Free and Easy examines the evolution of how the film musical genre has come to be defined: what gets counted as a musical, why, and who gets to make that decision. Surveying centuries of music history from the music and dance of Native Americans to contemporary music performance in streaming media, including the growth of American musical theater, music publishing, and the music recording industry, Free and Easy examines how social factors helped invent and shape the musical, and the genre's ongoing balance between celebrating individual freedom and reaffirming the joys of community. Expanding beyond the glory days of MGM and the classical Hollywood musical or the blockbuster Broadway adaptation to sound experiments, short subjects and cartoons, foreign-language films, "race movies," documentaries, and contemporary independent cinema, this history questions exactly how "free and easy" it is to determine what is and what is not a musical.