Music cultures today in rural and urban Mongolia and Inner Mongolia emerge from centuries-old pastoralist practices that were reshaped by political movements in the twentieth century. Mongolian Sound Worlds investigates the unique sonic elements, fluid genres, social and spatial performativity, and sounding objects behind new forms of Mongolian music--forms that reflect the nation's past while looking towards its globalized future. Drawing on fieldwork in locations across the Inner Asian region, the contributors report on Mongolia's genres and musical landscapes; instruments like the morin khuur, tovshuur, and Kazakh dombyra; combined fusion band culture; and urban popular music. Their broad range of concerns include nomadic herders' music and instrument building, ethnic boundaries, heritage-making, ideological influences, nationalism, and global circulation. A merger of expert scholarship and eyewitness experience, Mongolian Sound Worlds illuminates a diverse and ever-changing musical culture. Contributors: Bayarsaikhan Badamsuren, Otgonbaayar Chuulunbaatar, Andrew Colwell, Johanni Curtet, Charlotte D'Evelyn, Tamir Hargana, Peter K. Marsh, K. Oktyabr, Rebekah Plueckhahn, Jennifer C. Post, D. Tserendavaa, and Sunmin Yoon

Originally published in 1973. Folk-life and folk-culture, usually the preserve of the scholar, have been brought vividly and entertainingly to life in these recollections and stories of one man's life in the Irish countryside. This book tells the life story of John Maguire, who died in 1975, including over 50 of the songs he sang, with full musical transcriptions. He was a fine singer, firmly within the Irish tradition, and his songs are the record of a people, their history and traditions, their joys and sufferings, their comedies and tragedies. John Maguire's fascinating story, skilfully and unobtrusively collated by Robin Morton, is full of material that will interest singers and students of folksongs. His songs and music will be of value to all those interested in traditional music and song.

Originally published in 1980. Song is perhaps the strongest form of traditional culture. Its vigour and energy represent the power of the community from which it springs. This book focuses on traditional singing in two small English villages. It studies in detail an activity which goes to the core of the communal life in any village and demonstrates how song becomes the lifeblood of the traditions of rural life. In many ways traditional singing is highly subversive because its practice is an affirmation of community and a denial of the fragmentation of modern society. The songs sung, those remembered, the singers now dead whose lives are recalled each time an old favourite is performed, all connect the present with the past. The primary aesthetic concern within these singing traditions is that a man should sing, whatever the objective quality of his performance; and a song should tell a good story. The individual singer assumes a special role in performance since he becomes spokesman for a group and gives voice not only to personal but also to social concerns, dynamics and emotions.

Originally published in 1983. Song has always been a natural way to record everyday experiences - an expression of celebration, commiseration, complaint and protest. This innovative book is a study of popular and working-class song combining several approaches to the subject. It is a history of working-class song in Britain which concentrates not simply on the songs and the singers but attempts to locate such song in its cultural context and apply principles of literary criticism to this essentially oral medium. It triggered controversy: some critics castigated its Marxist approach, others enthused that 'such unabashed partisanship amply reveals the outstanding characteristic of Watson's book'. The author discusses the way in which the popular song, from Victorian times onwards, has been forced by the entertainment industry out of its roots in popular culture, to become a blander form of art with minimal critical potential. The book ends by considering the possibilities for a continued flourishing of a genuine popular song culture in an electronic age. It has become a standard title in bibliographies and curricula. Much has changed since 1983, not least in music; but this then innovative book still has a lot to say about popular song in its social and historical context.

Originally published in 1969. Until the latter half of the nineteenth century, it was thought that England, alone among the European countries, and unlike Scotland and Ireland where collections of ballads and songs had already been published as early as the eighteenth century, had no important native tradition of music. The founding of the (English) Folk-Song Society in 1898, however, and the pioneering work of such collectors as Lucy Broadwood, the Reverend S. Baring-Gould and, later, Cecil Sharp uncovered a still flourishing folk culture. Since then interest in this subject has grown steadily, and the bibliography of publications of actual folk-songs and ballads is now huge. Frank Howes sets out a general and scholarly introduction, first examining in detail the history and origins of folk music and going on to show the nature and vast amount of the material, enforcing his arguments with a wealth of examples from around the world. His discussion of the differences of national idiom leads on to a comparison of British folk music with that of other European countries and America, in which he pays due attention to the Celtic and Norse traditions. Separate sections on balladry, carols, street cries, broadsides, sea shanties, nursery rhymes and instruments illustrate both the variety of folk music and the extent to which it permeates our national heritage.

Originally published in 1968. The author, a well-known contemporary and friend of folklorist Katharine M. Briggs, collected a tremendous store of folk music material over many years and eventually decided to put some of it on permanent record. This book comprises a cross-section of rescued melodies dating back to medieval days and up to the Victorian early ballads. It describes individual folk singers in Somerset in great detail as personal accounts and documents their lyrics and their tunes, which are all together at the end of the volume.

Originally published in 1982. The songs on which this study is based were once vibrant in the throats and ears and minds of living people. This book examines the songs and their meanings in relation to the lives of those people, and relates them to the cultural tradition and practice of which they were an integral part. The art of village song represents a sense of cohesiveness and mutual identity around local patterns of kinship, social groupings, territorial orientations and cultural relationships. The actual ways in which songs were part of village life is of course highly problematic, but this book endeavours, most of all, to present an understanding of the place of song in the social life of villagers.

Originally published in 1994. Filling a gap in the sound recordings of traditional Anglo-American folk music this volume covers both vocal and instrumental material from the 1920s to the 1990s. The listings have also been limited to performers native to the tradition rather than "revival" performers. The album selection is grouped into field recordings and commercial (pre-1942) recordings, with subdivisions into individual recordings or anthologies. The discography not only reflects its author's in-depth knowledge of Anglo-American folk music's historical development but charts a valuable step forward in the evaluation, as well as select lissting, of available sound recordings.

Contributions by Tina Bucuvalas, Anna Caraveli, Aydin Chaloupka, Sotirios (Sam) Chianis, Frank Desby, Stavros K. Frangos, Stathis Gauntlett, Joseph G. Graziosi, Gail Holst-Warhaft, Michael G. Kaloyanides, Panayotis League, Roderick Conway Morris, National Endowment for the Arts/National Heritage Fellows, Nick Pappas, Meletios Pouliopoulos, Anthony Shay, David Soffa, Dick Spottswood, Jim Stoynoff, and Anna Lomax Wood Despite a substantial artistic legacy, there has never been a book devoted to Greek music in America until now. Those seeking to learn about this vibrant and exciting music were forced to seek out individual essays, often published in obscure or ephemeral sources. This volume provides a singular platform for understanding the scope, practice, and development of Greek music in America through essays and profiles written by principal scholars in the field. Greece developed a rich variety of traditional, popular, and art music that diasporic Greeks brought with them to America. In Greek American communities, music was and continues to be an essential component of most social activities. Music links the past to the present, the distant to the near, and bonds the community with an embrace of memories and narrative. From 1896 to 1942, more than a thousand Greek recordings in many genres were made in the United States, and thousands more have appeared since then. These encompass not only Greek traditional music from all regions, but also emerging urban genres, stylistic changes, and new songs of social commentary. Greek Music in America includes essays on all of these topics as well as history and genre, places and venues, the recording business, and profiles of individual musicians. This book is required reading for anyone who cares about Greek music in America, whether scholar, fan, or performer.

A new approach to the mysterious ballads, and their relationship with the past. Katharine Briggs Award 2018: Runner Up The ballad genre, and its material, are frequently backward-looking in terms of subject and style: it is ideally suited to the reimagining of past events, both real and fictional. This volume addresses the past of the ballad and the past in the ballad. It challenges existing scholarship by embracing discontinuity rather than continuity, seeing the ballad as belonging to a culture of cheap printand imaginative literature rather than the rarefied construct of a mythical "folk". It finds a conscious antiquarianism and medievalism reinterpreting the genre at different stages of its literary history, at the same time as theballad itself is continually adapting to the needs of readers, singers, and audience. Chapters cover the few remaining examples of the medieval ballad, and Thomas Percy's medievalism; David Mallet's "William and Margaret" andthe beginnings of the gothic mode early in the eighteenth century; ballads of "Sir James the Rose" and the culture of cheap print in Scotland from the late eighteenth through to the early twentieth century; shipwreck ballads on the loss of the Ramillies and "Sir Patrick Spens", and the reimagining of the past in the present, with a diversion into Coleridge's "Dejection: An Ode"; murder ballads, special providence, and the history of mentalities from earlymodern to Victorian times. DAVID ATKINSON is Honorary Research Fellow at the Elphinstone Institute, University of Aberdeen.

An in-depth study of the Bulgarian harmonic system is long overdue. More than two decades since the Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares choir was awarded a Grammy (1990), there is no scholarly study of the captivating sounds of Bulgarian vertical sonorities. Kalin Kirilov traces the gradual formation of a unique harmonic system that developed in three styles of Bulgarian music: village music from the 1930s to the 1990s, wedding music from the 1970s to 2000, and choral arrangements (obrabotki) - creations of the socialist period (1944-1989), popularized by Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares. Kirilov classifies the different approaches to harmony and situates them in their historical and cultural contexts, establishing new systems for analysis. In the process, he introduces a new system for the categorization of scales. Kirilov argues that the ready-made concepts that are frequently forced onto Bulgarian music - 'westernization', 'socialist' or 'Middle Eastern influence', are not only outdated but also too vague to be of use in understanding the sophisticated modal and harmonic systems found in Bulgarian music. As an insider who has performed, composed and arranged this music for 30 years, Kirilov is uniquely qualified to interpret it for an international audience.

Focus: Scottish Traditional Music engages methods from ethnomusicology, popular music studies, cultural studies, and media studies to explain how complex Scottish identities and culture are constructed in the traditional music and culture of Scotland. This book examines Scottish music through their social and performative contexts, outlining vocal traditions such as lullabies, mining songs, Scottish ballads, herding songs, and protest songs as well as instrumental traditions such as fiddle music, country dances, and informal evening pub sessions. Case studies explore the key ideas in understanding Scotland musically by exploring ethnicity, Britishness, belonging, politics, transmission and performance, positioning the cultural identity of Scotland within the United Kingdom. Visit the author's companion website at http://www.scottishtraditionalmusic.org/ for additional resources.

In the 1970s John Baily conducted extensive ethnomusicological research in Afghanistan, principally in the city of Herat but also in Kabul. Then, with Taraki's coup in 1978, came conflict, war, and the dispersal of many musicians to locations far and wide. This new publication is the culmination of Baily's further research on Afghan music over the 35 years that followed. This took him to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, the USA, Australia and parts of Europe - London, Hamburg and Dublin. Arranged chronologically, the narrative traces the sequence of political events - from 1978, through the Soviet invasion, to the coming of the Taliban and, finally, the aftermath of the US-led invasion in 2001. He examines the effects of the ever-changing situation on the lives and works of Afghan musicians, following individual musicians in fascinating detail. At the heart of his analysis are privileged vignettes of ten musical personalities - some of friends, and some newly discovered. The result is a remarkable personal memoir by an eminent ethnomusicologist known for his deep commitment to Afghanistan, Afghan musicians and Afghan musical culture. John Baily is also an ethnographic filmmaker. Four of his films relating to his research are included on the downloadable resources that accompanies the text.

Written from the perspective of a scholar and performer, Traditional Music and Irish Society investigates the relation of traditional music to Irish modernity. The opening chapter integrates a thorough survey of the early sources of Irish music with recent work on Irish social history in the eighteenth century to explore the question of the antiquity of the tradition and the class locations of its origins. Dowling argues in the second chapter that the formation of what is today called Irish traditional music occurred alongside the economic and political modernization of European society in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Dowling goes on to illustrate the public discourse on music during the Irish revival in newspapers and journals from the 1880s to the First World War, also drawing on the works of Pierre Bourdieu and Jacques Lacan to place the field of music within the public sphere of nationalist politics and cultural revival in these decades. The situation of music and song in the Irish literary revival is then reflected and interpreted in the life and work of James Joyce, and Dowling includes treatment of Joyce's short stories A Mother and The Dead and the 'Sirens' chapter of Ulysses. Dowling conducted field work with Northern Irish musicians during 2004 and 2005, and also reflects directly on his own experience performing and working with musicians and arts organizations in order to conclude with an assessment of the current state of traditional music and cultural negotiation in Northern Ireland in the second decade of the twenty-first century.

World-class luthier and renowned guitarist Wayne Henderson calls Albert Hash "a real folk hero." A virtuoso fiddler from the Blue Ridge, Hash built more than 300 fiddles in his lifetime, recorded numerous times with a variety of bands and inspired countless instrument makers and musicians in the mountains of rural Southwest Virginia near the North Carolina border. His biography is the story of a resourceful, humble man who dedicated his life to his art, community and Appalachian musical heritage.

A valuable resource for James Taylor fans and a fascinating read for anyone interested in autobiographical popular music of the past 50 years. What kinds of unusual musical forms and lyrical structures did American singer-songwriter James Taylor incorporate into his songs? What role did Taylor play in the introspective singer-songwriter movement of the 1970s? How did Taylor write and record songs that were inspired from his own experiences in life that touched so many other people? The Words and Music of James Taylor explores these specific topics and provides detailed critical analysis of the songs and recordings of this well-known musical icon, examining his melodic writing, his use of harmony, and his often-unappreciated tailoring of musical form to enhance his lyrical messages. The book is organized chronologically, primarily around Taylor's studio albums from 1968 to 2015, and offers an introduction, a summary of Taylor's career and importance, as well as an annotated bibliography and discography. The final section of the book presents an overview of Taylor's importance and lasting impact, an analysis of themes that run through his songs, and an explanation of how Taylor's treatment of these themes changed over the years as he matured and as the world around him changed. Pairs critical analysis of every significant composition and recording by James Taylor with historical perspective on the events of his 50-year life journey Ties Taylor's highly publicized struggles with drugs and in relationships to his songs Delves into the not-frequently discussed musical aspects of Taylor's writing, including his use of unusual musical forms Examines Taylor's arrangements and recordings of cover songs as essentially examples of re-writing the songs

Zoe C. Sherinian shows how Christian Dalits (once known as untouchables or outcastes) in southern India have employed music to protest social oppression and as a vehicle of liberation. Her focus is on the life and theology of a charismatic composer and leader, Reverend J. Theophilus Appavoo, who drew on Tamil folk music to create a distinctive form of indigenized Christian music. Appavoo composed songs and liturgy infused with messages linking Christian theology with critiques of social inequality. Sherinian traces the history of Christian music in India and introduces us to a community of Tamil Dalit Christian villagers, seminary students, activists, and theologians who have been inspired by Appavoo's music to work for social justice. Multimedia components available online include video and audio recordings of musical performances, religious services, and community rituals.

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.

This text explores Scotland's musical heritage and influences, past and present. Fiddles and Folk provides a journey in the company of the performers who have taken Scotland's music around the world and come back singing.

Taiwan aboriginal song has received extensive media coverage since the launch and settlement of a copyright lawsuit following pop group Enigma's allegedly unauthorized use of Amis voices in the 1996 Olympics hit, Return To Innocence. Taking as her starting point the ripple effects of this case, Shzr Ee Tan explores the relationship of this song culture to contemporary Amis society. She presents Amis song in its multiple manifestations as an ecosystem, symbiotic components of which interact and feed back upon one another in cross-cutting platforms of village life, festival celebration, cultural performance, popular song, art music and Christian hymnody. Tan's investigation hinges upon drawing a conceptual line between ladhiw, the Amis term for 'song' - a word vested with connotations of life-force, tradition, ritual and taboo - and the foreign term of yinyue ('music' - borrowed from Mandarin). This difference forms the basis of how Amis song is (re)constructed through processes of modernization, Christianization and politico-economic change. A single Amis melody, for example, can exist in several guises that are contextually exclusive but functionally mutually-supportive. Thus, a weeding song (ladhiw), which may have lost its traditional context of existence following advancements in farming technology, becomes sustained within a larger ecosystem, finding new life on the interacting platforms of Amis Catholic hymnody, karaoke and tourist shows. The latter genres (collectively, yinyue) may not rely on traditional livelihoods for survival, but thrive on a traditional melody's deeper associations to local memory and idealized Amis identities. While these new and old genres are stylistically separate, they feed into each other and back into themselves - through transforming contexts and cross-referenced memes - in organic and developing cycles of song activity. Drawing from fieldwork conducted from 2000-2010 as well as a background in ethnomusicology and journalism, Tan paints a vivid picture of song culture as an ecosystem in the lives of Amis people.

Long an icon of American musical and political life, Pete Seeger has written eloquently in books and for magazines, activist movements, and union newsletters. Although he has never written an autobiography, his life story is nowhere more personally chronicled than in the private writings, documents, and letters stored for decades in his family barn. In "Pete Seeger in His Own Words," we hear directly from Seeger through the widest array of sources letters, notes to himself, published articles, rough drafts, stories, and poetry creating the most intimate picture yet available of Seeger as a musician, an activist, and a family man in his own words and from his own perspective. From letters to his mother written when he was a 13-year-old desiring his first banjo to speculations on the future, this book covers the passions, personalities, and experiences of a lifetime of struggle the pre-WWII labor movement, the Communist Party, Woody Guthrie, the blacklist, the Civil Rights movement, Martin Luther King, the struggle against the war in Vietnam, Bob Dylan, travels around the world, cleaning up the Hudson River, Granny D, Fidel Castro, Bill Clinton, and countless uncelebrated activists with whom Seeger has worked and sung. The portrait that emerges is not a saint, not a martyr, but a flesh-and-blood man, struggling to understand his gift, his time, and his place. Click Here to listen to Pete Seeger's interview on WNYC with Brian Lehrer "Hearing Pete Seeger," Alec Wilkinson's review for "The New Yorker" Culture Desk on Pete Seeger's latest event in Bryant Park. An article by the New Haven Register."

Bluegrass has found an unlikely home, and avid following, in the Czech Republic. The music's emergence in Central Europe places it within an increasingly global network of communities built around bluegrass activities. Lee Bidgood offers a fascinating study of the Czech bluegrass phenomenon that merges intimate immersion in the music with on-the-ground fieldwork informed by his life as a working musician. Drawing on his own close personal and professional interactions, Bidgood charts how Czech bluegrass put down roots and looks at its performance as a uniquely Czech musical practice. He also reflects on "Americanist" musical projects and the ways Czech musicians use them to construct personal and social identities. Bidgood sees these acts of construction as a response to the Czech Republic's postsocialist environment but also to US cultural prominence within our global mediascape.

Woodrow Wilson Guthrie (1912-67) has had an immense impact on popular culture throughout the world. His folk music brought traditional song from the rural communities of the American southwest to the urban American listener and, through the global influence of American culture, to listeners and musicians alike throughout Europe and the Americas. Similarly, his use of music as a medium of social and political protest has created a new strategy for campaigners in many countries. But Guthrie's music was only one aspect of his multifaceted life. His labour-union activism helped embolden the American working class, and united such distinct groups as the rural poor, the urban proletariat, merchant seamen and military draftees, contributing to the general call for workers' rights during the 1930s and 1940s. As well as penning hundreds of songs (both recorded and unrecorded), Guthrie was also a prolific writer of non-sung prose, writing regularly for the American communist press, producing volumes of autobiographical writings and writing hundreds of letters to family, friends and public figures. Furthermore, beyond music Guthrie also expressed his creative talents through his numerous pen-and-ink sketches, a number of paintings and occasional forays into poetry. This collection provides a rigorous examination of Guthrie's cultural significance and an evaluation of both his contemporary and posthumous impact on American culture and international folk-culture. The volume utilizes the rich resources presented by the Woody Guthrie Foundation.

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.

Bluegrass has found an unlikely home, and avid following, in the Czech Republic. The music's emergence in Central Europe places it within an increasingly global network of communities built around bluegrass activities. Lee Bidgood offers a fascinating study of the Czech bluegrass phenomenon that merges intimate immersion in the music with on-the-ground fieldwork informed by his life as a working musician. Drawing on his own close personal and professional interactions, Bidgood charts how Czech bluegrass put down roots and looks at its performance as a uniquely Czech musical practice. He also reflects on "Americanist" musical projects and the ways Czech musicians use them to construct personal and social identities. Bidgood sees these acts of construction as a response to the Czech Republic's postsocialist environment but also to US cultural prominence within our global mediascape.