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316 books match the query 'Ethnomusicology' and 12 start with l

cover of Lessons from "Take Me Home, Country Roads": Identity, (Be)Longing, and Imagined Landscapes

Lessons from "Take Me Home, Country Roads"

Identity, (Be)Longing, and Imagined Landscapes

Sarah L. Morris

West Virginia University Press, 2025

You may have heard it at a football game, in an advertisement, or on the radio on a road trip far from home. You may have sung along on a rooftop in Thailand, at Oktoberfest in Belgium, or with a Japanese cover band. It may have moved you to dance at a wedding or cry at a funeral. Regardless of where it plays, the song “Take Me Home, Country Roads” is ubiquitous, unmistakable, universal. Written and recorded by Bill Danoff, Taffy Nivert, and John Denver in 1971, the song continues to resonate across cultures and audiences, carrying meaning beyond naming and inviting transformation for a range of rhetorical purposes in nearly 300 recorded English versions and in more than 20 languages. 

This book examines “Country Roads” as it illuminates a universal sense of belonging to place even as it obscures the literality of the place it names. In examining “Country Roads” as anthem, text, artifact, and rhetoric, this work untangles ideas related to place, belonging, identity, and pedagogy. Sarah L. Morris uses the Welsh term hiraeth, which is an existential longing for an idealized, sometimes imaginary home, as a governing framework for this work. She explores the song in various contexts, such as how it pertains to West Virginia geography and heritage and the diversity of these beliefs, external perceptions of the state, concepts of home and belonging, and the song as a phenomenon across different media platforms. “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” while being about West Virginia, has registered as a global phenomenon.
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cover of Let Jasmine Rain Down: Song and Remembrance among Syrian Jews

Let Jasmine Rain Down

Song and Remembrance among Syrian Jews

Kay Kaufman Shelemay

University of Chicago Press, 1998

When Jews left Aleppo, Syria, in the early twentieth century and established communities abroad, they carried with them a repertory of songs (pizmonim) with sacred Hebrew texts set to melodies borrowed from the popular Middle Eastern Arab musical tradition. Let Jasmine Rain Down tells the story of the pizmonim as they have continued to be composed, performed, and transformed through the present day; it is thus an innovative ethnography of an important Judeo-Arabic musical tradition and a probing contribution to studies of the link between collective memory and popular culture.

Shelemay views the intersection of music, individual remembrances, and collective memory through the pizmonim. Reconstructing a century of pizmon history in America based on research in New York, Mexico, and Israel, she explains how verbal and musical memories are embedded in individual songs and how these songs perform both what has been remembered and what otherwise would have been forgotten. In confronting issues of identity and meaning in a postmodern world, Shelemay moves ethnomusicology into the domain of memory studies.

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cover of Lion's Share: Remaking South African Copyright

Lion's Share

Remaking South African Copyright

Veit Erlmann

Duke University Press, 2022

In the aftermath of apartheid, South Africa undertook an ambitious revision of its intellectual property system. In Lion’s Share Veit Erlmann traces the role of copyright law in this process and its impact on the South African music industry. Although the South African government tied the reform to its postapartheid agenda of redistributive justice and a turn to a postindustrial knowledge economy, Erlmann shows how the persistence of structural racism and Euro-modernist conceptions of copyright threaten the viability of the reform project. In case studies ranging from antipiracy police raids and the crafting of legislation to protect indigenous expressive practices to the landmark lawsuit against Disney for its appropriation of Solomon Linda’s song "Mbube" for its hit “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” from The Lion King, Erlmann follows the intricacies of musical copyright through the criminal justice system, parliamentary committees, and the offices of a music licensing and royalty organization. Throughout, he demonstrates how copyright law is inextricably entwined with race, popular music, postcolonial governance, indigenous rights, and the struggle to create a more equitable society.
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cover of Listen but Don't Ask Question: Hawaiian Slack Key Guitar across the TransPacific

Listen but Don't Ask Question

Hawaiian Slack Key Guitar across the TransPacific

Kevin Fellezs

Duke University Press, 2019

Performed on an acoustic steel-string guitar with open tunings and a finger-picking technique, Hawaiian slack key guitar music emerged in the mid-nineteenth century. Though performed on a non-Hawaiian instrument, it is widely considered to be an authentic Hawaiian tradition grounded in Hawaiian aesthetics and cultural values. In Listen But Don’t Ask Question Kevin Fellezs listens to Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) and non-Hawaiian slack key guitarists in Hawai‘i, California, and Japan, attentive to the ways in which notions of Kanaka Maoli belonging and authenticity are negotiated and articulated in all three locations. In Hawai‘i, slack key guitar functions as a sign of Kanaka Maoli cultural renewal, resilience, and resistance in the face of appropriation and occupation, while in Japan it nurtures a merged Japanese-Hawaiian artistic and cultural sensibility. For diasporic Hawaiians in California, it provides a way to claim Hawaiian identity. By demonstrating how slack key guitar is a site for the articulation of Hawaiian values, Fellezs illuminates how slack key guitarists are reconfiguring notions of Hawaiian belonging, aesthetics, and politics throughout the transPacific. 
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cover of Listening for Africa: Freedom, Modernity, and the Logic of Black Music's African Origins

Listening for Africa

Freedom, Modernity, and the Logic of Black Music's African Origins

David F. Garcia

Duke University Press, 2017

In Listening for Africa David F. Garcia explores how a diverse group of musicians, dancers, academics, and activists engaged with the idea of black music and dance’s African origins between the 1930s and 1950s. Garcia examines the work of figures ranging from Melville J. Herskovits, Katherine Dunham, and Asadata Dafora to Duke Ellington, Dámaso Pérez Prado, and others who believed that linking black music and dance with Africa and nature would help realize modernity’s promises of freedom in the face of fascism and racism in Europe and the Americas, colonialism in Africa, and the nuclear threat at the start of the Cold War. In analyzing their work, Garcia traces how such attempts to link black music and dance to Africa unintentionally reinforced the binary relationships between the West and Africa, white and black, the modern and the primitive, science and magic, and rural and urban. It was, Garcia demonstrates, modernity’s determinations of unraced, heteronormative, and productive bodies, and of scientific truth that helped defer the realization of individual and political freedom in the world.
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cover of Listening to the Lomax Archive: The Sonic Rhetorics of African American Folksong in the 1930s

Listening to the Lomax Archive

The Sonic Rhetorics of African American Folksong in the 1930s

Jonathan W. Stone

University of Michigan Press, 2021

In 1933, John A. Lomax and his son Alan set out as emissaries for the Library of Congress to record the folksong of the “American Negro” in several southern African-American prisons. Listening to the Lomax Archive: The Sonic Rhetorics of African American Folksong in the 1930s asks how the Lomaxes’ field recordings—including their prison recordings and a long-form oral history of jazz musician Jelly Roll Morton—contributed to a new mythology of Americana for a nation in the midst of financial, social, and identity crises. Jonathan W. Stone argues that folksongs communicate complex historical experiences in a seemingly simple package, and can thus be a key element—a sonic rhetoric—for interpreting the ebb and flow of cultural ideals within contemporary historical moments. He contends that the Lomaxes, aware of the power folk music, used the folksongs they collected to increase national understanding of and agency for the subjects of their recordings (including the reconstitution of prevailing stereotypes about African American identity) even as they used the recordings to advance their own careers. Listening to the Lomax Archive gives readers the opportunity to listen in on these seemingly contradictory dualities, demonstrating that they are crucial to the ways that we remember and write about the subjects of the Lomaxes archive and other repositories of historicized sound.

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cover of Listening with a Feminist Ear: Soundwork in Bombay Cinema

Listening with a Feminist Ear

Soundwork in Bombay Cinema

Pavitra Sundar

University of Michigan Press, 2023

Honorable Mention of the 2023 MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for South Asian Studies

  • Longlist Finalist of the 2024 Kraszna-Krausz Foundation Moving Image Book Award

Listening with a Feminist Ear is a study of the cultural politics and possibilities of sound in cinema. Eschewing ocularcentric and siloed disciplinary formations, the book takes seriously the radical theoretical and methodological potential of listening. It models a feminist interpretive practice that is not just attuned to how power and privilege are materialized in sound, but that engenders new, counter-hegemonic imaginaries.

Focusing on mainstream Bombay cinema, Sundar identifies singing, listening, and speaking as key sites in which gendered notions of identity and difference take form. Charting new paths through seven decades of film, media, and cultural history, Sundar identifies key shifts in women’s playback voices and the Islamicate genre of the qawwali. She also conceptualizes spoken language as sound, and turns up the volume on a capacious, multilingual politics of belonging that scholarly and popular accounts of nation typically render silent. All in all, Listening with a Feminist Ear offers a critical sonic sensibility that reinvigorates debates about the gendering of voice and body in cinema, and the role of sound and media in conjuring community.

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cover of Living Ethnomusicology: Paths and Practices

Living Ethnomusicology

Paths and Practices

Margaret Sarkissian and Ted Solís

University of Illinois Press, 2019

Ethnomusicologists have journeyed from Bali to Morocco to the depths of Amazonia to chronicle humanity's relationship with music. Margaret Sarkissian and Ted Solís guide us into the field's last great undiscovered country: ethnomusicology itself. Drawing on fieldwork based on person-to-person interaction, the authors provide a first-ever ethnography of the discipline. The unique collaborations produce an ambitious exploration of ethnomusicology's formation, evolution, practice, and unique identity. In particular, the subjects discuss their early lives and influences and trace their varied career trajectories. They also draw on their own experiences to offer reflections on all aspects of the field. Pursuing practitioners not only from diverse backgrounds and specialties but from different eras, Sarkissian and Solís illuminate the many trails ethnomusicologists have blazed in the pursuit of knowledge.

A bountiful resource on history and practice, Living Ethnomusicology is an enlightening intellectual exploration of an exotic academic culture.

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cover of Living the Hiplife: Celebrity and Entrepreneurship in Ghanaian Popular Music

Living the Hiplife

Celebrity and Entrepreneurship in Ghanaian Popular Music

Jesse Weaver Shipley

Duke University Press, 2013

Hiplife is a popular music genre in Ghana that mixes hip-hop beatmaking and rap with highlife music, proverbial speech, and Akan storytelling. In the 1990s, young Ghanaian musicians were drawn to hip-hop's dual ethos of black masculine empowerment and capitalist success. They made their underground sound mainstream by infusing carefree bravado with traditional respectful oratory and familiar Ghanaian rhythms. Living the Hiplife is an ethnographic account of hiplife in Ghana and its diaspora, based on extensive research among artists and audiences in Accra, Ghana's capital city; New York; and London. Jesse Weaver Shipley examines the production, consumption, and circulation of hiplife music, culture, and fashion in relation to broader cultural and political shifts in neoliberalizing Ghana.

Shipley shows how young hiplife musicians produce and transform different kinds of value—aesthetic, moral, linguistic, economic—using music to gain social status and wealth, and to become respectable public figures. In this entrepreneurial age, youth use celebrity as a form of currency, aligning music-making with self-making and aesthetic pleasure with business success. Registering both the globalization of electronic, digital media and the changing nature of African diasporic relations to Africa, hiplife links collective Pan-Africanist visions with individualist aspiration, highlighting the potential and limits of social mobility for African youth.

The author has also directed a film entitled Living the Hiplife and with two DJs produced mixtapes that feature the music in the book available for free download.

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cover of Lost Delta Found: Rediscovering the Fisk University-Library of Congress Coahoma County Study, 1941-1942

Lost Delta Found

Rediscovering the Fisk University-Library of Congress Coahoma County Study, 1941-1942

John W. Work

Vanderbilt University Press, 2005

Blues Hall of Fame Inductee—Named a "Classic of Blues Literature" by the Blues Foundation, 2019

This remarkable book recovers three invaluable perspectives, long thought to have been lost, on the culture and music of the Mississippi Delta.

In 1941 and ’42 African American schol-ars from Fisk University—among them the noted composer and musicologist John W. Work III, sociologist Lewis Wade Jones, and graduate student Samuel C. Adams Jr.—joined folklorist Alan Lomax of the Library of Congress on research trips to Coahoma County, Mississippi. Their mis­sion was “to document adequately the cul­tural and social backgrounds for music in the community.” Among the fruits of the project were the earliest recordings by the legendary blues singer and guitar­ist Muddy Waters.

The hallmark of the study was to have been a joint publica­tion of its findings by Fisk and the Library of Congress. While this publication was never completed, Lost Delta Found is com­posed of the writings, interviews, notes, and musical transcriptions produced by Work, Jones, and Adams in the Coahoma County study. Their work captures, with compelling immediacy, a place, a people, a way of life, and a set of rich musical tra­ditions as they existed in the 1940s.


Illustrated with photos and more than 160 musical transcriptions.
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cover of Love Songs in Motion: Voicing Intimacy in Somaliland

Love Songs in Motion

Voicing Intimacy in Somaliland

Christina J. Woolner

University of Chicago Press, 2023

An intimate account of everyday life in Somaliland, explored through an ever-evolving musical genre of love songs.

At first listen, both music and talk about love are conspicuously absent from Somaliland’s public soundscapes. The lingering effects of war, the contested place of music in Islam, and gendered norms of emotional expression limit opportunities for making music and sharing personal feelings. But while Christina J. Woolner was researching peacebuilding in Somaliland’s capital, Hargeysa, she kept hearing snippets of songs. Almost all of these, she learned, were about love. In these songs, poets, musicians, and singers collaborate to give voice to personal love aspirations and often painful experiences of love-suffering. Once in circulation, the intimate and heartfelt voices of love songs provide rare and deeply therapeutic opportunities for dareen-wadaag (feeling-sharing). In a region of political instability, these songs also work to powerfully unite listeners on the basis of shared vulnerability, transcending social and political divisions and opening space for a different kind of politics.
 
Taking us from 1950s recordings preserved on dusty cassettes to new releases on YouTube and live performances at Somaliland’s first postwar music venue—where the author herself eventually takes the stage—Woolner offers an account of love songs in motion that reveals the capacity of music to connect people and feelings across time and space, creating new possibilities for relating to oneself and others.
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cover of Lying up a Nation: Race and Black Music

Lying up a Nation

Race and Black Music

Ronald M. Radano

University of Chicago Press, 2003

What is black music? For some it is a unique expression of the African-American experience, its soulful vocals and stirring rhythms forged in the fires of black resistance in response to centuries of oppression. But as Ronald Radano argues in this bracing work, the whole idea of black music has a much longer and more complicated history-one that speaks as much of musical and racial integration as it does of separation.
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