Dispatches From the Front
Dispatches from the Front is the website of Don Armstrong, independent scholar and author of The Life and Writings of Ralph J. Gleason. Published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2024, this monograph tells the story of the iconoclastic co-founder of Rolling Stone magazine.
This website believes that American music journalism regenerates itself through contradiction. It’s not surprising in a field populated by music enthusiasts immersed yet sometimes estranged from the dominant musical culture. This is why music journalism’s past is a “living, fragile, pulsating history” charged with dissent.[i]
Whether it was fearless writers working for Abolition newspapers or college radicals cranking out mimeographed 4-pagers, rebel writers have challenged the repressive and championed the emancipatory.
The mission of Dispatches from the Front is to tell the stories of music journalism’s disruptors. These writers made music journalism an instrument of cultural democracy.
[i] Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (Random House, 2010): 11.
The Life and Writings of Ralph J. Gleason is a thoughtful celebration and an engagingly detailed reading of the work of one of the great American music journalists.
Simon Frith, Emeritus Professor of Music, University of Edinburgh, UK
In this superb book, Don Armstrong gives Gleason what he deserves and what we desperately need: a richly detailed chronicle of this singular writer/producer/social activist’s career.
John Gennari, Professor of English and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, University of Vermont, USA, and author of Blowin’ Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics (2006)
Don Armstrong writes about music journalism history. He focuses on groundbreaking critics like Ralph Gleason, who believe in pop music’s power to change the world. Surprisingly, Don’s interest in socially attuned music critics grew out of his experiences as an Associate Professor of Architecture at Tuskegee University … Read more …