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This chapter studies Charles Leland Bagley, a professional musician who traveled to Los Angeles in 1893. Bagley's experiences as a musician in Los Angeles are intertwined with the stories of other early working musicians in Los Angeles. The chapter takes a look at the various jobs a musician could have, and introduces the La Fiesta De Los Angeles, an event that helped the city achieve the Spanish “days of the dons” image it sought to project. It also looks at Bagley's experiences in opera and ragtime.

This chapter analyzes how musicians see their work: as freelance work, a full-time profession, a leisurely hobby, or a craft. Defining and analyzing the concept of “working musician,” it positions musicians' labor in the context of immigration and class-based views on training and professionalism. The vulnerability of musicians as immigrant laborers plays a vital part in how they approach music making and relate to fellow musicians. It shows how musicians deal with the norm of low-paying, contingent music jobs and strategize about how to best pursue lives as working musicians. The work experience of Latina/o musicians in Charlotte highlights how globalization has brought a new vibrancy that provides some (limited) avenues for economic mobility through capital flows and migration, but also promotes a labor regime that depends on contingent, flexible labor and facilitates a growing divide between rich and poor.

This chapter examines how Latino immigrant musicians and audience members, through their music making, debate political questions relevant to their everyday lives as working musicians and residents of a globalizing city. Musicians and their audiences negotiate their political stances through a physical and intellectual process called the circular colectivo (collective circle). The collective circle describes the circle of dancers that often form at Eastside rock concerts in Charlotte, in which dancers slam into each other in dances where jumping and shoving serve to unite band and audience in a collective music-making strategy. But the term has an additional meaning—the collective circulation of ideas through music as bands, audience members, and journalists engage in debates about the political and social importance of what they are performing, how they perform it, and its meaning in the context of a politicized immigrant presence in the U.S. South.

This chapter discusses the arrival of ultramodern music in Los Angeles. It first describes music making in Los Angeles during the 1920s, excluding the working-class musicians who were employed in restaurants, bars, and the silent movie palaces. The chapter then introduces Olga Steeb, a successful teacher and artist who remained open to the “new” in music, and also identifies several patrons of the concert music scene, before discussing the ultramodern performances conducted in Los Angeles.

This chapter examines two Washington-based figures who provided John Philip Sousa with examples of just how expansive a nineteenth-century musical career could become. Indeed, the most important lessons of Sousa's youth did not come from formal apprenticeships or professional employment; they were found in the careers of musicians who lived in the Navy Yard. The first model was George Felix Benkert, who provided Sousa with a technical education in composition. However, the most remarkable of these models was, no doubt, John Esputa—a working-class musician who found employment where he could, wrote what must have seemed financially prudent at the time, and had a wide range of musical talents. Esputa's musical career seems quite remarkable in its specifics, but its outlines were perfectly typical of American musical life in the nineteenth century.