The remarkable story of how modern Irish music was shaped and spread through the brash efforts of a Chicago police chief. Irish music as we know it today was invented not only in the cobbled lanes of Dublin or the green fields of County Kerry but in the burgeoning American metropolis of early-twentieth-century Chicago. The boundaries of the genre combine a long vernacular tradition with one man's curatorial quirks. That man was Francis O'Neill: a larger-than-life Chicago police chief, and an Irish immigrant with an intense interest in his home country's music. Michael O'Malley's The Beat Cop tells the story of this hardly unknown yet little-investigated figure, from his birth in Ireland in 1865 to a rough-and-tumble early life in the United States. By 1901, O'Neill had worked his way up to become Chicago's chief of police, where he developed new methods of tracking people and recording their identities. At the same, he also obsessively tracked and recorded the music he heard from local Irish immigrants, favoring specific rural forms and enforcing a strict view of what he felt was and wasn't authentic. His police work and his musical work were flip sides of the same coin: as a music collector, O'Neill tracked down fugitive tunes, established their backstories, and formally organized them by type. O'Malley delves deep into how O'Neill harnessed his policing skills and connections to publish classic songbooks still widely used today, becoming the foremost shaper of how Americans see, and hear, the music of Ireland.

Shortly before his death, the Devonshire-born cleric, writer and antiquarian, Sabine Baring-Gould (1834-1924) wrote: 'To this day I consider that the recovery of our West Country melodies has been the principal achievement of my life.' Though there have been a number of biographies of this Victorian polymath, none has looked in detail at his role as a leading figure in the English folk song. Most of Baring-Gould's childhood was spent travelling in Europe with his family. Away from the influences of a conventional education he explored the mythology, romances and folklore of northern Europe and took particular delight in the Icelandic sagas. He entered the church at the age of thirty and became a curate in Yorkshire where he accumulated folk tales, riddles and the first of the thousands of traditional songs he collected during his long life. He inherited the Lew Trenchard estate in Devon to become both squire and parson of this little parish. It was in 1888 that a chance remark at dinner prompted his hunt for old songs in the area around his home. From Lew Trenchard he travelled around Devon and Cornwall to meet the singers in their pubs and their cottages and to coax them to part with their old songs. He used his celebrity status as a leading novelist and writer to bring the folk songs of the West Country to a wider audience through his publications, lectures, costume concerts and the first folk opera, Red Spider, based on one of his novels and on songs he had heard. The books of songs that he published have been criticised for the way in which he edited them for publication, striking out coarse material or rewriting songs but, in doing so, he was acknowledging the limits and demands of public taste of his time. Martin Graebe has been fascinated by Baring-Gould for many years, but the re-discovery of a large quantity of his personal papers in 1992 propelled him towards a re-evaluation of Baring-Gould's work on folk song. What he has uncovered is a fascinating collaborative project between Baring-Gould and the musicians, singers and ordinary members of the public in Devon and Cornwall. He also looks at his relationships with other folk song collectors such as Lucy Broadwood, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Cecil Sharp. This book will be of interest, not just to enthusiasts for English folk song, but also to those who wish to know more about their place in the lives of the ordinary people of the late nineteenth century.

A series of little books of short carefully graded folk tunes beginning with the simplest passages and progressing to more difficult leaps, rhythms, chromatics, and modulations. The later books introduce two-part sight singing.

This is a vivid introduction, by two of the foremost scholars in the field, to one of the most fascinating and little-known song traditions in Europe, the Breton gwerz, or ballad. These narrative songs, collected in Western Brittany from the 19th century to the present day, recount a wealth of stories based on tragic local events or legends. They tell of shipwrecks, abductions, accidents and murders, miraculous rescues, penitent souls, and strange journeys. Quite unlike songs from the neighbouring French tradition, and distinct from anything else in the other Celtic languages, these ballads unfold in clear, spare verses, filled with striking imagery: they are often highly dramatic in nature. Historians of popular culture will find much to explore here, as will medievalists interested in tracing themes and legends across different European cultures, or linguists looking for rare material in Breton. But the gwerziou speak to readers and listeners of all kinds, with stories of violence, love, and grief that touch us directly today. This generous selection of songs is presented here for the first time in the original Breton with English translations and musical notation; an accompanying CD showcases some of the most famous Breton traditional singers. A comprehensive introductory essay offers insights into the history of ballad collection in Brittany, the nature of the songs, and the contexts in which they have been performed.

A patriot and a political radical, Woody Guthrie captured the spirit of his times in his enduring songs. He was marked by the FBI as a subversive. He lived in fear of the fatal fires that stalked his family and of the mental illness that snared his mother. At forty-two, he was cruelly silenced by Huntington's disease. Ed Cray, the first biographer to be granted access to the Woody Guthrie Archive, has created a haunting portrait of an American who profoundly influenced Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and American popular music itself.

Dolly Parton's success as a performer and pop culture phenomenon has overshadowed her achievements as a songwriter. But she sees herself as a songwriter first, and with good reason. Parton's compositions like "I Will Always Love You" and "Jolene" have become American standards with an impact far beyond country music. Lydia R. Hamessley's expert analysis and Parton's characteristically straightforward input inform this comprehensive look at the process, influences, and themes that have shaped the superstar's songwriting artistry. Hamessley reveals how Parton's loving, hardscrabble childhood in the Smoky Mountains provided the musical language, rhythms, and memories of old-time music that resonate in so many of her songs. Hamessley further provides an understanding of how Parton combines her cultural and musical heritage with an artisan's sense of craft and design to compose eloquent, painfully honest, and gripping songs about women's lives, poverty, heartbreak, inspiration, and love. Filled with insights on hit songs and less familiar gems, Unlikely Angel covers the full arc of Dolly Parton's career and offers an unprecedented look at the creative force behind the image.

While Fernando Ortiz's contribution to our understanding of Cuba and Latin America more generally has been widely recognized since the 1940s, recently there has been renewed interest in this scholar and activist who made lasting contributions to a staggering array of fields. This book is the first work in English to reassess Ortiz's vast intellectual universe. Essays in this volume analyze and celebrate his contribution to scholarship in Cuban history, the social sciences notably anthropology and law, religion and national identity, literature, and music. Presenting Ortiz's seminal thinking, including his profoundly influential concept of 'transculturation', Cuban Counterpoints explores the bold new perspectives that he brought to bear on Cuban society. Much of his most challenging and provocative thinking which embraced simultaneity, conflict, inherent contradiction and hybridity has remarkable relevance for current debates about Latin America's complex and evolving societies."

The Songs of Septimus Winner is a testament to a man with an extraordinarily unusual career in music. Most modern-day readers may have never heard of Septimus Winner or Alice Hawthorne. But the music they created is now part of the pantheon of what we might now term "America's folk songs". Most Americans might remember songs such as "Ten Little Indians" or "Der Deitscher?s Dog" from their childhood just as they may know "Jimmy Crack Corn" or "Oh, Susannah!" but few know the men and women who wrote these songs or their significance to generations of nineteenth-century Americans. Septimus Winner (1827?1902) is one of these forefathers of American popular song. His musical contributions are significant: well over 300 popular songs, over 2000 arrangements of both his own and others' music, and an astounding array of pedagogical books. Culled from the original sheet music publications and presented unedited, this volume explores twenty-two of Winner's best loved songs including "Ten Little Injuns," "Whispering Hope," "Listen to the Mocking Bird," "The Deitscher's Dog" and "Give Us Back Our Old Commander."

David Schiller's study of the Jewish music of Bloch, Schoenberg, and Bernstein reveals how, in the mid-twentieth century, the problem of assimilation was acutely felt as the unfinished business of European Jewry, at a time when American Jewry was creating its own distinctive culture (albeit with European roots). He shows how the business of 'assimilating Jewish music' is as much a process audiences themselves engage in when they listen to Jewish music as it is something critics and musicologists do when they write about it. He reveals how this process of assimilation is performed by the music itself - that Jewish music assimilates into the Western tradition of art music when it appears in the form of concert genres like the oratorio, cantata, and symphony. This incisive study sheds new light on an important aspect of the cultural and aesthetic achievements of these seminal Jewish composers.

When 20-year-old Odetta Holmes-classically trained as a vocalist and poised to become "the next Marian Anderson"-veered away from both opera and musical theater in favor of performing politically charged field hollers, prison songs, work songs, and folk tunes before mixed-race audiences in 1950s coffee houses, she was making one of the most portentous decisions in the history of both American music and Civil Rights. Released the same year as her famous rendition of "I'm on My Way" at the March on Washington, One Grain of Sand captures the social justice project that was Odetta's voice. "There was no way I could say the things I was thinking, but I could sing them," she later remarked. In pieces like "Moses, Moses," "Ain't No Grave," and "Ramblin' Round Your City," One Grain of Sand embodies Odetta's approach to the folk repertoire as both an archive of black history and a vehicle for radical expression. For many among her audience, a song like "Cotton Fields" represented a first introduction to black history at a time when there was as yet no academic discipline going by this name, and when history books themselves still peddled convenient fictions of a fundamentally "happy" plantation past. And for many among her audience, black and white, this young woman's pride in black artistry and resolve, and her open rage and her challenge to whites to recognize who they were and who they had been, too, modeled the very honesty and courage that the movement now called for.

This step-by-step instruction book explains everything required to master the basics of tin whistle playing. This easy, straightforward approach to playing the penny whistle has countless diagrams and symbols and comes complete with a wide selection of simple tunes and traditional songs from around the globe. Contents: A Bunch of Thyme * A Donegal Mazurka * An Buachaill Caol Dubh * Andersons * Blind Mary * Come Back Paddy Reilly * Going to the Well for Water * Im Bim Babaro * Kathleen Hehir * Munster Buttermilk * Pilib an Cheoil * Saratoga Hornpipe * Still I Love Him * Sweeney's Dream * The Bag of Spuds * The Bantry Girls' Lament * The Blacksmith's Reel * The Boy in the Boat * The Boy in the Gap * The Cliffs of Dooneen * The Derry Air * The Old Shandy Bohereen * The Poor Irish Boy * The Star of the County Down * The Three Sea Captains * The Versevienna * The Wet December.

Bold and original, The Power of Black Music offers a new way of listening to the music of black America, and appreciating its profound contribution to all American music.

Country Music: A Very Short Introduction presents a compelling overview of the music and its impact on American culture. Country music has long been a marker of American identity; from our popular culture to our politics, it has provided a soundtrack to our national life. While traditionally associated with the working class, country's appeal is far broader than any other popular music style. While this music rose from the people, it is also a product of the popular music industry, and the way the music has been marketed to its audience is a key part of its story. Key artists, songs, and musical styles are highlighted that are either touchstones for a particular social event (such as Tammy Wynette's "Stand By Your Man," which produced both a positive and negative backlash as a marker of women's roles in society at the beginning of the liberation movement) or that encompass broader trends in the industry (for example, Jimmie Rodgers' "T for Texas" was an early example of the appropriation of black musical forms by white artists to market them to a mainstream audience). While pursuing a basically chronological outline, the book is structured around certain recurring themes (such as rural vs. urban; tradition vs. innovation; male vs. female; white vs. black) that have been documented through the work of country artists from the minstrel era to today. Truly the voice of the people, country music expresses both deep patriotism as well as a healthy skepticism towards the powers that dominate American society. Country Music: A Very Short Introduction illuminates this rich tradition and assesses its legacy in American popular music culture.

A traveling salesman with little formal education, Max Hunter gravitated to song catching and ballad hunting while on business trips in the Ozarks. Hunter recorded nearly 1600 traditional songs by more than 200 singers from the mid-1950s through the mid-1970s, all the while focused on preserving the music in its unaltered form. Sarah Jane Nelson chronicles Hunter's song collecting adventures alongside portraits of the singers and mentors he met along the way. The guitar-strumming Hunter picked up the recording habit to expand his repertoire but almost immediately embraced the role of song preservationist. Being a local allowed Hunter to merge his native Ozark earthiness with sharp observational skills to connect--often more than once--with his singers. Hunter's own ability to be present added to that sense of connection. Despite his painstaking approach, ballad collecting was also a source of pleasure for Hunter. Ultimately, his dedication to capturing Ozarks song culture in its natural state brought Hunter into contact with people like Vance Randolph, Mary Parler, and non-academic folklorists who shared his values.

Reflecting the growing interest in popular music from the developing world, this unique book is the first to examine all major non-Western urban music styles, from increasingly familiar genres like reggae and salsa, to the lesser-known regional styles of Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, the Middle East, non-Western Europe (Greece, Yugoslavia, Portugal), Asia, and the Near East. Manuel establishes parameters that distinguish popular music from both folk and classical music, defining popular music as music created with the mass media in mind and reproduced on a large scale basis as a salable commodity for wide public consumption. While emphasizing stylistic analysis and historical development, he also treats the diverse popular musics as sites for the negotiation and mediation of the dialectics of nationalism and acculturation, tradition and modernity, urban and rural aesthetics, and grassroots spontaneity and corporate or bureaucratic manipulation. With its encyclopedic syntheses of earlier studies and extensive original research, Manuel's book will be an invaluable source for general readers and students of ethnology, popular music, and contemporary culture.

No further information has been provided for this title.

This is the musical counterpart to the famous Francis James Child collection of English and Scottish ballads from the 13th to the 19th centuries. Professor Child's canon established the texts; Professor Bronson's work provides both tunes and texts. Originally published in 1959. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Across Europe, from the dawn of print until the early twentieth century, the news of crime and criminals' public executions was printed in song form on cheap broadsides and pamphlets to be sold in streets and marketplaces by ballad-singers. Singing the News of Death: Execution Ballads in Europe 1500-1900 looks at how and why song was employed across Europe for centuries as a vehicle for broadcasting news about crime and executions, exploring how this performative medium could frame and mediate the message of punishment and repentance. Examining ballads in English, French, Dutch, German, and Italian across four centuries, author Una McIlvenna offers the first multilingual and longue duree study of the complex and fascinating phenomenon of popular songs about brutal public death. Ballads were frequently written in the first-person voice, and often purported to be the last words, confession or 'dying speech' of the condemned criminal, yet were ironically on sale the day of the execution itself. Musical notation was generally not required as ballads were set to well-known tunes. Execution ballads were therefore a medium accessible to all, regardless of literacy, social class, age, gender or location. A genre that retained extraordinary continuities in form and content across time, space, and language, the execution ballad grew in popularity in the nineteenth century, and only began to fade as executions themselves were removed from the public eye. With an accompanying database of recordings, Singing the News of Death brings these centuries-old songs of death back to life.

An brilliant introductory course in the art of playing the Bodhran, covering all the basic techniques needed to accompany traditional Irish and other music. Ideal for beginners, this illustrated booklet is crammed with useful features, diagrams and examples. Also included is a demonstration CD that shows all the techniques that are discussed in the book.

Songs, airs, and dance music from Ireland. A delightful and handy book, crammed with songs and dance tunes with specific notes and hints for most traditional instruments. Eighteen songs and more than 60 tunes.

This fabulous book contains the complete lyrics for 100 old favourites from the huge reserve of Irish party songs. It includes many traditional favourites and popular classics. The shape and style of the book means that it is perfect as a gog-bag reference, but the collection will appeal to anyone who enjoys joining in at a sing-song and karaoke sessions, or even a quiet croon in the bathroom.