Accordion Revolution Pre-Readers’ Draft

I’m looking for feedback on drafts of my book, Accordion Revolution: the Squeezebox Heart of North American Popular Music. (Title suggestions welcome.) Here’s a silly one-take video asking people to read it (too long but hopefully amusing for 5 min):

It’s basically a “Peoples’ History of the Accordion.” If you’d like to be a pre-reader, the texts are available for now at the links at the bottom of this post. (My Patreon has the same links for those who would like to support the project so far.)

The Texts (Click To Download, Version 2.0) The Whole Thing Here: With Footnotes or Without Footnotes

The Table of Contents and the Preface reveal the shape: “The book proceeds roughly chronologically, with sections divided by culture and genre.”

I’m asking for help with: 

Historical fact-checks (others have corrected a bunch).

Typos and misspellings (especially proper nouns and such).

Style: I’d like it to be fun, engaging reading. Please note parts that feel boring or too academic. Long sentences and long words make reading harder, so keep your eye out for run on words.

Does the overall story I’m telling work? 

[Spoiler alert: This is accordion history as told to modern pop audiences who’ve never thought about it. Emphasizing “where’d it go?” and the cool accordion folk traditions that helped bring it back. Also focusing on the “country, blues, folk” roots of rock ’n’ roll and how they impacted the accordion. End spoiler.]

My dream is that even non-accordion music history fans find the book intriguing and entertaining.

A word about the notes/no-notes versions: I plan to publish a popular reader version of the book with no footnotes, and another academic edition (possibly pdf only) with the same text and thousands of notes and sources.

If you’re a keener and willing to take on the footnote version that’d be swell. It is fully annotated to help inspire future researchers. There’s some fun stuff in there that didn’t make the main text too. I’m cleaning up the bibliography and references now so any corrections are welcome.

The below links should download Word .docx files so if you’d like to make detailed edits you can track changes and send the whole document back to me.

If there’s issues with the files, do tell me: missing parts, randomly included author comments not meant to be visible, etc.

Have a look and have fun. I look forward to hearing what you think.

— Bruce

The Texts (Click To Download, Version 2.0) The Whole Thing Here: With Footnotes or Without Footnotes