This unique volume is the only book solely about antebellum American fiddling. It includes more than 250 easy-to-read and clearly notated fiddle tunes alongside biographies of fiddlers and careful analysis of their personal tune collections. The reader learns what the tunes of the day were, what the fiddlers' lives were like, and as much as can be discovered about how fiddling sounded then. Personal histories and tunes' biographies offer an accessible window on a fascinating period, on decades of growth and change, and on rich cultural history made audible. In the decades before the Civil War, American fiddling thrived mostly in oral tradition, but some fiddlers also wrote down versions of their tunes. This overlap between oral and written traditions reveals much about the sounds and social contexts of fiddling at that time. In the early 1800s, aspiring young violinists maintained manuscript collections of tunes they intended to learn. These books contained notations of oral-tradition dance tunes - many of them melodies that predated and would survive this era - plus plenty of song melodies and marches. Chris Goertzen takes us into the lives and repertoires of two such young men, Arthur McArthur and Philander Seward. Later, in the 1830s to 1850s, music publications grew in size and shrunk in cost, so fewer musicians kept personal manuscript collections. But a pair of energetic musicians did. Goertzen tells the stories of two remarkable violinist/fiddlers who wrote down many hundreds of tunes and whose notations of those tunes are wonderfully detailed, Charles M. Cobb and William Sidney Mount. Goertzen closes by examining particularly problematic collections. He takes a fresh look at George Knauff's Virginia Reels and presents and analyzes an amateur musician's own questionable but valuable transcriptions of his grandfather's fiddling, which reaches back to antebellum western Virginia.

Ballad singing has long been one of the most powerful expressions of Scottish culture. For hundreds of years, women in Scotland have sung of heroines who are strong, arrogant, canny--the very opposite of the bourgeois stereotype of the good, maternal woman. In Weep Not for Me, Deborah Symonds explores the social world that gave rise to both the popular ballad heroine and her maternal counterpart. The setting is the Scottish countryside in the eighteenth century--a crucial period in Scotland's history, for it witnessed the country's union with England, the Enlightenment, and the flowering of letters. But there were also great economic changes as late-feudal Scotland hurried into capitalist agriculture and textile production. Ballad singing reflected many of these developments. In the ballads, marriage is rare and lovers murder each other, haunted by premarital pregnancy, incest, and infanticide, while relatives argue over dowries. These problems were not fiction. The women in this study lived and died in a period when hopes of marriage and landholding were replaced by the reality of wage labor and disintegrating households. Using these ballads, together with court records of women tried for infanticide, Symonds makes fascinating points about the shifting meaning of womanhood in the eighteenth century, the roles of politically astute lawyers in that shift, and the significance of ballad singing as a response. She also discusses the political implications of Walter Scott's infanticide novel, The Heart of Mid-Lothian, for women and for the ballad heroine. While some historians have argued that women's history has little to do with the watershed events of textbook history, Symondsconvincingly shows us that the democratic and economic revolutions of the late eighteenth century were just as momentous for women as for men, even if their effects on women were quite different. Deborah A. Symonds is Associate Professor of History at Drake University.

The history of Haiti throughout the twentieth century has been marked by oppression at the hands of colonial and dictatorial overlords. But set against this "day for the hunter" has been a "day for the prey," a history of resistance, and sometimes of triumph. With keen cultural and historical awareness, Gage Averill shows that Haiti's vibrant and expressive music has been one of the most highly charged instruments in this struggle--one in which power, politics, and resistance are inextricably fused.
Averill explores such diverse genres as Haitian jazz, troubadour traditions, Vodou-jazz, "konpa, mini-djaz," new generation, and roots music. He examines the complex interaction of music with power in contexts such as honorific rituals, sponsored street celebrations, Carnival, and social movements that span the political spectrum.
With firsthand accounts by musicians, photos, song texts, and ethnographic descriptions, this book explores the profound manifestations of power and song in the day-to-day efforts of ordinary Haitians to rise above political repression.

Lumberman Larry Gorman was no respecter of borders -- nor of anything else, it seems. From the time he was a young man growing up on Prince Edward Island until his death in Brewer, Maine in 1917. Larry Gorman composed satirical songs about friend and foe, relative and stranger, without fear or favour. This new edition of Sandy Ives's celebrated book features more than 70 of Gorman's songs, 29 with music.

This handy book contains the complete lyrics for 100 old favourites from the vast array of Irish songs and ballads. Includes traditional favourites and popular classics. The shape and style of the book means that it is useful as a gig-bag refernce, but the collection will appeal to anyone who enjoys joining in at a sing-song and karaoke sessions.

"Klezmer, " the Yiddish word for a folk instrumental musician, has come to mean a person, a style, and a scene. This musical subculture came to the United States with the late-nineteenth-century Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. Although it had declined in popularity by the middle of the twentieth century, this lively music is now enjoying recognition among music fans of all stripes. Today, klezmer flourishes in the United States and abroad in the world music and accompany Jewish celebrations. The outstanding essays collected in this volume investigate American klezmer: its roots, its evolution, and its spirited revitalization.
The contributors to "American Klezmer" include every kind of authority on the subject--from academics to leading musicians--and they offer a wide range of perspectives on the musical, social, and cultural history of klezmer in American life. The first half of this volume concentrates on the early history of klezmer, using folkloric sources, records of early musicians unions, and interviews with the last of the immigrant musicians. The second part of the collection examines the klezmer "revival" that began in the 1970s. Several of these essays were written by the leaders of this movement, or draw on interviews with them, and give firsthand accounts of how klezmer is transmitted and how its practitioners maintain a balance between preservation and innovation.

Focusing on blues, jazz, gospel, rhythm and blues, and soul music, this text explores the rich musical heritage of African-Americans in California. The contributors describe in detail the individual artists, locales, groups, musical styles and regional qualities, and the result is a book which seeks to lay the groundwork for a whole new field of study. The essays draw from oral histories, music recordings, newspaper articles and advertisements, as well as population statistics to provide insightful discussions of topics such as the Californian urban milieu's influence on gospel music, the development of the West Coast blues style, and the significance of Los Angeles's Central Avenue in the early days of jazz. Other esays offer perspectives on how individual musicians have been shaped by their African-American heritage and on the role of the record industry and radio in the making of music. In addition to the diverse range of essays, the book includes a bibliography of African-American music and culture in California.

The songs in this book are a sampling of the urban folk songs of Greece during the first half of the 20th century. They are the creative expression of an urban subculture whose members the Greeks commonly called rebetes. These rebetes were people living a marginal and often underworld existence on the fringes of established society, disoriented and struggling to maintain themselves in the developing industrial ports, despised and persecuted by the rest of society. And it is the hardships and suffering of these people, their fruitless dreams, their current loves and their lost loves that these songs are about, and underlying them all, their jaunty, tough will to survive.The appeal of these songs, often compared to the American blues, is that the conflicts they express are not exclusively Greek conflicts, they are everybody's; and they are still unresolved in urban Greece as in urban Anywhere.

In November 1916, a young Afro-Brazilian musician named Donga registered sheet music for the song "Pelo telefone" ("On the Telephone") at the National Library in Rio de Janeiro. This apparently simple act--claiming ownership of a musical composition--set in motion a series of events that would shake Brazil's cultural landscape. Before the debut of "Pelo telephone," samba was a somewhat obscure term, but by the late 1920s, the wildly popular song had helped to make it synonymous with Brazilian national music.

The success of "Pelo telephone" embroiled Donga in controversy. A group of musicians claimed that he had stolen their work, and a prominent journalist accused him of selling out his people in pursuit of profit and fame. Within this single episode are many of the concerns that animate "Making Samba," including intellectual property claims, the Brazilian state, popular music, race, gender, national identity, and the history of Afro-Brazilians in Rio de Janeiro. By tracing the careers of Rio's pioneering black musicians from the late nineteenth century until the 1970s, Marc A. Hertzman revises the histories of samba and of Brazilian national culture.

Responding to growing international interest in Yoruba culture, practitioners of bata performance - a centuries-old drumming, dancing, and singing tradition from southwestern Nigeria - have presented themselves to the world as an emblem of traditional Nigeria. Locally, however, the market for bata has been declining as it plays less of a ritual role and opportunities for performance have dwindled. Debra L. Klein's lively ethnography explores this disjunction, in the process revealing the world of the bata artists and the global culture market that helps to sustain their art. "Yoruba Bata Goes Global" describes the dramatic changes and reinventions of traditional bata performance in recent years, showing how they are continually recreated, performed, and sold. Klein delves into the lives of Yoruba musicians, focusing on their strategic collaborations with artists, culture brokers, researchers, and entrepreneurs worldwide, and she explores how reinvigorated performing ensembles are beginning to parlay success on the world stage into increased power and status within Nigeria. Klein's study of the interwoven roles of innovation and tradition will interest scholars of anthropology; African, global, and cultural studies; and ethnomusicology alike.