Historic Vienna's Fall Meeting Celebrating our 50th with a very special program on "The Sounds of the 70s"

Dennis Cole, Ph.D., a Library Technician in the Music Division of the Library of Congress, author of A History of Popular Music in America, and adjunct professor at George Mason University

Free and Open to the Public

A music history on the sounds of the 70's celebrating HVI's 50th anniversary.

Turn back the dial fifty years to the music that shaped a decade — and coincided with HVI’s own founding. In this lively program, Dennis Cole, Ph.D., a Library Technician in the Music Division of the Library of Congress and author of A History of Popular Music in America, takes HVI on a tour through the 1970s’ defining sounds, from the artists everyone remembers to the deep cuts most have forgotten. Along the way, Cole reveals rare copyright deposits from the Library’s collection — published and unpublished sheet music submitted for copyright registration — offering a different look at songs listeners think they already know. He also traces how vinyl, cassettes, 8-tracks, and shows like Soul Train shaped the way people experienced this music and spotlights the local venues — Wolf Trap among them — that brought the era’s biggest names close to home. The talk closes with a special focus on 1976, the very year HVI was founded.  

Dennis Cole, Ph.D. (Ethnomusicology–Musicology), is a Library Technician in the Music Division of the Library of Congress (Washington, D.C.). His scholarship centers on American Studies, with a particular focus on popular and vernacular music traditions from the late nineteenth through twenty-first centuries.

Dr. Cole is the author of A History of Popular Music in America: Its Styles and Cultural Considerations (McGraw-Hill, 2022; second edition, 2026). His work has been published in the United States, Frankfurt am Main (Germany), and Lódz (Poland), and he has delivered conference papers throughout the United States and Canada. He has served on manuscript peer-review committees for SUNY Press and Ljubljana University Press (Slovenia).

For more than twenty years, Dr. Cole has taught music history and popular music studies across the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, including his current appointment at George Mason University.