A lavish presentation of 208 folksongs collected throughout Alabama in the 1940s
 
Alabama is a state rich in folksong tradition, from old English ballads sung along the Tennessee River to children’s game songs played in Mobile, from the rhythmic work songs of the railroad gandy dancers of Gadsden to the spirituals of the Black Belt. The musical heritage of blacks and whites, rich and poor, hill folk and cotton farmers, these songs endure as a living part of the state’s varied past.
 
In the mid 1940s Byron Arnold, an eager young music professor from The University of Alabama, set out to find and record as many of these songs as he could and was rewarded by unstinting cooperation from many informants. Mrs. Julia Greer Marechal of Mobile, for example, was 90 years old, blind, and a semi-invalid, but she sang for Arnold for three hours, allowing the recording of 33 songs and exhausting Arnold and his technician. Helped by such living repositories as Mrs. Marechal, the Arnold collection grew to well over 500 songs, augmented by field notes and remarkable biographical information on the singers.
 
An Alabama Songbook is the result of Arnold’s efforts and those of his informants across the state and has been shaped by Robert W. Halli Jr. into a narrative enriched by more than 200 significant songs-lullabies, Civil War anthems, African-American gospel and secular songs, fiddle tunes, temperance songs, love ballads, play-party rhymes, and work songs. In the tradition of Alan Lomax’s The Folk Songs of North America and Vance Randolph’s Ozark Folksongs, this volume will appeal to general audiences, folklorists, ethnomusicologists, preservationists, traditional musicians, and historians.
 

Three prominent folklorists wrote these essays in the 1970s about Dorrance Weir of upstate New York and his song "Take that Night Train to Selma," Joe Scott of Maine and his song "The Plain Golden Band," and Paul Hall of Newfoundland and "The Bachelor's Song."

Music / Folklore / Ethnic & Native American Studies / American Midwest

America's Upper Midwest is a distinctive region where many indigenous and immigrant peoples have maintained, merged, and modified their folk song traditions for more than two centuries. In the 1930s and 40s, Sidney Robertson, Alan Lomax, and Helene Stratman-Thomas—with support from the Library of Congress and armed with bulky microphones, blank disks, spare needles, and cumbersome disk-cutting machines—recorded roughly 2000 songs and tunes throughout Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. Spanning dance tunes, ballads, lyric songs, hymns, laments, versified taunts, political anthems, street cries, and recitations, these field recordings—made by people born before or shortly after 1900—were captured at a transformative moment when America was in the throes of the Great Depression, World War II was erupting, and market-driven mass entertainment media were expanding rapidly. Yet, except for a handful of Anglo-American performances, these remarkable field recordings in more than twenty-five languages have remained largely unknown, along with the lives of their mostly immigrant, indigenous, rural, and working class performers.

Since the 1970s, folklorist James P. Leary has worked steadily to bring the folk music of the Upper Midwest to a larger public. Folksongs of Another America presents 187 representative performances by more than 200 singers and musicians, carefully restored in digital form from deteriorating original formats. The accompanying book provides an introduction, full texts of all lyrics in the original languages and in English translation, extensive notes about each song and tune, biographical sketches and photographs of many of the performers, and details about Robertson, Lomax, and Stratman-Thomas and their fieldwork efforts as song collectors. These restored performances reveal with clarity and power a nearly lost sonic portrait of another America.

Available here for the first time is the remarkably diverse folk music of America's Upper Midwest, captured in field recordings by collectors for the Library of Congress from 1937 to 1946. This landmark multimedia work challenges and considerably broadens popular and scholarly understanding of folk music in American culture. Although Eastern, Southern, and Western musical traditions are familiar to fans of American roots music, the restored images and performances of Folksongs of Another America weave the songs and spirit of the Upper Midwest's peoples into the nation's folksong fabric.

187 songs and tunes, digitally restored

Songs in more than 25 languages, with full original lyrics and English translations

More than 200 performers, with biographical notes and many photographs

BOXED SET INCLUDES

Illustrated book Folksongs of Another America

300 pp. (est.), 94 black and white photographs and illustrations

CDs & DVD

CD 1 Pigtown Fling: The Sidney Robertson Recordings

Recordings of lumberjack, Finnish, Scots Gaelic, and Serbian performers captured by fieldworker Sidney Robertson in Wisconsin and Minnesota in 1937.

CD 2 The River in the Pines: The Wisconsin Lumberjacks Recordings

Performances of the acclaimed Wisconsin Lumberjacks band of Rice Lake, Wisconsin, recorded by both Sidney Robertson and Alan Lomax during National Folk Festivals in Chicago and Washington, D.C., in 1937 and 1938.

CD 3 Harps and Accordions: The Alan Lomax Recordings Alan Lomax's 1938 Michigan field recordings of lumberjack, Finnish, French Canadian, German, Irish, Lithuanian, Ojibwe, Polish, and Swedish performers.

CD 4 When the Dance is Over: Helene Stratman-Thomas Recordings, Part 1 CD 5 My Father Was a Dutchman: Helene Stratman-Thomas Recordings, Part 2 Recordings made throughout Wisconsin in 1940, 1941, and 1946, encompassing not only Finns, French Canadians, Germans, Irish, Lithuanians, Ojibwe, Poles, Scots, Serbs, and Swedes, but also African American, Austrian, Belgian, Cornish, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Ho-Chunk, Icelandic, Italian, Luxemburger, Norwegian, Oneida, Swiss, and Welsh performers.

DVD Alan Lomax Goes North The new documentary film combines digitally restored silent color film footage, related field recordings, voice-over readings from Lomax's correspondence and field notes, and onscreen text to create an audiovisual narrative featuring the performers and scenes that captivated Alan Lomax during his 1938 Upper Midwestern foray.

Funding for this project was provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Brittingham Trust, the University of Wisconsin–Madison Graduate School with funding from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, the University of Wisconsin–Madison Department of Scandinavian Studies' Birgit Baldwin professorship, and the Finlandia Foundation.

"A major academic work that is also brilliantly, clearly, humanely, and poetically written. It can be enjoyed not only by ballad and bawdry scholars but by everyone who picks it up." -- Kenneth S. Goldstein, University of Pennsylvania, former president of the American Folklore Society
"Toelken's insights . . . are unique. His study broadens and deepens scholarly appreciation of how folksong metaphors carry their own semantic weight. . . . One of the best expressions of the power of music in folksong that I have seen in recent years." -- James Porter, author of The Traditional Music of Britain and Ireland

In this lively exploration of folksongs and their meanings, Barre Toelken looks closely at riddle songs and other ambiguous folksongs, as well as the various "ballad commonplaces." Ranging through metaphors such as weaving, plowing, plucking flowers, and walking in the dew, Toelken shows how each contributes to meaning in vernacular song. He includes comparisons to German folksongs, medieval poetry, Italian folk lyrics, and a wide range of Euro-American vernacular expression.

Unearthing Gender is a compelling ethnographic analysis of folksongs sung primarily by lower-caste women in north India, in the fields, at weddings, during travels, and in other settings. Smita Tewari Jassal uses these songs to explore how ideas of caste, gender, sexuality, labor, and power may be strengthened, questioned, and fine-tuned through music. At the heart of the book is a library of songs, in their original Bhojpuri and in English translation, framed by Jassal's insights into the complexities of gender and power.

The significance of these folksongs, Jassal argues, lies in their suggesting and hinting at themes, rather than directly addressing them: women sing what they often cannot talk about. Women's lives, their feelings, their relationships, and their social and familial bonds are persuasively presented in song. For the ethnographer, the songs offer an entry into the everyday cultures of marginalized groups of women who have rarely been the focus of systematic analytical inquiry.