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Romancing The Folk
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Book Synopsis Romancing the Folk by : Benjamin Filene
Download or read book Romancing the Folk written by Benjamin Filene and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2000 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In American music, the notion of "roots" has been a powerful refrain, but just what constitutes our true musical traditions has often been a matter of debate. As Benjamin Filene reveals, a number of competing visions of America's musical past have vied fo
Book Synopsis The Invention and Reinvention of Big Bill Broonzy by : Kevin D. Greene
Download or read book The Invention and Reinvention of Big Bill Broonzy written by Kevin D. Greene and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2018-09-28 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the course of his long career, legendary bluesman William "Big Bill" Broonzy (1893–1958) helped shape the trajectory of the genre, from its roots in the rural Mississippi River Delta, through its rise as a popular genre in the North, to its eventual international acclaim. Along the way, Broonzy adopted an evolving personal and professional identity, tailoring his self-presentation to the demands of the place and time. His remarkable professional fluidity mirrored the range of expectations from his audiences, whose ideas about race, national belonging, identity, and the blues were refracted through Broonzy as if through a prism. Kevin D. Greene argues that Broonzy's popular success testifies to his ability to navigate the cultural expectations of his different audiences. However, this constant reinvention came at a personal and professional cost. Using Broonzy's multifaceted career, Greene situates blues performance at the center of understanding African American self-presentation and racial identity in the first half of the twentieth century. Through Broonzy's life and times, Greene assesses major themes and events in African American history, including the Great Migration, urbanization, and black expatriate encounters with European culture consumers. Drawing on a range of historical source materials as well as oral histories and personal archives held by Broonzy's son, Greene perceptively interrogates how notions of race, gender, and audience reception continue to shape concepts of folk culture and musical authenticity.
Book Synopsis Music and the Making of a New South by : Gavin James Campbell
Download or read book Music and the Making of a New South written by Gavin James Campbell and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2005-12-15 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Startled by rapid social changes at the turn of the twentieth century, citizens of Atlanta wrestled with fears about the future of race relations, the shape of gender roles, the impact of social class, and the meaning of regional identity in a New South. Gavin James Campbell demonstrates how these anxieties were played out in Atlanta's popular musical entertainment. Examining the period from 1890 to 1925, Campbell focuses on three popular musical institutions: the New York Metropolitan Opera (which visited Atlanta each year), the Colored Music Festival, and the Georgia Old-Time Fiddlers' Convention. White and black audiences charged these events with deep significance, Campbell argues, turning an evening's entertainment into a struggle between rival claimants for the New South's soul. Opera, spirituals, and fiddling became popular not just because they were entertaining, but also because audiences found them flexible enough to accommodate a variety of competing responses to the challenges of making a New South. Campbell shows how attempts to inscribe music with a single, public, fixed meaning were connected to much larger struggles over the distribution of social, political, cultural, and economic power. Attitudes about music extended beyond the concert hall to simultaneously enrich and impoverish both the region and the nation that these New Southerners struggled to create.
Download or read book Folk City written by Stephen Petrus and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015-06-08 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Washington Square Park and the Gaslight Café to WNYC Radio and Folkways Records, New York City's cultural, artistic, and commercial assets helped to shape a distinctively urban breeding ground for the folk music revival of the 1950s and 60s. Folk City explores New York's central role in fueling the nationwide craze for folk music in postwar America. It involves the efforts of record company producers and executives, club owners, concert promoters, festival organizers, musicologists, agents and managers, editors and writers - and, of course, musicians and audiences. In Folk City, authors Stephen Petrus and Ron Cohen capture the exuberance of the times and introduce readers to a host of characters who brought a new style to the biggest audience in the history of popular music. Among the savvy New York entrepreneurs committed to promoting folk music were Izzy Young of the Folklore Center, Mike Porco of Gerde's Folk City, and John Hammond of Columbia Records. While these and other businessmen developed commercial networks for musicians, the performance venues provided the artists space to test their mettle. The authors portray Village coffee houses not simply as lively venues but as incubators of a burgeoning counterculture, where artists from diverse backgrounds honed their performance techniques and challenged social conventions. Accessible and engaging, fresh and provocative, rich in anecdotes and primary sources, Folk City is lavishly illustrated with images collected for the accompanying major exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York in 2015.
Book Synopsis Collecting Music in the Aran Islands by : Deirdre Ní Chonghaile
Download or read book Collecting Music in the Aran Islands written by Deirdre Ní Chonghaile and published by University of Wisconsin Pres. This book was released on 2021-07-27 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collecting Music in the Aran Islands, a critical historiographical study of the practice of documenting traditional music, is the first to focus on the archipelago off the west coast of Ireland. Deirdre Ní Chonghaile argues for a framework to fully contextualize and understand this process of music curation.
Download or read book Gone to the Country written by Ray Allen and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2011-02-14 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gone to the Country chronicles the life and music of the New Lost City Ramblers, a trio of city-bred musicians who helped pioneer the resurgence of southern roots music during the folk revival of the late 1950s and 1960s. Formed in 1958 by Mike Seeger, John Cohen, and Tom Paley, the Ramblers introduced the regional styles of southern ballads, blues, string bands, and bluegrass to northerners yearning for a sound and an experience not found in mainstream music. 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.
Book Synopsis Frankie and Johnny by : Stacy I. Morgan
Download or read book Frankie and Johnny written by Stacy I. Morgan and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2017-04-18 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originating in a homicide in St. Louis in 1899, the ballad of "Frankie and Johnny" became one of America's most familiar songs during the first half of the twentieth century. It crossed lines of race, class, and artistic genres, taking form in such varied expressions as a folk song performed by Huddie Ledbetter (Lead Belly); a ballet choreographed by Ruth Page and Bentley Stone under New Deal sponsorship; a mural in the Missouri State Capitol by Thomas Hart Benton; a play by John Huston; a motion picture, She Done Him Wrong, that made Mae West a national celebrity; and an anti-lynching poem by Sterling Brown. In this innovative book, Stacy I. Morgan explores why African American folklore—and "Frankie and Johnny" in particular—became prized source material for artists of diverse political and aesthetic sensibilities. He looks at a confluence of factors, including the Harlem Renaissance, the Great Depression, and resurgent nationalism, that led those creators to engage with this ubiquitous song. Morgan's research uncovers the wide range of work that artists called upon African American folklore to perform in the 1930s, as it alternately reinforced and challenged norms of race, gender, and appropriate subjects for artistic expression. He demonstrates that the folklorists and creative artists of that generation forged a new national culture in which African American folk songs featured centrally not only in folk and popular culture but in the fine arts as well.
Book Synopsis Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music by : Ross Hair
Download or read book Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music written by Ross Hair and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-12-08 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Released in 1952, The Anthology of American Folk Music was the singular vision of the enigmatic artist, musicologist, and collector Harry Smith (1923–1991). A collection of eighty-four commercial recordings of American vernacular and folk music originally issued between 1927 and 1932, the Anthology featured an eclectic and idiosyncratic mixture of blues and hillbilly songs, ballads old and new, dance music, gospel, and numerous other performances less easy to classify. Where previous collections of folk music, both printed and recorded, had privileged field recordings and oral transmission, Smith purposefully shaped his collection from previously released commercial records, pointedly blurring established racial boundaries in his selection and organisation of performances. Indeed, more than just a ground-breaking collection of old recordings, the Anthology was itself a kind of performance on the part of its creator. Over the six decades of its existence, however, it has continued to exert considerable influence on generations of musicians, artists, and writers. It has been credited with inspiring the North American folk revival—"The Anthology was our bible", asserted Dave Van Ronk in 1991, "We all knew every word of every song on it"—and with profoundly influencing Bob Dylan. After its 1997 release on CD by Smithsonian Folkways, it came to be closely associated with the so-called Americana and Alt-Country movements of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Following its sixtieth birthday, and now available as a digital download and rereleased on vinyl, it is once again a prominent icon in numerous musical currents and popular culture more generally. This is the first book devoted to such a vital piece of the large and complex story of American music and its enduring value in American life. Reflecting the intrinsic interdisciplinarity of Smith’s original project, this collection contains a variety of new perspectives on all aspects of the Anthology.
Book Synopsis Postwar Politics, Society and the Folk Revival in England, 1945-65 by : Julia Mitchell
Download or read book Postwar Politics, Society and the Folk Revival in England, 1945-65 written by Julia Mitchell and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-09-19 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The English folk revival cannot be understood when divorced from the history of post-war England, yet the existing scholarship fails to fully engage with its role in the social and political fabric of the nation. Postwar Politics, Society and the Folk Revival in England is the first study to interweave the story of a gentrifying folk revival with the socio-political tensions inherent in England's postwar transition from austerity to affluence. Julia Mitchell skillfully situates the English folk revival in the context of the rise of the new left, the decline of heavy industry, the rise of local, regional and national identities, the 'Americanisation' of English culture and the development of mass culture. In doing so, she demonstrates that the success of the English folk revival derived from its sense of authenticity and its engagement with topical social and political issues, such as the conflicted legacy of the Welfare State, the fight for nuclear disarmament and the fallout of nationalization. In addition, she shrewdly compares the US and British revival to identify the links but also what was distinctive about the movement in Britain. Drawing on primary sources from folk archives, the BBC, the music press and interviews with participants, this is a theoretically engaged and sophisticated analysis of how postwar culture shaped the folk revival in England.
Book Synopsis The North American Folk Music Revival: Nation and Identity in the United States and Canada, 1945–1980 by : Gillian Mitchell
Download or read book The North American Folk Music Revival: Nation and Identity in the United States and Canada, 1945–1980 written by Gillian Mitchell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-02-17 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work represents the first comparative study of the folk revival movement in Anglophone Canada and the United States and combines this with discussion of the way folk music intersected with, and was structured by, conceptions of national affinity and national identity. Based on original archival research carried out principally in Toronto, Washington and Ottawa, it is a thematic, rather than general, study of the movement which has been influenced by various academic disciplines, including history, musicology and folklore. Dr Gillian Mitchell begins with an introduction that provides vital context for the subject by tracing the development of the idea of 'the folk', folklore and folk music since the nineteenth century, and how that idea has been applied in the North American context, before going on to examine links forged by folksong collectors, artists and musicians between folk music and national identity during the early twentieth century. With the 'boom' of the revival in the early sixties came the ways in which the movement in both countries proudly promoted a vision of nation that was inclusive, pluralistic and eclectic. It was a vision which proved compatible with both Canada and America, enabling both countries to explore a diversity of music without exclusiveness or narrowness of focus. It was also closely linked to the idealism of the grassroots political movements of the early 1960s, such as integrationist civil rights, and the early student movement. After 1965 this inclusive vision of nation in folk music began to wane. While the celebrations of the Centennial in Canada led to a re-emphasis on the 'Canadianness' of Canadian folk music, the turbulent events in the United States led many ex-revivalists to turn away from politics and embrace new identities as introspective singer-songwriters. Many of those who remained interested in traditional folk music styles, such as Celtic or Klezmer music, tended to be very insular and conservative in their approach, rather than linking their chosen genre to a wider world of folk music; however, more recent attempts at 'fusion' or 'world' music suggest a return to the eclectic spirit of the 1960s folk revival. Thus, from 1945 to 1980, folk music in Canada and America experienced an evolving and complex relationship with the concepts of nation and national identity. Students will find the book useful as an introduction, not only to key themes in the folk revival, but also to concepts in the study of national identity and to topics in American and Canadian cultural history. Academic specialists will encounter an alternative perspective from the more general, broad approach offered by earlier histories of the folk revival movement.
Download or read book I Got a Song written by Rick Massimo and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 2017-06-06 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first-ever book exclusively devoted to the history of the Newport Folk Festival, I Got a Song documents the trajectory of an American musical institution that began more than a half-century ago and continues to influence our understanding of folk music today. Rick Massimo’s research is complemented by extensive interviews with the people who were there and who made it all happen: the festival's producers, some of its biggest stars, and people who huddled in the fields to witness moments—like Bob Dylan’s famous electric performance in 1965—that live on in musical history. As folk has evolved over the decades, absorbing influences from rock, traditional music and the singer-songwriters of the ‘60s and ‘70s, the Newport Folk Festival has once again become a gathering point for young performers and fans. I Got a Song tells the stories, small and large, of several generations of American folk music enthusiasts.
Book Synopsis This Land that I Love by : John Shaw
Download or read book This Land that I Love written by John Shaw and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2013-11-05 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: February, 1940: After a decade of worldwide depression, World War II had begun in Europe and Asia. With Germany on the march, and Japan at war with China, the global crisis was in a crescendo. America's top songwriter, Irving Berlin, had captured the nation's mood a little more than a year before with his patriotic hymn, “God Bless America.” Woody Guthrie was having none of it. Near-starving and penniless, he was traveling from Texas to New York to make a new start. As he eked his way across the country by bus and by thumb, he couldn't avoid Berlin's song. Some people say that it was when he was freezing by the side of the road in a Pennsylvania snowstorm that he conceived of a rebuttal. It would encompass the dark realities of the Dust Bowl and Great Depression, and it would begin with the lines: “This land is your land, this land is my land….” In This Land That I Love, John Shaw writes the dual biography of these beloved American songs. Examining the lives of their authors, he finds that Guthrie and Berlin had more in common than either could have guessed. Though Guthrie's image was defined by train-hopping, Irving Berlin had also risen from homelessness, having worked his way up from the streets of New York. At the same time, This Land That I Love sheds new light on our patriotic musical heritage, from “Yankee Doodle” and “The Star-Spangled Banner” to Martin Luther King's recitation from “My Country 'Tis of Thee” on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in August 1963. Delving into the deeper history of war songs, minstrelsy, ragtime, country music, folk music, and African American spirituals, Shaw unearths a rich vein of half-forgotten musical traditions. With the aid of archival research, he uncovers new details about the songs, including a never-before-printed verse for “This Land Is Your Land.” The result is a fascinating narrative that refracts and re-envisions America's tumultuous history through the prism of two unforgettable anthems.
Book Synopsis The Never-Ending Revival by : Michael F. Scully
Download or read book The Never-Ending Revival written by Michael F. Scully and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2008-03-04 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on American folk music and roots music since the 1950s, The Never-Ending Revival: Rounder Records and the Folk Alliance analyzes the intrinsic contradictions of a commercialized folk culture. In recent years, 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. Tracing the histories of these organizations, Michael F. Scully explores the lively debates about the difficulty of making commercially accessible music, honoring tradition, and remaining artistically relevant, all without "selling out." He 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.
Download or read book Book Reports written by Robert Christgau and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2019-04-04 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this generous collection of book reviews and literary essays, legendary Village Voice rock critic Robert Christgau showcases the passion that made him a critic—his love for the written word. Many selections address music, from blackface minstrelsy to punk and hip-hop, artists from Lead Belly to Patti Smith, and fellow critics from Ellen Willis and Lester Bangs to Nelson George and Jessica Hopper. But Book Reports also teases out the popular in the Bible and 1984 as well as pornography and science fiction, and analyzes at length the cultural theory of Raymond Williams, the detective novels of Walter Mosley, the history of bohemia, and the 2008 financial crisis. It establishes Christgau as not just the Dean of American Rock Critics, but one of America's most insightful cultural critics as well.
Book Synopsis Thomas Hart Benton and the American Sound by : Leo G. Mazow
Download or read book Thomas Hart Benton and the American Sound written by Leo G. Mazow and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Argues that musical imagery in the art of American painter Thomas Hart Benton was part of a larger belief in the capacity of sound to register and convey meaning"--Provided by publisher.
Book Synopsis Romancing the Real by : Sabra J. Webber
Download or read book Romancing the Real written by Sabra J. Webber and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2016-11-11 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the goals of the "new" or experimental ethnography is to illuminate the unique historical, social, and political situation of a people from their own multifaceted perspectives. As part of the effort to reach this goal, ethnographers are learning to listen in various keys to what members of society under study have to say about themselves and about their place in the world. In Romancing the Real, Sabra J. Webber argues that folklore—traditional aesthetic culture—is of central importance to the new ethnography. It is by becoming cultured in a people's traditional art forms that the ethnographer can come closest to an unmediated hearing of the individual voices of community members and to an understanding of how community "affect" is shaped and shared rhetorically. She contends that traditional verbal art does more than reflect a culture from its members' points of view: it is one of the means by which members comment upon change and recreate their culture. It is also a powerful resource through which they respond to the ethnographer and what the ethnographer represents. Drawing on over five years of field research conducted between 1967 and 1987 in Kelibia, a town on the northeastern coast of Tunisia, Webber offers insights into the community gained through the study of its folk communicative resources and especially through study of the hikayah, a colloquial Arabic verbal art genre that resembles the western genres of local history or personal experience narrative. She demonstrates that Kelibians draw upon hikayat to cope creatively with both the destabilizing and the energizing facets of centuries of frequent, rarely controlled or invited, contact with outsiders. She finds that older community members use the art form to romance (not romanticize) their town and thus address important communal issues like colonialism. Webber discusses a marginalized town in the context of a marginalized discipline, folklore; an often devalued language, colloquial Arabic; and a frequently underestimated cultural domain, "affect," to demonstrate that a re-perception of each can yield rich insights into the centripetal forces that supposedly powerless communities can draw upon for empowerment.
Book Synopsis Digital Sound Studies by : Mary Caton Lingold
Download or read book Digital Sound Studies written by Mary Caton Lingold and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-26 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The digital turn has created new opportunities for scholars across disciplines to use sound in their scholarship. This volume’s contributors provide a blueprint for making sound central to research, teaching, and dissemination. They show how digital sound studies has the potential to transform silent, text-centric cultures of communication in the humanities into rich, multisensory experiences that are more inclusive of diverse knowledges and abilities. Drawing on multiple disciplines—including rhetoric and composition, performance studies, anthropology, history, and information science—the contributors to Digital Sound Studies bring digital humanities and sound studies into productive conversation while probing the assumptions behind the use of digital tools and technologies in academic life. In so doing, they explore how sonic experience might transform our scholarly networks, writing processes, research methodologies, pedagogies, and knowledges of the archive. As they demonstrate, incorporating sound into scholarship is thus not only feasible but urgently necessary. Contributors. Myron M. Beasley, Regina N. Bradley, Steph Ceraso, Tanya Clement, Rebecca Dowd Geoffroy-Schwinden, W. F. Umi Hsu, Michael J. Kramer, Mary Caton Lingold, Darren Mueller, Richard Cullen Rath, Liana M. Silva, Jonathan Sterne, Jennifer Stoever, Jonathan W. Stone, Joanna Swafford, Aaron Trammell, Whitney Trettien
