The International Association for the Study of Popular Music-US Branch (IASPM-US) presents two book awards each year to the most outstanding books on popular music. 

The Woody Guthrie Award is for the most outstanding book that is an author’s first monograph, and the Greg Tate Award recognizes the most outstanding book beyond an author’s first monograph. Winners receive a monetary award and are announced each year at the IASPM-US Annual Conference.

2026 Woody Guthrie Award

The Woody Guthrie Award Committee IASPM-US requests your nominations for the most distinguished English-language monographs in popular music studies published during 2024 as the author’s first book. Books may be nominated by any member in good standing of IASPM, by members of the prize committee, by their authors, or by publishers. Copyrights must state 2024. 

The deadline for nominations is October 15, 2025. Nominations for the Guthrie Award should be sent electronically to Elliott H. Powell (ehpowell@umn.edu). The email subject line should read “IASPM-US Guthrie Nomination,” and the contents of the email should include the author’s name, book title, and publisher’s information (including ISBN). Please feel free to contact Elliott with any questions. 

2026 Greg Tate Award

This year’s Greg Tate Committee IASPM-US (Mark Katz, Liz Pryzbylski, Barry Shank) requests your nominations for the most distinguished English-language monographs in popular music studies, beyond the first book, published during 2024. Books may be nominated by any member in good standing of IASPM, by members of the prize committee, by their authors, or by publishers. Copyrights must state 2024. 

The deadline for nominations is October 15, 2025. Nominations for the Greg Tate Award and electronic copies of the book should be sent to chair Barry Shank (shank.46@osu.edu) and should include the author’s name, book title, and publisher’s information including ISBN. Please feel free to contact Barry with any questions.

2026 Greg Tate Book Award Winner

David Suisman, Instruments of War: Music and the Making of America's Soldiers 

(University of Chicago Press)

This year’s winner of the 2026 Greg Tate Award for best book past the first book in popular music studies is Instruments of War by David Suisman. This is an extraordinary work of scholarship, featuring deep engagement with a wide range of archives and primary sources, accompanied by close readings of significant songs across nearly 150 years of the military’s use of music. Suisman builds his arguments from sources that range from archival military records to PX sales data to song books to military training manuals to private journals, letters and diaries, to newspapers and magazines concurrent with specific periods. His arguments integrate that range of material into historiographies well beyond the purely military, including literatures that focus on musical instruments, the development of recording and playback technologies, of the psychological impact of noise, of theories of social bonding and fragmentation, and more. This interdisciplinary base provides the ground upon which Suisman supports his claims. Music was a tool of war. It was also a site of struggle between the needs of soldiers to stay alive and alert and the needs of commanders to be able to shape and control the behavior of their fighters.

2026 Tate Award Honorable Mention

Eric Drott. Streaming Music, Streaming Capital (Duke University Press)

Eric Drott’s Streaming Music, Streaming Capital is a powerful and tremendously important work that brings significant archival detail to support and illuminate quite complex arguments about the relationships between music and capitalism. The book traces changes in those relationships in the age of streaming, showing how music changes streaming as well as streaming changing music. Perhaps even more important, it shows how music, like all performing arts, as well as education, health, and care-taking of all sorts, resists the objectification that results from commodification, even as the music industry develops new ways to extract profits. The book is so clearly written that even complex arguments about social reproduction, capitalist exploitation, and surveillance society fall into place. A timely book whose importance will resonate for many years.

2026 Woody Guthrie Book Award Winner

Matthew D. Morrison. Blacksound: Making Race and Popular Music in the United States (University of California Press)

Blacksound is a theoretically sophisticated and relentlessly precise text that draws on a vast body of archies and texts to show how blackface performance shaped the sonic aesthetics, commercial structures, and racial workings of popular music in the United States from the nineteenth century to the present day. Morrison’s notion of “Intellectual Performance Property” powerfully highlights how modern music IP law was primed to extract Black creativity from its very beginnings while also inviting the reader to imagine a world where communal authorship, oral transmission, and gestural vocabularies were also respected enough to warrant protection. Blacksound is a revelation and a model work in and for interdisciplinary work whose titular concept will be indispensable for future research across many fields. It is, without question, a game changer in popular music studies.

2026 Guthrie Award Honorable Mentions

Benjamin Barson. Brassroots Democracy: Maroon Ecologies and the Jazz Commons (Wesleyan University Press)

Deeply rich and textured in its analysis and research, Brassroots Democracy radically reframes the history of early New Orleans collective music-making, and opens up a vast network of interpretive horizons that link fugitive spaces and sounds of the “jazz commons” to the improvisational foundations of jazz. Barson’s theorization of jazz's "maroon ecologies”—rooted in the Haitian Revolution and the long arc of Black Reconstruction—powerfully excavates how closely intertwined community musicking and political organizing were in this crucible of multi-racial democratic politics as well as uncovers surprising connections of counter-plantation organizing across the Caribbean, Mexico, and the U.S. South.

James Gabrillo. Pop Convergence: Musical Multimedia in Manila (Oxford University Press)

In this kaleidoscopic study of pop music entertainers in Manila, Gabrillo reveals how multimedia artists combine parody, kitsch, and overstatement to crystallize an emerging sense of working-class identity after the tumult of the previous century. Moving fluently across digital streams and street spectacles, drag stages and pandemic-era social media, Gabrillo offers layered and vibrant accounts of the Filipino entertainment scene as a dynamic “patchwork of convergence” in which consumer fatigue, irony, and collective joy become forms of survival and resistance.

Alyxandra Vesey. Extending Play: The Feminization of Collaborative Music Merchandise in the Early Twenty-First Century (Oxford University Press)

Extending Play is a brilliant and theoretically sophisticated text that builds conceptual and analytic bridges between fields of scholarship that are rarely in dialogue. Vesey offers readers a deep and detailed exploration of how femme artists tactically turn to brand partnerships (around fashion, cosmetics, food, and more) as well as online collaborations with fans in order to secure economic stability in an industry where recording sales have collapsed and streaming income remains meagre. Extending Play is one of the sharpest investigations into the racialized, gendered, and sexualized workings of global capitalism in the contemporary music industry.

Previous Woody Guthrie And Greg Tate Award Winners

2025:

Woody Guthrie Award:

Luis Manuel Garcia-Mispireta. Together, Somehow: Music, Affect, and Intimacy on the Dancefloor (Duke University Press)

Greg Tate Award:

Liz Przybylski. Sonic Sovereignty: Hip Hop, Indigeneity and Shifting Popular Music Mainstreams  (New York University Press)

Honorable Mention:

Lisa Barg. Queer Arrangements: Billy Strayhorn and Midcentury Jazz Collaboration (Wesleyan University Press)

Jonathan Leal. Dreams in Double Time: On Race, Freedom and Bebop (Duke University Press)

2024:

First Book Award: 

Shana Goldin-Perschbacher. Queer Country (University of Illinois Press)

Outstanding Book Beyond Author's First Monograph: 

Francesca Royster. Black Country Music: Listening for Revolutions (University of Texas Press)

Honorable Mention:

Steve Waksman. Live Music in America: A History from Jenny Lind to Beyoncé (Oxford University Press)

Meredith Schweig. Renegade Rhymes: Rap Music, Narrative, and Knowledge in Taiwan (University of Chicago Press)

2023:

Celeste Day Moore Soundscapes of Liberation: African American Music in Postwar France (Duke University Press)

Chris Gibson and Andrew Warren. The Guitar: Tracing the Grain Back to the Tree (University of Chicago Press)

2022:

First Book Award: 

Elliot H. Powell. Sounds from the Other Side: Afro-South Asian Collaborations in Black Popular Music (University of Minnesota Press)

Outstanding Book Beyond Author's First Monograph: 

Daphne A. Brooks. Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound (Harvard University Press)

2021:

First Book Award: 

Áine Mangoang. Dangerous Mediations: Pop Music in a Philippine Prison Video (Bloomsbury).

Outstanding Book Beyond Author's First Monograph: 

Deborah Wong. Louder and Faster: Pain, Joy, and the Body Politic in Asian American Taiko (University of California Press).

Honorable Mention:

Kyle Devine. Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music (The MIT Press)

2019:

Mark Burford. Mahalia Jackson and the Black Gospel Field (Oxford University Press)

Honorable Mention:
Dale Chapman. The Jazz Bubble (University of California Press)

2018:

Kristina M. Jacobsen. The Sound of Navajo Country: Music, Language, and Diné Belonging (UNC Press)

Honorable Mention:
Licia Fiol-Matta. The Great Woman Singer: Gender and Voice in Puerto Rican Music (Duke University Press)

2017:

John Troutman. Kika Kila: How the Hawaiian Steel Guitar Changed the Sound of Modern Music (UNC Press)

2016:

Allison McCracken. Real Men Don’t Sing: Crooning in American Culture (Duke University Press)

2015:

Eric Weisbard. Top 40 Democracy: The Rival Mainstreams of American Music (University of Chicago Press)

Honorable Mentions:
Nadine Hubbs. Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music (University of California Press)

Barry Shank. The Political Force of Musical Beauty (Duke University Press)

2014:

Lila Ellen Gray Fado Resounding: Affective Politics and Urban Life (Duke University Press)

Honorable Mentions:
Todd Decker. Show Boat: Performing Race in an American Musical (Oxford University Press)

Marc A. Hertzman. Making Samba: A New History of Race and Music in Brazil (Duke University Press)

2013:

Deborah R. Vargas. Dissonant Divas in Chicana Music: The Limits of La Onda (University of Minnesota Press)

Honorable Mention:
Mark Katz. Groove Music: The Art and Culture of the Hip-Hop DJ (Oxford University Press)

2012:

Nona Willis Aronowitz, ed, Ellen Willis. Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music (University of Minnesota Press)

Kevin Fellezs. Birds of Fire: Jazz, Rock, Funk and the Creation of Fusion (Duke University Press)

2011:

Karl Hagstrom Miller. Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow (Duke University Press)

Honorable Mention:
Katherine Meizel Idolized: Music, Media and Identity in American Idol (Indiana University Press)

2010:

Steve Waksman. This Ain’t the Summer of Love: Conflict and Crossover in Heavy Metal and Punk (University of California Press)

Honorable Mentions:
Annie Randall. Dusty! Queen of the Postmods (Oxford University Press)

David Suisman. Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music (Harvard University Press)

Elijah Wald. How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music (Oxford University Press)

2009:

Alejandro Madrid. Nor-tec Rifa! Electronic Dance Music from Tijuana to the World (Oxford University Press)

Honorable Mentions:
Charles Hiroshi Garrett. Struggling to Define a Nation: American Music and the Twentieth Century (University of California Press)

Marybeth Hamilton. In Search of the Blues (Basic Books)

2008:

Ingrid Monson. Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call Out to Jazz and Africa (Oxford University Press)

2007

Heidi Feldman. Black Rhythms of Peru: Reviving the African Musical Heritage in the Black Pacific (Wesleyan University Press)

2006

Steven F. Pond. Head Hunters: The Making of Jazz’s First Platinum Album (University of Michigan Press)

Honorable Mentions:
Paul Austerlitz. Jazz Consciousness: Music, Race, and Humanity (Wesleyan University Press)

Lisa Rhodes. Electric Ladyland: Women and Rock Culture (University of Pennsylvania Press)

Daniel Goldmark. Tunes for ‘Toons: Music and the Hollywood Cartoon (University of California Press)

2005

Bryan McCann. Hello, Hello Brazil: Popular Music in the Making of Modern Brazil (Duke University Press)

Honorable Mention:
Tim Lawrence. Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970-1979 (Duke University Press)

2004

Guthrie Ramsey. Race Music: Black Cultures From Bebop to Hip-Hop (University of California Press)

2003

Bernard Gendron. Between Monmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant Garde (University of Chicago Press)

2002

Gary Giddins. Bing Crosby: A Pocketful Of Dreams: The Early Years 1903-1940 (Back Bay Books)

Theodore Gracyk. I Wanna Be Me: Rock Music and the Politics of Identity (Temple University Press)

2001

Norman Stolzoff. Wake the Town and Tell the People: Dancehall Culture In Jamaica (Duke University Press)

2000

Adelaida Reyes. Songs of the Caged, Songs of the Free: Music and the Vietnamese Experience (Temple University Press)

Honorable Mention:
Steve Waksman. Instruments of Desire: The Electric Guitar and the Shaping of Musical Experience (Harvard University Press)

1999

Frances R. Aparicio. Listening to Salsa: Gender, Latin Popular Music, and Puerto Rican Cultures (Wesleyan University Press/University Press of New England)

Honorable Mention:
Daniel Cavicchi. Tramps Like Us: Music and Meaning among Springsteen Fans (Oxford University Press)

1998 

Scott DeVeaux. The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History (University of Califonia Press)

1997 

Paul Théberge. Any Sound You Can Imagine: Making Music/Consuming Technology (Wesleyan University Press)