in the plain Baez split-level house in a Boston suburb, moves to the Cambridge folk scene, Cornell University (where Farina ran with Thomas Pynchon), and the University of Minnesota (where Robert Zimmerman christened himself Bob Dylan and swapped his electric guitar for an acoustic and a harmonica rack) before the four protagonists converge in New York. Based on extensive new interviews and full of surprising revelations, Positively Fourth Street is that rare book with a new story to tell about the 1960s. It is, in a sense, a book about the Sixties before they were the Sixties--about how the decade and all that it is now associated with it were created in a fit of collective inspiration, with an energy and creativity that David Hajdu captures on the page as if for the first time.

This never-before-told story of the life and work of a (fictitious) musical phenomenon is "a revealing—and at times hilarious—satire of the music business, fame, and the cult of personality" (Clea Simon, Boston Globe). Adrianne Geffel was a genius. Praised as the “Geyser of Grand Street” and the “Queen of Bleak Chic,” she was a one-of-a-kind artist, a pianist and composer with a rare neurological condition that enabled her to make music that was nothing less than pure, unmediated emotional expression. She and her sensibility are now fully integrated into the cultural lexicon; her music has been portrayed, represented, and appropriated endlessly in popular culture. But what do we really know about her? Despite her renown, Adrianne Geffel vanished from public life, and her whereabouts remain a mystery to this day. David Hajdu cuts through the noise to tell, for the first time, the full story of Geffel’s life and work, piecing it together through the memories of those who knew her, inspired her, and exploited her—her parents, teachers, best friend, manager, critics, and lovers. Adrianne Geffel made music so strange, so compelling, so utterly unique that it is simply not to be believed. Hajdu has us believing every note of it in this slyly entertaining work of fiction. A brilliantly funny satire, with characters that leap off the page, Adrianne Geffel is a vividly twisted evocation of the New York City avant-garde of the 1970s and ’80s, and a strangely moving portrait of a world both utterly familiar and like none we’ve ever encountered.

Winner - 2022 Deems Taylor / Virgil Thomson Book Awards in Pop from the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers Bert Williams—a Black man forced to perform in blackface who challenged the stereotypes of minstrelsy. Eva Tanguay—an entertainer with the signature song “I Don’t Care” who flouted the rules of propriety to redefine womanhood for the modern age. Julian Eltinge—a female impersonator who entranced and unnerved audiences by embodying the feminine ideal Tanguay rejected. At the turn of the twentieth century, they became three of the most provocative and popular performers in vaudeville, the form in which American mass entertainment first took shape. A Revolution in Three Acts explores how these vaudeville stars defied the standards of their time to change how their audiences thought about what it meant to be American, to be Black, to be a woman or a man. The writer David Hajdu and the artist John Carey collaborate in this work of graphic nonfiction, crafting powerful portrayals of Williams, Tanguay, and Eltinge to show how they transformed American culture. Hand-drawn images give vivid visual form to the lives and work of the book’s subjects and their world. This book is at once a deft telling of three intricately entwined stories, a lush evocation of a performance milieu with unabashed entertainment value, and an eye-opening account of a key moment in American cultural history with striking parallels to present-day questions of race, gender, and sexual identity.

In the years between the end of World War II and the mid-1950s, the popular culture of today was invented in the pulpy, boldly illustrated pages of comic books. But no sooner had comics emerged than they were beaten down by mass bonfires, congressional hearings, and a McCarthyish panic over their unmonitored and uncensored content. Esteemed critic David Hajdu vividly evokes the rise, fall, and rise again of comics in this engrossing history. "Marvelous . . . a staggeringly well-reported account of the men and women who created the comic book, and the backlash of the 1950s that nearly destroyed it....Hajdu’s important book dramatizes an early, long-forgotten skirmish in the culture wars that, half a century later, continues to roil."--Jennifer Reese,Entertainment Weekly(Grade: A-) "Incisive and entertaining . . . This book tells an amazing story, with thrills and chills more extreme than the workings of a comic book’s imagination."--Janet Maslin,The New York Times "A well-written, detailed book . . . Hajdu’s research is impressive."--Bob Minzesheimer,USA Today "Crammed with interviews and original research, Hajdu’s book is a sprawling cultural history of comic books."--Matthew Price,Newsday "To those who think rock ''n'' roll created the postwar generation gap, David Hajdu says: Think again. Every page ofThe Ten-Cent Plagueevinces [Hajdu’s] zest for the ''aesthetic lawlessness'' of comic books and his sympathetic respect for the people who made them. Comic books have grown up, but Hajdu’s affectionate portrait of their rowdy adolescence will make readers hope they never lose their impudent edge."--Wendy Smith, Chicago Tribune "A vivid and engaging book."--Louis Menand,The New Yorker "David Hajdu, who perfectly detailed the Dylan-era Greenwhich Village scene in Positively 4th Street, does the same for the birth and near death (McCarthyism!) of comic books inThe Ten-Cent Plague." --GQ "Sharp . . . lively . . . entertaining and erudite . . . David Hajdu offers captivating insights into America’s early bluestocking-versus-blue-collar culture wars, and the later tensions between wary parents and the first generation of kids with buying power to mold mass entertainment."--R. C. Baker,The Village Voice "Hajdu doggedly documents a long national saga of comic creators testing the limits of content while facing down an ever-changing bonfire brigade. That brigade was made up, at varying times, of politicians, lawmen, preachers, medical minds, and academics. Sometimes, their regulatory bids recalled the Hays Code; at others, it was a bottled-up version of McCarthyism. Most of all, the hysteria over comics foreshadowed the looming rock ''n'' roll era."--Geoff Boucher, Los Angeles Times "A compelling story of the pride, prejudice, and paranoia that marred the reception of mass entertainment in the first half of the century."--Michael Saler,The Times Literary Supplement(London) David Hajdu is the author ofLush Life: A Biography of Billy StrayhornandPositively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña and Richard Fariña.

The sounds, styles, and lives of outstanding singers from the 1920s to the present, are "written about with loving expertise by two writers who can make singers and their songs live on paper," says Clive Barnes. Features revealing biographies, critical assessments, and selective discographies and videographies.

An acclaimed critic, journalist, and songwriter-musician tells the story of art’s relation to machines, from the Baroque period to the age of AI. What does it mean to be human in a world where machines, too, can be artists? The Uncanny Muse explores the history of automation in the arts and delves into one of the most momentous and controversial aspects of AI: artificial creativity. The adoption of technology and machinery has long transformed the world, but as the potential for artificial intelligence expands, David Hajdu examines the new, increasingly urgent questions about technology’s role in culture. From the life-size mechanical doll that made headlines in Victorian London to the doll’s modern AI–pop star counterpart, Hajdu traces the fascinating, varied ways in which inventors and artists have sought to emulate mental processes and mechanize creative production. For decades, machines and artists have engaged in expressing the human condition—along with the condition of living with machines—through player pianos, broadcasting technology, electric organs, digital movie effects, synthesizers, and motion capture. By communicating and informing human knowledge, the machines have exerted considerable influence on the history of art—and often more influence than humans have been willing to recognize. As Hajdu proclaims: “before machine learning, there was machine teaching.” With thoughtful, wide-ranging, and surprising turns from Berry Gordy and George Harrison to Andy Warhol and Stevie Wonder, David Hajdu takes a novel and contrarian approach: he sees how machines through the ages have enabled creativity, not stifled it—and The Uncanny Muse sees no reason why this shouldn’t be the case with AI today.