front cover of GIT ALONG LITTLE DOGIES
GIT ALONG LITTLE DOGIES
SONGS AND SONGMAKERS OF THE AMERICAN WEST
John I. White
University of Illinois Press, 1975
A former singing cowboy himself, John I. White spent decades compiling information on cowboy and western songs and the artists, songwriters, and others attached to them. He also sought out and corresponded with a who's who of the genre, people like Badger Clark, Curley Fletcher, D. J. O'Malley, Romaine Lowdermilk, Will Barnes, Joseph Mills Hanson, and Owen Wister.
 
In Git Along, Little Dogies, White draws on old friendships and his exhaustive files to bring readers the untold story of cowboy and western song. Wonderful anecdotes stand beside White's trademark attention to detail as he painstakingly establishes the time, place, and circumstance behind each song's origin and places the music within the evolution of popular song. He also looks at how radio and recording affected the genre and shows how the music crisscrossed with pop music but also with folk and the traditional Anglo-Irish tradition.
 
From "Whoopee Ti Yi Yo" to "Ten Thousand Cattle Straying," Git Along, Little Dogies ventures from cow camps to saloons to big-city radio studios as it lassos a vivid piece of American music history. 
 
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front cover of SINGING FOR SURVIVAL
SINGING FOR SURVIVAL
"SONGS OF THE LODZ GHETTO, 1940-45"
Gila Flam
University of Illinois Press, 1992
Gila Flam offers a penetrating insider's look at a musical culture previously unexplored---the song repertoire created and performed in the Lodz ghetto of Poland. Drawing on interviews with survivors and on library and archival materials, the author illustrates the general themes of the Lodz repertoire and explores the nature of Holocaust song. Most of the songs are presented here for the first time.
 
"An extremely accurate and valuable work. There is nothing like it in either the extensive holocaust literature or the ethnomusicology literature."
-- Mark Slobin, author of Chosen Voices: The Story of the American Cantorate
 
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