Creole Soul: Zydeco Lives is an exquisitely photographed volume of interviews with contemporary zydeco musicians. Featuring the voices of zydeco’s venerable senior generation and its current agents of change, this book celebrates a musical world full of passion, energy, cowboy hats and boots, banging bass, horse trailers, joy, and dazzling dance moves. Author Burt Feintuch captures an important American music in the process of significant—and sometimes controversial—change. Creole Soul draws us into conversations with zydeco musicians from Texas and Louisiana, most of them bandleaders, including Ed Poullard, Lawrence "Black" Ardoin, Step Rideau, Brian Jack, Jerome Batiste, Ruben Moreno, Nathan Williams Jr., Leroy Thomas, Corey Ledet, Sean Ardoin, and Dwayne Dopsie. Some of the interviewees represent the contemporary scene and are among today’s most popular performers along the Creole Corridor. Others are rooted in older French music forms and are especially well qualified to talk about zydeco’s origins. The musicians speak freely, whether discussing the death of a famed musician or describing a memorable performance, such as when Boozoo Chavis played the accordion while dripping blood on stage shortly after a freak barbeque-building accident that sliced off parts of two of his fingers. They address the influence of rap on today’s zydeco music and discuss how to pass music along to a younger generation—and how not to. They weigh the merits of the old-time zydeco clubs versus today’s casinos and African American trailrides, which come complete with horses and the loudest zydeco bands you can imagine. In Creole Soul, zydeco musicians give an unprecedented look into their lives, their music, and their culture.

In 1899, a fundraising program for Berea College featured a group of students from the mountains of eastern Kentucky singing traditional songs from their homes. The audience was entranced. That small en-counter at the end of the last century lies near the beginning of an unparalleled national -- and international -- fascination with the indigenous music of a single state. Kentucky has long figured prominently in our national sense of traditional music. Over the years, a diverse group of people -- reformers, enthusiasts, the musically literate and the musically illiterate, radicals, liberals, a British gentleman and his woman companion, amateurs, local residents, and academics -- have been sufficiently captivated by that music to have devoted considerable energy to harvesting it from its fertile ground, studying its various manifestations, and considering its many performers. Kentucky Folkmusic: An Annotated Bibliography is a guide to the literature of this remarkable music. More than seven hundred entries, each with an evaluative annotation, comprise the largest bibliographic resource for the folkmusic of any state or region in North America. Divided into eight sections, the bibliography covers collections and anthologies; fieldworkers and scholars; singers, musicians, and other performers; text-centered studies; studies of history, context, and style; festivals; dance; and discographies, check-lists, and other reference tools. A subject index, an author index, and an index of periodicals provide access to the materials. From early hymnals and songsters to Kentucky performers of traditional music, the bibliography is a comprehensive guide to music which has for many years been one of the major emblems of American traditional music.