Download or read book Well of Souls written by Kristina R Gaddy and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2022-10-04 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An illuminating history of the banjo, revealing its origins at the crossroads of slavery, religion, and music. In an extraordinary story unfolding across two hundred years, Kristina Gaddy uncovers the banjo’s key role in Black spirituality, ritual, and rebellion. Through meticulous research in diaries, letters, archives, and art, she traces the banjo’s beginnings from the seventeenth century, when enslaved people of African descent created it from gourds or calabashes and wood. Gaddy shows how the enslaved carried this unique instrument as they were transported and sold by slaveowners throughout the Americas, to Suriname, the Caribbean, and the colonies that became U.S. states, including Louisiana, South Carolina, Maryland, and New York. African Americans came together at rituals where the banjo played an essential part. White governments, rightfully afraid that the gatherings could instigate revolt, outlawed them without success. In the mid-nineteenth century, Blackface minstrels appropriated the instrument for their bands, spawning a craze. Eventually the banjo became part of jazz, bluegrass, and country, its deepest history forgotten.
Download or read book Well of Souls Uncovering the Banjo s Hidden History written by Kristina R. Gaddy and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2022-10-04 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of The New Yorker’s Best Books of the Year Named one of the Most Memorable Music Books of the Year by No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music “Compelling.… [R]eveals [an instrument] intimately rooted in the African diaspora and capable of expressing flights of sorrow and joy.” —David Yezzi, Wall Street Journal An illuminating history of the banjo, revealing its origins at the crossroads of slavery, religion, and music. In an extraordinary story unfolding across two hundred years, Kristina Gaddy uncovers the banjo’s key role in Black spirituality, ritual, and rebellion. Through meticulous research in diaries, letters, archives, and art, she traces the banjo’s beginnings from the seventeenth century, when enslaved people of African descent created it from gourds or calabashes and wood. Gaddy shows how the enslaved carried this unique instrument as they were transported and sold by slaveowners throughout the Americas, to Suriname, the Caribbean, and the colonies that became U.S. states, including Louisiana, South Carolina, Maryland, and New York. African Americans came together at rituals where the banjo played an essential part. White governments, rightfully afraid that the gatherings could instigate revolt, outlawed them without success. In the mid-nineteenth century, Blackface minstrels appropriated the instrument for their bands, spawning a craze. Eventually the banjo became part of jazz, bluegrass, and country, its deepest history forgotten.
Download or read book America s Instrument written by Philip F. Gura and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 1999 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This handsome illustrated history traces the transformation of the banjo from primitive folk instrument to sophisticated musical machine and, in the process, offers a unique view of the music business in nineteenth-century America. Philip Gura and Jame
Download or read book Banjo written by Bob Carlin and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2023-10-03 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The banjo is emblematic of American country music, and it is at the core of other important musical movements, including jazz and ragtime. The instrument has been adopted by many cultures and has been ingrained into many musical traditions, from Mento music in the Caribbean and dance music in Ireland. Virtuosos such as Béla Fleck have played Bach, African music, and Christmas tunes on the five-string banjo, and the instrument has had a resurgence in pop music with such acts a Mumford and Sons and the Avett Brothers. This book offers the first comprehensive, illustrated history of the banjo in its many forms. It traces the story of the instrument from its roots in West Africa to its birth in the Americas, through its coming of age in the Industrial Revolution and beyond. The book profiles the most important players and spotlights key luthiers and manufacturers. It features 100 “milestone instruments” with in-depth coverage, including model details and beautiful photos. It offers historical context surrounding the banjo through the ages, from its place in Victorian parlors and speakeasies through its role in the folk boom of the 1950s and 1960s to its place in the hands of songwriter John Hartford and comedian Steve Martin. Folk, jazz, bluegrass, country, and rock – the banjo has played an important part in all of these genres. Lavishly illustrated, and thoughtfully written by author, broadcaster, and acclaimed banjoist Bob Carlin, this is a must-have for lovers of fretted instruments, aficionados of roots music, and music history buffs.
Download or read book Flowers in the Gutter written by K. R. Gaddy and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-01-07 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The true story of the Edelweiss Pirates, working-class teenagers who fought the Nazis by whatever means they could. Fritz, Gertrud, and Jean were classic outsiders: their clothes were different, their music was rebellious, and they weren’t afraid to fight. But they were also Germans living under Hitler, and any nonconformity could get them arrested or worse. As children in 1933, they saw their world change. Their earliest memories were of the Nazi rise to power and of their parents fighting Brownshirts in the streets, being sent to prison, or just disappearing. As Hitler’s grip tightened, these three found themselves trapped in a nation whose government contradicted everything they believed in. And by the time they were teenagers, the Nazis expected them to be part of the war machine. Fritz, Gertrud, and Jean and hundreds like them said no. They grew bolder, painting anti-Nazi graffiti, distributing anti-war leaflets, and helping those persecuted by the Nazis. Their actions were always dangerous. The Gestapo pursued and arrested hundreds of Edelweiss Pirates. In World War II’s desperate final year, some Pirates joined in sabotage and armed resistance, risking the Third Reich’s ultimate punishment. This is their story.
Download or read book Sinful Tunes and Spirituals written by Dena J. Epstein and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Awarded both the Chicago Folklore Prize and the Simkins Prize of the Southern Historical Association From the plaintive tunes of woe sung by exiled kings and queens of Africa to the spirited worksongs and "shouts" of freedmen, in Sinful Tunes and Spirituals Dena J. Epstein traces the course of early black folk music in all its guises. This classic work is being reissued with a new author's preface on the silver anniversary of its original publication.
Download or read book That Half barbaric Twang written by Karen Linn and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Long a symbol of American culture, the banjo actually originated in Africa before European-Americans adopted it. Karen Linn shows how the banjo--despite design innovations and several modernizing agendas--has failed to escape its image as a "half-barbaric" instrument symbolic of antimodernism and sentimentalism. Caught in the morass of American racial attitudes and often used to express ambivalence toward modern industrial society, the banjo stood in opposition to the "official" values of rationalism, modernism, and belief in the beneficence of material progress. Linn uses popular literature, visual arts, advertisements, film, performance practices, instrument construction and decoration, and song lyrics to illustrate how notions about the banjo have changed. Linn also traces the instrument from its African origins through the 1980s, alternating between themes of urban modernization and rural nostalgia. She examines the banjo fad of bourgeois Northerners during the late nineteenth century; the African-American banjo tradition and the commercially popular cultural image of the southern black banjo player; the banjo's use in ragtime and early jazz; and the image of the white Southerner and mountaineer as banjo player.
Download or read book The Beautiful Music All Around Us written by Stephen Wade and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2012-08-10 with total page 505 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Beautiful Music All Around Us presents the extraordinarily rich backstories of thirteen performances captured on Library of Congress field recordings between 1934 and 1942 in locations reaching from Southern Appalachia to the Mississippi Delta and the Great Plains. Including the children's play song "Shortenin' Bread," the fiddle tune "Bonaparte's Retreat," the blues "Another Man Done Gone," and the spiritual "Ain't No Grave Can Hold My Body Down," these performances were recorded in kitchens and churches, on porches and in prisons, in hotel rooms and school auditoriums. Documented during the golden age of the Library of Congress recordings, they capture not only the words and tunes of traditional songs but also the sounds of life in which the performances were embedded: children laugh, neighbors comment, trucks pass by. Musician and researcher Stephen Wade sought out the performers on these recordings, their families, fellow musicians, and others who remembered them. He reconstructs the sights and sounds of the recording sessions themselves and how the music worked in all their lives. Some of these performers developed musical reputations beyond these field recordings, but for many, these tracks represent their only appearances on record: prisoners at the Arkansas State Penitentiary jumping on "the Library's recording machine" in a rendering of "Rock Island Line"; Ora Dell Graham being called away from the schoolyard to sing the jump-rope rhyme "Pullin' the Skiff"; Luther Strong shaking off a hungover night in jail and borrowing a fiddle to rip into "Glory in the Meetinghouse." Alongside loving and expert profiles of these performers and their locales and communities, Wade also untangles the histories of these iconic songs and tunes, tracing them through slave songs and spirituals, British and homegrown ballads, fiddle contests, gospel quartets, and labor laments. By exploring how these singers and instrumentalists exerted their own creativity on inherited forms, "amplifying tradition's gifts," Wade shows how a single artist can make a difference within a democracy. Reflecting decades of research and detective work, the profiles and abundant photos in The Beautiful Music All Around Us bring to life largely unheralded individuals--domestics, farm laborers, state prisoners, schoolchildren, cowboys, housewives and mothers, loggers and miners--whose music has become part of the wider American musical soundscape. The hardcover edition also includes an accompanying CD that presents these thirteen performances, songs and sounds of America in the 1930s and '40s.
Download or read book Dwight Diller written by Lewis M. Stern and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2016-05-03 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dwight Hamilton Diller is a musician from West Virginia devoted to traditional Appalachian fiddle and banjo music, and a seminary-trained minister steeped in local Christian traditions. For the past 40 years, he has worked to preserve archaic fiddle and banjo tunes, teaching his percussive, primitively rhythmic style to small groups in marathon banjo workshops. This book tells of Diller's life and music, his personal challenges and his decades of teaching an elusive musical form.
Download or read book Banjo Roots and Branches written by Robert B Winans and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2018-08-15 with total page 490 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of the banjo's journey from Africa to the western hemisphere blends music, history, and a union of cultures. In Banjo Roots and Branches, Robert B. Winans presents cutting-edge scholarship that covers the instrument's West African origins and its adaptations and circulation in the Caribbean and United States. The contributors provide detailed ethnographic and technical research on gourd lutes and ekonting in Africa and the banza in Haiti while also investigating tuning practices and regional playing styles. Other essays place the instrument within the context of slavery, tell the stories of black banjoists, and shed light on the banjo's introduction into the African- and Anglo-American folk milieus. Wide-ranging and illustrated with twenty color images, Banjo Roots and Branches offers a wealth of new information to scholars of African American and folk musics as well as the worldwide community of banjo aficionados. Contributors: Greg C. Adams, Nick Bamber, Jim Dalton, George R. Gibson, Chuck Levy, Shlomo Pestcoe, Pete Ross, Tony Thomas, Saskia Willaert, and Robert B. Winans.
Download or read book The Banjo written by Laurent Dubois and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2016-03-14 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The banjo has been called by many names over its history, but they all refer to the same sound—strings humming over skin—that has eased souls and electrified crowds for centuries. The Banjo invites us to hear that sound afresh in a biography of one of America’s iconic folk instruments. Attuned to a rich heritage spanning continents and cultures, Laurent Dubois traces the banjo from humble origins, revealing how it became one of the great stars of American musical life. In the seventeenth century, enslaved people in the Caribbean and North America drew on their memories of varied African musical traditions to construct instruments from carved-out gourds covered with animal skin. Providing a much-needed sense of rootedness, solidarity, and consolation, banjo picking became an essential part of black plantation life. White musicians took up the banjo in the nineteenth century, when it became the foundation of the minstrel show and began to be produced industrially on a large scale. Even as this instrument found its way into rural white communities, however, the banjo remained central to African American musical performance. Twentieth-century musicians incorporated the instrument into styles ranging from ragtime and jazz to Dixieland, bluegrass, reggae, and pop. Versatile and enduring, the banjo combines rhythm and melody into a single unmistakable sound that resonates with strength and purpose. From the earliest days of American history, the banjo’s sound has allowed folk musicians to create community and joy even while protesting oppression and injustice.
Download or read book African Banjo Echoes in Appalachia written by Cecelia Conway and published by Univ. of Tennessee Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout the Upland South, the banjo has become an emblem of white mountain folk, who are generally credited with creating the short-thumb-string banjo, developing its downstroking playing styles and repertory, and spreading its influence to the national consciousness. In this groundbreaking study, however, Cecelia Conway demonstrates that these European Americans borrowed the banjo from African Americans and adapted it to their own musical culture. Like many aspects of the African-American tradition, the influence of black banjo music has been largely unrecorded and nearly forgotten--until now. Drawing in part on interviews with elderly African-American banjo players from the Piedmont--among the last American representatives of an African banjo-playing tradition that spans several centuries--Conway reaches beyond the written records to reveal the similarity of pre-blues black banjo lyric patterns, improvisational playing styles, and the accompanying singing and dance movements to traditional West African music performances. The author then shows how Africans had, by the mid-eighteenth century, transformed the lyrical music of the gourd banjo as they dealt with the experience of slavery in America. By the mid-nineteenth century, white southern musicians were learning the banjo playing styles of their African-American mentors and had soon created or popularized a five-string, wooden-rim banjo. Some of these white banjo players remained in the mountain hollows, but others dispersed banjo music to distant musicians and the American public through popular minstrel shows. By the turn of the century, traditional black and white musicians still shared banjo playing, and Conway shows that this exchange gave rise to a distinct and complex new genre--the banjo song. Soon, however, black banjo players put down their banjos, set their songs with increasingly assertive commentary to the guitar, and left the banjo and its story to white musicians. But the banjo still echoed at the crossroads between the West African griots, the traveling country guitar bluesmen, the banjo players of the old-time southern string bands, and eventually the bluegrass bands. The Author: Cecelia Conway is associate professor of English at Appalachian State University. She is a folklorist who teaches twentieth-century literature, including cultural perspectives, southern literature, and film.
Download or read book Leading Global Diversity Equity and Inclusion written by Rohini Anand and published by Berrett-Koehler Publishers. This book was released on 2021-11-30 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers five proven principles so multinational companies can advance diversity, equity, and inclusion with a nuanced understanding of local contexts across countries and cultures. It's easy to fall into the trap of using a single-culture worldview when implementing global DEI in organizations. But what makes DEI change efforts successful in one country may have opposite, unintended consequences in another. How do companies find the right balance between anchoring their efforts locally while pushing for change that may disrupt existing power dynamics? This is the question at the heart of global DEI work. Along with practical advice and examples, Rohini Anand offers five overarching principles derived from her own experience leading global DEI transformation and interviews with more than sixty-five leaders to provide a through line for leading global DEI transformation in divergent cultures. Local relevance—understanding markets and acknowledging local beliefs, regulations, and history—is essential for global success. This groundbreaking book explicitly details how to take local histories, laws, and practices into account in DEI transformation work while promoting social justice worldwide.
Download or read book American Visions The United States 1800 1860 written by Edward L. Ayers and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2023-10-24 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An inspiring book.… American Visions beautifully shows how remarkably resilient dreams of a better republic remained even in the darkest of times.” —Christoph Irmscher, Wall Street Journal A revealing history of the formative period when voices of dissent and innovation defied power and created visions of America still resonant today. With so many of our histories falling into dour critique or blatant celebration, here is a welcome departure: a book that offers hope as well as honesty about the American past. The early decades of the nineteenth century saw the expansion of slavery, Native dispossession, and wars with Canada and Mexico. Mass immigration and powerful religious movements sent tremors through American society. But even as the powerful defended the status quo, others defied it: voices from the margins moved the center; eccentric visions altered the accepted wisdom, and acts of empathy questioned self-interest. Edward L. Ayers’s rich history examines the visions that moved Frederick Douglass, Margaret Fuller, the Native American activist William Apess, and others to challenge entrenched practices and beliefs. So, Lydia Maria Child condemned the racism of her fellow northerners at great personal cost. Melville and Thoreau, Joseph Smith and Samuel Morse all charted new paths for America in the realms of art, nature, belief, and technology. It was Henry David Thoreau who, speaking of John Brown, challenged a hostile crowd "Is it not possible that an individual may be right and a government wrong?" Through decades of award-winning scholarship on the Civil War, Edward L. Ayers has himself ventured beyond the interpretative status quo to recover the range of possibilities embedded in the past as it was lived. Here he turns that distinctive historical sensibility to a period when bold visionaries and critics built vigorous traditions of dissent and innovation into the foundation of the nation. Those traditions remain alive for us today.
Download or read book Loving You Thinking of You Don t Forget to Pray written by Jacqueline L. Jackson and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2019-02-05 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Jacqueline Jackson, wife of Jesse Jackson, role model, and civil rights veteran, comes an inspiring gift of love to a child in his darkest hour—and a lesson to everyone who has been touched by the scourge of mass incarceration. Jacqueline Jackson promised her son, Congressman Jesse L. Jackson, Jr., that she would write him every day during his incarceration in prison while he served his thirty-month sentence. This book is an inspiring and moving selection of the letters she wrote him. Together, they comprise a powerful act of love—nurturing and ministering to her son's heart, health, and mind and maintaining his essential connection with home. Frank, anecdotal, imbued with faith, and sometimes humorous, they offer intimate details from the family’s daily life, along with news of friends and the community and glimpses of such figures as Nelson Mandela, Winnie Mandela, and Mayor Marion Barry. They also touch eloquently on issues of social justice, politics, and history, as when Mrs. Jackson recalls growing up in Jim Crow Florida, and they reflect the qualities, instilled by her own mother, that made her a role model for much of her life. Ultimately, these letters offer a blueprint for why we have to support our families not just as they elevate but when they fall. This collection is Mrs. Jackson's contribution to healing during a time when our prisons are full and our communities are suffering. She provides the road map for ensuring that the individuals serving sentences understand that prison is where they are, not who they are and for helping them sustain the courage to keep hope alive.
Download or read book PreachersNSneakers written by Ben Kirby and published by Thomas Nelson. This book was released on 2021-04-27 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Founder of the phenomenon social media account PreachersNSneakers tackles how faith, capitalism, consumerism, and (wannabe) celebrity have collided and asks both believers and nonbelievers alike: how much is too much? What started as a joke account on Instagram has turned into a movement. Through this provocative project, the founder of PreachersNSneakers is helping thousands of Jesus followers wrestle with the inevitable dilemmas created by our Western culture obsessed with image and entertainment. In PreachersNSneakers: Authenticity in an Age of For-Profit Faith and (Wannabe) Celebrities, Ben Kirby approaches many of the difficult questions plaguing countless Christians’ minds, presenting experiences and input from both sides of difficult questions, such as: Should pastors grow wealthy off of religion, and can their churches ever be too large? Do we really believe that divine blessings are monetary, or is that just religious wallpaper to hide our own greed? Is there space in Christendom for celebrities like Kanye and Bieber to exist without distorting the good news? What about this: Is it wrong for someone—even wrong for author Ben Kirby—to call out faith leaders online and leverage “cancel culture” to affect change? PreachersNSneakers will navigate these challenging questions and many more with humor, wit, candor, and a few never-before-published hijinks. Each chapter will explore the various sides of the debate, holding space for us to make up our own minds. This book is not about finding the perfect, “right” way to do something, but instead learning how to articulate what we believe, why we believe it, and what to do when we want to stand up against cultural norms. This book will doubtlessly become a staple for church small groups, college ministries, and book clubs, emboldening struggling believers who want to live a more genuine faith. After all, the Lord works in mysterious colorways.
Download or read book Songs Without Music written by Desmond Manderson and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2000-10-03 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a series of reflections on the aesthetic dimensions of law (how it is presented and conveyed to its subjects) and justice (the ways in which justice can be aesthetically satisfying or dissatisfying).
