How big an act was the Kingston Trio? Big enough that the their first 19 albums not only reached Billboard's Top 100, but 14 of them entered the top 10, with five albums alone hitting the no. 1 spot! At the height of their popularity, the Kingston Trio was arguably the most popular vocal group in the world, having single-handedly ushered in the folk music boom of the late '50s and early '60s. Their meteoric rise quite literally paved the way for Bob Dylan; Joan Baez; Peter, Paul & Mary; and the many acts that followed in their wake. With the release of their version of "Tom Dooley" in fall 1958, the Kingston Trio changed American popular music forever, inspiring legions of young listeners to pick up guitars and banjoes and join together in hootenannies and sing-alongs. In Greenback Dollar: The Incredible Rise of The Kingston Trio, the first in-depth biography of America's first recording super-group, William J. Bush retraces the band members' personal and professional lives, from their rapid rise to stardom to their early retirement in 1967. Through interviews with Trio members, their families, and associates, Bush paints a detailed portrait of the Trio's formative early years and sudden popular success, their innovations in recording technology, pioneering of the college concert and intensive tour schedule, their impact on and response to the '60s protest movement, the first break-up of the Trio with Dave Guard's departure, and its re-formation with John Stewart. Lovers of folk music and students and scholars of the history of popular music and the music business, the counterculture movement, and the American folk tradition will find in Greenback Dollar a remarkably detailed view of the musical and cultural legacy that resulted in the Kingston Trio receiving a 2011 Lifetime Achievement Award at the 53rd Annual Grammy Awards.

American folk musicians Ry Cooder and Taj Mahal, once musical partners, have had careers which are at once conservative and innovative, imbuing the best of folk traditions with their own powerful style. In The Unbroken Circle, Fred Metting challenges the musical labels that often bind artists as he explores the inspirational sources behind these two men. Cooder was influenced by ragtime-blues, bottleneck gospel blues, Norteno music, as well as epic folk ballads. Mahal surrounded himself with Afro-Caribbean music, Chicago blues and Hawaiian music. Both of these artists created a collage from these sources, resisting categories and always driving for the emotional center of the musical experience. Metting traces the parallels between the two, in their careers and their musical backgrounds. He demonstrates how American music transcends classification, finding definition in its very fluidity. The result of a study such as this is not only a respect for the earlier musical sources, but also a desire to continue the tradition of adaptation and change. The Unbroken Circle is a book well-suited for music students, American folklorists, and fans of the musicians profiled.

Arlo Guthrie, the son of America's legendary dust bowl troubadour Woody Guthrie and Martha Graham dancer Marjorie Mazia Guthrie, was reared in the rarefied atmosphere of New York City's remnant Old Left culture, a period that brought together art, political action, and folk music. Music was part of Guthrie's life from the very beginning and his self-confessed earliest childhood memory was standing knee-high next to Lead Belly, the blues legend and "King of the twelve-string Guitar." Arlo's earliest mentors were his father's friends, and the youngster would learn his craft from the giants of American folk music: Pete Seeger, the Weavers, Cisco Houston, Josh White, Oscar Brand, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Brownie McGhee, and Sonny Terry. Arlo Guthrie: The Warner/Reprise Years revisits Guthrie's fifteen-year ride as a recording artist for the prestigious record label. Hank Reineke guides readers through the colorful history of Guthrie's most creative period, when the droll, shaggy-haired troubadour promised in song that a "new world" was surely coming. In his thoughtful consideration of Guthrie's career as a popular, if idiosyncratic, recording artist for the Reprise/Warner Bros. label, Reineke regales readers with stories behind the remarkable success of Guthrie's talking blues-turned-movie Alice's Restaurant and his celebrated appearance at the 1969 Woodstock festival. Guthrie's time at Reprise/Warner Bros. from 1967 to 1982 saw twelve critically acclaimed solo albums, two staple singles of FM radio ("Coming Into Los Angeles" and "City of New Orleans"), and a pair of treasured folk-music recording collaborations with Pete Seeger. With a look at Guthrie's life and times before and after this prolific period of his career, Arlo Guthrie: The Warner/Reprise Years is the first biography dedicated solely to this gifted artist. A goldmine of information on the Guthrie family's legacy to American music, the counterculture of the 1960s, and the record industry of the 1970s, this work also features a detailed bibliography as well as the first comprehensive discography of Guthrie's recordings through the present day. Arlo Guthrie: The Warner/Reprise Years will appeal to popular music historians, folk-rock fans, and readers interested in the American counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s.

Flamenco Music and National Identity in Spain explores the efforts of the current government in southern Spain to establish flamenco music as a significant patrimonial symbol and marker of cultural identity. Further, it aims to demonstrate that these Andalusian efforts form part of the ambitious project of rethinking the nation-state of Spain, and of reconsidering the nature of national identity. A salient theme in this book is that the development of notions of style and identity are mediated by social institutions. Specifically, the book documents the development of flamenco's musical style by tracing the genre's development, between 1880 and 1980, and demonstrating the manner in which the now conventional characterization of the flamenco style was mediated by krausist, modernist, and journalist institutions. Just as importantly, it identifies two recent institutional forces, that of audio recording and cinema, that promote a concept of musical style that sharply contrasts with the conventional notion. By emphasizing the importance of forward-looking notions of style and identity, Flamenco Music and National Identity in Spain makes a strong case for advancing the Spanish experiment in nation-building, but also for re-thinking nationalism and cultural identity on a global scale.

.cs7CED571B{text-align: left;text-indent:0pt;padding:0pt 0pt 0pt 0pt;margin:0pt 0pt 0pt 0pt}.cs5EFED22F{color: #000000;background-color: transparent;font-family: Times New Roman; font-size:12pt; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; }.csA62DFD6A{color: #000000;background-color: transparent;font-family: Times New Roman; font-size:12pt; font-weight: normal; font-style: italic; }In applying the term folk music to the music they were collecting, early nineteenth-century Swedish folklorists saturated it with the cultural currency of romantic nationalism. These collectors promoted the music as the essence of the rural peasant folk, and thus of the nation; the tradition it represented was ancient, invested with the power of nature itself. Since that time, folk music has retained its symbolic value, while at the same time the national romantic narrative has broken down due to its being politically problematic as well as factually unsustainable. Research that has been done on rural peasant music in the intervening years reveals that it was never particularly ancient nor nationally uniform, nor truly distinguishable from popular or art musics. Swedish Folk Music in the Twenty-First Century: On the Nature of Tradition in a Folkless Nation, by David Kaminsky, examines the struggle of present-day Swedish folk musicians and dancers to maintain the cultural currency of their genre while simultaneously challenging the historical fallacies and ideological agenda upon which that currency was originally based. The notion of Swedish cultural purity once championed by nineteenth-century folklorists has been dismissed by serious scholars and now marks the discourse of the anti-immigrant extreme right, alienating it from the academic-savvy center/left-leaning folk music subculture of today. Kaminsky's study is especially relevant today, given the rise of the anti-immigrant extreme right in Sweden, and their efforts to preserve culturally pure Swedish folk music at the expense of existing multicultural government initiatives.

This book examines the diverse facets of popular music in Malta, paying special attention to ghana (Malta's folk song), the wind band tradition, and modern popular music. Ciantar provides intriguing discussions and examples of how popular music on this small Mediterranean island country interacts with other aspects of the island's life and culture such as language, religion, history, customs, and politics. Through a series of ethnographic vignettes, the book explores the music as it takes place in bars, at festivals, and during village celebrations, and considers how it is talked about in the local press, at group gatherings, and on social media. The ethnography adopted here is that of a native musician and ethnomusicologist and therefore marries the author's memories with ongoing observations and their evaluation.

All people, in no matter what culture, must be able to place their music firmly in the context of the totality of their beliefs, experiences, and activities, for without such ties, music cannot exist. This means that there must be a body of theory connected with any music system--not necessarily a theory of the structure of music sound, although that may be present as well, but rather a theory of what music is, what it does, and how it is coordinated with the total environment, both natural and cultural, in which human beings move. The Flathead Indians of Western Montana (just over 26,000 in number as of the 2000 census) inhabit a reservation consisting of 632,516 acres of land in the Jocko and Flathead Valleys and the Camas Prairie country, which lie roughly between Evaro and Kalispell, Montana. The reservation is bounded on the east by the Mission Range, on the west by the Cabinet National Forest, on the south by the Lolo National Forest, and on the north by an arbitrary line, approximately bisecting Flathead Lake about twenty-four miles south of Kalispell. The area is one of the richest agricultural regions in Montana, and fish and game are abundant. The Flathead are engaged in stocking, timbering, and various agricultural enterprises. For the Flathead, the most important single fact about music and its relationship to the total world is its origin in the supernatural sphere. All true and proper songs, particularly in the past, owe their origin to a variety of contacts experienced by humans with beings which, though a part of this world, are superhuman and the source of both individual and tribal powers and skills. Thus a sharp distinction is drawn by the Flathead between what they call "make-up" and all other songs. Merriam's pioneering work in the relationship of ethnography and musicology remains a primary source in this field in anthropology.

This book brings together articles from The International Encyclopedia of Communications in the areas of Folklore, Drama, Verbal and Non-Verbal Communication, Music, and History, with a new introduction and updated bibliographies.

This book consists primarily of papers presented at the international symposium Approaches to Music Research: Between Practice and Epistemology, held in Ljubljana (Slovenia) in May 2008. Scholars from various music research areas offered heterogeneous views of one central issue: the relations between music-research ideals and practices. The intention was to offer a reflection concerning disciplinary intersections as ideal-typical formations in which different contemporary musicological practices meet each other, either positively or in more negative terms. The topoi of the symposium discussed elemental, difficult-to-answer questions about the position that musicology holds within the humanities and sciences. The symposium especially encouraged case studies of basic epistemological reflections with an emphasis on the practice of music research from any field.

North American Fiddle Music: A Research and Information Guide is the first large-scale annotated bibliography and research guide on the fiddle traditions of the United States and Canada. These countries, both of which have large immigrant populations as well as Native populations, have maintained fiddle traditions that, while sometimes faithful to old-world or Native styles, often feature blended elements from various traditions. Therefore, researchers of the fiddle traditions in these two countries can not only explore elements of fiddling practices drawn from various regions of the world, but also look at how different fiddle traditions can interact and change. In addition to including short essays and listings of resources about the full range of fiddle traditions in those two countries, it also discusses selected resources about fiddle traditions in other countries that have influenced the traditions in the United States and Canada.

How do marginalized communities speak back to power when they are excluded from political processes and socially denigrated? In what ways do they use music to sound out their unique histories and empower themselves? How can we hear their voices behind stereotyped and exaggerated portrayals promoted by mainstream communities, record producers and government officials? Sounding Roman: Music and Performing Identity in Western Turkey explores these questions through a historically-grounded and ethnographic study of Turkish Roman ("Gypsies") from the Ottoman period up to the present. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork (1995 to the present), collected oral histories, historical documents of popular culture (recordings, images, song texts, theatrical scripts), legal and administrative documents, this book takes a hard look at historical processes by which Roman are stereotyped as and denigrated as "cingene"--a derogatory group name equivalent to the English term, "gypsy", and explores creative musical ways by which Roman have forged new musical forms as a means to create and assert new social identities. Sounding Roman presents detailed musical analysis of Turkish Roman musical genres and styles, set within social, historical and political contexts of musical performances. By moving from Byzantine and Ottoman social contexts, we witness the reciprocal construction of ethnic identity of both Roman and Turk through music in the 20th century. From neighborhood weddings held in the streets, informal music lessons, to recording studios and concert stages, the book traces the dynamic negotiation of social identity with new musical sounds. Through a detailed ethnography of Turkish Roman ("Gypsy") musical practices from the Ottoman period to the present, this work investigates the power of music to configure new social identities and pathways for political action, while testing the limits of cultural representation to effect meaningful social change.

Bhangra is commonly understood as the hybrid music produced in Britain by British Asian music producers through mixing Panjabi folk melodies with western pop and black dance rhythms. This is derived from a Punjabi harvest dance of the same name. This book looks at Bhangra's global flows from one of its originary sites, the Indian subcontinent, to contribute to the understanding of emerging South Asian cultural practices such as Bhangra or Bollywood in multi-ethnic societies. It seeks to trace Bhangra's moves from Punjab and its 'return back' to look at the forces that initiate and regulate global flows of local texts and to ask how their producers and consumers redirect them to produce new definitions of culture, identity and nation. The critical importance of this book lies in understanding the difference between the present globalizing wave and previous trans-local movements. Gera Roy contrasts the frames of cultural imperialism with those of cultural invasion to show how Indian cultures have constantly reinvented themselves by cross-pollinating with 'invading' cultures such as Hellenic, Persian, Arabic and many others in the past. By looking at Bhangra's flows to and from India, the book revises the relation between culture, space and identity and challenges boundaries. It weighs both the uses and costs of visibility provided by global networks to marginalized groups in diverse localities and explores whether collaborations between Bhangra practitioners, largely of working class origin, give ordinary people any control over the circulation of culture in the global village. Finally, the book considers whether cultural practices can alter hierarchies and power structures in the real world.

For the many poor and working-class Northeastern Brazilians who have been displaced from their home region for economic reasons, the music of forro is a redemptive attempt at establishing an immanent relationship to history and community in the diaspora. The redemption explored in this book is multifaceted, including a desire to return home as part of a larger workforce in a sustainable economy, the desire to see the region's rich culture celebrated throughout Brazil, and to ensure that its traditional legacies are both preserved and further enriched through respectful innovation. The acute perceptiveness of forro musicians in portraying the diasporic experience of Northeastern Brazilians is elaborated in various chapters, including: one chapter focused on lyrical, musical, and collective representations or manifestations of diasporic nostalgia (saudade), another chapter analyzing the lyrico-musical representation of rural workers' alienation from - and resistance to - life in the urban centers, and a third chapter which contextualizes forro's descriptions of the experiences of Brazil's internal migrants, utilizing an array of testimonials and academic studies on the subject of interregional migration to reveal both the wisdom of forro lyricists and some of their blind spots. The study also includes a historical analysis of this Northeastern genre's transformation from a rhythm called baiao that symbolically represented the Northeast as a simple, coherent entity, to forro, a more allegorical representation with a greater appreciation for the class, gender, racial, and generational complexity of the region. The development of the genre, as well as the circulation of theory related to cultural production and identity, are contextualized in a global economy.

Sounds of the Borderland is the first book-length study of how popular music became a medium for political communication and contested identification during and after Croatia's war of independence from Yugoslavia. It extends existing cultural studies literature on music, politics and the state, which has largely been grounded in Western European and North American political systems. It also responds to an emerging fascination with the culture and politics of contemporary south-east Europe, expanding scholarship on the post-Yugoslav conflicts by going on to encompass significant social and political changes into the present day. The outbreak of war in 1991 saw almost every professional musician in Croatia take part in a wave of patriotic music-making and the powerful state television system strive to bring popular music under its control. As the political imperative shifted from securing national survival to consolidating a homogenous nation-state, the music industry responded with several strategies for creating a national popular music, producing messages about the nation and, in the ongoing debates over the origins of the folk music that inspired many songs, a way to define the nation by expressing what Croatia was not. The war on ethnic ambiguity which cut through individuals' social and creative lives played out across the airwaves, sales racks and gossip columns of a small country that imagined itself a historical and cultural borderland. These explicit and implicit narratives of nationhood connect many political phases: the months of fiercest fighting, the stabilised front, the uneasy post-war years when the symbolic frontline region of eastern Slavonia had still not returned to Croatian sovereignty, the euphoria and instability after the end of the Tudjman regime in 2000, and Croatia's fraught journey towards the European Union. Baker's book provides valuable insight into the role of music in a wartime and post-conflict society and will be essential reading for researchers and students interested in south-east Europe or the transformation of entertainment during and after conflict.

The Appalachian dulcimer is one of America's major contributions to world music and folk art. Homemade and handmade, played by people with no formal knowledge of music, this beautiful instrument entered the post-World-War-II Folk Revival with virtually no written record. Appalachian Dulcimer Traditions tells the fascinating story of the effort to recover the instrument's lost history through fieldwork in the Southern mountains, finding of old instruments, and listening to the tales of old folks. After reviewing the instrument's distinctive musical features, Ralph Lee Smith presents the dulcimer's story chronologically, tracing its roots in a Renaissance German instrument, the scheitholt; describing the early history of the scheitholt and the dulcimer in America; and outlining the development of distinctive dulcimer styles in Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, and Kentucky. The story continues into the 20th Century, through the final group of tradition-based Appalachian makers whose work flowed into the national scene of the Folk Revival. This fully revised edition provides expanded information about the history of the scheitholt and the dulcimer before the Civil War and discusses traditions and types that are still being discovered and documented. Smith also adds his personal adventures in searching for the dulcimer's history. A new final chapter describes types and styles that do not fit conveniently into the mainstream development of the instrument. The book concludes with several appendixes, including measurements of representative dulcimers and listings of dulcimer recordings in the Archive of Folk Culture of the Library of Congress.

This book was awarded a Special Mention Citation in the 2010 competition for the 'de la Torre Bueno Prize' by The Society of Dance History Scholars. In the region of Salento in Southern Italy, the music and dance of the pizzica has been used in the ritual of tarantism for many centuries as a means to cure someone bitten by the taranta spider. This book, a historical and ethnographic study of tarantism and pizzica, draws upon seven hundred years of writings about the ritual contributed by medical practitioners, scientists, travel writers and others. It also investigates the contemporary revival of interest in pizzica music and dance as part of the 'neo-tarantism' movement, where pizzica and the history of tarantism form a complex web of place, culture and identity for Salentines today. This is one of the first books in English to explore this fascinating ritual practice and its contemporary resurgence. It uses an interdisciplinary framework based in performance studies to ask wider questions about the experience of the body in performance, and the potential of music and dance to create a sense of personal and collective transformation and efficacy.

Dave van ronk (1936-2002) was not only one of the founding figures of the 1960s folk music revival he was a pioneer of modern acoustic blues, a fine songwriter and arranger, a powerful singer, and one of the most influential guitarists of his era. He was also a marvellous storyteller, a peerless musical historian, and one of the most quotable figures in The Village. The Mayor of MacDougal Street is a unique firsthand account of the sixties folk scene that includes encounters with young stars-to-be like Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell and older luminaries like Woody Guthrie and Odetta. colourful, hilarious, and engaging, The Mayor of MacDougal Street will appeal not only to folk and blues fans but also to anyone interested in the music, politics, and spirit of a revolutionary period in American culture.

Jon Stratton provides a pioneering work on Jews as a racialized group in the popular music of America, Britain and Australia during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Rather than taking a narrative, historical approach the book consists of a number of case studies, looking at the American, British and Australian music industries. Stratton's primary motivation is to uncover how the racialized positioning of Jews, which was sometimes similar but often different in each of the societies under consideration, affected the kinds of music with which Jews have become involved. Stratton explores race as a cultural construction and continues discussions undertaken in Jewish Studies concerning the racialization of the Jews and the stereotyping of Jews in order to present an in-depth and critical understanding of Jews, race and popular music.

A third collection of 50 carols, mostly for SATB, some unaccompanied, and some having accompaniments for piano or organ or orchestra. The carols reflect a diversity of styles and periods, while remaining within the capacity of an average group of amateur performers. Includes compositions and arrangements by Britten, Holst, Howells, Hurford, Vaughan Williams, and Walton.
Orchestral and brass accompaniments for many of the items are available on hire.

For at least two centuries, and arguably much longer, Ireland has exerted an important influence on the development of the traditional, popular and art musics of other regions, and in particular those of Britain and the United States. During the past decade or so, the traditional musics of the so-called Celtic regions have become a focus of international interest. The phenomenal success of shows such as Riverdance (which appeared in 1995, spawned from a 1994 Eurovision Song Contest interval act) brought Irish music and dance to a global audience and played a part in the further commoditization of Irish culture, including traditional music. However, there has been until now, relatively little serious musicological study of the traditional music of Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland remains a divided community in which traditional culture, in all its manifestations, is widely understood as a marker of religious affiliation and ethnic identity. Since the outbreak of the most recent 'troubles' around 1968, the borders between the communities have often been marked by music. For example, many in the Catholic, nationalist community, regard the music of Orange flute bands and Lambeg drums as a source of intimidation. Equally, many in the Protestant community have distanced themselves from Irish music as coming from a different ethnic tradition, and some have rejected tunes, styles and even instruments because of their association with the Catholic community and the Irish Republic. Of course, during the same period many other Protestants and Catholics have continued to perform in an apolitical context and often together, what in earlier times would simply have been regarded as folk or country music. With the increasing espousal of a discrete Ulster Scots tradition since the signing of the Belfast (or 'Good Friday') Agreement in 1998, the characteristics of the traditional music performed in Northern Ireland, and the place of Protestant musicians within popular Irish culture, clearly require a more thoroughgoing analysis. David Cooper's book provides such analysis, as well as ethnographic and ethnomusicological studies of a group of traditional musicians from County Antrim. In particular, this book offers a consideration of the cultural dynamics of Northern Ireland with respect to traditional music.

Barbara Lebrun traces the evolution of 'protest' music in France since 1981, exploring the contradictions that emerge when artists who take their musical production and political commitment 'seriously', cross over to the mainstream, becoming profitable and consensual. Contestation is understood as a discourse shaped by the assumptions and practices of artists, producers, the media and audiences, for whom it makes sense to reject politically reactionary ideas and the dominant taste for commercial pop. Placing music in its economic, historical and ideological context, however, reveals the fragility and instability of these oppositions. The book firstly concentrates on music production in France, the relationships between independent labels, major companies and the state's cultural policies. This section provides the material background for understanding the development of rock alternatif, France's self-styled 'subversive' genre of the 1980s, and explains the specificity of a 'protest' music culture in late-twentieth-century France, in relation to the genre's tradition in the West. The second part looks at representations of a 'protest' identity in relation to discourses of national identity, focusing on two 1990s sub-genres. The first, chanson neo-realiste, contests modernity through the use of acoustic instruments, but its nostalgic 'protest' raises questions about the artists' real engagement with the present. The second, rock metis, borrows from North African and Latino rhythms and challenges the 'neutral' Frenchness of the Republic, while advocating multiculturalism in problematic ways. A discussion of Manu Chao's career, a French artist who has achieved success abroad, also allows an exploration of the relationship between transnationalism and anti-globalization politics. Finally, the book examines the audiences of French 'protest' music and considers festivals as places of 'non-mainstream' identity negotiation. Based on first-hand interviews, this section highlights the vocabulary of emotions that audiences use to make sense of an 'alternative' performance, unveiling the contradictions that underpin their self-definition as participants in a 'protest' culture. The book contributes to debates on the cultural production of 'resistance' and the representation of post-colonial identities, uncovering the social constructedness of the discourse of 'protest' in France. It pays attention to its nation-specific character while offering a wider reflection on the fluidity of 'subversive' identities, with potential applications across a range of Western music practices.

Marie-Galante is a small island situated in the Caribbean to the south of Guadeloupe. The majority of Marie-Galantais are descendants of the slave era, though a few French settlers also occupy the island. Along with its neighbours Guadeloupe and Martinique, Marie-Galante forms an official departement of France. Marie-Galante historically has never been an independent polity. Marie-Galantais express sentiments of being 'deux fois colonise', or twice colonized, concomitant with their sense of insularity from a global organization of place. Dr Ron Emoff translates this pervasive sense of displacement into the concept of the 'non-nation'. Musical practices on the island provide Marie-Galantais with a means of re-connecting with other significant distant places. Many Marie-Galantais display a 'split-subjectivity', embracing an African heritage, a French association and a Caribbean regionalism. This book is unique, in part, with regard to its treatment of a particular mode of self-consciousness, expressed musically, on a virtually forgotten Caribbean island. The book also combines literary, narrative, historical and musical sources to theorize a postcolonial subsurreal in the French Antilles. The focus of the book is upon kadril dance and gwo ka drumming, two prevalent musical practices on the island with which Marie-Galantais construct unique perceptions of self in relation, specifically, to Africa and France. Based on several extended periods of ethnographic research, the book evokes unique Marie-Galantais views on tradition, historicity, esclavage, nationalism (and its absence) and the local significance of occupying a globally out-of-the-way place. The book will be of interest not only to ethnomusicologists, but also to those interested in cultural and linguistic anthropology, postcolonial studies, performance studies, folklore and Caribbean studies.

***AS READ ON BBC RADIO 4*** A beautifully written exploration of the world of Edwardian folk music, and its influence on the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams In January 1905 the young Vaughan Williams, not yet one of England's most famous composers, visited King's Lynn, Norfolk, to find folk songs 'from the mouths of the singers'. He had started collecting in earnest little more than a year before but was now obsessed with saving these indigenous tunes before they were lost forever. An old fisherman, James 'Duggie' Carter, performed 'The Captain's Apprentice', a brutal tale of torture sung to the most beautiful tune the young composer had ever heard. The Captain's Apprentice is the story of how this mysterious song 'opened the door to an entirely new world of melody, harmony and feeling' for Vaughan Williams. With this transformational moment at its heart, the book traces the contrasting lives of the well-to-do composer and a forgotten King's Lynn cabin boy who died at sea, and brings fresh perspectives on Edwardian folk-song collectors, the singers and their songs. While exploring her own connections to folk song, via a Hebridean ancestor, a Scottish ballad learnt as a child and memories of family sing-songs, the author makes the unexpected discovery that Vaughan Williams has been a hidden influence on her musical life from the beginning - an experience she shares with generations of twentieth-century British schoolchildren. Published for Vaughan Williams's 150th birthday in August, this evocative, sensitive look at the great composer will also be read on BBC Radio 4. 'Her gift is a work of love and infinite care' KEGGIE CAREW, author of Dadland 'I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and its weaving of biography, social history and folk song' STEVE ROUD, author of Folk Song in England

In A History of Folk Music Festivals in the United States: Feasts of Musical Celebration, Ronald D. Cohen presents a comprehensive narration of folk music festivals in America, providing details on events both large and small from the 19th century to the present. Cohen discusses events like the Newport, Philadelphia, University of Chicago, and National Folk Festivals, describing and analyzing long-running as well as short-lived festivals throughout the country and covering a dizzying array of musical styles, including blues, Cajun, Irish, klezmer, women's, bluegrass, gospel, country, singer-songwriters, and world. Cohen draws on a wide range of primary and secondary sources to create a detailed description of these exciting "feasts of musical celebration," capturing the nature and variety of the festivals and fully expressing this vital part of the development of folk music. Studying these events brings a truly national perspective to our understanding of folk music and provides important insights into their social, cultural, musical, and even political contexts. This account of folk music festivals in America is vital to folklorists, ethnomusicologists, U.S. historians, and readers with an interest in folk music and its history.

A scholar and a balladeer, Paul Clayton (1931-1967) is credited with the Top-Ten hit "Gotta Travel On" and was a key figure in the mid-1950s rise of folksong to media popularity. Clayton single-handedly brought hundreds of obscure folksongs to the mainstream radio and recording market, and he influenced listeners and friends from Dave Van Ronk to Bob Dylan, who considered Clayton a mentor, "mindguard," and well of folksong. Paul Clayton and the Folksong Revival is the first biography of the folk singer and song collector. Using accounts from friends, family, and fellow musicians, author Bob Coltman relates the breadth and depth of Clayton's extraordinary life, from his birth into a singing family and his teenage years as a radio singer and folksong collector, to his establishment in New York as a folk performer and recording artist, to his tragic early suicide. Clayton's recordings are also examined, interspersed with his insights and adventures as a performer and songwriter in the folk world. Gradually, Clayton's achievements become overwhelmed by his disintegration as a drug user, failing musician, and bipolar gay man, culminating in eyewitness accounts relating to his tragic end. Presenting an in-depth look at folk music in the 1950s, Coltman illuminates what it meant to be a working, but not starring, folksinger in this period. With quotes from a number of folksongs, a discographic summary, and a bibliography, this volume brings to life this intelligent, perceptive, and largely unknown scholar-folksinger.