Mobility in American Painting and Popular Music, 1825-2025

This book explores the manifestation of road culture in American music and painting from 1825-2020. The American road was popularized in 20th century culture through the combination of music, cars, and highways. Historically, the concept of the "American road" owes much to Walt Whitman’s “The Song of the Open Road” (1856) that linked poetry, music, transcendental ideology, and travel. Related Romantic notions of the sublime and beautiful also undergirded European classical music and art at the turn of the 19th century and American landscape painting that began in 1825, but American vernacular music developed along different lines. Vernacular and popular music and realistic landscape painting came to celebrate cross-country treks by foot, ship, and rail, reinforcing each other. In the 20th century, however, painting veered toward Impressionistic treatments of rural and urban settings, as travel—the road in all its forms—remained central. Especially from the 1920s on, popular music led the way in that celebration of the road. This has been true even as music and painting moved from modernism to postmodernism, in which automobiles, motorcycles, railroads, ships, and airplanes figure prominently, themselves becoming road objects and subjects of popular songs and canvases. Charting the varieties of representation of the American road and the strong links between the road and American folk music and art, The American Road in Painting and Music, 1825-2020 begins with the Hudson River School, continues to Pop art, and finishes with popular music, rock, and hip hop in the current era.