Music Browse Guides by Research Area
Subject Guide
American Folk Musics
This page includes suggested resources for beginning exploration of American folk musics, including both eBooks and physical books in the UWM collection. Popular music, jazz, and American classical music are explored on other pages.
Because our library uses the Library of Congress organizational system, most books on American folk music will be located together; you may notice that many of the books listed here have a call number beginning ML 3551, the call number for general works on US folk music. Books about a specific ethnic group's music within the US will also be grouped together elsewhere in the ML 3550s.
When exploring these materials in the library catalog, try using the "Subject" details to locate other books on similar topics.
General Folk Music Introductions
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Discovering folk music
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From indigenous music to Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen singing "This Land Is Your Land" side-by-side at the pre-inaugural concert for our first African American president, folk music has been at the center of America's history. Thomas Jefferson wooed his bride-to-be with fiddle playing. Stephen Foster captured the mood of our country in transition. The Carter Family adapted music from across the pond to Appalachia. Paul Robeson carried folk music of many lands to the world stage. Woody Guthrie's dust bowl ballads spoke to the common man, while Sixties protest music put folk on the map...
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9798400641183Publication Date: 2010 -
Exploring American folk music : ethnic, grassroots, and regional traditions in the United States
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Call Number: eBookISBN: 9786613668578Publication Date: 2012 -
Folk Music: a regional exploration
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American folk music has provided a narrative thread to the fiber of the nation since its earliest days. Folk music scholar Norm Cohen presents a thorough exploration of the many ways in which folk music genres and subgenres have arisen in different regions of America. Chapters on folk song types, folk instrumentation, and the urban folk revival set further context to the discussion, and an itemized summary of noted folksong collections serves as an additional tool for both general readers and folk music scholars. American folk music has provided a narrative thread to the fiber of the nation since its earliest days. Forms ranging from New England sea chanteys to Pennsylvania Dutch worksongs helped shape life in the Northeast. Appalachian ballads evolved in the South, as did slave spirituals that served as codes for the Underground Railroad. Folk ballads on lumbering and mining grew in the Midwest and Northwest, while cowboy ballads emerged across the Great Plains and the West, and railroad songs accompanied expansion along the American frontier. Folk music scholar Norm Cohen presents a thorough exploration of the many ways in which folk music genres and subgenres have arisen in different regions of America. Chapters on folk song types, folk instrumentation, and the urban folk revival set further context to the discussion, and an itemized summary of noted folksong collections serves as an additional tool for both general readers and folk music scholars. The Greenwood Guide to American Roots Music series includes volumes on musical genres that have pervaded American culture. Each volume explores the different ways that selected genres, such as folk music, have evolved naturally in different regions and scenes thoughout the nation.
Call Number: ML3551 .C56 2005ISBN: 0313328722Publication Date: 2005 -
Folk Music: the Basics
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Folk Music: The Basics gives a brief introduction to British and American folk music. Drawing upon the most recent and relevant scholarship, it will focus on comparing and contrasting the historical nature of the three aspects of understanding folk music: traditional, local performers; professional collectors; and the advent of professional performers in the twentieth century during the so-called "folk revival." The two sides of the folk tradition will be examined--both as popular and commercial expressions. Folk Music: The Basics serves as an excellent introduction to the players, the music, and the styles that make folk music an enduring and well-loved musical style. Throughout, sidebars offer studies of key folk performers, record labels, and related issues to place the general discussion in context.
Call Number: ML3551 .C578 2006ISBN: 0415971594Publication Date: 2006
Issues in Folk Music Studies
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American Folk Music As Tactical Media
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American folk music has long presented a problematic conception of authenticity, but the reality of the folk scene, and its relationship to media, is far more complicated. This book draws on the fields of media archaeology, performance studies, and sound studies to explore the various modes of communication that can be uncovered from the long American folk revival. From Alan Lomax's cybernetic visions to Bob Dylan's noisy writing machines, this book retrieves a subterranean discourse on the concept of media that might help us to reimagine the potential of the networks in which we work, play, and sing.
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9789048535859Publication Date: 2017 -
The ballad collectors of North America : how gathering folksongs transformed academic thought and American identity
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Both biographical and topical, The Ballad Collectors of North America chronicles those individuals most influential in the gathering of North American folksongs and investigates the two leading schools of thought regarding the collection process, the leading proponents of those schools, and the projects shaped by them. Contributors also reflect on the role of technology-especially the phonograph-in the collection efforts and the impact of that technology.
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9786613362131Publication Date: 2012 -
The Beautiful Music All Around Us: Field Recordings and the American Experience
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The Beautiful Music All Around Us presents the extraordinarily rich backstories of thirteen performances captured on Library of Congress field recordings between 1934 and 1942 in locations reaching from Southern Appalachia to the Mississippi Delta and the Great Plains. Including the children's play song "Shortenin' Bread," the fiddle tune "Bonaparte's Retreat," the blues song "Another Man Done Gone," and the spiritual "Ain't No Grave Can Hold My Body Down," these performances were recorded in kitchens and churches, on porches and in prisons, in hotel rooms and school auditoriums. Documented during the golden age of the Library of Congress recordings, they capture not only the words and tunes of traditional songs but also the sounds of life in which the performances were embedded: children laugh, neighbors comment, trucks pass by._x000B__x000B_Musician and researcher Stephen Wade sought out the performers on these recordings, their families, fellow musicians, and others who remembered them. He reconstructs the sights and sounds of the recording sessions themselves and how the music worked in all their lives. Some of these performers developed musical reputations beyond these field recordings, but for many, these tracks represent their only appearances on record: prisoners at the Arkansas State Penitentiary jumping on "the Library's recording machine" in a rendering of "Rock Island Line"; Ora Dell Graham being called away from the schoolyard to sing the jump-rope rhyme "Pullin' the Skiff"; Luther Strong shaking off a hungover night in jail and borrowing a fiddle to rip into "Glory in the Meetinghouse."_x000B__x000B_Alongside loving and expert profiles of these performers and their locales and communities, Wade also untangles the histories of these iconic songs and tunes, tracing them through slave songs and spirituals, British and homegrown ballads, fiddle contests, gospel quartets, and labor laments. By exploring how these singers and instrumentalists exerted their own creativity on inherited forms, "amplifying tradition's gifts," Wade shows how a single artist can make a difference within a democracy. _x000B__x000B_Reflecting decades of research and detective work, the profiles and abundant photos in The Beautiful Music All Around Us bring to life largely unheralded individuals--domestics, farm laborers, state prisoners, schoolchildren, cowboys, housewives and mothers, loggers and miners--whose music has become part of the wider American musical soundscape. The book also includes an accompanying CD that presents these thirteen performances, songs and sounds of America in the 1930s...
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9781283691994Publication Date: 2012 -
Long Steel Rail : the railroad in American folksong
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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.
Call Number: ML3551 .C57 2000ISBN: 0252068815Publication Date: 2000 -
Making People's Music : Moe Asch and Folkways records
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Ray and Pat Browne Award, Popular Culture Association. The founder of Folkways Records in 1948 and its director for nearly forty years, Moe Asch was committed to preserving the entire range of the world's musical and oral traditions. Using Asch's career as a lens through which to view folk music, leftist politics, and the recording industry, Peter D. Goldsmith shows how Asch's breadth of vision produced an extraordinary recorded legacy -- from jazz, historical ballads, and children's street rhymes to the folk music of Woody Guthrie and the blues of Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee.
Call Number: ML429.A83 G65 1998ISBN: 1560988126Publication Date: 1998 -
Millennium Folk : American folk music since the sixties
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This first ethnographic study of the American folk music revival that began in the late 1980s examines its people, economy, and politics. Covering the perspectives of fans, performers, marketers, and others, Thomas Gruning takes on some of the folk community's stickiest issues, many of which have roots extending to the previous folk heyday in the 1960s - and sometimes to even more distant eras. Today, such issues are most evident in the clash between the folk community's entrepreneurial, tech-savvy present and its idealized memory of origins in some rural, egalitarian, blue-collar past. Whose voice gets heard in the folk community has always raised fundamental questions about race, gender, sexuality, authenticity, and power relations, says Gruning. To assess folk's current state and the direction it may be heading, Gruning discusses the microcosm of folk music festivals, the rise of the singer/songwriter, the heightened visibility of gay and lesbian performers, the blurring distinction between folk and world music, the explosion of affordable, high-quality recording and reproduction technology, and more. ""Millennium Folk"" is a challenging new look at an understudied community, valuable for what it tells us about folk music, and for what folk in turn suggests about the wider culture's hopes and apprehensions in a globalized, consumerist world.
Call Number: ML3551.5 .G7 2006ISBN: 0820328294Publication Date: 2006 -
Rainbow Quest : the folk music revival and American society, 1940-1970
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This study reconstructs the history of the folk-music revival in the States, tracing its origins to the early decades of the 20th century. Drawing on scores of interviews and numerous manuscript collections, as well as his own extensive files, Cohen shows how a broad range of traditions - from hillbilly, gospel, blues and sea shanties to cowboy, ethnic and political-protest music - all contributed to the genre known as folk.
Call Number: eBookISBN: 1558493468Publication Date: 2002 -
Romancing the Folk
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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 for influence over the public imagination in this century. Filene builds his story around a fascinating group of characters -- folklorists, record company executives, producers, radio programmers, and publicists -- who acted as middlemen between folk and popular culture. These cultural brokers "discovered" folk musicians, recorded them, and promoted them. In the process, Filene argues, they shaped mainstream audiences' understanding of what was "authentic" roots music. Filene moves beyond the usual boundaries of folk music to consider a wide range of performers who drew on or were drawn into the canon of American roots music -- from Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie, to Muddy Waters and Willie Dixon, to Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan. Challenging traditional accounts that would confine folk music revivalism to the 1930s and 1960s, he argues instead that the desire to preserve and popularize America's musical heritage is a powerful current that has run throughout this century's culture and continues to flow today.
Call Number: ML3551 .F55 2000ISBN: 0807825506Publication Date: 2000 -
Singing out : an oral history of America's folk music revivals
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Intimate, anecdotal, and spell-binding, Singing Out offers a fascinating oral history of the North American folk music revivals and folk music. Culled from more than 150 interviews recorded from 1976 to 2006, this captivating story spans seven decades and cuts across a wide swath of generations and perspectives, shedding light on the musical, political, and social aspects of this movement. The narrators highlight many of the major folk revival figures, including Pete Seeger, Bernice Reagon, Phil Ochs, Mary Travers, Don McLean, Judy Collins, Arlo Guthrie, Ry Cooder, and Holly Near.
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9786612501074Publication Date: 2010 -
Stories from the Anne Grimes Collection of American Folk Music
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Stories from the Anne Grimes Collection of American Folk Music is a treasury of American traditional music and Ohio's folklife heritage. Traveling along the highways and byways of Ohio in the 1950s as a folksinger and collector of traditional music, Anne Grimes encountered people from many different backgrounds who opened up their homes to her to share their most precious family heirlooms--their songs. She recorded these treasures for posterity and further preserved them through her lectures and recitals. After years of performance and research on her material, Anne Grimes decided to write about it all. This beautiful book presents her lively portraits of the major contributors with photographs taken by her husband, James W. Grimes; lyrics and extensive notes on the songs; and a CD sampler that includes performances by her contributors, most of whom had not been previously recorded. It also contains selections from Bob Gibson, Carl Sandburg, Pete Seeger, Jenny Wells Vincent, as well as Grimes herself. The Anne Grimes Collection is preserved in the Library of Congress. Besides songs, Anne Grimes also collected dulcimers, and portraits of these folk instruments and their players--including Anne Grimes herself--are featured throughout the book and on the CD. Photographsinclude some of the forty-two rare vintage dulcimers and other instruments collected by Anne Grimes that are now preserved at the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian Institution. Songs and Dulcimer Playing CD Selections from the Anne Grimes Collection: Reuben Allen, Bertha Bacon, Sarah Basham/Bertha Basham Wright, Henry Lawrence Beecher, John Bodiker, Dolleah Church, Walter W. Dixon, Ken Ward, Blanche Wilson Fullen, Bob Gibson, Brodie F. Halley, Perry Harper, Anne Grimes, Donald Langstaff, Bascom Lamar Lunsford, W.E. Lunsford, Jane Jones McNerlin, May Kennedy McCord, Jenny Wells Vincent, Pete Seeger, Neva Randolph, Babe Reno/Arbannah Reno, Branch Rickey, Carl Sandburg, Bessie Weinrich, Faye Wemmer, Okey Wood
Call Number: ML3551 .G77 2010ISBN: 9780821419083Publication Date: 2010
Ethnic Musics in America
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African American Folksong and American Cultural Politics
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In African American Folksong and American Cultural Politics: The Lawrence Gellert Story, scholar and musician Bruce Conforth tells the story of one of the most unusual collections of African American folk music ever amassed--and the remarkable story of the man who produced it: Lawrence Gellert. Compiled between the World Wars, Gellert's recordings were immediately adopted by the American Left as the voice of the true American proletariat, with the songs--largely variants of traditional work songs or blues--dubbed by the Left as "songs of protest." As both the songs and Gellert's standing itself turned into propaganda weapons of left-wing agitators, Gellert experienced a meteoric rise within the circles of left-wing organizations and the American Communist party. But such success proved ephemeral, with Gellert contributing to his own neglect by steadfastly refusing to release information about where and from whom he had collected his recordings. Later scholars, as a result, would skip over his closely held, largely inaccessible research, with some asserting Gellert's work had been doctored for political purposes. And to a certain extent they were correct. Conforth reveals how Gellert at least "assisted" in the creation of some of his more political material. But hidden behind the few protest songs that Gellert allowed to become public was a vast body of legitimate African America folksongs--enough to rival the work of any of his contemporary collectors. Had Gellert granted access to all his material, scholars would have quickly seen that it comprised an incredibly complete and diverse collection of all African American song genres: work songs, blues, chants, spirituals, as well as the largest body of African American folktales about Irish Americans (what were referred to as "One Time I'shman" tales). It also included vast swaths of African American oral literature collected by Gellert as part of the Federal Writers' Project. In African American Folksong and American Cultural Politics, Conforth brings to light for the first time the entire body of work collected by Lawrence Gellert, establishing his place, and the place for the material he collected, within the pages of American folk song scholarship. In addition to shedding new light on the concept of "protest music" within African American folk music, Conforth discusses the unique relationship of the American Left to this music and how personal psychology and the demands of the American Communist party would come to ruin Gellert's life. African American Folksong and American Cultural Politics will appeal to students and scholars in the fields of American social and political history, African American studies, the history of American folk music, and ethnomusicology.
Call Number: ML3556 .C664 2013ISBN: 9780810884885Publication Date: 2013 -
Balkan fascination : creating an alternative music culture in America
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In Balkan Fascination, ethnomusicologist Mirjana Lausevic, a native of the Balkans, investigates why so many Americans actively participate in specific Balkan cultural practices to which they have no family or ethnic connection. Going beyond traditional interpretations, she challenges the notion that participation in Balkan culture in North America is merely a specialized offshoot of the 1960's American folk music scene. Instead, her exploration of the relationship between the stark sounds and lively dances of the Balkan region and the Americans who love them reveals that Balkan dance and music
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9786611158989Publication Date: 2007 -
Land Without Nightingales
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Despite the laments of some nineteenth-century German immigrants that America was a land bereft of poetry and song, a "land without nightingales," the history of German American music is a rich one. This book explores the wide variety of forms of musical expression among German-speaking immigrants to America and their descendants from the eighteenth century to the present. Topics range from Moravian music in colonial America to musical life among twenty-first century Canadian Hutterites, from polka music to German singing societies, from Lutheran hymns to the songs of German-speaking Catholic and Jewish immigrants, and from the songs of German-speaking Swiss settlers to the music of immigrants from the Burgenland region of Austria. Underlying these diverse contributions is a common theme--the constant interplay between the German and American sides of the hyphen of "German-American" to be found in all these musical styles. A companion CD includes musical selections that complement and expand upon this theme. The contributors--historians, musicologists, folklorists, and scholars of German studies--include Philip V. Bohlman, Alan R. Burdette, Kathleen Neils Conzen, Otto Holzapfel, James P. Leary, Laurence Libin, Rudolf Pietsch, A. Gregg Roeber, Leo Schelbert, and Helmut Wulz.
Call Number: ML3555 .L36 2002ISBN: 0924119047Publication Date: 2002 -
Listening to the Lomax Archive
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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. 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 of folk music, used the folksongs they collected to increase national understanding of and agency for the subjects of their recordings 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. Throughout Listening to the Lomax Archive, there are a number of audio resources for readers to listen to, including songs, oral histories, and radio program excerpts. Each resource is marked with a ♫ in the text. Visit https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.9871097#resources to access this audio content.
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9780472038558Publication Date: 2021 -
Music of the First Nations : tradition and innovation in native North America
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This unique anthology presents a wide variety of approaches to an ethnomusicology of Inuit and Native North American musical expression. Contributors include Native and non-Native scholars who provide erudite and illuminating perspectives on aboriginal culture, incorporating both traditional practices and contemporary musical influences. The collection covers both tribe-specific musical practices and Pan-Indian topics such as pow-wows and country music, and it demonstrates the many ways of doing contemporary ethnomusicology in Indian country, including dialogic, historiographic, fieldwork based, linguistic, and interpretive methods._x000B__x000B_Gathering scholarship on a realm of intense interest but little previous publication, this volume promises to revitalize the study of Native music in North America, an area of ethnomusicology that stands to benefit greatly from these scholars' cooperative, community-oriented methods._x000B__x000B_Contributors are T. Christopher Aplin, Tara Browner, Paula Conlon, David E. Draper, Elaine Keillor, Lucy Lafferty, Franziska von Rosen, David W. Samuels, Laurel Sercombe, and Judith Vander.
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9781283043946Publication Date: 2009 -
Northward Bound
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". . . provides a valuable service of not only gathering and presenting from 5,000 song texts a wide variety of ballads with full translation but also placing them all in a succinct historical context extending from the Mexican War to the present." ?Journal of American Ethnic History " . . . [a] stunning achievement, not only because it is an intelligent and comprehensive study of Mexican immigrant ballads, but because analysis gives way to, steps aside respectfully for, a multitude of immigrants who sing their experiences of crossing the border into the U.S. with astonishing clarity and historical perspicacity." ?Western Folklore "Herrera-Sobek's folk-song collection is impressive, as are her English translations?crisp and unstilted." ?MultiCultural Review "[Herrera-Sobek's] well-written book provides historians, ethnomusicologists, sociologists, and other scholars with a case study that demonstrates how valuable song lyrics can be in their studies. Strongly recommended to humanists and social scientists." ?Choice "Supported with photographs, full documentation and other scholarly devices, this is a solid work on an unusual topic." ?Sing Out! Northward Bound traces Mexican emigration to the United States from 1848 to 1991 through the lyrics of Mexican ballads (corridos) and contemporary popular songs (canciones). These autobiographical songs reflect the relationship between individual experience and the history-making process.
Call Number: ML3558 .H47 1993ISBN: 0253327377Publication Date: 1993 -
A Passion for Polka
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Not so long ago, songs by the Andrews Sisters and Lawrence Welk blasted from phonographs, lilted over the radio, and dazzled television viewers across the country. Lending star quality to the ethnic music of Poles, Italians, Slovaks, Jews, and Scandinavians, luminaries like Frankie Yankovic, the Polka King, and "Whoopee John" Wilfart became household names to millions of Americans. In this vivid and engaging book, Victor Greene uncovers a wonderful corner of American social history as he traces the popularization of old-time ethnic music from the turn of the century to the 1960s. Drawing on newspaper clippings, private collections, ethnic societies, photographs, recordings, and interviews with musicians and promoters, Greene chronicles the emergence of a new mass culture that drew heavily on the vivid color, music, and dance of ethnic communities. In this story of American ethnic music, with its countless entertainers performing never-forgotten tunes in hundreds of small cities around the country, Greene revises our notion of how many Americans experienced cultural life. In the polka belt, extending from Connecticut to Nebraska and from Texas up to Minnesota and the Dakotas, not only were polkas, laendlers, schottisches, and waltzes a musical passion, but they shone a scintillating new light on the American cultural landscape. Greene follows the fortunes of groups like the Gold Chain Bohemians, illuminating the development of an important segment of American popular music that fed the craze for international dance music. And even though old-time music declined in the 1960s, overtaken by rock and roll, a new Grammy for the polka was initiated in 1986. In its ebullience and vitality, the genre endures.
Call Number: ML3551 G696 1992ISBN: 0520075846Publication Date: 1992 -
Roots of the Revival
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In Roots of the Revival: American and British Folk Music in the 1950s, Ronald D. Cohen and Rachel Clare Donaldson present a transatlantic history of folk's midcentury resurgence that juxtaposes the related but distinct revivals that took place in the United States and Great Britain. nbsp; 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. nbsp; 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.
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9780252080128Publication Date: 2014 -
A Sound of Strangers : musical culture, acculturation, and the post-Civil War ethnic American
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Tawa examines the musical traditions brought to America by the peasants and urban workers of southern Italy, the Middle East , and eastern Europe, and by the Chinese, Japanese, and East European Jews, and describes their survival within the American context, in often hostile surroundings.
Call Number: ML3551 T29 1982ISBN: 9780810815049Publication Date: 1995
