Download or read book Discovering Folk Music written by Stephanie P. Ledgin and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2010-02-09 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Ani DiFranco to Bob Dylan to Woodie Guthrie, American folk music comprises a truly diverse and rich traditionone that's almost impossible to define in broad terms. This book explains why folk music is still highly relevant in the digital age. From indigenous music to Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen singing "This Land Is Your Land" side-by-side at the pre-inaugural concert for our first African American president, folk music has been at the center of America's history. Thomas Jefferson wooed his bride-to-be with fiddle playing. Stephen Foster captured the mood of our country in transition. The Carter Family adapted music from across the pond to Appalachia. Paul Robeson carried folk music of many lands to the world stage. Woody Guthrie's dust bowl ballads spoke to the common man, while Sixties protest music put folk on the map, following the Kingston Trio's hit, "Tom Dooley." Folk music has evolved with America's changing landscape, celebrating its multi-cultural traditions. From Irish step dancers to rap, parlor songs to Dixieland, blues to classical, Discovering Folk Music presents the genre as surprisingly diverse, every bit the product of our national melting pot. Demonstrating continuing relevance of folk music in our everyday lives, the book spotlights an amazing array of personalities, with special emphasis on the folk revival era when Dylan, Baez, Odetta, and Peter, Paul and Mary sang out. These and others influenced such contemporary performers as Shawn Colvin and Ani DiFranco. Those on today's "fringes of folk" scene continue to look to these deep roots while embracing alternative sounds. Included are interviews with such legendary artists as Janis Ian, Tom Paxton, and Jean Ritchie. Nora Guthrie, Woody's daughter, also weighs in. Discovering Folk Music is a ground-breaking look at 21st-century folk music in our rapidly changing digital world, family friendly while ripe for rediscovery by the Woodstock generation.
Download or read book Introducing American Folk Music written by Kip Lornell and published by McGraw-Hill Companies. This book was released on 2002 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Romancing the Folk written by Benjamin Filene and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2000 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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
Download or read book Exploring American Folk Music written by Kip Lornell and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2012-05-29 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The perfect introduction to the many strains of American-made music
Download or read book Electric Folk written by Britta Sweers and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2005-01-13 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1960s and 1970s, a number of British musicians rediscovered traditional folk ballads, fusing the old melodies with rock, jazz, and blues styles to create a new genre dubbed "electric folk" or "British folk rock." This revival featured groups such as Steeleye Span, Fairport Convention, and Pentangle and individual performers like Shirley & Dolly Collins, and Richard Thompson. While making music in multiple styles, they had one thing in common: they were all based on traditional English song and dance material. These new arrangements of an old repertoire created a unique musical voice within the popular mainstream. After reasonable commercial success, peaking with Steeleye Span's Top 10 album All Around My Hat, Electric Folk disappeared from mainstream notice in the late 1970s, yet performers continue to create today. In Electric Folk: The Changing Face of English Traditional Music, Britta Sweers provides an illuminating history and fascinating analysis of the unique features of the electric folk scene, exploring its musical styles and cultural implications. Drawing on rare historical sources, contemporary music journalism, and first-hand interviews with several of electric folk's most prominent artists, Sweers argues that electric folk is both a result of the American folk revival of the early 1960s and a reaction against the dominance of American pop music abroad. Young British "folk-rockers," such as Richard Thompson and Maddy Prior, turned to traditional musical material as a means of asserting their British cultural identity. Yet, unlike many American and British folk revivalists, they were not as interested in the "purity" of folk ballads as in the music's potential for lively interaction with modern styles, instruments, and media. The book also delves into the impact of the British folk rock movement on mainstream pop, American rock music, and neighboring European countries. Ultimately, Sweers creates a richly detailed portrait of the electric folk scene--as cultural phenomenon, commercial entity, and performance style.
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 Lament from Epirus An Odyssey into Europe s Oldest Surviving Folk Music written by Christopher C. King and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2018-05-29 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Wall Street Journal Best Book of 2018 In the tradition of Patrick Leigh Fermor and Geoff Dyer, a Grammy-winning producer discovers a powerful and ancient folk music tradition. In a gramophone shop in Istanbul, renowned record collector Christopher C. King uncovered some of the strangest—and most hypnotic—sounds he had ever heard. The 78s were immensely moving, seeming to tap into a primal well of emotion inaccessible through contemporary music. The songs, King learned, were from Epirus, an area straddling southern Albania and northwestern Greece and boasting a folk tradition extending back to the pre-Homeric era. To hear this music is to hear the past. Lament from Epirus is an unforgettable journey into a musical obsession, which traces a unique genre back to the roots of song itself. As King hunts for two long-lost virtuosos—one of whom may have committed a murder—he also tells the story of the Roma people who pioneered Epirotic folk music and their descendants who continue the tradition today. King discovers clues to his most profound questions about the function of music in the history of humanity: What is the relationship between music and language? Why do we organize sound as music? Is music superfluous, a mere form of entertainment, or could it be a tool for survival? King’s journey becomes an investigation into song and dance’s role as a means of spiritual healing—and what that may reveal about music’s evolutionary origins.
Download or read book Always a Song written by Ellen Harper and published by Chronicle Books. This book was released on 2021-01-26 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Always a Song is a collection of stories from singer and songwriter Ellen Harper—folk matriarch and mother to the Grammy-winning musician Ben Harper. Harper shares vivid memories of growing up in Los Angeles through the 1960s among famous and small-town musicians, raising Ben, and the historic Folk Music Center. This beautifully written memoir includes stories of Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Joan Baez, The New Lost City Ramblers, Doc Watson, and many more. • Harper takes readers on an intimate journey through the folk music revival. • The book spans a transformational time in music, history, and American culture. • Covers historical events from the love-ins, women's rights protests, and the assassination of John F. Kennedy to the popularization of the sitar and the ukulele. • Includes full-color photo insert. "Growing up, an endless stream of musicians and artists came from across the country to my family's music store. Bess Lomax Hawes, Joan Baez, Sonny Terry, and Brownie McGee—all the singers, organizers, guitar and banjo pickers and players, songwriters, painters, dancers, their husbands, wives, and children—we were all in it together. And we believed singing could change the world."—Ellen Harper Music lovers and history buffs will enjoy this rare invitation into a world of stories and song that inspired folk music today. • A must-read for lovers of music, history, and those nostalgic for the acoustic echo of the original folk music that influenced a generation • Harper's parents opened the legendary Folk Music Center in Claremont, California, as well as the revered folk music venue The Golden Ring. • A perfect book for people who are obsessed with folk music, all things 1960s, learning about musical movements, or California history • Great for those who loved Small Town Talk: Bob Dylan, The Band, Van Morrison, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Friends in the Wild Years of Woodstock by Barney Hoskyns; and Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon—and the Journey of a Generation by Sheila Weller.
Download or read book Discovering American Folklife written by Don Yoder and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Transatlantic Roots Music written by Jill Terry and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2012-07-02 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a collection of essays on the debates about origins, authenticity, and identity in folk and blues music. The essays had their origins in an international conference on the Transatlantic routes of American roots music, out of which emerged common themes and questions of origins and authenticity in folk music, black and white, American and British. The central theme is musical influences, but issues of identity—national, local, and racial—are also recurring subjects. The extent to which these identities were invented, imagined, or constructed by the performers, or by those who recorded their work for posterity, is also a prominent concern and questions of racial identity are particularly central. The book features a new essay on the blues by Paul Oliver alongside an essay on Oliver's seminal blues scholarship. There are also several essays on British blues and the links between performers and styles in the United States and Britain and new essays on critical figures such as Alan Lomax and Woody Guthrie. This volume uniquely offers perspectives from both sides of the Atlantic on the connections and interplay of influences in roots music and the debates about these subjects drawing on the work of eminent established scholars and emerging young academics who are already making a contribution to the field. Throughout, the contributors offer the most recent scholarship available on key issues.
Download or read book Gone to the Country written by Ray Allen and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2010-09-24 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Seasons They Change written by Jeanette Leech and published by Jawbone Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring the careers of the original wave of artists and their contemporary equivalents, Leech tells the story of acid and psychedelic folk recording artists from the 1960s to the present day.
Download or read book The Never Ending Revival written by Michael F. Scully and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2008-03-04 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on American folk music and roots music since the 1950s, The Never-Ending Revival: Rounder Records and the Folk Alliance analyzes the intrinsic contradictions of a commercialized folk culture. In recent years, both Rounder Records and the North American Folk Music and Dance Alliance have sought to make folk music widely available, while simultaneously respecting its defining traditions and unique community atmosphere. Tracing the histories of these organizations, Michael F. Scully explores the lively debates about the difficulty of making commercially accessible music, honoring tradition, and remaining artistically relevant, all without "selling out." He combines rich interviews of music executives and practicing folk musicians with valuable personal experience to reveal how this American subculture remains in a "never-ending revival" based on fluid definitions of folk and folk music.
Download or read book The Study of Folk Music in the Modern World written by Philip V. Bohlman and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1988-06-22 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "[This book] is a contribution of considerable substance because it takes a holistic view of the field of folk music and the scholarship that has dealt with it." -- Bruno Nettl "... a praiseworthy combination of solid scholarship, penetrating discussion, and global relevance." -- Asian Folklore Studies "... successfully ties the history and development of folk music scholarship with contemporary concepts, issues, and shifts, and which treats varied folk musics of the world cultures within the rubric of folklore and ethnomusicology with subtle generalizations making sense to serious minds... " -- Folklore Forum "... [this book] challenges many carefully-nurtured sacred cows. Bohlman has executed an intellectual challenge of major significance by successfully organizing a welter of unruly data and ideas into a single, appropriately complex but coherent, system." -- Folk Music Journal Bohlman examines folk music as a genre of folklore from a broadly cross-cultural perspective and espouses a more expansive view of folk music, stressing its vitality in non-Western cultures as well as Western, in the present as well as the past.
Download or read book The New Penguin Book of English Folk Songs written by Julia Bishop and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2012-06-07 with total page 666 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the Spectator's Books of the Year 2012 'Farewell and adieu to you fair Spanish ladies Farewell and adieu to you ladies of Spain For we've received orders for to sail for old England But we hope in a short while to see you again' One of the great English popular art forms, the folk song can be painful, satirical, erotic, dramatic, rueful or funny. They have thrived when sung on a whim to a handful of friends in a pub; they have bewitched generations of English composers who have set them for everything from solo violin to full orchestra; they are sung in concerts, festivals, weddings, funerals and with nobody to hear but the singer. This magical new collection brings together all the classic folk songs as well as many lesser-known discoveries, complete with music and annotations on their original sources and meaning. Published in cooperation with the English Folk Dance and Song Society, it is a worthy successor to Ralph Vaughan Williams and A.L.Lloyd's original Penguin Book of English Folk Songs. 'Her keen eye did glitter like the bright stars by night The robe she was wearing was costly and white Her bare neck was shaded with her long raven hair And they called her pretty Susan, the pride of Kildare' In association with EFDSS, the English Folk Dance and Song Society
Download or read book Folk Song in England written by Steve Roud and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2017-08-15 with total page 612 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Victorian times, England was famously dubbed the land without music - but one of the great musical discoveries of the early twentieth century was that England had a vital heritage of folk song and music which was easily good enough to stand comparison with those of other parts of Britain and overseas. Cecil Sharp, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Percy Grainger, and a number of other enthusiasts gathered a huge harvest of songs and tunes which we can study and enjoy at our leisure. But after over a century of collection and discussion, publication and performance, there are still many things we don't know about traditional song - Where did the songs come from? Who sang them, where, when and why? What part did singing play in the lives of the communities in which the songs thrived? More importantly, have the pioneer collectors' restricted definitions and narrow focus hindered or helped our understanding? This is the first book for many years to investigate the wider social history of traditional song in England, and draws on a wide range of sources to answer these questions and many more.
Download or read book I d Give My Life written by Erik Darling and published by Science and Behavior Books. This book was released on 2008-06-01 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Darling's journey involved the formation of the Tarriers, with actor Alan Arkin, and creating the massive hit ?The Banana Boat Song,? making the Tarriers the first group after the famous Weavers to gain worldwide fame through the singing of folk music, thus preparing the way for the Kingston Trio and all who would follow. Having been inspired by Pete Seeger and the original Weavers, life's typical twists had him taking Seeger's place in that group. Not finding the answers to his internal quest, however, he found himself leaving the Weavers, forming the Rooftop Singers and introducing the 12-string guitar to popular music through their number one hit, ?Walk Right In.? Darling's journey was a perilous one, as anyone's journey in the arts is likely to be, given the twists of fate that can affect the art world, along with the confusion of becoming a political person, but not of the left or the right. He ended up thinking that our political answers lie in the realm of psychology, and in the idea of (just as it sounds): a University for Becoming More Fully Human. Includes a CD with 24 songs. See track listing.Erik Darling
