A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
Drawing in part on interviews with elderly African-American banjo players from the Piedmont—among the last American representatives of an African banjo-playing tradition that spans several centuries—Conway reaches beyond the written records to reveal the similarity of pre-blues black banjo lyric patterns, improvisational playing styles, and the accompanying singing and dance movements to traditional West African music performances. The author then shows how Africans had, by the mid-eighteenth century, transformed the lyrical music of the gourd banjo as they dealt with the experience of slavery in America.
By the mid-nineteenth century, white southern musicians were learning the banjo playing styles of their African-American mentors and had soon created or popularized a five-string, wooden-rim banjo. Some of these white banjo players remained in the mountain hollows, but others dispersed banjo music to distant musicians and the American public through popular minstrel shows.
By the turn of the century, traditional black and white musicians still shared banjo playing, and Conway shows that this exchange gave rise to a distinct and complex new genre—the banjo song. Soon, however, black banjo players put down their banjos, set their songs with increasingly assertive commentary to the guitar, and left the banjo and its story to white musicians. But the banjo still echoed at the crossroads between the West African griots, the traveling country guitar bluesmen, the banjo players of the old-time southern string bands, and eventually the bluegrass bands.
The Author: Cecelia Conway is associate professor of English at Appalachian State University. She is a folklorist who teaches twentieth-century literature, including cultural perspectives, southern literature, and film.
Sarah Jane Nelson chronicles Hunter’s song collecting adventures alongside portraits of the singers and mentors he met along the way. The guitar-strumming Hunter picked up the recording habit to expand his repertoire but almost immediately embraced the role of song preservationist. Being a local allowed Hunter to merge his native Ozark earthiness with sharp observational skills to connect--often more than once--with his singers. Hunter’s own ability to be present added to that sense of connection. Despite his painstaking approach, ballad collecting was also a source of pleasure for Hunter. Ultimately, his dedication to capturing Ozarks song culture in its natural state brought Hunter into contact with people like Vance Randolph, Mary Parler, and non-academic folklorists who shared his values.
Wide-ranging and illustrated with twenty color images, Banjo Roots and Branches offers a wealth of new information to scholars of African American and folk musics as well as the worldwide community of banjo aficionados.
Contributors: Greg C. Adams, Nick Bamber, Jim Dalton, George R. Gibson, Chuck Levy, Shlomo Pestcoe, Pete Ross, Tony Thomas, Saskia Willaert, and Robert B. Winans.
Yucatecan trova is a music genre comprising a type of romantic song that is considered “the soul of Yucatán and Yucatecans.” This first book on Yucatecan trova offers an insider’s view of the history and practice of a treasured cultural heritage. A central theme of Gabriela Vargas-Cetina’s ethnography is what she refers to as the “beautiful politics of music” practiced by Yucatecan trova patrons and organizations, which is a way of asserting the importance of groups and issues through nonconfrontational means.
Trova emerged on the peninsula at the end of the nineteenth century and continues to be part of the general urban soundscape in the states of Yucatán and Campeche. Until the 1920s, this music was little known outside Yucatán and became absorbed into the larger Latin American Bolero genre, making it difficult to perceive its uniqueness and relation to life in Yucatán.
Vargas-Cetina, a native Yucatecan and trova musician, offers ethnographic insight into the local music scene. With family connections, she embedded herself as a trovadora, and her fieldwork—singing, playing the guitar in a trova group, and extensively researching the genre and talking with fellow enthusiasts and experts—ensued. Trova, like other types of artistic endeavors, is the result of collaboration and social milieu. She describes the dedicated trova clubs, cultural institutions, the Yucatecan economy of agricultural exports, and identity politics that helped the music come about and have maintained it today.
Positioned in the larger context of the music of Mexico and Latin America and engaging with theories of modernity and cosmopolitanism, experimental ethnography, and the anthropology of organizations, Beautiful Politics of Music consists of rigorous scholarship. It is also a warm tribute to performers and songs that have inspired many people around the world for more than two centuries.
"Tell 'em I'm a farmer with a mandolin and a high tenor voice," Bill Monroe said. Known as the Father of Bluegrass Music, Monroe pioneered a whole new category of music and inspired generations of musicians and fans. Yet from his founding of the original bluegrass band through six decades of performing, he remained an enigmatic figure, a compelling mixture of fierce intensity, homespun modesty, and musical integrity.
Determined to play the mandolin in a way it had never been played before, Monroe distinguished himself in the mid-1930s with the Monroe Brothers then began forming his own band, the Blue Grass Boys, in 1938. By the mid-1940s other bands were copying his sound, and a new style, bluegrass music, was born. While country music moved toward electrification, Monroe maintained his acoustic ensemble and developed his "high, lonesome sound," performing nearly up to his death in 1996.
In this eclectic, richly illustrated reader, former Blue Grass Boy Tom Ewing gathers the most significant and illuminating of the many articles that have been written about Monroe. Through the writings of nearly sixty observers, interviewers, admirers, folklorists, and other scholars, along with Ewing's astute commentary, The Bill Monroe Reader offers a multifaceted view of one of the most influential country musicians of the twentieth century.
Lively, heartfelt, and informative, The Bill Monroe Reader is a fitting tribute to the man and the musician who transformed the traditional music of western Kentucky into an international sensation.
The story of the Minneapolis musicians who were unexpectedly summoned to re-record half of the songs on Bob Dylan's most acclaimed album
When Bob Dylan recorded Blood on the Tracks in New York in September 1974, it was a great album. But it was not the album now ranked by Rolling Stone as one of the ten best of all time. “When something’s not right, it’s wrong,” as Dylan puts it in “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go”—and something about that original recording led him to a studio in his native Minnesota to re-record five songs, including “Idiot Wind” and “Tangled Up in Blue.” Six Minnesota musicians participated in that two-night recording session at Sound 80, bringing their unique sound to some of Dylan’s best-known songs—only to have their names left off the album and their contribution unacknowledged for more than forty years. This book tells the story of those two nights in Minneapolis, introduces the musicians who gave the album so much of its ultimate form and sound, and describes their decades-long fight for recognition.
Blood in the Tracks takes readers behind the scenes with these “mystery” Minnesota musicians: twenty-one-year-old mandolin virtuoso Peter Ostroushko; drummer Bill Berg and bass player Billy Peterson, the house rhythm section at Sound 80; progressive rock keyboardist Gregg Inhofer; guitarist Chris Weber, who owned The Podium guitar shop in Dinkytown; and Kevin Odegard, whose own career as a singer-songwriter had paralleled Dylan’s until he had to take a job as a railroad brakeman to make ends meet. Through in-depth interviews and assiduous research, Paul Metsa and Rick Shefchik trace the twists of fate that brought these musicians together and then set them on different paths in its wake: their musical experiences leading up to the December 1974 recording session, the divergent careers that followed, and the painstaking work required to finally obtain the official credit that they were due.
A rare look at the making—or remaking—of an all-time great album, and a long overdue recognition of the musicians who made it happen, Blood in the Tracks brings to life a transformative moment in the history of rock and roll, for the first time in its true context and with its complete cast of players.
In the past fifty years, the bodhrán, or traditional Irish circular frame drum, has undergone a rapid evolution in development. Traditionally, it is a shallow drum ranging from ten to twenty-six inches in diameter, covered in goatskin on the top (or drum) side and open on the other. Unlike any other instrument associated with Irish traditional music, the bodhrán has been dramatically altered by its confrontation with modern instrument design, performance techniques, and musical practice. Colin Harte’s The Bodhrán: Experimentation, Innovation, and the Traditional Irish Frame Drum presents a definitive history of the bodhrán from its early origins to its present-day resurgence in Irish American folk music.
The bodhrán has global roots and bears many characteristics of older drums from northern Africa and the Middle East. Harte picks up on these basic similarities and embarks on an engaging tour of the instrument’s historical and organological development, gradual evolution in playing styles, and more recent history of performative practice. Drawing from a host of interviews over a multi-year period with participants primarily located in Europe and North America, this work provides a platform for multiple perspectives regarding the bodhrán. Participants include bodhrán makers, professional performers, educators, amateur musicians, historians, and enthusiasts. Growing out of rich ethnographic interviews, this book serves as the definitive reference for understanding and navigating the developments in the bodhrán’s history, organology, performance practices, and repertoire.
Since he first hitched a ride out of Lubbock, Texas, at the age of sixteen, singer-songwriter and Flatlanders band member Joe Ely has been a road warrior, traveling highways and back roads across America and Europe, playing music for "2 hours of ecstasy" out of "22 hours of misery." To stay sane on the road, Ely keeps a journal, penning verses that sometimes morph into songs, and other times remain "snapshots of what was flying by, just out of reach, so to savor at a later date when the wheels stop rolling, and the gears quit grinding, and the engines shut down."
In Bonfire of Roadmaps, Ely takes readers on the road with him. Using verse passages from his road journals and his own drawings, Ely authentically re-creates the experience of a musician's life on tour, from the hard goodbyes at home, to the long hours on the road, to the exhilaration of a great live show, to the exhaustion after weeks of touring. Ely's road trips begin as he rides the rails to Manhattan in 1972 and continue up through recent concert tours with fellow Flatlanders Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Butch Hancock.
While acknowledging that "it is not the nature of a gypsy to look in the rearview mirror," Joe Ely nevertheless offers his many fans a revelatory look back over the roads he's traveled and the wisdom he's won from his experiences. And for "those who want to venture beyond the horizon just to see what is there... to those, I hope these accounts will give a glint of inspiration..."
This third edition of Born in the U.S.A. is fully revised and updated, incorporating discussion of Springsteen’s wide output in the 21st century. While addressing Springsteen’s responses to events like 9/11, it also considers the evolution of his attitudes towards religion, masculinity, and his relationship with his audience. Whether a serious Springsteen fan or simply an observer of American popular culture, Born in the U.S.A. will give you a new appreciation for The Boss.
Unlike any other resource, it provides detailed analyses of each album, essays on their historical significance, and a chronological examination of every studio song. Discover the stories behind the recordings and gain insight into Springsteen's creative process.
Rich with contemporary reviews, insider accounts, photographs, and special sections highlighting pivotal moments and key figures, Bruce Songs is an indispensable companion for fans and scholars. It offers an immersive journey through the music of The Boss, making it an essential read for anyone captivated by Springsteen's enduring musical legacy.
Businessman, politician, broadcasting personality, and newspaper publisher, Cas Walker (1902–1998) was, by his own estimation, a “living legend” in Knoxville for much of the twentieth century. Renowned for his gravelly voice and country-boy persona, he rose from blue-collar beginnings to make a fortune as a grocer whose chain of supermarkets extended from East Tennessee into Virginia and Kentucky. To promote his stores, he hosted a local variety show, first on radio and then TV, that advanced the careers of many famed country music artists from a young Dolly Parton to Roy Acuff, Chet Atkins, and Bill Monroe. As a member of the Knoxville city council, he championed the “little man” while ceaselessly irritating the people he called the “silk-stocking crowd.”
This wonderfully entertaining book brings together selections from interviews with a score of Knoxvillians, various newspaper accounts, Walker’s own autobiography, and other sources to present a colorful mosaic of Walker’s life. The stories range from his flamboyant advertising schemes—as when he buried a man alive outside one of his stores—to memories of his inimitable managerial style—as when he infamously canned the Everly Brothers because he didn’t like it when they began performing rock ’n’ roll. Further recollections call to mind Walker’s peculiar brand of bare-knuckle politics, his generosity to people in need, his stance on civil rights, and his lifelong love of coon hunting (and coon dogs). The book also traces his decline, hastened in part by a successful libel suit brought against his muckraking weekly newspaper, the Watchdog.
It’s said that any Knoxvillian born before 1980 has a Cas Walker story. In relating many of those stories in the voices of those who still remember him, this book not only offers an engaging portrait of the man himself and his checkered legacy, but also opens a new window into the history and culture of the city in which he lived and thrived.
“In Cool Wooden Box, Rand Smith has cleverly woven person, social, and musical histories into a compelling narrative. In doing so, Smith has illustrated just how, well, cool the steel string acoustic guitar, its makers, and its players are.” —John Thomas, author of Kalamazoo Gals: A Story of Extraordinary Women and Gibson’s “Banner” Guitars of WWII, and field editor for The Fretboard Journal
Beginning with a comparison of the American acoustic guitar world in the early 1960s with that of today, then describing iconic performances at storied venues such as The Ark in Ann Arbor while meticulously researching the instrument’s top makers, Smith assembles a passion-filled and eye-opening history of that “cool wooden box” from the folk era through the pandemic. The author focuses on both the playing and making of the acoustic guitar, concluding that the instrument has been transformed in both aspects during the last sixty years. On the playing side, Smith examines the influences on, and the impact of, such guitarists as David Bromberg, Elizabeth Cotten, Paul Geremia, and Norman Blake. On the making side, the author takes the reader into the tradition-minded yet dynamic world of lutherie. He traces how the oldest, most revered companies whose reputations are based on legendary breakthroughs in lutherie, Gibson and Martin, have adapted as the new lutherie movement of innovative small-scale producers, exemplified by interviewees such as Michael Gurian, Bill Collings, Richard Hoover, and Dana Bourgeois, arose. Starting small and then growing exponentially, Taylor Guitars is a wholly different “player” in acoustic guitar building, and Smith compellingly tells its story. Finally, Cool Wooden Box considers the effects of globalization on the industry.
Clocking thousands of miles and hours of interviews with guitar makers, suppliers, and sellers, W. Rand Smith has created not only a detailed history of the acoustic guitar, but also a lasting tribute to an instrument he so clearly reveres.
Couldn’t Have a Wedding without the Fiddler draws heavily on interviews conducted with 150 fiddlers and other “Islanders”—including singers, dancers, music instructors, community leaders, and event organizers—whose memories span decades. The book thus colorfully brings to life a time not so very long ago when virtually any occasion—a wedding, harvest, house warming, holiday, or the need to raise money for local institutions such as schools and churchs—was sufficient excuse to hold a dance, with the fiddle player at the center of the celebration. Perlman explores how fiddling skills and traditions were learned and passed down through the generations and how individual fiddlers honed their distinctive playing styles. He also examines the Island’s history and material culture, fiddlers’ values and attitudes, the role of radio and recordings, the fiddlers’ repertoire, fiddling contests, and the ebb and flow of the fiddling tradition, including efforts over the last few decades to keep the music alive in the face of modernization and the passing of “old-timers.” Rounding out the book is a rich array of photographs, musical examples, dance diagrams, and a discography.
The inaugural volume in the Charles K. Wolfe American Music Series, Couldn’t Have a Wedding without the Fiddler is, in the words of series editor Ted Olson, “clearly among the more significant studies of a local North American music tradition to be published in recent years.”
A highly regarded banjoist, guitarist, teacher, and music collector, Ken Perlman previously published a collection of over 400 tunes called The Fiddle Music of Prince Edward Island: Celtic & Acadian Tunes in Living Tradition; he also produced a 2-CD set of field recordings for Rounder Records called The Prince Edward Island Style of Fiddling.. He has written several music instruction manuals now regarded as classics in their field, notably Clawhammer Style Banjo, Melodic Clawhammer Banjo, and Fingerstyle Guitar.
Stivale combines his personal knowledge and love of Cajun music and dance with the theoretical insights of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to consider representations of things Cajun. He examines the themes expressed within the lyrics of the Cajun musical repertoire and reflects on the ways Cajun cultural practices are portrayed in different genres including feature films, documentaries, and instructional dance videos. He analyzes the dynamic exchanges between musicians, dancers, and spectators at such venues as bars and music festivals. He also considers a number of thorny socio-political issues underlying Cajun culture, including racial tensions and linguistic isolation. At the same time, he describes various efforts by contemporary musicians and their fans to transcend the limitations of cultural stereotypes and social exclusion.
Disenchanting Les Bons Temps will appeal to those interested in Cajun culture, issues of race and ethnicity, music and dance, and the intersection of French and Francophone studies with Anglo and American cultural studies.
Dyas’s photographs present both the sweaty intensity of live performances and the more contemplative moments of individual portraits. They are complemented by Chris Offutt’s empathetic essay, which also encapsulates the experience of connecting with a new home through its music. A companion CD with eighteen tracks by Iowa’s finest singer/songwriters, including Dave Moore, Greg Brown, Bo Ramsey, David Zollo, and Pieta Brown, add up to an unmatched perspective on Iowa music and musicians.
CD Tracks
1. Iowa Crawl, Joe Price
2. Poor Back Slider, Greg Brown
3. Parnell, David Zollo
4. #807, Pieta Brown
5. Wheels of Steel, Radoslav Lorkovic
6. Down to the River, Dave Moore
7. Lucy and Andy Drive to Arkansas, Kevin Gordon
8. Chuck Brown, Mike and Amy Finders
9. Nobody But You, Joe Price
10. Earleton, BeJae Fleming
11. Ceremonial Child, High and Lonesome
12. Sidetrack Lounge, Bo Ramsey
13. On the Edge, Pieta Brown
14. One Wrong Turn, Greg Brown
15. Not in Iowa, Kelly Pardekooper
16. Living in a Cornfield, Bo Ramsey
17. ’57 Chevy, Tom Jessen’s Dimestore Outfit
18. Roll on John, the Pines
Based on more than twenty years of collaborative research, Carole Pegg’s long-awaited participatory ethnography explores how Indigenous nomadic peoples of Russia’s southern Siberian republics (Altai, Khakassia, Tyva) sound multiphonies of place in a post-Soviet global world. Inspired by the mountain-steppe ecology and pathways of nomadism, soundscapes created in performative ritual events cross political and multiple-world boundaries in a shamanic-animist universe, enabling human and spirit actor interactions in a series of sensuous worlds. As with the “throat-singing” for which Indigenous Altai-Sayan peoples are famous, senses of place involve sonic relations, rootedness, movement, and plurality. Pegg echoes their drone-partials musical and ontological models in an innovative theoretical entwinement. Three strands form the book’s multivocal drone, the partials of which sound in each chapter: ontological sonicality and musicality that enables emplacement and movement; the importance of shamanism-animism--at the core of Indigenous spiritual practices--for personhood and community; and the agency of sonic performances. Sounding place, Pegg demonstrates, is essential to the identities, ways of life, and very senses of being of Indigenous Altai-Sayan peoples.
Since the late 1970s, a new folk hero has risen to prominence in the U.S.-Mexico border region and beyond—the narcotrafficker. Celebrated in the narcocorrido, a current form of the traditional border song known as the corrido, narcotraffickers are often portrayed as larger-than-life "social bandits" who rise from poor or marginalized backgrounds to positions of power and wealth by operating outside the law and by living a life of excess, challenging authority (whether U.S. or Mexican), and flouting all risks, including death. This image, rooted in Mexican history, has been transformed and commodified by the music industry and by the drug trafficking industry itself into a potent and highly marketable product that has a broad appeal, particularly among those experiencing poverty and power disparities. At the same time, the transformation from folk hero to marketable product raises serious questions about characterizations of narcocorridos as "narratives of resistance."
This multilayered ethnography takes a wide-ranging look at the persona of the narcotrafficker and how it has been shaped by Mexican border culture, socioeconomic and power disparities, and the transnational music industry. Mark Edberg begins by analyzing how the narcocorrido emerged from and relates to the traditional corrido and its folk hero. Then, drawing upon interviews and participant-observation with corrido listening audiences in the border zone, as well as musicians and industry producers of narcocorridos, he elucidates how the persona of the narcotrafficker has been created, commodified, and enacted, and why this character resonates so strongly with people who are excluded from traditional power structures. Finally, he takes a look at the concept of the cultural persona itself and its role as both cultural representation and model for practice.
Ever wanted to know the "correct" words to "Roll Me Over?" Wondered where the melody of "Sweet Betsy from Pike" came from? Ed Cray ranges from "The Cod Fish Song" to "Hallelujah I'm a Bum" in a tireless quest to answer such questions and restore bawdy to an esteemed place in our folk music canon.
Extensively revised and including forty more songs than its predecessor, the second edition of The Erotic Muse is a unique collection of bawdy and even forbidden American folksongs. Cray presents the full texts of some 125 works with melodies for most and detailed annotations for all. In addition, he adds lively commentary that places the songs in historical, social, and, where appropriate, psychological context.
An iconic symbol of Spain, flamenco has become a global phenomenon. Peter Manuel offers English-language readers a rare portrait of the music’s history, styles, and cultural impact. Beginning with flamenco’s Moorish and Roma influences, Manuel follows the music’s evolution through its consolidation in the mid-1800s and on to the vibrant contemporary scene. An investigation of flamenco’s major song-types looks at rhythm and compás, guitar technique, and many other aspects of the music while Manuel’s description and analysis of the repertoire range from soleares and bulerías to tangos. His overview of contemporary flamenco culture provides insight into issues that surround the music, including globalization, gender dynamics, notions of ownership, and the ongoing debates on purity versus innovation and the relative roles played by Gitanos and non-Gitanos.
Multifaceted and entertaining, Flamenco Music is an in-depth study of the indelible art form that inspires enthusiasts and practitioners around the world.
A group of three friends who made music in a house in Lubbock, Texas, recorded an album that wasn’t released and went their separate ways into solo careers. That group became a legend and then—twenty years later—a band. The Flatlanders—Joe Ely, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, and Butch Hancock—are icons in American music, with songs blending country, folk, and rock that have influenced a long list of performers, including Robert Earl Keen, the Cowboy Junkies, Ryan Bingham, Terry Allen, John Hiatt, Hayes Carll, Lucinda Williams, Steve Earle, and Lyle Lovett.
In The Flatlanders: Now It’s Now Again, Austin author and music journalist John T. Davis traces the band’s musical journey from the house on 14th Street in Lubbock to their 2013 sold-out concert at Carnegie Hall. He explores why music was, and is, so important in Lubbock and how earlier West Texas musicians such as Buddy Holly and Roy Orbison, as well as a touring Elvis Presley, inspired the young Ely, Gilmore, and Hancock. Davis vividly recreates the Lubbock countercultural scene that brought the Flatlanders together and recounts their first year (1972–1973) as a band, during which they recorded the songs that, decades later, were released as the albums More a Legend Than a Band and The Odessa Tapes. He follows the three musicians through their solo careers and into their first decade as a (re)united band, in which they cowrote songs for the first time on the albums Now Again and Hills and Valleys and recovered their extraordinary original demo tape, lost for forty years. Many roads later, the Flatlanders are finally both a legend and a band.
This biography of 97-year-old Richard Seaman, who grew up in Kissimmee Park, Florida, relies on oral history and folklore research to define the place of musicianship and storytelling in the state's history from one artist's perspective. Gregory Hansen presents Seaman’s assessment of Florida’s changing cultural landscape through his tall tales, personal experience narratives, legends, fiddle tune repertory, and descriptions of daily life.
Seaman’s childhood memories of fiddling performances and rural dances explain the role such gatherings played in building and maintaining social order within the community. As an adult, Seaman moved to Jacksonville, Florida, where he worked as a machinist and performed with his family band. The evolution of his musical repertory from the early 1920s through the 1950s provides a resource for reconstructing social life in the rural south and for understanding how changes in musical style reflect the state's increasingly urban social structure. Hansen includes a set of Seaman's fiddle tunes, transcribed for the benefit of performer and researcher alike. The thirty tall tales included in the volume constitute a representative sample of Florida’s oral tradition in the early years of the 20th century.
Originally built around interviews with these figures and their close associates, these thirty-nine revised articles yield new information from a variety of sources, much from Bear Family boxed sets as well as counsel, advice, and knowledge shared by other music scholars. Tribe's profiles cover musicians and bands that were bluegrass pickers and singers themselves, as well as some musicians who are often characterized as traditional country musicians. Some led bands for all or part of their careers, while others ranked as noted sidemen or band members. Others composed songs that have become popular, indeed often standard, fare in the bluegrass field.
As part of the Charles K. Wolfe Music Series, formed in honor of the late music scholar, Folk Music in Overdrive succinctly advances traditional music scholarship and Wolfe’s own love of early country and bluegrass.
Folk Songs from the West Virginia Hills stands out as a book with multiple audiences. As a musical text, it offers comparatively easy access to a rich variety of folk songs that could provide a new repertoire for Appalachian singers. As an ethnographic text, it has the potential to reintroduce significant data about the musical lives of many West Virginians into conversations around Appalachian music—discourses that are being radically reshaped by scholars working in folklore, ethnomusicology, and Appalachian studies. As a historical document, it gives readers a glimpse into the research methods commonly practiced by mid-twentieth-century folklorists. And when read in conjunction with John Harrington Cox’s Folk Songs of the South (also available from WVU Press), it sheds important light on the significant role that West Virginia University has played in documenting the state’s vernacular traditions.
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."
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.
“The spirit of balladry is not dead, but slowly dying. The instincts, sentiments, and feelings which it represents are indeed as immortal as romance itself, but their mode of expression, the folksong, is fighting with its back to the wall, with the odds against it in our introspective age.” This statement by Josiah Henry Combs is that of a man who grew up among the members of a singing family in one of the last strongholds of the ballad-making tradition, the Southern Highlands of the United States.
Combs was born in 1886 in Hazard, Kentucky, the heart of the mountain feud area—a significant background for one who was to take a prominent part in the “ballad war” of the 1900s. Combs’s intimate knowledge of folk culture and his grasp of the scholarly literature enabled him to approach the ballad controversy with common sense as well as with some of the heat generated by the dispute.
Although in the early twentieth century there was probably no more controversy about the nature of the folk and folksong than there is today, it was a different kind of controversy. Many theories of the origins of folksong current at that time, such as the alleged relationship of traditional ballads to “primitive poetry,” did not take into account contemporary evidence. Combs said, “Here as elsewhere, I go directly to the folk for much of my information, allowing the songs, language, names, customs . . . of the people to help settle the problem of ancestry. . . . In brief, a conscientious study of the lore of the folk cannot be separated from the folk itself.”
Folk-Songs du Midi des États-Unis, published as a doctoral dissertation at the University of Paris in 1925, was an introduction to the study of the folksong of the Southern Appalachians, together with a selection of folksong texts collected by Combs. Folk-Songs of the Southern United States, the first publication of that work in English, is based on the French text and Combs’s English draft. To this edition is appended an annotated listing of all songs in the Josiah H. Combs Collection in the Western Kentucky Folklore Archive at the University of California, Los Angeles. The appendix also includes the texts of selected songs.
The aim of this edition is to make the contents of the original volume more readily available in English and to provide an index to the Combs Collection that may be drawn upon by students of folksong. The book also offers texts of over fifty songs of British and American origin as sung in the Southern Highlands.
Ray Allen interweaves biography, history, and music criticism to follow the band from its New York roots to their involvement with the commercial folk music boom. Allen details their struggle to establish themselves amid critical debates about traditionalism brought on by their brand of folk revivalism. He explores how the Ramblers ascribed notions of cultural authenticity to certain musical practices and performers and how the trio served as a link between southern folk music and northern urban audiences who had little previous exposure to rural roots styles. Highlighting the role of tradition in the social upheaval of mid-century America, Gone to the Country draws on extensive interviews and personal correspondence with band members and digs deep into the Ramblers' rich trove of recordings.
In Gypsy Music, Alan Ashton-Smith explores why this music has such wide appeal, surveying the varied styles that are considered to be gypsy music and asking what links them together. The book begins in the Balkans, home to the world’s largest Romani populations and a major site of gypsy music production. But just as the traditionally nomadic Roma have traveled globally, so has their music. Gypsy music styles have roots and associations outside of the Balkans, including Russian Romani guitar music, flamenco and gypsy jazz, and the more recent forms of gypsy punk and Balkan beats.
Covering the thirteenth century to the present day, and with a geographical scope that ranges from rural Romania to New York by way of Budapest, Moscow, and Andalusia, Gypsy Music reveals the remarkable diversity of this exuberant art form.
In A Hot-Bed of Musicians, Paula Anderson-Green tells the stories of several of these legendary performers and instrument makers from the Upper New River Valley–Whitetop Mountain region, including Ola Belle Campbell Reed, Albert Hash, and Dave Sturgill. These men and women began to bring the music of Appalachia to a wider audience well before Nashville became the center of country music. Making extensive use of interviews, the book reveals the fascinating experiences and enduring values behind the practice of old-time music. This musical heritage remains an indispensable component of Appalachian culture, and Anderson-Green traces the traditions down to the present generation of musicians there.
Written for anyone with an interest in mountain music, this book focuses on performers from Alleghany and Ashe Counties in North Carolina and Carroll County and Grayson County in Virginia. It includes a comprehensive appendix of place names and music venues as well as annotated lists of musicians and the songs they have performed.
The Author: Paula Hathaway Anderson-Green is an adjunct professor of English at Kennesaw State University and does research in Appalachian studies.
The Sacred Harp choral singing tradition originated in the American South in the mid-nineteenth century, spread widely across the country, and continues to thrive today. Sacred Harp isn’t performed but participated in, ideally in large gatherings where, as the a cappella singers face each other around a hollow square, the massed voices take on a moving and almost physical power. I Belong to This Band, Hallelujah! is a vivid portrait of several Sacred Harp groups and an insightful exploration of how they manage to maintain a sense of community despite their members’ often profound differences.
Laura Clawson’s research took her to Alabama and Georgia, to Chicago and Minneapolis, and to Hollywood for a Sacred Harp performance at the Academy Awards, a potent symbol of the conflicting forces at play in the twenty-first-century incarnation of this old genre. Clawson finds that in order for Sacred Harp singers to maintain the bond forged by their love of music, they must grapple with a host of difficult issues, including how to maintain the authenticity of their tradition and how to carefully negotiate the tensions created by their disparate cultural, religious, and political beliefs.
In "I Hear America Singing," Rachel Donaldson traces the vibrant history of the twentieth-century folk music revival from its origins in the 1930s through its end in the late 1960s. She investigates the relationship between the revival and concepts of nationalism, showing how key figures in the revival--including Pete Seeger , Alan Lomax, Moses Asch, and Ralph Rinzler--used songs to influence the ways in which Americans understood the values, the culture, and the people of their own nation.
As Donaldson chronicles how cultural norms were shaped over the course of the mid-twentieth century, she underscores how various groups within the revival and their views shifted over time. "I Hear America Singing" provides a stirring account of how and why the revivalists sustained their culturally pluralist and politically democratic Americanism over this tumultuous period in American history.
Kalevala (the Finnish national epic). In Ilmatar's Inspirations, Tina K. Ramnarine explores creative processes and the critical role that music has played in Finnish nationalism by focusing on Finnish "new folk music" in the shifting spaces between the national imagination and the global marketplace.
Through extensive interviews and observations of performances, Ramnarine reveals how new folk musicians think and talk about past and present folk music practices, the role of folk music in the representation of national identity, and the interactions of Finnish folk musicians with performers from around the globe. She focuses especially on two internationally successful groups—JPP, a group that plays fiddle dance music, and Värttinä, an ensemble that highlights women's vocal traditions. Analyzing the multilayered processes—musical, institutional, political, and commercial—that have shaped and are shaped by new folk music in Finland, Ramnarine gives us an entirely new understanding of the connections between music, place, and identity.
Joe Wilson (1938-2015), a native of rural East Tennessee, was a civil rights activist, self-educated scholar, founder/administrator of nationally important roots music enterprises, and was legendary for his colorful writing and opinions. Lucky Joe’s Namesake, a companion to Roots Music in America: Collected Writings of Joe Wilson (also published by the University of Tennessee Press), brings us Wilson’s life and observations, mostly in his own words.
From humble mountain beginnings, Wilson’s career progressed through Nashville, Tennessee; Birmingham, Alabama; and New York City, before settling him for twenty-eight years near the seats of power in Washington, D.C. as the executive director of the National Council for the Traditional Arts. In that role, he developed a national model for folk festival presentations, stalked the halls of federal representatives seeking support for traditional artists, and filled concert venues throughout the world with audiences eager to experience the work of master folk musicians. A powerful advocate on behalf of agrarian values, social justice, artistic authenticity, and cultural democracy, Joe wrote in an engaging, humorous, and memorable style.
This eclectic anthology is filled with Joe Wilson’s brilliant published writing for magazines, books, and newspapers as well as privately circulated unpublished works, including an extended autobiographical essay. Readers are sure to benefit from Wilson’s lessons and artful ruminations culled from a lifetime of devotion to music and cultural and social activism.
In the context of this history, Rice brings Bulgarian folk music to life by focusing on the biography of the Varimezov family, including the musician Kostadin and his wife Todora, a singer. Combining interviews with his own experiences of learning how to play, sing and dance Bulgarian folk music, Rice presents one of the most detailed accounts of traditional, aural learning processes in the ethnomusicological literature.
Using a combination of traditionally dichotomous musicological and ethnographic approaches, Rice tells the story of how individual musicians learned their tradition, how they lived it during the pre-Communist era of family farming, how the tradition changed with industrialization brought under Communism, and finally, how it flourished and evolved in the recent, unstable political climate.
This work—complete with a compact disc and numerous illustrations and musical examples—contributes not only to ethnomusicological theory and method, but also to our understanding of Slavic folklore, Eastern European anthropology, and cultural processes in Socialist states.
A merger of expert scholarship and eyewitness experience, Mongolian Sound Worlds illuminates a diverse and ever-changing musical culture.
Contributors: Bayarsaikhan Badamsuren, Otgonbaayar Chuulunbaatar, Andrew Colwell, Johanni Curtet, Charlotte D’Evelyn, Tamir Hargana, Peter K. Marsh, K. Oktyabr, Rebekah Plueckhahn, Jennifer C. Post, D. Tserendavaa, and Sunmin Yoon
Turino's ethnography is the first large-scale study to concentrate on the pervasive effects of migration on Andean people and their music. Turino uses the musical traditions of Conima, Peru as a unifying thread, tracing them through the varying lives of Conimeos in different locales. He reveals how music both sustains and creates meaning for a people struggling amid the dramatic social upheavals of contemporary Peru.
Moving Away from Silence contains detailed interpretations based on comparative field research of Conimeo musical performance, rehearsals, composition, and festivals in the highlands and Lima. The volume will be of great importance to students of Latin American music and culture as well as ethnomusicological and ethnographic theory and method.
Honorable Mention, Graphis 2021 Design Annual Competition
Popular music has long been a powerful force for social change. Protest songs have served as anthems regarding war, racism, sexism, ecological destruction, and so many other crucial issues.
Music Is Power takes us on a guided tour through the past one hundred years of politically conscious music, from Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie to Green Day and NWA. Covering a wide variety of genres, including reggae, country, metal, psychedelia, rap, punk, folk, and soul, Brad Schreiber demonstrates how musicians can take a variety of approaches— angry rallying cries, mournful elegies to the victims of injustice, or even humorous mockeries of authority—to fight for a fairer world. While shining a spotlight on Phil Ochs, Gil Scott-Heron, the Dead Kennedys and other seminal, politicized artists, he also gives readers a new appreciation of classic acts such as Lesley Gore, James Brown, and Black Sabbath, who overcame limitations in their industry to create politically potent music
Music Is Power tells fascinating stories about the origins and the impact of dozens of world-changing songs, while revealing political context and the personal challenges of legendary artists from Bob Dylan to Bob Marley.
Supplemental material (Artist and Title List): https://d3tto5i5w9ogdd.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/24001955/Music_Is_Power_Supplementary_Artist_Title_List.doc
Myers details the musical repertory of Felicity, which is based largely on north Indian genres including the traditional Bhojpuri folk songs and drumming styles brought by the first indentured laborers in 1845. In her engaging exploration of the fate of Indian classical music and new popular styles such as Hindi calypso, soca, and chutney, she even finds herself at the ancestral home of Trinidadian V. S. Naipaul in India. Copiously illustrated and accompanied by a compact disk, Music of Hindu Trinidad is a model ethnographic study.
In recent years, there has been an upsurge in interest in "roots music" and "world music," popular forms that fuse contemporary sounds with traditional vernacular styles. In the 1950s and 1960s, the music industry characterized similar sounds simply as "folk music." Focusing on such music since the 1950s, The Never-Ending Revival: Rounder Records and the Folk Alliance analyzes the intrinsic contradictions of a commercialized folk culture. Both Rounder Records and the North American Folk Music and Dance Alliance have sought to make folk music widely available, while simultaneously respecting its defining traditions and unique community atmosphere. By tracing the histories of these organizations, Michael F. Scully examines the ongoing controversy surrounding the profitability of folk music. He explores the lively debates about the difficulty of making commercially accessible music, honoring tradition, and remaining artistically relevant, all without "selling out."
In the late 1950s through the 1960s, the folk music revival pervaded the mainstream music industry, with artists such as Bob Dylan and Joan Baez singing historically or politically informed ballads based on musical forms from Appalachia and the South. In the twenty-first century, the revival continues, and it includes a variety of music derived from Cajun, African American, and Mexican traditions, among many others. Even though the mainstream music industry and media largely ignore the term "folk music," a strong allure based on nostalgia, the desire for community, and a sense of exclusiveness augments an enthusiastic following connected by word-of-mouth, numerous festivals, and the Internet. There are more folk festivals now than there were during the original boom of the 1960s, suggesting that music artists, agents, and record label representatives are striking a successful balance between tradition and profitability. Scully combines rich interviews of music executives and practicing folk musicians with valuable personal experience to reveal how this American subculture remains in a "never-ending revival" based on fluid definitions of folk and folk music.
The New Harp of Columbia, originally published in Knoxville in 1867, was a shape-note tunebook used in East Tennessee singing schools. It was based on an even earlier publication, The Harp of Columbia (1848). In 1978, the University of Tennessee Press published a facsimile edition of The New Harp with an introduction by Dorothy D. Horn, Ron Petersen, and Candra Phillips that detailed the history of shape-note singing as well as the story of the tunebook itself and its original compilers, W. H. Swan and M. L. Swan. That edition went out of print in 1999. Now, for this “restored edition” of the tunebook, the Press has reprinted not only the full text of its 1978 facsimile edition but has included additional tunes that were part of the original 1848 Harp of Columbia. A few verses to some songs favored by contemporary singers have also been added, and a new foreword by Larry Olszewski and Bruce Wheeler brings the story of the tunebook and its users up to date.
Included in the book are old psalm and hymn tunes, anthems, fuguing pieces, and folk hymns—a total of more than two hundred pieces that represent a fascinating slice of Americana. As a reviewer for the Journal of Church Music noted of the 1978 facsimile: “[The book is] a worthwhile addition to any church musician’s library, especially those interested in the development of American sacred music over the past two centuries.” This publication marks a significant new step in preserving an important musical tradition.
WINNER OF THE ELIZABETH AGEE PRIZE IN AMERICAN LITERATURE
The literary establishment tends to regard Bob Dylan as an intriguing, if baffling, outsider. That changed overnight when Dylan was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature, challenging us to think of him as an integral part of our national and international literary heritage. No One to Meet: Imitation and Originality in the Songs of Bob Dylan places Dylan the artist within a long tradition of literary production and offers an innovative way of understanding his unique, and often controversial, methods of composition.
In lucid prose, Raphael Falco demonstrates the similarity between what Renaissance writers called imitatio and the way Dylan borrows, digests, and transforms traditional songs. Although Dylan’s lyrical postures might suggest a post-Romantic, “avant-garde” consciousness, No One to Meet shows that Dylan’s creative process borrows from and creatively expands the methods used by classical and Renaissance authors.
Drawing on numerous examples, including Dylan’s previously unseen manuscript excerpts and archival materials, Raphael Falco illuminates how the ancient process of poetic imitation, handed down from Greco-Roman antiquity, allows us to make sense of Dylan’s musical and lyrical technique. By placing Dylan firmly in the context of an age-old poetic practice, No One to Meet deepens our appreciation of Dylan’s songs and allows us to celebrate him as what he truly is: a great writer.
Such tunebooks, popular during the nineteenth century, rarely survive and are often overlooked by folk scholars in favor of commercially produced recordings, published sheet music, or oral tradition. Based on extensive historical and genealogical research, Amy Shaw presents a grounded picture of a musician, his family, and his community in the Upper Midwest, revealing much about music and dance in the area. This notable contribution to regional music and folklore includes more than one hundred of Ole's dance tunes, transcribed into modern musical notation for the first time. Ole Hendricks and His Tunebook will be valuable to readers and scholars interested in ethnomusicology and the Norwegian American immigrant experience.
In sunbaked Terlingua, Texas (pop., a few hundred), residents joke that there is a musician under every rock. Located ten miles from Mexico in one of the remotest corners of the United States, the town had a recording studio before it had a school, a well-stocked grocery store, or even a water utility. Open jam sessions are a daily ritual, and some songwriters make a living from their craft despite being thousands of miles from New York or Nashville. Why does such a tiny and isolated place ring with singing and guitars?
Based on more than two years of on-the-ground research, On the Porch tells the story of this small but remarkable community. Chase Peeler invites us into the music, introducing us to a cast of characters as unique as the town itself. He reveals how novices and experts perform together—a rarity in contemporary America. He recounts the devastation brought on by a border closure and describes how music is once again uniting people across the Rio Grande. He considers the impact of gentrification in an off-the-grid paradise, and how this threatens to transform a precarious musical ecosystem. On the Porch is a celebration of human musicality, of the role that music plays and can play in our lives, both in Terlingua and beyond.
Originally published in 1949, this comprehensive gathering of folksongs is being reissued after many years out of print. The renewed interest in folklore among the general public as well as the scholarly community has prompted this publication.
The collection comprises four volumes including more than eight hundred songs, indexed by title, by first line, and by contributor and town. Each song is thoroughly annotated. In addition to lyrics, the compiler furnished scores and variant lyrics and titles for each song and listed similarities to other songs along with whatever historical information was available to him.
The songs are presented in four volumes. The fourth volume is an assortment of religious songs, hymns, and revival tunes along with sentimental ballads and journalistic pieces.
Characteristic of the compiler's careful work is the painstaking accuracy with which dialect peculiarities are preserved. Randolph scrupulously avoided correcting pronunciation or adding missing words or forgotten lines. Because, as he explains in his introduction, many of the people who sang for him were reluctant to have their voices recorded, his texts represent the best possible reproduction of this priceless American folk art.
A new introduction by W. K. McNeil, folklorist for the Ozark Folklore Center and book review editor for the Journal of American Folklore, comments on Randolph's importance to the field of American folklore and the significance of this work in particular.
Pinery Boys now incorporates, commemorates, contextualizes, and complements Rickaby's early work. It includes an introduction and annotations throughout by eminent folklore scholar James P. Leary and an engaging, impressively researched biography by Rickaby's granddaughter Gretchen Dykstra. Central to this edition are Rickaby's own introduction and the original fifty-one songs that he published—including "Jack Haggerty's Flat River Girl," "The Little Brown Bulls," "Ole from Norway," "The Red Iron Ore," and "Morrissey and the Russian Sailor"—plus fourteen additional songs selected to represent the varied collecting Rickaby did beyond the lumber camps.
Supplemented by historical photographs, Pinery Boys fully reveals Franz Rickaby as a visionary artist and scholar and provides glimpses into the past lives of woods poets and singers.
Detailed and rife with social and cultural implications, Poetry and Violence is a compelling commentary on violence as both human experience and communicative action.
A Classic of Blues Literature inductee into the Blues Foundation's Blues Hall of Fame
Drawing on archives and interviews with musicians, Red River Blues remains an acclaimed work of blues scholarship. Bruce Bastin traces the origins of the music to the turn of the twentieth century, when African Americans rejected slave songs, worksongs, and minstrel music in favor of a potent new vehicle for secular musical expression. Bastin looks at the blues' early emerging popularity and its spread via the Great Migration, delves into a wealth of field recordings, and looks at the careers of Brownie McGhee, Blind Boy Fuller, Curly Weaver, Sonny Terry, and many other foundational artists.
"This is a path-breaking work, important alike to music students and teachers, but it will make profitable reading for performers, too."—New York Times Book Review
"When at some future time theories of rhythm . . . are . . . as well understood, and as much discussed as theories of harmony and counterpoint . . . they will rest in no small measure on the foundations laid by Cooper and Meyer in this provocative dissertation on the rhythmic structure of music."—Notes
". . . . a significant, courageous and, on the whole, successful attempt to deal with a very controversial and neglected subject. Certainly no one who takes the time to read it will emerge from the experience unchanged or unmoved."—Journal of Music Theory
The late GROSVENOR W. COOPER, author of Learning to Listen, was professor of music at the University of California at Santa Cruz.
“Joe Wilson represented a deep diversity in American vernacular music and culture. He directed the National Folk Festival and roots music tours, engaging government support for traditional communities. Joe combined Appalachian wisdom with searching intellect to create original brilliance. ‘America’s foremost hillbilly intellectual,’ laughed at my sobriquet and worked tirelessly for the music and people he loved.”
—Nick Spitzer, American Routes
Joe Wilson served for twenty-eight years as executive director of the National Folk Festival and National Council for Traditional Arts. Throughout his impressive career, Wilson wrote extensively and colorfully about many facets of vernacular music in North America, including works on major folk instruments, as well as on characteristic musical styles, especially old-time, bluegrass, modern country, blues, cowboy, a cappella gospel, and others. This volume, a companion to Lucky Joe’s Namesake: The Extraordinary Life and Observations of Joe Wilson, compiles Wilson’s best writings on musical topics, including some previously unpublished works.
With wry humor, Wilson covers the origins of roots music in eighteenth-century America and its subsequent dispersion through races, classes, ethnic groups, and newly settled regions. Wilson knew, worked with, and wrote about many iconic artists of the twentieth century, including Willie Nelson, Doc Watson, Clarence Ashley, the Stanley Brothers, Kenny Baker, Cephas & Wiggins, John Jackson, and members of the Hill Billies—the band whose name came to signify an entire genre of the earliest recorded roots music. This carefully curated volume is comprised of works previously scattered in liner notes, small-circulation magazines, tour booklets, and unpublished manuscripts, all collected here and organized by theme.
The writings of this legendary, internationally recognized figure will be indispensable to roots music fans and will delight readers and students interested in the traditional arts and dedicated to preserving historic folkways.
Fred Bartenstein teaches country and bluegrass music history at the University of Dayton. He is the editor of Bluegrass Bluesman: Josh Graves, a Memoir and coauthor and editor of The Bluegrass Hall of Fame: Inductee Biographies, 1991–2014.
After setting the stage with the work of music collectors in the nineteenth century, the authors explore the so-called recovery of folk music practices and performers by Alan Lomax and others, including journeys to and within the British Isles that allowed artists and folk music advocates to absorb native forms and facilitate the music's transatlantic exchange. Cohen and Donaldson place the musical and cultural connections of the twin revivals within the decade's social and musical milieu and grapple with the performers' leftist political agendas and artistic challenges, including the fierce debates over "authenticity" in practice and repertoire that erupted when artists like Harry Belafonte and the Kingston Trio carried folk into the popular music mainstream.
From work songs to skiffle, from the Weavers in Greenwich Village to Burl Ives on the BBC, Roots of the Revival offers a frank and wide-ranging consideration of a time, a movement, and a transformative period in American and British pop culture.
In Searching for Woody Guthrie, Ron Briley embarks on a chronological exploration of Guthrie’s music in the vein of American radicalism and civil rights. Briley begins this journey with an overview of five key periods in Guthrie’s life and, in the chapters that follow, analyzes his political ideas through primary and secondary source materials.
While numerous biographies on Woody Guthrie exist—including Guthrie’s own 1943 autobiography—this book takes a different approach. Less biographical and more thematic in nature, Searching for Woody Guthrie centers around Guthrie’s faith in the common working people of America, bringing together People’s Daily World “Woody Sez” newspaper columns, Guthrie centennial secondary source texts, research in the Woody Guthrie Archives, and Briley’s own personal reflections to present a narrative that is at once personal to the author and relatable to America’s rural working class.
Interlacing Guthrie’s music with his own geographic and economic background, Briley presents an original and eloquent chronology of Guthrie’s life and work in what amounts to a compelling new case for why that work, more than fifty years after Guthrie’s death, continues to leave its mark.
This distinct collection begins with a personal narrative in which Worthington relates how she discovered her own home through teaching Lee Smith’s Fair and Tender Ladies. Other essays range from the anticipated—Ron Rash, Barbara Kingsolver, Harriette Simpson Arnow—to the unanticipated—Charles Frazier’s magical realism, a Confederate soldier’s journals, and three different examinations of Affrilachian poets. Adding further texture to the collection are essays examining the diversity in Appalachian music, including Cherokee song and dance, a discussion of Appalachian mining songs, and an examination of recording technology and authenticity.
Seeking Home confirms that just as there are many Souths, there are also many Appalachias. The region is multifaceted, multicultural, and all we have to do is be willing to examine the variety.
LESLIE HARPER WORTHINGTON is the dean of Academic Programs and Services at Gadsden State Community College in Alabama. She is the author of Cormac McCarthy and the Ghost of Huck Finn. JÜRGEN E. GRANDT is an associate professor of English at the University of North Georgia. He is the author of Shaping Words to Fit the Soul: The Southern Ritual Grounds of Afro-Modernism and Kinds of Blue: The Jazz Aesthetic in African American Narrative.
In this unique blend of memoir and musical analysis, John Massaro reflects on his experiences as a lifelong fan of The Boss and one of the first professors to design a college course on Springsteen’s work. Focusing on five of the Jersey rocker’s main themes—love, masculinity, sports, politics, and the power of music—he shows how they are represented in Springsteen’s lyrics and shares stories from his own life that powerfully resonate with those lyrics. Meanwhile, paying tribute to Springsteen’s inclusive vision, he draws connections among figures as seemingly disparate as James Joyce, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Thomas Aquinas, Bobby Darin, and Lin-Manuel Miranda. Shades of Springsteen offers a deeply personal take on the musical and cultural legacies of an American icon.
Lair and Knott's discovery of new developments in theater and entertainment during the 1920s led the pair to careers that kept each of them center stage. Inspired by programs such as WLS's Barn Dance and the success of early folk events, Lair promoted Kentucky musicians. Knott staged her own radically inclusive festival, which included Native and African American traditions and continues today as the National Folk Festival. Michael Ann Williams shows how Lair and Knott fed the public's fascination with the "art of the common man" and were in turn buffeted by cultural forces that developed around and beyond them.
"This is a fascinating, well-researched text that scholars, musicians, collectors, and luthiers will treasure as a gem of information.”
—Scott Suter, author of Shenandoah Valley Folklife
Perhaps no instrument better represents the music of Appalachia than the fretted dulcimer. The instrument was no longer confined to back porches and local music halls when Jean Ritchie so melodically thrust herself and her dulcimer into the national limelight during the folk revival of the 1950s. But where did the dulcimer, known to exist in no other folk culture in the world, come from?
In The Story of the Dulcimer, Ralph Lee Smith traces the dulcimer’s beginnings back to European immigration to America in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As German immigrants settled in Pennsylvania and Appalachia, they brought with them scheitholts, a type of northern European fretted zither. As German immigrants intermingled with English and Scotch-Irish immigrants, the scheitholt, which was customarily played to a slower tempo in German cultural music, began to be musically integrated into the faster tempos of English and Scotch-Irish ballads and folk songs. As Appalachia absorbed an increasing flow of English and Scotch-Irish immigrants and the musical traditions they brought with them, the scheitholt steadily evolved into an instrument that reflected this folk music amalgamation, and the modern dulcimer was born.
In this second edition, Smith brings the dulcimer’s history into the twenty-first century with a new preface and updates to the original edition. Copiously illustrated with images of both antique scheitholts and contemporary dulcimers, The Story of the Dulcimer is a testament to the enduring musical heritage of Appalachia and solves one of the region’s musical mysteries.
RALPH LEE SMITH is a musician specializing in traditional Appalachian music and, along with the late Jean Ritchie, is widely regarded as the leading authority on the music and history of the dulcimer. He is the author of seven collections of folk songs relating to the dulcimer. He recently published a memoir/songbook, Greenwich Village: The Happy Folk Singing Days, 1950s–1960s, which recounts his time in New York City during the folk revival.
soon became a national center for country music. Then, in the post-war years as the Grand Ole Opry gained recognition, country music achieved worldwide popularity and significance with Nashville a it axis. In Tennessee Strings, renowned music scholar Charles K. Wolfe trace for the first time the vital role played by Tennessee and its musicians in the development of this unique American art form.
The folksongs of Texas's Mexican population pulsate with the lives of folk heroes, gringos, smugglers, generals, jailbirds, and beautiful women. In his cancionero, or songbook, Américo Paredes presents sixty-six of these songs in bilingual text—along with their music, notes on tempo and performance, and discography. Manuel Peña's new foreword situates these songs within the main currents of Mexican American music.
Around 1930, a highly popular and distinctive type of accordion music, commonly known as conjunto, emerged among Texas-Mexicans. Manuel Peña's The Texas-Mexican Con;unto is the first comprehensive study of this unique folk style. The author's exhaustive fieldwork and personal interviews with performers, disc jockeys, dance promoters, recording company owners, and conjunto music lovers provide the crucial connection between an analysis of the music itself and the richness of the culture from which it sprang.
Using an approach that integrates musicological, historical, and sociological methods of analysis, Peña traces the development of the conjunto from its tentative beginnings to its preeminence as a full-blown style by the early 1960s. Biographical sketches of such major early performers as Narciso Martínez (El Huracán del Valle), Santiago Jiménez (El Flaco), Pedro Ayala, Valerio Longoria, Tony de la Rosa, and Paulino Bernal, along with detailed transcriptions of representative compositions, illustrate the various phases of conjunto evolution.
Peña also probes the vital connection between conjunto's emergence as a powerful symbolic expression and the transformation of Texas-Mexican society from a pre-industrial folk group to a community with increasingly divergent socioeconomic classes and ideologies. Of concern throughout the study is the interplay between ethnicity, class, and culture, and Peña's use of methods and theories from a variety of scholarly disciplines enables him to tell the story of conjunto in a manner both engaging and enlightening. This important study will be of interest to all students of Mexican American culture, ethnomusicology, and folklore.
Composing songs of love and war in medieval Western and Southern Europe, troubadours spanned the social spectrum from powerful nobles to penniless minstrels. This book delves into the everyday worlds of these remarkable poet-musicians, famed for their innovative use of language and music as well as the lasting impact of their work on audiences then and now. The troubadours’ songs explored ideas about courtly love as well as medieval perceptions of gender, class, war, and chivalry. Linda M. Paterson examines the troubadours’ music, performance, and legacy, pairing fresh translations with the original texts to highlight the enduring beauty of their songs and poetry.
Focusing on urban folias, Suzel Ana Reily shows how participants use the ritual journeys and musical performances of the folias to create sacred spheres distinct from, yet intimately related to, their everyday world. Reily calls this practice "enchantment" and argues that it allows the folia communities to temporarily make the social ideals of mutual reciprocity and equality embodied in their religious beliefs a reality. The contrast between their ritual experiences and the daily lives of these impoverished workers, in turn, reinforces the religious convictions of these devotees of the music of the Magi.
When We Were Good traces the many and varied cultural influences on the folk revival of the sixties from early nineteenth-century blackface minstrelsy; the Jewish entertainment and political cultures of New York in the 1930s; the Almanac singers and the wartime crises of the 1940s; the watershed record album Folkways Anthology of American Folk Music; and finally to the cold-war reactionism of the 1950s. This drove the folk-song movement, just as Pete Seeger and the Weavers were putting "On Top of Old Smokey" and "Goodnight, Irene" on the Hit Parade, into a children's underground of schools, summer camps, and colleges, planting the seeds of the folk revival to come. The book is not so much a history as a study of the cultural process itself, what the author calls the dreamwork of history.
Cantwell shows how a body of music once enlisted on behalf of the labor movement, antifascism, New Deal recovery efforts, and many other progressive causes of the 1930s was refashioned as an instrument of self-discovery, even as it found a new politics and cultural style in the peace, civil rights, and beat movements. In Washington Square and the Newport Folk Festival, on college campuses and in concert halls across the country, the folk revival gave voice to the generational tidal wave of postwar youth, going back to the basics and trying to be very, very good.
In this capacious analysis of the ideologies, traditions, and personalities that created an extraordinary moment in American popular culture, Cantwell explores the idea of folk at the deepest level. Taking up some of the more obdurate problems in cultural studies--racial identity, art and politics, regional allegiances, class differences--he shows how the folk revival was a search for authentic democracy, with compelling lessons for our own time.
At the heart of traditional songs rest the concerns of ordinary people. And folk throughout the centuries have found themselves entangled with the law: abiding by it, breaking it, and being caught and punished by it. Who Killed Cock Robin? is an anthology of just such songs compiled by one of Britain’s most senior judges, Stephen Sedley, and best-loved folk singers, Martin Carthy. The songs collected here are drawn from manuscripts, broadsides, and oral tradition. They are grouped according to the various categories of crime and punishment, from Poaching to the Gallows. Each section contains a historical introduction, and every song is presented with a melody, lyrics, and an illuminating commentary that explores its origins and sources. Together, they present unique, sometimes comic, often tragic, and always colorful insight into the past, while preserving an important body of song for future generations.
Winner of the Westerners International Co-Founders Awards of the Western History Association, 1990.
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