In recent years an almost overwhelming number of books have appeared on various aspects of American folk music and its history. Before 1970, most comprised collections of songs with a sprinkling of biographical information on noted performers. Over the last decade, however, scholars, journalists, and folk artists themselves have contributed biographies and autobiographies, instructional books and historical surveys, sociological studies and ethnographic analyses of this musical genre. 100 Books Every Folk Music Fan Should Own by performer and historian Dick Weissman finally offers a reliable route through the growing sea of book-length studies, establishing for future scholars a foundation for their research. Beginning with early 20th century collections of folk songs, it brings readers to the present by selecting for exploration modern studies of important events, critical collections of primary sources, the most significant musical instruction guides, and in-depth studies of traditional and contemporary American folk musicians.For each title selected, Weissman provides his own brief summary of its contents and assessment of its significance for the reader-whether fan or scholar. Folk music fans, scholars, and students of the American folk music tradition-indeed, any intelligent reader seeking guidance on the best books in the field-will want a copy of this vital work.

Almost 20 years ago Michael Brocken created from his doctoral research, what became both a seminal and contested volume concerning the social mores surrounding the British Folk Revival up to that point in time: The British Folk Revival 1944-2002. In this long-overdue second edition he revisits not only his own research, but also that of others from the 1990s and early 21st century. He then considers how a discourse of folkloric authenticity emerged in the closing years of the 19th century and how a worrying nationalistic immanence came to surround folk music and dance during the inter-war years. Brocken also proposes that the media: records, radio and TV in post-WWII folk revivalism can offer us important insights into how self-directed learning of the folk guitar emerged. Brocken moves on to consider the business structures of the contemporary folk scene and how relationships are formed between contemporary folk business and the digital and social media spheres. In his penultimate chapter he discusses the masculinisation of folk traditions and asks important questions about how our folk traditions are carried and are authorised. In the final chapter he also considers the rise of an exciting new folk live music built environment.

Now available in paperback, Performing Englishness examines the growth in popularity and profile of the English folk arts in the first decade of the twenty-first century. In the only study of its kind, the authors explore how the folk resurgence speaks to a broader explosion of interest in the subject of English national and cultural identity. Combining approaches from British cultural studies and ethnomusicology, the book draws on ethnographic fieldwork, interviews with central figures of the resurgence and close analysis of music and dance as well as visual and discursive sources. Its presentation of the English case study calls for a rethinking of concepts such as revival and indigeneity. It will be of interest to students and scholars in cultural studies, ethnomusicology and related disciplines. -- .

The 1930s and 1940s represented an era in United States history when large groups of citizens took political action in response to their social and economic circumstances. The vision, attitudes, beliefs and purposes of participants before, during, and after this time period played an important part of American cultural history. Richard and JoAnne Reuss expertly capture the personality of this era and the fascinating chronology of events in American Folk Music and Left-Wing Politics, 1927-1957, a historical analysis of singers, writers, union members and organizers and their connection to left-wing politics and folk music during this revolutionary time period. While scholarship on folk music, history, and politics is not unique in and of itself, Reuss' approach is noteworthy for its folklorist perspective and its long, encompassing assessment of a broad cross-section of participants and their interactions. An innovative and informative look into one of the most evocative and challenging eras in American history, American Folk Music and Left-Wing Politics, 1927-1957 stands as a historic milestone in this period's scholarship and evolution.

Turbo-folk music is the most controversial form of popular culture in the new states of former Yugoslavia. Theoretically ambitious and innovative, this book is a new account of popular music that has been at the centre of national, political and cultural debates for over two decades. Beginning with 1970s Socialist Yugoslavia, Uros Cvoro explores the cultural and political paradoxes of turbo-folk: described as 'backward' music, whose misogynist and Serb nationalist iconography represents a threat to cosmopolitanism, turbo-folk's iconography is also perceived as a 'genuinely Balkan' form of resistance to the threat of neo-liberalism. Taking as its starting point turbo-folk's popularity across national borders, Cvoro analyses key songs and performers in Serbia, Slovenia and Croatia. The book also examines the effects of turbo on the broader cultural sphere - including art, film, sculpture and architecture - twenty years after its inception and popularization. What is proposed is a new way of reading the relationship of contemporary popular music to processes of cultural, political and social change - and a new understanding of how fundamental turbo-folk is to the recent history of former Yugoslavia and its successor states.

This volume examines how the search for "cultural authenticity," the dispute over the past, and the role of "modernity" have been instrumental in building the regional musical culture of the Mantaro Valley, a central Peruvian region with about half a million inhabitants. Covering private and public music making, along with ritual, ceremonial, and popular uses of music, Romero studies the interaction of music and identity. The book is concerned with a modern regional culture, situated and defined in the context of an emergent nation, which is struggling to build a distinct cultural identity and to recreate values.

First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The book explores cellular pivots as a new means of progression, functional tonality having disappeared in much of contemporary music. Bela Bartok can be seen as a kind of father figure to the other two composers, Chen Yi and George Crumb, in terms of their stylistic, technical, and even philosophical connections. The musical affinities of all three composers reflect a larger body of post-tonal music. Cell constructions and their pivotal motions span the gamut from traditional/asymmetrical to more abstract/symmetrical formations. This study provides insight into universal principles of the post-tonal era and reveals a broader evolution of the musical language as represented by the three composers.

Elvis Presley chose one of his songs, "Blue Moon of Kentucky," for his first single. A young Jerry Garcia traveled cross-country to audition for his band. Johnny Cash, Buddy Holly, and even Frank Sinatra were fans. Considering the range of stars and styles that claim him as an influence, no single artist has had as broad an impact on American popular music as Bill Monroe.

Born in 1911 in rural Kentucky, Monroe melded the fiddle tunes, ballads, and blues of his youth into the "high lonesome" sound known today as bluegrass, making him perhaps the only performer to create an entire musical genre. His distinctive bluegrass style profoundly influenced country, early rock 'n' roll, and the folk revival of the 1960s. A Grand Ole Opry star for more than sixty years, Monroe was a searing mandolinist who redefined the instrument, a haunting high-range vocalist, and a god-like figure to generations of admirers who became famous in their own right.

When Monroe died in 1996, he was universally acclaimed as "the Father of Bluegrass," but the personal life of this taciturn figure remained largely unknown. His childhood feelings of isolation and abandonment - "lonesomeness" he called it - fueled his reckless womanizing in adulthood and inspired his most powerful compositions. From his professional breakthrough in the Monroe Brothers duet act to his bitter rivalry with former sidemen Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs to his final days as a revered elder statesman of bluegrass, Monroe's career was filled with trials and triumphs. Now, veteran bluegrass journalist Richard D. Smith has interviewed a multitude of Monroe's surviving friends, lovers, colleagues, and contemporaries to create a three-dimensional portrait of this brilliant, complex, and contradictory man. Compellingly narrated and thoroughly researched, Can't You Hear Me Callin' is the definitive biography of a true giant of American music.

This book challenges the monolithic portrayals of folk music and social change under communism by making a case for "people's music" and shows how new folk music embodies an inherently pluralistic concept of Yugoslavia's culture.

From his birth in Owensboro, Kentucky, in 1947, to his 2020 album featuring the music of Lee Hammons, Wayne Howard has lived an exceptionally creative life. Howard seems to be eternally present at fiddle festivals, on the margins of old-time music gatherings, and ensconced in the circles of creative forces working to preserve and disseminate this archaic southern mountain music. In 1969, he relocated to West Virginia and, after being introduced to the Hammons family by Dwight Diller, Howard befriended the family and recorded Lee, Sherman, Burl, and Maggie Hammons playing music and telling stories. From there, Howard carved out a place for himself as a professional computer programmer, a vintage book collector and seller, and woodworker before turning his attention to writing about the Hammons family, and producing CDs from his reel-to-reel tapes of their stories and music for the Field Recorders' Collective. This biography follows the threads of music and folklore through Howard's life, celebrating his profound knowledge of the songs and songsters that does much to sustain the interest of those who seek out Appalachian tunes, songs, and stories.

In 1946, Harry Choates, a Cajun fiddle virtuoso, changed the course of American musical history when his recording of the so-called Cajun national anthem "Jole Blon" reached number four on the national Billboard charts. Cajun music became part of the American consciousness for the first time thanks to the unprecedented success of this issue, as the French tune crossed cultural, ethnic, racial, and socio-economic boundaries. Country music stars Moon Mullican, Roy Acuff, Bob Wills, and Hank Snow rushed into the studio to record their own interpretations of the waltz-followed years later by Waylon Jennings and Bruce Springsteen. The cross-cultural musical legacy of this plaintive waltz also paved the way for Hank Williams Sr.'s Cajun-influenced hit "Jamabalaya."
Choates' "Jole Blon" represents the culmination of a centuries-old dialogue between the Cajun community and the rest of America. Joining into this dialogue is the most thoroughly researched and broadly conceived history of Cajun music yet published, Cajun Breakdown. Furthermore, the book examines the social and cultural roots of Cajun music's development through 1950 by raising broad questions about the ethnic experience in America and nature of indigenous American music. Since its inception, the Cajun community constantly refashioned influences from the American musical landscape despite the pressures of marginalization, denigration, and poverty. European and North American French songs, minstrel tunes, blues, jazz, hillbilly, Tin Pan Alley melodies, and western swing all became part of the Cajun musical equation. The idiom's synthetic nature suggests an extensive and intensive dialogue with popular culture, extinguishing the myth that Cajuns were an isolated folk group astray in the American South. Ryan Andre Brasseaux's work constitutes a bold and innovative exploration of a forgotten chapter in America's musical odyssey."

Roy Cape is a Trinidadian saxophonist active as a band musician for more than fifty years and as a bandleader for more than thirty. He is known throughout the islands and the Caribbean diasporas in North America and Europe. Part ethnography, part biography, and part Caribbean music history, "Roy Cape" is about the making of reputation and circulation, and about the meaning of labor and work ethics. An experiment in storytelling, it joins Roy's voice with that of ethnomusicologist Jocelyne Guilbault. The idea for the book emerged from an exchange they had while discussing Roy's journey as a performer and bandleader. In conversation, they began experimenting with voice, with who takes the lead, who says what, when, to whom, and why. Their book reflects that dynamic, combining first-person narrative, dialogue, and the polyphony of Roy's bandmates' voices. Listening to recordings and looking at old photographs elicited more recollections, which allowed Roy to expand on recurring themes and motifs. This congenial, candid book offers different ways of knowing Roy's labor of love--his sound and work through sound, his reputation and circulation as a renowned musician and bandleader in the world.

Greek Rebetiko from a Psychocultural Perspective: Same Songs Changing Minds examines the ways in which audiences in present-day Greece and Turkey perceive and use the Greek popular song genre rebetiko to cultivate specific cultural habits and identities. In the past, rebetiko has been associated chiefly with the lower strata of Greek society. But Daniel Koglin approaches the subject from a different perspective, exploring the mythological and ritual aspects of rebetiko, which intellectual elites on both sides of the Aegean Sea have adapted to their own world views in our age of globalized consumption. Combining qualitative and quantitative methods from ethnomusicology, ritual studies, conceptual history and music psychology, Koglin casts light on the role played by national perceptions in the processes of music production and consumption. His analysis reveals that rebetiko persistently oscillates between conceptual categories: it is a music both ours and theirs, marginal and mainstream, joyful and grievous, sacred and profane. The study culminates in the thesis that this semantic multistability is not only a key concept to understanding the ongoing popularity of rebetiko in Greece, and its recent renaissance in Turkey, but also a fundamental aspect of the human experience on the south-eastern borders of Europe.

SIMON & GARFUNKEL is a definitive account of Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel's career together. With unique material and exclusive interviews with fellow musicians, promoters and friends, acclaimed author Spencer Leigh has written a compelling biography of some of the world's biggest musical stars. With remarkable stories about the duo on every page, the book not only charts their rise to success and the years of their fame, but analyses the personalities of the two men and the ups and downs of their often fraught relationship.

In Local Fusions, author Barbara Rose Lange explores musical life in Hungary, Slovakia, and Austria between the end of the Cold War and the world financial crisis of 2008. With case studies from Budapest, Bratislava, and Vienna, the book looks at the ways that artists generated social commentary and tried new ways of working together as the political and economic atmosphere shifted during this time. Drawn from a variety of sources, the case studies illustrate how young musicians redefined a Central European history of elevating the arts by fusing poetry, local folk music, and other vernacular music with jazz, Asian music, art music, and electronic dance music. Their projects rejected exclusion based on ethnic background or gender prevalent in Central Europe's present far-right political movements, and instead embraced diverse modes of expression. Through this, the musicians asserted woman power, broadened masculinities, and declared affinity with regional minorities such as the Romani people.

Originally published in 1977. Frances Tolmie (1840-1926) was one of the foremost Gaelic folklore and folksong experts. This account of her life and work places her unique contribution to human song against a full personal, historical and cultural background. The book includes a selection of the songs she heard and wrote down, together with the part they played in her life and that of her circle and the larger community. Moving in a variety of circles, Frances Tolmie experienced the warm domesticity of an enlightened Skye manse, the cultural bustle of upper middle-class Edinburgh 'entrepreneurs', the romantic serious-mindedness of the first Cambridge women students, the sensitive nature-loving community round Ruskin at Coniston, and spent her later sociable years back in Scotland. This book, with its historical introduction by Flora MacLeod and musical introduction by Frank Howes along with Ethel Bassin's own detailed introduction, reflects her profound study of the song and folklore of her people, and describes how she recorded a precious part of British traditional culture, catching it alive and sharing it as truly as possible.

This is the first history of the harp in Scotland to be published. It sets out to trace the development of the instrument from its earliest appearance on the Pictish stones of the 8th century, to the present day. Describing the different harps played in the Highlands and the Lowlands of Scotland, the authors examine the literary and physical evidence for their use within the Royal Courts and "big houses" by professional harpers and aristocratic amateurs. They vividly follow the decline of the wire-strung clarsach from its links with the hereditary bards of the Highland chieftains to its disappearance in the 18th century, and the subsequent attempts at the revival of the small harp during the 19th and 20th centuries. The music played on the harp, and its links with the great families of Scotland are described. The authors present, in this book, material which has never before been brought to light, from unpublished documents, family papers and original manuscripts. They also make suggestions, based on their research, about the development and dissemination of the early Celtic harps and their music. This book, therefore, should be of great interest, not only to harp players but to historians, to all musicians in the fields of traditional and early music, and to any reader who recognises the importance of these beautiful instruments, and their music, throughout a thousand years of Scottish culture.

Originally published in 1977. The Travellers, from those living in bow-tents and horse-drawn caravans to those dwelling in motor caravans and permanent homes, are an important source of traditional music. Their society means that songs that have died out in more settled communities are preserved among them. Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger, widely known as two of the founding singers of the British and American folk revivals, here display a vast fund of folklore scholarship around the songs of British travelling people. Resulting from extensive collecting in southern and southeastern England and central and northeastern Scotland in the 1960s and 70s, this book contains 130 songs with music and comprehensive notes relating them to folkloristic and historical points of interest. It includes traditional ballads and ballads of broadside origin, bawdy, tragic and humorous songs about love, work and death. Most are in English or in Scots dialect with four in Anglo-Romani.

This is a welcome addition to recently published work on the popular musics which have emerged in many countries as a response to and as a result of the encounter of local musical traditions with Anglo-American pop/rock. . . . The empirical components make this an impressive book. . . . It is also quite unique. . . . The data collected is presented in a successful combination of quantitative information and 'windows' of text telling the story of different individual musicians, and tracing the influence on them of economics and politics, of local and foreign musicians. --Cambridge Journals "The book is a magnificent achievement and stands on par with the work by Wallis & Malm with which it inevitably must be compared. One looks forward to the companion volumes of the project. Of particular note is the research style that drew on 40 indigenous researchers from over 20 countries. This is a highly ambitious project in intercultural studies and stands as a landmark in intercultural cooperation." --Canadian Journal of Communication "Music at the Margins is the utopian experiment par excellence. . . . We are treated to an intriguing print montage of the current 'world music' landscape; this book's multicultural scholarship is a tour de force in cross-cultural dialogics. . . . The results of the studies help to set the agenda for further research in the field. . . . The book is an extremely ambitious project. . . . Music at the Margins . . . is a groundbreaking study of popular music in its international contexts. The book is a must for anyone interested in the subject." --Journal of Communication "Music at the Margins: Popular Music and Global Cultural Diversity fills an important scholarly gap by investigating the nature of the international recording industry and production of music by local performers working at the margins of that industry in a variety of national contexts. The authors report on cross-cultural research done by a large international team that "tests the cultural imperialism hypothesis" that a largely one-way flow of cultural texts is leading to worldwide cultural homogenization." --International Journal of Intercultural Relations "A very interesting, highly readable book about the global pop-music world, reflecting its complexity and its artistic, economic, cultural-social, and political involvement and influence. . . .Music at the Margins is a special book and will be relished by music fans, general readers, and students in music, sociology, economics and other courses." --Academic Library Book Review "One of the better books in the trend toward establishing legitimacy of popular culture studies through pseudoacademic trappings, this is a responsible attempt to collate and make sense of information and perceptions gleaned by researchers in more than 15 First-, Second-, and Third-World countries." --Choice "It inspires great respect for its authors. For someone who writes about popular music for a daily newspaper and magazines as well as academic settings, it has a lot of value and interest. The broad conceptual framework alone helps me think about what's happening with all aspects of pop culture, not just music. . . . Most important for me is the evidence the book provides of how the process of cultural production actually works at both individual and national levels." --Lynn Darroch, Mt. Hood Community College "An exhaustive academic account of the forces governing the international music industry. . . . Music at the Margins is an ambitious project encompassing many complex issues. . . . For anyone interested in the past, present and future of international popular music, it is an impressive and rewarding volume." --Tracking "An amazingly rich tour-de-force of contested territory: how meanings are negotiated between domination and diversity, cultural erosion and enrichment. Indispensable for students of mass media and popular culture, as well as of music." --George Gerbner, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania Popular music is a form of communication easily recognized and understood around the world. But as it spreads from culture to culture, is it becoming more homogenized? Or, conversely, is there a continuing and perhaps ever-increasing diversity of song styles and forms? Music at the Margins explores the debate surrounding popular music's spread, testing the more conventional "cultural imperialism" hypothesis as based on empirical findings from a study by the International Communication and Youth Culture Consortium. The primary focus is on how the process of popular music production is perceived by local musicians--people who are immersed in overlapping international, national, and local contexts of production. Discussions on theory, local case studies, and interview data are provided and integrated to show how societal influences are tempered by and interpreted through cultural and semiotic codes--as well as individual musicians' experiences and creative talents. Specific topics addressed include the rise of the international recording industry, music production in socialist or formerly socialist countries, censorship, and sociopolitical influences, to name but a few. Music at the Margins will appeal to a wide range of scholars and students in the fields of communication, popular culture, and sociology.

This book draws attention to the reception of Oskar Kolberg's folklorist's work outside of Poland. It also presents the work of other scholars active in Eastern Europe from the nineteenth century to the present day, many of them poorly known, despite their lofty achievements. The contributions by authors from Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Russia, Slovakia and Poland reflect on how Kolberg's work is being continued by scholars today and how the musical repertoire that he recorded is functioning. This book unites the results of the international conference "The Kolbergs of Eastern Europe", organised by the College of Eastern Europe and the Institute of Musicology of the University of Wroclaw.

A career-spanning account of the artistry and politics of Bob Dylan's songwriting Bob Dylan's reception of the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature has elevated him beyond the world of popular music, establishing him as a major modern artist. However, until now, no study of his career has focused on the details and nuances of the songs, showing how they work as artistic statements designed to create meaning and elicit emotion. Bob Dylan: How the Songs Work (originally published as Bob Dylan's Poetics) is the first comprehensive book on both the poetics and politics of Dylan's compositions. It studies Dylan, not as a pop hero, but as an artist, as a maker of songs. Focusing on the interplay of music and lyric, it traces Dylan's innovative use of musical form, his complex manipulation of poetic diction, and his dialogues with other artists, from Woody Guthrie to Arthur Rimbaud. Moving from Dylan's earliest experiments with the blues, through his mastery of rock and country, up to his densely allusive recent recordings, Timothy Hampton offers a detailed account of Dylan's achievement. Locating Dylan in the long history of artistic modernism, the book studies the relationship between form, genre, and the political and social themes that crisscross Dylan's work. Bob Dylan: How the Songs Work offers both a nuanced engagement with the work of a major artist and a meditation on the contribution of song at times of political and social change.

Explores the world of women's professional and amateur musical activity as it developed on and beyond the island of Ireland. In a story which spans several centuries, the book highlights representative composers and performers in classical music, Irish traditional music, and contemporary art music whose contributions have been marginalised in music narratives. As well as investigating the careers of public figures, this edited collection brings attention to women who engaged with and taught music in a variety of domestic settings. It also shines a spotlight on women who worked behind the scenes to build infrastructures such as festivals and educational institutions which remain at the heart of the country's musical life today. The book addresses and reconsiders ideas about the intersections of music, gender, and Irish society, including how the national emblem of the harp became recast as a symbol of Irish womanhood in the twentieth century. The book is divided into four parts. Part 1 surveys women musicians in Irish society of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Part 2 discusses women and practice in Irish traditional music. Part 3 studies gaps and gender politics in the history of twentieth-century women composers and performers. Part 4 situates discourses of women, gender, and music in the twenty-first century. The book's contributors encompass musicologists, cultural historians, composers, and performers.

First published in 1987. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This companion to The Ethnomusicologists' Cookbook combines scholarship with a unique approach to the study of the world's foods, musics, and cultures. Covering over four dozen regions, the entries in these collection each include a regional food-related proverb, a recipe for a complete meal, a list of companion readings and listening pieces, and a short essay that highlights the significant links between music and food in the area. The Ethnomusicologists' Cookbook, Volume 2 will appeal to ethnomusicologists, anthropologists, and sociologists, but should also find a welcome place on the bookshelf of anyone who enjoys eating and learning about foods from around the world.