Charles Hamm, who helped establish the field of American popular music history with two books that have become standard texts, died on Oct. 16 in Lebanon, N. H. He was 86. Mr. Hamm was one of the first scholars to study the history of American popular music with musicological rigor and sensitivity to complex racial and ethnic dynamics, and both oral and written traditions. He traced pop’s history not just to its full recent flowering in the 1950s or to the 19th century and Stephen Foster, but also to the colonial-era compositions that created the context for all that followed.
NYTimes
SHOP: Charles Hamm
