Music in Washington

For more than 100 years, the Pacific Northwest has been making music history. In this new retrospective, rare photographs evoke the musical memories of days gone by, from the earliest 19th-century brass bands to Roaring Twenties jazz combos, 1940s hillbilly twangers, 1950s rhythm-and-blues singers, and generations of rock 'n' rollers, including the original 1950s rockabillies, 1960s "Louie Louie"-era garage bands and psychedelic acid-rock acts, 1970s punks, and 1980s new-wave artistes and heavy metal headbangers. Readers will discover how a scrappy backwoods region struggled to build the necessary infrastructure to eventually create a viable music industry and an underground scene that would ultimately earn global recognition as the home base of the 1990s grunge movement.

Musician and music historian Peter Blecha has researched the Northwest's music for over two decades. As senior curator with Seattle's Experience Music Project (EMP), he developed such exhibits as the Northwest Passage local history gallery and the Jimi Hendrix gallery. Blecha has been acknowledged as the premier expert in his chosen field and Seattle's Curator of Rock & Roll (Seattle Weekly, 1988), the leading expert on Northwest music (Vintage Guitar, 2000), and even the Indiana Jones of Rock 'n' Roll (The Rocket, 2000).