The last century has seen radical social changes in Ireland, which have impacted all aspects of local life but none more so than traditional Irish music, an increasingly important identity marker both in Ireland and abroad. The author focuses on a small village in County Clare, which became a kind of pilgrimage site for those interested in experiencing traditional music. He begins by tracing its historical development from the days prior to the influx of visitors, through a period called "the Revival," in which traditional Irish music was revitalized and transformed, to the modern period, which is dominated by tourism. A large number of incomers, locally known as "blow-ins," have moved to the area, and the traditional Irish music is now largely performed and passed on by them. This fine-grained ethnographic study explores the commercialization of music and culture, the touristic consolidation and consumption of "place," and offers a critique of the trope of "authenticity," all in a setting of dramatic social change in which the movement of people is constant.

For years, Todd Snider has been one of the most beloved country-folk singers in the United States, compared to Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, John Prine, and dozens of others. He's become not only a new-century Dylan but a modern-day Will Rogers, an everyman whose intelligence, self-deprecation, experience, and sense of humor make him a uniquely American character. In live performance, Snider's monologues are cheered as much as his songs. But never before has he told the whole story. Running the gamut from personal memoir to shaggy-dog comedy to rueful memories of his troubles and triumphs with drugs and alcohol to sharp-eyed observations from years on the road, "I Never Met a Story I Didn't Like" is for fans of Snider's music, but also for fans of America itself: the broad, wild country that has produced figures of folk wisdom like Will Rogers, Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Tonya Harding, Garrison Keillor, and more. There are storytellers and there are performers and there are stand-up comedians. And then there's Todd Snider, who is all three in one, and something else entirely.

This new edition of "Journeyman," Ewan MacColl's vivid and entertaining autobiography, has been re-edited from the original manuscript, and includes a new introduction by Peggy Seeger, for whom he wrote the unforgettable "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face." MacColl, a singer, songwriter, actor, playwright and broadcaster, begins this fascinating account with his working class Salford childhood, traces the founding and life of Theatre Workshop, one of Britain's most innovative theatre companies, then moves on to his work with folksingers, the Radio Ballads and his ascent into old age. Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger were among the main leaders of the UK folksong revival. "Journeyman" documents their struggle to secure the integrity of that revival as the popular media appropriated and re-created traditional music for commercial gain. An entertaining and thought-provoking slice of British history, it will appeal to those interested in the histories of folk music, theatre, radio, left-wing politics and the Manchester area.

Identifying the roots of African American spirituals and other religious folk music has intrigued academics, hymnologists and song leaders since this genre came to the public eye in 1867. The conversation on origins has waned and waxed for over eighty years, sometimes polemical, sometimes compromising. They Bear Acquaintance looks at this discussion through the output of various well-regarded researchers from the twentieth century. The effects of cultural distinctions, immigration patterns and class structure have all left their imprint on the anatomy of the music. No one living has ever heard a spiritual performed in an authentic setting, so misconceptions abound. Pre-dating the American Civil War and achieving global attention in the Civil Rights movement, the spirituals soften the edges of difficult situations, and speak gently, yet poignantly, to human struggles. The book also pinpoints new material from a wide range of sources in the twenty-first century that will preserve and affirm this music for many years to come.

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

This new edition of "Journeyman," Ewan MacColl's vivid and entertaining autobiography, has been re-edited from the original manuscript, and includes a new introduction by Peggy Seeger, for whom he wrote the unforgettable "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face." MacColl, a singer, songwriter, actor, playwright and broadcaster, begins this fascinating account with his working class Salford childhood, traces the founding and life of Theatre Workshop, one of Britain's most innovative theatre companies, then moves on to his work with folksingers, the Radio Ballads and his ascent into old age. Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger were among the main leaders of the UK folksong revival. "Journeyman" documents their struggle to secure the integrity of that revival as the popular media appropriated and re-created traditional music for commercial gain. An entertaining and thought-provoking slice of British history, it will appeal to those interested in the histories of folk music, theatre, radio, left-wing politics and the Manchester area.

With Bob Dylan's receipt of the Nobel Prize in Literature, his iconic status as an American musical, cultural, and poetic giant has never been more apparent. Bob Dylan: American Troubadour is the first book to look at Dylan's career, from his first album to his late masterpiece Tempest. Donald Brown provides insightful critical commentary on Dylan's prolific body of work, placing Dylan's career in the context of its time in order to assess the relationship of Dylan's music to contemporary American culture. Each chapter follows the shifting versions of Dylan, from his songs of conscientious social involvement to more personal exploratory songs; from his influential rock albums of the mid-1960s to his adaptations of country music; from his three very different tours in the 1970s to his "born again" period as a proselytizer for Christ and his frustrations as a recording and performing artist in the 1980s; from his retrospective importance in the 1990s to the refreshingly vital albums he has been producing in the twenty-first century. Bob Dylan: American Troubadour will engage not only Dylan fans and students of his work but also those interested in American popular music, history, and culture. Anyone who has been touched, challenged, or surprised by a Dylan song will enjoy this concise and informed critical exploration of Dylan's music and his place in the American musical landscape.

Released in 1952, The Anthology of American Folk Music was the singular vision of the enigmatic artist, musicologist, and collector Harry Smith (1923-1991). A collection of eighty-four commercial recordings of American vernacular and folk music originally issued between 1927 and 1932, the Anthology featured an eclectic and idiosyncratic mixture of blues and hillbilly songs, ballads old and new, dance music, gospel, and numerous other performances less easy to classify. Where previous collections of folk music, both printed and recorded, had privileged field recordings and oral transmission, Smith purposefully shaped his collection from previously released commercial records, pointedly blurring established racial boundaries in his selection and organisation of performances. Indeed, more than just a ground-breaking collection of old recordings, the Anthology was itself a kind of performance on the part of its creator. Over the six decades of its existence, however, it has continued to exert considerable influence on generations of musicians, artists, and writers. It has been credited with inspiring the North American folk revival-"The Anthology was our bible", asserted Dave Van Ronk in 1991, "We all knew every word of every song on it"-and with profoundly influencing Bob Dylan. After its 1997 release on CD by Smithsonian Folkways, it came to be closely associated with the so-called Americana and Alt-Country movements of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Following its sixtieth birthday, and now available as a digital download and rereleased on vinyl, it is once again a prominent icon in numerous musical currents and popular culture more generally. This is the first book devoted to such a vital piece of the large and complex story of American music and its enduring value in American life. Reflecting the intrinsic interdisciplinarity of Smith's original project, this collection contains a variety of new perspectives on all aspects of the Anthology.

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

This edited volume examines manele (sing. manea), an urban Romanian song-dance ethnopop genre that combines local traditional and popular music with Balkan and Middle Eastern elements. The genre is performed primarily by male Romani musicians at weddings and clubs and appeals especially to Romanian and Romani youth. It became immensely popular after the collapse of communism, representing for many the newly liberated social conditions of the post-1989 world. But manele have also engendered much controversy among the educated and professional elite, who view the genre as vulgar and even "alien" to the Romanian national character. The essays collected here examine the "manea phenomenon" as a vibrant form of cultural expression that engages in several levels of social meaning, all informed by historical conditions, politics, aesthetics, tradition, ethnicity, gender, class, and geography.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Using interviews with world-renowned and innovative hip-hop DJs, as well as technology manufacturers that cater to the market/culture, this book reveals stories behind some of the iconic DJ technologies that have helped shape the history and culture of DJing. More importantly, it explores how DJs have impacted the evolution of technology. By looking at the networks of innovation behind DJ technologies, this book problematizes the notion of the individual genius and the concept of invention. Developing a theory of "technocultural synergism," this book attempts to detail the relationship between culture and industry through the manipulation, exchange, and rights associated with intellectual property. While the subject of hip-hop and intellectual property has already been well explored, this is the first time that hip-hop DJs have been conceptualized as intellectual property because of their role in the R&D and branding of DJ products. The book also addresses the impact of digital technology on the democratization of DJ culture, as well as how new digital DJ technology has affected the recorded music market.

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

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

The book shows the importance for parents to encourage a child's imagination. Imagination has a strong connection to language and logical thinking for a child in learning and it promotes their sociability where children are led to success. Presenting a Japanese-Austrian music-project that took place in Utsunomiya (Japan), the study offers a new view on children's imagination, their different family cultures and the role of parents in raising successful children.

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

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

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

This book offers an overview of issues related to the regulated, formal organization of sound and speech in verse intended for singing. Particularly, it is concerned with the structural properties and underlying mechanisms involved in the association of lyrics and music. While in spoken verse the underlying metrical scheme is grounded in the prosody of the language in which it is composed, in sung verse the structure is created by the mapping of specific prosodic units of the text (syllables, moras, tones, etc.) onto the rhythmic-melodic structure provided by the tune. Studying how this mapping procedure takes place across different musical genres and styles is valuable for what it can add to our knowledge of language and music in general, and also for what it can teach us about individual languages and poetic traditions. In terms of empirical coverage, the collection includes a wide variety of (Western) languages and metrical/musical forms, ranging from the Latin hexameter to the Norwegian stev, from the French chant courtois to the Sardinian mutetu longu. Readers interested in formal analyses of vocal music, or in metrics and linguistics, will find useful insights here.

Research on translation and music has so far focused mainly on "art music" and on issues such as quality, singability and accessibility. Studies which seek to embed translation and music within their historical and sociocultural contexts are relatively rare. This book aims to shed light on how translations of popular music contribute to fostering international relations by focusing on a case study of Turkish-Greek rapprochement in the last two decades. It provides a brief account of the thaw in relations between the two countries and then examines the ways in which translation and music have played a role in these changes. By looking at the phenomenon through the music's various forms of materiality (on paper, in audio and through the internet) and the different forms the accompanying translations take, and by drawing on a range of disciplines (popular music studies, sociology of music, ethnomusicology, social anthropology, comparative literature and fan studies), the book aims to foreground the multifaceted nature of translation and music and their wide-ranging impact on society and international relations.

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

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