Romancing the Folk

Romancing the Folk
Author: Benjamin Filene
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2000
Genre: Music
ISBN: 9780807848623

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In American music, the notion of "roots" has been a powerful refrain, but just what constitutes our true musical traditions has often been a matter of debate. As Benjamin Filene reveals, a number of competing visions of America's musical past have vied fo

Book Reports

Book Reports
Author: Robert Christgau
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2019-04-04
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1478002123

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In this generous collection of book reviews and literary essays, legendary Village Voice rock critic Robert Christgau showcases the passion that made him a critic—his love for the written word. Many selections address music, from blackface minstrelsy to punk and hip-hop, artists from Lead Belly to Patti Smith, and fellow critics from Ellen Willis and Lester Bangs to Nelson George and Jessica Hopper. But Book Reports also teases out the popular in the Bible and 1984 as well as pornography and science fiction, and analyzes at length the cultural theory of Raymond Williams, the detective novels of Walter Mosley, the history of bohemia, and the 2008 financial crisis. It establishes Christgau as not just the Dean of American Rock Critics, but one of America's most insightful cultural critics as well.

Gone to the Country

Gone to the Country
Author: Ray Allen
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 330
Release: 2011-02-14
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0252099621

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Gone to the Country chronicles the life and music of the New Lost City Ramblers, a trio of city-bred musicians who helped pioneer the resurgence of southern roots music during the folk revival of the late 1950s and 1960s. Formed in 1958 by Mike Seeger, John Cohen, and Tom Paley, the Ramblers introduced the regional styles of southern ballads, blues, string bands, and bluegrass to northerners yearning for a sound and an experience not found in mainstream music. Ray Allen interweaves biography, history, and music criticism to follow the band from its New York roots to their involvement with the commercial folk music boom. Allen details their struggle to establish themselves amid critical debates about traditionalism brought on by their brand of folk revivalism. He explores how the Ramblers ascribed notions of cultural authenticity to certain musical practices and performers and how the trio served as a link between southern folk music and northern urban audiences who had little previous exposure to rural roots styles. Highlighting the role of tradition in the social upheaval of mid-century America, Gone to the Country draws on extensive interviews and personal correspondence with band members and digs deep into the Ramblers' rich trove of recordings.

I Got a Song

I Got a Song
Author: Rick Massimo
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2017-06-06
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0819577049

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The first-ever book exclusively devoted to the history of the Newport Folk Festival, I Got a Song documents the trajectory of an American musical institution that began more than a half-century ago and continues to influence our understanding of folk music today. Rick Massimo’s research is complemented by extensive interviews with the people who were there and who made it all happen: the festival's producers, some of its biggest stars, and people who huddled in the fields to witness moments—like Bob Dylan’s famous electric performance in 1965—that live on in musical history. As folk has evolved over the decades, absorbing influences from rock, traditional music and the singer-songwriters of the ‘60s and ‘70s, the Newport Folk Festival has once again become a gathering point for young performers and fans. I Got a Song tells the stories, small and large, of several generations of American folk music enthusiasts.

Romancing the Folk

Romancing the Folk
Author: Benjamin Filene
Publisher:
Total Pages: 394
Release: 1995
Genre: African Americans
ISBN:

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Romancing the Real

Romancing the Real
Author: Sabra J. Webber
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2016-11-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1512808253

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One of the goals of the "new" or experimental ethnography is to illuminate the unique historical, social, and political situation of a people from their own multifaceted perspectives. As part of the effort to reach this goal, ethnographers are learning to listen in various keys to what members of society under study have to say about themselves and about their place in the world. In Romancing the Real, Sabra J. Webber argues that folklore—traditional aesthetic culture—is of central importance to the new ethnography. It is by becoming cultured in a people's traditional art forms that the ethnographer can come closest to an unmediated hearing of the individual voices of community members and to an understanding of how community "affect" is shaped and shared rhetorically. She contends that traditional verbal art does more than reflect a culture from its members' points of view: it is one of the means by which members comment upon change and recreate their culture. It is also a powerful resource through which they respond to the ethnographer and what the ethnographer represents. Drawing on over five years of field research conducted between 1967 and 1987 in Kelibia, a town on the northeastern coast of Tunisia, Webber offers insights into the community gained through the study of its folk communicative resources and especially through study of the hikayah, a colloquial Arabic verbal art genre that resembles the western genres of local history or personal experience narrative. She demonstrates that Kelibians draw upon hikayat to cope creatively with both the destabilizing and the energizing facets of centuries of frequent, rarely controlled or invited, contact with outsiders. She finds that older community members use the art form to romance (not romanticize) their town and thus address important communal issues like colonialism. Webber discusses a marginalized town in the context of a marginalized discipline, folklore; an often devalued language, colloquial Arabic; and a frequently underestimated cultural domain, "affect," to demonstrate that a re-perception of each can yield rich insights into the centripetal forces that supposedly powerless communities can draw upon for empowerment.

Romancing

Romancing
Author: Cooperative Recreation Service (Delaware, Ohio)
Publisher:
Total Pages: 48
Release: 1946*
Genre: Folk songs
ISBN:

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Folk City

Folk City
Author: Stephen Petrus
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2015-06-08
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0190231033

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From Washington Square Park and the Gaslight Café to WNYC Radio and Folkways Records, New York City's cultural, artistic, and commercial assets helped to shape a distinctively urban breeding ground for the folk music revival of the 1950s and 60s. Folk City explores New York's central role in fueling the nationwide craze for folk music in postwar America. It involves the efforts of record company producers and executives, club owners, concert promoters, festival organizers, musicologists, agents and managers, editors and writers - and, of course, musicians and audiences. In Folk City, authors Stephen Petrus and Ron Cohen capture the exuberance of the times and introduce readers to a host of characters who brought a new style to the biggest audience in the history of popular music. Among the savvy New York entrepreneurs committed to promoting folk music were Izzy Young of the Folklore Center, Mike Porco of Gerde's Folk City, and John Hammond of Columbia Records. While these and other businessmen developed commercial networks for musicians, the performance venues provided the artists space to test their mettle. The authors portray Village coffee houses not simply as lively venues but as incubators of a burgeoning counterculture, where artists from diverse backgrounds honed their performance techniques and challenged social conventions. Accessible and engaging, fresh and provocative, rich in anecdotes and primary sources, Folk City is lavishly illustrated with images collected for the accompanying major exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York in 2015.

Music and the Making of a New South

Music and the Making of a New South
Author: Gavin James Campbell
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2005-12-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0807863351

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Startled by rapid social changes at the turn of the twentieth century, citizens of Atlanta wrestled with fears about the future of race relations, the shape of gender roles, the impact of social class, and the meaning of regional identity in a New South. Gavin James Campbell demonstrates how these anxieties were played out in Atlanta's popular musical entertainment. Examining the period from 1890 to 1925, Campbell focuses on three popular musical institutions: the New York Metropolitan Opera (which visited Atlanta each year), the Colored Music Festival, and the Georgia Old-Time Fiddlers' Convention. White and black audiences charged these events with deep significance, Campbell argues, turning an evening's entertainment into a struggle between rival claimants for the New South's soul. Opera, spirituals, and fiddling became popular not just because they were entertaining, but also because audiences found them flexible enough to accommodate a variety of competing responses to the challenges of making a New South. Campbell shows how attempts to inscribe music with a single, public, fixed meaning were connected to much larger struggles over the distribution of social, political, cultural, and economic power. Attitudes about music extended beyond the concert hall to simultaneously enrich and impoverish both the region and the nation that these New Southerners struggled to create.

Frankie and Johnny

Frankie and Johnny
Author: Stacy I. Morgan
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2017-04-18
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1477312080

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Originating in a homicide in St. Louis in 1899, the ballad of "Frankie and Johnny" became one of America's most familiar songs during the first half of the twentieth century. It crossed lines of race, class, and artistic genres, taking form in such varied expressions as a folk song performed by Huddie Ledbetter (Lead Belly); a ballet choreographed by Ruth Page and Bentley Stone under New Deal sponsorship; a mural in the Missouri State Capitol by Thomas Hart Benton; a play by John Huston; a motion picture, She Done Him Wrong, that made Mae West a national celebrity; and an anti-lynching poem by Sterling Brown. In this innovative book, Stacy I. Morgan explores why African American folklore—and "Frankie and Johnny" in particular—became prized source material for artists of diverse political and aesthetic sensibilities. He looks at a confluence of factors, including the Harlem Renaissance, the Great Depression, and resurgent nationalism, that led those creators to engage with this ubiquitous song. Morgan's research uncovers the wide range of work that artists called upon African American folklore to perform in the 1930s, as it alternately reinforced and challenged norms of race, gender, and appropriate subjects for artistic expression. He demonstrates that the folklorists and creative artists of that generation forged a new national culture in which African American folk songs featured centrally not only in folk and popular culture but in the fine arts as well.