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51 books match the query 'Songs and music' and 5 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 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 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 Long Steel Rail

Long Steel Rail

Norm Cohen

University of Illinois Press, 2000

Impeccable scholarship and lavish illustration mark this landmark study of American railroad folksong. Norm Cohen provides a sweeping discussion of the human aspects of railroad history, railroad folklore, and the evolution of the American folksong. The heart of the book is a detailed analysis of eighty-five songs, from "John Henry" and "The Wabash Cannonball" to "Hell-Bound Train" and "Casey Jones," with their music, sources, history, variations, and discographies. A substantial new introduction updates this edition.
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cover of Lyrics and Borrowed Tunes of the American Temperance Movement

Lyrics and Borrowed Tunes of the American Temperance Movement

Edited & Compiled by Paul D. Sanders

University of Missouri Press, 2006

 Cold water is the drink for me / Of all the drinks the best, sir; / Your grog, of whate’er name it be, / I dare not for to taste, sir. 

Such a lyric, sung to the tune of “Yankee Doodle,” was typical ammunition in the temperance movement’s battle against alcohol. By the 1830s, Americans drank an average of 9.5 gallons of hard liquor each year. From the 1840s until the beginning of Prohibition, well over one hundred temperance songbooks were published in which inspirational lyrics were set to mostly borrowed tunes in the hope of persuading citizens to put down the bottle.

            Despite the prominent place of music in the temperance movement, little has been written about the large volume of lyrics it produced. This book, the most extensive on the subject in nearly thirty years, presents more than four hundred of those lyrics and the thirty-two melodies most often employed, from “Auld Lang Syne” to “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Paul D. Sanders has assembled the various songs the movement used into five thematic chapters: patriotic songs, hymns, traditional Scottish songs, popular songs, and Civil War songs. In each, he offers an introductory commentary, provides the music for the original song to remind readers of the tune, and then presents the temperance versions chronologically with the lyricists’ names where known.
The songs reflect the efforts of the four major temperance organizations: the Washingtonians, the Independent Order of Good Templars, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, and the Anti-Saloon League. And although today’s image of temperance reformers is generally that of controlling puritans, these songs show that it was a multifaceted movement with a diverse influence on American society.
            While many of these songs might seem naive or even comical to modern readers, temperance workers in their day understood that music was a powerful force that could be used to sway the masses. These crusaders were sincere in their wish to eradicate the alcohol problem. Sanders’s book is a lively collection, punctuated with temperance cartoons, that shows that these persuasive songs have stories to tell us today, bringing the evolution of the movement into clearer focus than ever before.
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