Selling Folk Music: An Illustrated History highlights commercial sources that reveal how folk music has been packaged and sold to a broad, shifting audience in the United States. Folk music has a varied and complex scope and lineage, including the blues, minstrel tunes, Victorian parlor songs, spirituals and gospel tunes, country and western songs, sea shanties, labor and political songs, calypsos, pop folk, folk-rock, ethnic, bluegrass, and more. The genre is of major importance in the broader spectrum of American music, and it is easy to understand why folk music has been marketed as America's music. Selling Folk Music presents the public face of folk music in the United States via its commercial promotion and presentation throughout the twentieth century. Included are concert flyers; sheet music; book, songbook, magazine, and album covers; concert posters and flyers; and movie lobby cards and posters, all in their original colors. The 1964 hootenanny craze, for example, spawned such items as a candy bar, pinball machine, bath powder, paper dolls, Halloween costumes, and beach towels. The almost five hundred images in Selling Folk Music present a new way to catalog the history of folk music while highlighting the transformative nature of the genre. Following the detailed introduction on the history of folk music, illustrations from commercial products make up the bulk of the work, presenting a colorful, complex history.

On any weekend in Texas, Czech polka music enlivens dance halls and drinking establishments as well as outdoor church picnics and festivals. The songs heard at these venues are the living music of an ethnic community created by immigrants who started arriving in Central Texas in the mid-nineteenth century from what is now the Czech Republic. Today, the members of this community speak English but their songs are still sung in Czech. Czech Songs in Texas includes sixty-one songs, mostly polkas and waltzes. The songs themselves are beloved heirlooms ranging from ceremonial music with origins in Moravian wedding traditions to exuberant polkas celebrating the pleasures of life. For each song, the book provides music notation, and the Czech lyrics are set side-by-side with English translation. Then, an essay explores the song's European roots, its American evolution, and the meaning of its lyrics and lists notable performances and recordings. In addition to the songs and essays, Frances Barton provides a chapter on the role of music in the Texas Czech ethnic community, and John K. Novok surveys Czech folk and popular music in its European home. The book both documents a specific musical inheritance and serves as a handbook for learning about a culture through its songs. As folklorist and polka historian James P. Leary writes in his foreword, "Barton and Novak take us on a poetic, historical, and ethnographic excursion deep into a community's expressive heartland. Their Czech Songs in Texas just might be the finest extant annotated anthology of any American immigrant/ethnic group's regional song tradition.

Longlisted for the Penderyn Music Book Prize England was once dubbed 'the land without music', but in the early twentieth century collectors and enthusiasts such as Cecil Sharp, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Percy Grainger discovered a vital heritage of folk song, vibrant and alive among working men and women. Yet after more than a century of collecting, publishing and performing songs, there are still many things we don't know about England's traditional music. Where did the songs come from? Who sang them, and where, when and why? Why did some songs thrive, and did the collectors' passions and prejudices determine what was preserved, and what was lost? In answer to these questions, acclaimed folklorist Steve Roud has drawn on an unprecedented range of sources to present an intricate social history of folk song through the ages, from the sixteenth to the early twentieth century. It is an absorbing and impeccably researched account that gives a sonorous voice to England's past.

The English folk revival cannot be understood when divorced from the history of post-war England, yet the existing scholarship fails to fully engage with its role in the social and political fabric of the nation. Postwar Politics, Society and the Folk Revival in England is the first study to interweave the story of a gentrifying folk revival with the socio-political tensions inherent in England's postwar transition from austerity to affluence. Julia Mitchell skillfully situates the English folk revival in the context of the rise of the new left, the decline of heavy industry, the rise of local, regional and national identities, the 'Americanisation' of English culture and the development of mass culture. In doing so, she demonstrates that the success of the English folk revival derived from its sense of authenticity and its engagement with topical social and political issues, such as the conflicted legacy of the Welfare State, the fight for nuclear disarmament and the fallout of nationalization. In addition, she shrewdly compares the US and British revival to identify the links but also what was distinctive about the movement in Britain. Drawing on primary sources from folk archives, the BBC, the music press and interviews with participants, this is a theoretically engaged and sophisticated analysis of how postwar culture shaped the folk revival in England.

Between 1959 and 1968, New England saw a folk revival emerge in more than fifty clubs and coffeehouses, a revolution led by college dropouts, young bohemians, and lovers of traditional music that renewed the work of the region's intellectuals and reformers. From Club 47 in Harvard Square to candlelit venues in Ipswich, Martha's Vineyard, and Amherst, budding musicians and hopeful audiences alike embraced folk music, progressive ideals, and community as alternatives to an increasingly toxic consumer culture. While the Boston-Cambridge Folk Revival was short-lived, the youthful attention that it spurred played a crucial role in the civil rights, world peace, and back-to-the-land movements emerging across the country. Fueled by interviews with key players from the folk music scene, I Believe I'll Go Back Home traces a direct line from Yankee revolutionaries, up-country dancers, and nineteenth-century pacifists to the emergence of blues and rock 'n' roll, ultimately landing at the period of the folk revival. Thomas S. Curren presents the richness and diversity of the New England folk tradition, which continues to provide perspective, inspiration, and healing in the present day.

Erin Osmon presents a detailed, human account of the Rust Belt-born musician Jason Molina-a visionary, prolific, and at times cantankerous singer-songwriter with an autodidactic style that captivated his devoted fans. The songwriting giant behind the bands Songs: Ohia and Magnolia Electric Co. had a knack for spinning tales, from the many personal myths he cultivated throughout his life to the poems and ballads he penned and performed. As with too many great musicians, Molina's complicated relationship with the truth, combined with a secretive relationship with the bottle, ultimately claimed his life. With a new foreword from singer-songwriter Will Johnson, Jason Molina: Riding with the Ghost details Molina's personal trials and triumphs and reveals for the first time the true story of Molina's last months and works, including an unpublished album unknown to many of his fans. Offering unfettered access to the mind and artistry of Molina through exclusive interviews with family, friends, and collaborators, the book also explores the Midwest music underground and the development of Bloomington, Indiana-based label Secretly Canadian. As the first authorized and detailed account of this prolific songwriter and self-mythologizer, Jason Molina provides readers with unparalleled insight into Molina's tormented life and the fascinating Midwest musical underground that birthed him. It's a story for the ages that speaks volumes to the triumphs and trials of the artistic spirit while exploring the meaningful music that Molina's creative genius left behind.