The eight-volume American Popular Music set includes more than 1,400 entries for musical artists, styles, events, and terms relating to music genres. Blues is the volume examined for this review (other volumes cover classical music, country music, folk music, and jazz, and the final volume is a comprehensive index). Entries vary in length from one or two paragraphs to several pages, with most being of the shorter variety. Each musician's entry includes name, birth and death dates, musical role, and biographical information. There are also entries for styles, such as Holy blues. Recent artists, such as young blues guitarist Kenny Wayne Sheppard, are included. Various appendixes--a chronology, a glossary of terms, and a bibliography--follow the A-Z entries in the volume.
