In Love for Sale: Pop Music in America, from the vaudeville singer Eva Tanguay, the “‘I Don’t Care’ Girl,” who upended Victorian conceptions of feminine property to become one of the biggest stars of her day, to the scandal of Blondie playing disco at CBGB, David Hajdu—one of the most respected music historians of our time—presents an incisive and idiosyncratic history of a form that has repeatedly upset social and cultural expectations.

Hajdu, unbound by the usual tropes of pop music history, gives a star turn to Bessie Smith and the blues queens of the 1920s who brought wildly transgressive sexuality to American audiences decades before rock and roll. And Jimmie Rodgers, a former blackface minstrel performer, who created country music from the songs of rural whites and blacks...entwined with the sound of the Swiss yodel.

Surveying the late-nineteenth century to the present era of digital streaming, Love for Sale is as authoritative as it is impassioned, drawing from the critic’s unique history as a besotted fan and lifelong student of pop.