Miller's study of folk and pop music in the late 19th and early 20th centuries adopts an interesting route to arrive at its conclusions. He does not purely focus on the work of folklorist collectors and record company workers in order to examine the divergent conceptions of folk and popular music held by these professionals. Instead these figures make appearances intermittently throughout the book, contributing to the more broadly sourced discussion of what constituted folk and pop music in this period.

Miller begins by recounting one example of an event which becomes very familiar throughout the book: a white northerner hearing early blues or ‘hard luck tales’ and being impressed with their seeming authenticity. This is contrasted with the popular songs also heard by the observer, which disappointed him with their populist, northern origins. Miller uses this beginning to introduce one of his central arguments: folk music and pop music in the south were not naturally discrete and separable, and these categories were largely the invention of workers in the entertainment and music industries, and academic folklorists. Miller incorporates surprisingly detailed analyses of numerous entertainment industry offshoots in his attempt to make this argument, and the argument is certainly a successful one.

Miller contends that theatre industry and music publishing staples in the late 19th century, such as sentimental stage ballads, blackface minstrelsy stereotypes and popular classical tunes, could become extremely popular in the south through touring theatre companies and an opened transport network. Thus, the popular songs in the south were often no different from those in the north, but northern conceptions of southern music and culture were generally distorted by romanticism and nostalgia. Miller identifies this curious combination of musical trends as being central to the conflation of folk and pop music. Northern audiences were interested in what they saw as authentic southern folk music, either by African-American or white performers, but this was based on the very stereotypes northern industry people had largely invented. Miller manages to negotiate these confusing entertainment industry stories with skill, allowing the reader to see how they illustrate his point about the interaction of folk and pop music.

Another central argument in Miller's study is the continued segregation of African-Americans throughout the developments in the entertainment industry. Miller asserts that these industries created a ‘musical colour line’ which severely restricted the performance opportunities of African-American artists, and enforced racial stereotypes in their depiction of African-American music and culture. However, he also notes that increased participation opportunities for African-Americans during the recording industry boom did allow circumscribed chances for musical expression and even social and political comment. In this way Miller also successfully avoids broad generalisations about race in his study, partly because they are not necessary to bolster his argument. He undermines various enduring assumptions about musical forms considered to be African-American. One of these is the notion that certain folk music forms arose from manual labour, and are naturally ancillary to work. Miller argues that in fact most musicians regarded their music as a means of escaping work altogether, and as an alternative to work. In this conception of music, Miller suggests that some types of song do not have a purely functional nature, i.e. the endurance of hard work, but have artistic traits because they enable the pursuit of a different career.

Miller regularly taps into popular musicology debates about authenticity in this study, and investigates similar territory to Richard Peterson in his seminal 1997 study Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity. Both Miller and Peterson explore the necessity for performers to conform to a stereotype, and how a performer's success is often derived from how successfully they play the role assigned to them. Miller diverges from Peterson in his use of this examination of authenticity, by employing authenticity as another vehicle for looking at segregation in the music industry. He explains how African-American performers were restricted to playing blues music, both to audiences and in recording sessions, because that was the music currently associated with authenticity in African-American musical culture.

Later in the book Miller looks at the familiar story of John Lomax and Leadbelly to further articulate this point. Leadbelly had a great interest in performing popular tunes to audiences, especially since many of these were his favourite songs, but Lomax encouraged him to perform only the songs which he equated with authenticity. Miller's central premise of segregation in the music industry often comes through strongest when studying examples like Leadbelly, which plainly indicate the degree of segregation imposed on African-American performers. What examples like these also demonstrate is the confusing conflation of pop and folk music which informs so many conceptions of music in this period. Miller argues that many people even in the 1930s still equated African-American musical authenticity with blackface minstrelsy and other musical styles invented by the theatre and music business at the turn of the century. These images of African-American culture were deeply linked with a fascination with primitivism, which Lomax continued to exploit in his promotion of Leadbelly. Again, Miller convincingly demonstrates that this segregation in music persisted in much the same way throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

As previously mentioned, one of the areas in which Miller's study diverges with particular success is the balanced study of music industry promoters, engineers, etc., theatre promoters and writers, music publishers and academic folklorists. Miller avoids the tendency to study folklore and the music business as separate areas of folk and pop music interest, and looks at them developing concomitantly. This is very much a component of his mandate to study the conflation of pop and folk music throughout the period. In doing this, Miller also shows how much popular conceptions of folk music have influenced folklore, despite the attempts of the latter to distance itself from populism.

In the conclusion, Miller quotes the musician Bill Broonzy's famous declaration ‘All Songs is Folk Songs’, apparently not with the intention of saying that all types of song qualify as authentic folk songs, but that all songs belong to the folk and are there to be used by them. He also concludes that Bill Broonzy was one of a number of African-American musicians who were, ‘intent on maintaining unique aspects of their culture without being reduced to them’ (p. 282). This conclusion reflects the number of performers throughout Miller's study who attempt to break out of the system of racial and regional stereotypes. Although the obvious emphasis was on African-American musical stereotyping, Miller shows that rural southern whites were also subject to stereotypes which limited to a lesser degree the music they played. Ultimately Miller's study succeeds because it questions many assumptions about folk and pop music, and about the commercial music business and the academic folklore world. Since that is Miller's mandate, and as he professes in his introduction,

This book succeeds because it comprehensively addresses these ‘standard approaches’ and offers an alternate summary of folk and pop music.

Although the 1950s and 1960s era folk revival makes only a brief appearance near the end of the book, because it falls outside the main period Miller is discussing, it would have been useful to look at how these assumptions have changed since the 1930s. Material pertaining to Harry Smith and the Anthology of American Folk Music features in the bibliography, but is not mentioned in the main body of the book, and considering the conflation of folk and popular music, and commercial and academic elements in the Anthology it would have made an appropriate discussion point. Overall though, this book succeeds in its aim of demonstrating that,