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Books > Arts & Architecture > Music > Folk music
Both a deeply personal memoir and a glimpse into their socio- political activism, Every Day Is An Opening Night by Des and Dawn Lindberg documents the joys and challenges of a lifetime in South African theatre – as musicians, performers, song writers, stage designers, managers, impresarios and ultimately legends of the entertainment industry.
The book traces the duo’s 55-year career, from singing folk songs in the Troubadour coffee-bar in Johannesburg to taking their “Folk on Trek” shows on tour across South Africa and (then) Rhodesia, and producing and performing in major musicals all over southern Africa. Highlights of their story include their controversial multiracial production of Godspell, the duo’s legendary Sunday-night Soirées and the founding of the annual Naledi Theatre Awards, now in their 18th year.
Their story unfolds during a turbulent era in South Africa’s history: a time when local unrest, international opprobrium, sanctions and an intransigent government combined to create a challenging environment for artistes. Along the way, they worked with famous musicians, endured Special Branch attention, had their albums banned, won and lost court-cases… and quietly persevered, undaunted, as musical anti-apartheid activists.
Their friends and collaborators constitute a roll call of some of the best-loved personalities in the arts and show business, from Jeremy Taylor and Mark Banks to Johnny Clegg and John Kani, with appearances by the legendary Taubie Kushlick, Pieter-Dirk Uys, author Gordon Forbes, pianist Richard Clayderman and UK comedian Spike Milligan. The reminiscences are told with a light touch – sometimes poignant, frequently funny – and enhanced by a generous gallery of photographs.
While the original manuscript was completed before the tragic loss of Dawn in December 2020, the book now stands in honour of her life, telling the tale of two pioneers of South African entertainment in their own words. As Des writes in the coda: “If this book achieves nothing else, I am determined that it will help me to sign off on our story in a way that does justice to the extraordinary leader, wife, mother, partner and lover Dawn was. Our story is a joyful one, and we tell it together as a celebration of life.”
From the acclaimed, controversial singer-songwriter Sinéad O’Connor comes a revelatory memoir of her fraught childhood, musical triumphs, struggles with illness, and of the enduring power of song.
Blessed with a singular voice and a fiery temperament, Sinéad O’Connor rose to massive fame in the late 1980s and 1990s with a string of gold records. By the time she was twenty, she was world-famous—living a rock-star life out loud. From her trademark shaved head to her 1992 appearance on Saturday Night Live when she tore up Pope John Paul II’s photograph, Sinéad has fascinated and outraged millions.
In Rememberings, O’Connor recounts her painful tale of growing up in Dublin in a dysfunctional, abusive household. Inspired by a brother’s Bob Dylan records, she escaped into music. She relates her early forays with local Irish bands; we see Sinéad completing her first album while eight months pregnant, hanging with Rastas in the East Village, and soaring to unimaginable popularity with her cover of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U.”
Intimate, replete with candid anecdotes and told in a singular form true to her unconventional career, Sinéad’s memoir is a remarkable chronicle of an enduring and influential artist.
The aim of this study is to increase understanding of folk music
within an historical, European framework, and to show the genre as
a dynamic and changing art form. The book addresses a plethora of
questions through its detailed examination of a wide range of music
from vastly different national and cultural identities. It attempts
to elucidate the connections between, and the varying development
of, the music of peoples throughout Europe, firstly by examining
the ways in which scholars of different ideological and artistic
ambitions have collected, studied and performed folk music, then by
investigating the relationship between folk and popular music. Jan
Ling is Professor of Musicology at Goteborg University, Sweden.
Melodious panpipes and kena flutes. The shimmering strums of a
charango. Poncho-clad musicians playing "El Condor Pasa" at subway
stops or street corners while selling their recordings. These
sounds and images no doubt come to mind for many "world music" fans
when they recall their early encounters with Andean music groups.
Ensembles of this type - known as "Andean conjuntos" or "pan-Andean
bands" - have long formed part of the world music circuit in the
Global North. In the major cities of Latin America, too, Andean
conjuntos have been present in the local music scene for decades,
not only in Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador (i.e., in the Andean
countries), but also in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico. It
is solely in Bolivia, however, that the Andean conjunto has
represented the preeminent folkloric-popular music ensemble
configuration for interpreting national musical genres from the
late 1960s onward. Despite its frequent association with indigenous
villages, the music of Andean conjuntos bears little resemblance to
the indigenous musical expressions of the Southern Andes. Created
by urban criollo and mestizo folkloric artists, the Andean conjunto
tradition represents a form of mass-mediated folkloric music, one
that is only loosely based on indigenous musical practices.
Panpipes & Ponchos reveals that in the early-to-mid 20th
century, a diverse range of musicians and ensembles, including
estudiantinas, female vocal duos, bolero trios, art-classical
composers, and mestizo panpipe groups, laid the groundwork for the
Andean conjunto format to eventually take root in the Bolivian
folklore scene amid the boom decade of the 1960s. Author Fernando
Rios analyzes local musical trends in conjunction with government
initiatives in nation-building and the ideologies of indigenismo
and mestizaje. Beyond the local level, Rios also examines key
developments in Bolivian national musical practices through their
transnational links with trends in Peru, Argentina, Chile, Mexico,
and France. As the first book-length study that chronicles how
Bolivia's folkloric music movement articulated, on the one hand,
with Bolivian state projects, and on the other, with transnational
artistic currents, for the pivotal era spanning the 1920s to 1960s,
Panpipes & Ponchos offers new perspectives on the Andean
conjunto's emergence as Bolivia's favored ensemble line-up in the
field of national folkloric-popular music.
The ballad "John Henry" is the most recorded folk song in American
history and John Henry-the mighty railroad man who could blast
through rock faster than a steam drill-is a towering figure in our
culture. But for over a century, no one knew who the original John
Henry was-or even if there was a real John Henry. In Steel Drivin'
Man, Scott Reynolds Nelson recounts the true story of the man
behind the iconic American hero, telling the poignant tale of a
young Virginia convict who died working on one of the most
dangerous enterprises of the time, the first rail route through the
Appalachian Mountains. Using census data, penitentiary reports, and
railroad company reports, Nelson reveals how John Henry, victimized
by Virginia's notorious Black Codes, was shipped to the infamous
Richmond Penitentiary to become prisoner number 497, and was forced
to labor on the mile-long Lewis Tunnel for the C&O railroad.
Nelson even confirms the legendary contest between John Henry and
the steam drill (there was indeed a steam drill used to dig the
Lewis Tunnel and the convicts in fact drilled faster). Equally
important, Nelson masterfully captures the life of the ballad of
John Henry, tracing the song's evolution from the first printed
score by blues legend W. C. Handy, to Carl Sandburg's use of the
ballad to become the first "folk singer," to the upbeat version by
Tennessee Ernie Ford. We see how the American Communist Party
appropriated the image of John Henry as the idealized American
worker, and even how John Henry became the precursor of such comic
book super heroes as Superman or Captain America. Attractively
illustrated with numerous images, Steel Drivin' Man offers a
marvelous portrait of a beloved folk song-and a true American
legend.
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Joni
- The Anthology
(Paperback)
Barney Hoskyns; Introduction by Barney Hoskyns; Barney Hoskyns
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R425
R399
Discovery Miles 3 990
Save R26 (6%)
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Bob Dylan has constantly reinvented the persona known as "Bob
Dylan," renewing the performance possibilities inherent in his
songs, from acoustic folk, to electric rock and a late, hybrid
style which even hints at so-called world music and Latin American
tones. Then in 2016, his achievements outside of performance - as a
songwriter - were acknowledged when he was awarded the Nobel
Literature Prize. Dylan has never ceased to broaden the range of
his creative identity, taking in painting, film, acting and prose
writing, as well as advertising and even own-brand commercial
production. The book highlights how Dylan has brought his
persona(e) to different art forms and cultural arenas, and how they
in turn have also created these personae. This volume consists of
multidisciplinary essays written by cultural historians,
musicologists, literary academics and film experts, including
contributions by critics Christopher Ricks and Nina Goss. Together,
the essays reveal Dylan's continuing artistic development and
self-fashioning, as well as the making of a certain legitimized
Dylan through critical and public recognition in the new
millennium.
THE INSPIRATION FOR THE MAJOR MOTION PICTURE A COMPLETE UNKNOWN. One of
the music world’s pre-eminent critics takes a fresh and much-needed
look at the day Dylan “went electric” at the Newport Folk Festival.
On the evening of July 25, 1965, Bob Dylan took the stage at Newport
Folk Festival, backed by an electric band, and roared into his new rock
hit, Like a Rolling Stone. The audience of committed folk purists and
political activists who had hailed him as their acoustic prophet
reacted with a mix of shock, booing, and scattered cheers. It was the
shot heard round the world—Dylan’s declaration of musical independence,
the end of the folk revival, and the birth of rock as the voice of a
generation—and one of the defining moments in twentieth-century music.
In Dylan Goes Electric!, Elijah Wald explores the cultural, political
and historical context of this seminal event that embodies the
transformative decade that was the sixties. Wald delves deep into the
folk revival, the rise of rock, and the tensions between traditional
and groundbreaking music to provide new insights into Dylan’s artistic
evolution, his special affinity to blues, his complex relationship to
the folk establishment and his sometime mentor Pete Seeger, and the
ways he reshaped popular music forever. Breaking new ground on a story
we think we know, Dylan Goes Electric! is a thoughtful, sharp appraisal
of the controversial event at Newport and a nuanced, provocative,
analysis of why it matters.
New perspectives on Anglo-Jewish history via the poetry and song of
Yiddish-speaking immigrants in London from 1884 to 1914. Archive
material from the London Yiddish press, songbooks, and satirical
writing offers a window into an untold cultural life of the Yiddish
East End. Whitechapel Noise: Jewish Immigrant Life in Yiddish Song
and Verse, London 1884-1914 by Vivi Lachs positions London's
Yiddish popular culture in historical perspective within
Anglo-Jewish history, English socialist aesthetics, and music-hall
culture, and shows its relationship to the transnational
Yiddish-speaking world. Layers of cultural references in the
Yiddish texts are closely analysed and quoted to draw out the
complex yet intimate histories they contain, offering new
perspectives on Anglo-Jewish historiography in three main areas:
politics, sex, and religion. The acculturation of Jewish immigrants
to English life is an important part of the development of their
social culture, as well as to the history of London. In the first
part of the book, Lachs presents an overview of daily immigrant
life in London, its relationship to the Anglo-Jewish establishment,
and the development of a popular Yiddish theatre and press,
establishing a context from which these popular texts came. The
author then analyzes the poems and songs, revealing the hidden
social histories of the people writing and performing them. Lachs
also explores how themes of marriage, relationships, and sexual
exploitation appear regularly in music-hall songs, alluding to the
changing nature of sexual roles in the immigrant London community
influenced by the cultural mores of their new location. In the
theme of religion, Lachs examines how ideas from Jewish texts and
practice were used and manipulated by the socialist poets to
advance ideas about class, equality, and revolution; and satirical
writings offer glimpses into how the practice of religion and
growing secularization was changing immigrants' daily lives in the
encounter with modernity. The detailed and nuanced analysis found
in Whitechapel Noise offers a new reading of Anglo-Jewish, London,
and immigrant history. It is a must-read for Jewish and
Anglo-Jewish historians and those interested in Yiddish, London,
and migration studies.
For fifty years, music fans, hippies, artists, and songwriters have
converged each spring on Quiet Valley Ranch in the Texas Hill
Country. They are drawn by the thousands to the annual Kerrville
Folk Festival, a weeks-long gathering of musical greats and
ordinary people living in an intentional community marked by
radical acceptance and the love of song. At the festival, David
Johnson is known as Photo Dave, the guy who lugs around a
large-format camera and captures the moments that make Kerrville
special. It Can Be This Way Always collects eighty images from the
past decade. Portraits of attendees and volunteers accompany scenes
of stage performances, campfire jam sessions, and vans repurposed
into coffee stands. In these images we see the temporary, makeshift
world that festivalgoers create, a place where eccentricities are
the norm and music is the foundation of friendship and unity. "It
can be this way always" is a popular saying at Kerrville:
simultaneously optimistic and wistful like a good folk song-or a
photograph from your best life.
Timothy E. Wise presents the first book to focus specifically on
the musical content of yodeling in our culture. He shows that
yodeling serves an aesthetic function in musical texts. A series of
chronological chapters analyzes this musical tradition from its
earliest appearances in Europe to its incorporation into a range of
American genres and beyond. Wise posits the reasons for yodeling's
changing status in our music. How and why was yodeling introduced
into professional music making in the first place? What purposes
has it served in musical texts? Why was it expunged from classical
music? Why did it attach to some popular music genres and not
others? Why does yodeling now appear principally at the margins of
mainstream tastes? To answer such questions, Wise applies the
perspectives of critical musicology, semiotics, and cultural
studies to the changing semantic associations of yodeling in an
unexplored repertoire stretching from Beethoven to Zappa. This
volume marks the first musicological and ideological analysis of
this prominent but largely ignored feature of American musical
life. Maintaining high scholarly standards but keeping the general
reader in mind, the author examines yodeling in relation to ongoing
cultural debates about singing, music as art, social class, and
gender. Chapters devote attention to yodeling in nineteenth-century
classical music, the nineteenth-century Alpine-themed song in
America, the Americanization of the yodel, Jimmie Rodgers, and
cowboy yodeling, among other topics.
From her unique standpoint as singer-songwriter-scholar, Polly
Paulusma examines the influences of Carter's 1960s folk singing,
unknown until now, on her prose writing. Recent critical attention
has focused on Carter's relationship with folk/fairy tales, but
this book uses a newly available archive containing Carter's folk
song notes, books, LPs and recordings to change the debate, proving
Carter performed folk songs. Placing this archive alongside the
album sleeve notes Carter wrote and her diaries and essays, it
reimagines Carter's prose as a vehicle for the singing voice, and
reveals a writing style imbued with 'songfulness' informed by her
singing praxis. Reading Carter's texts through songs she knew and
sang, this book shows, from influences of rhythm, melodic shape,
thematic focus, imagery, 'voice' and 'breath', how Carter steeped
her writing with folk song's features to produce 'canorography':
song-infused prose. Concluding with a discussion of Carter's
profound influence on songwriters, focusing on the author's
interview with Emily Portman, this book invites us to reimagine
Carter's prose as audial event, dissolving boundaries between prose
and song, between text and reader, between word and sound, in an
ever-renewing act of sympathetic resonance.
Jolly Sailors Bold: Ballads and Songs of the American Sailor is a
major anthology of folk songs and parlor songs excavated from
nine-teenth-century sailors' shipboard journals. The
author-editor-compiler is Stuart M. Frank, senior curator of the
world-famous New Bedford Whaling Museum, executive director
emeritus of the Kendall Whaling Museum, and renowned authority on
sailor songs and shipboard music. The product of more than thirty
years of research, this book features authentic historic renditions
of more than two hundred songs, with texts recovered unchanged from
historic nineteenth-century shipboard manuscripts, here reunited
with their original melodies.
Just as American culture has been constructed by people of many
ethnicities, roots music in America is multicultural in nature.
Native American music resonates from Indigenous traditions of the
Great Plains and the American West. Hispanic culture has spawned
Border Music styles such as Conjunto and Tejano, while Cajun and
Zydeco grew from cultural cross-pollination in the American South.
In northern regions, Polish-American musicians popularized Polka,
while Irish-American music holds a rich tradition throughout many
regions in the East. This unique volume presents influential
musical cultures from throughout the multicultural history of
American vernacular song. Series blurb: This series presents five
volumes on genres of music that have evolved in distinctly regional
styles throughout the nation. With volumes authored by leading
music scholars, the series traces the growth of Blues, Country,
Folk, and Jazz in their many regional variations, as well as Ethnic
and Border music traditions throughout America. Each volume
presents an accessible analysis of the genre in its many regional
forms, examining the musical elements and, when applicable, lyrical
subjects as tied to specific cultures throughout the United States.
The series features: BLTraditional music placed within regional
perspectives BLThe study of music shown to illustrate cultural
nuances BLMusical elements explained in accessible language for the
lay reader BLGlossaries of important biographical and topical
entries related to the genres.
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