Peter Blecha

Music in Washington Peter Blecha

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.