"From the Shanghai "Youth Palace" where a rouged male orchestra plays tangos and "Take Me Back to West Virginia," to the front porch of an Appalachian banjo-picker's cabin, Beats of the Heart takes us on a fourteen-stop tour of the places where today's most popular music is created. Samba, reggae, salsa; Tex-Mex ballads, African drums, Japanese synthesizations: the sounds are as varied as the cultures they reflect. In the profiles and interviews that make up the book's text, Jeremy Marre and Hannah Charlton show us how these traditional forms of expression have responded to the needs of a transformed society - how music has become a vehicle for protest, politics, history, commerce, dance, storytelling, and sheer joyful celebration, all at the same time. Beats of the Heart is a colorful, globe-trotting, and remarkably perspective one-of-a-kind book"--Back cover.