From The New York Times:
Charles Hamm, who helped establish the field of American popular music history with two books that have become standard texts, died on Oct. 16 in Lebanon, N. H. He was 86.
The cause was pneumonia, his son Stuart said.
After beginning his career as a specialist in Renaissance music, Mr. Hamm became frustrated with the condescension of his fellow musicologists toward contemporary popular music. He began to write and lecture on the subject.
“There was no literature in my own discipline to guide me,” he later recalled in “Putting Popular Music in Its Place,” a 1995 collection of his essays. “My first attempts were shots in the dark, guided only by the germ of a conviction that popular music should be approached as a complex field encompassing composers, performers, audiences, the music industry, the media and the state.”
• Charles Hamm: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Hamm