Search results

Fiddling has had a lengthy history in Africa which has long been ignored. Jacqueline Cogdell DjeDje corrects this oversight with an expansive study on fiddling in the Fulbe, Hausa, and Dagbamba cultures of West Africa. DjeDje not only explains the history of the instrument itself, but also discusses the processes of stylistic transference and adaptation, suggesting how these may have contributed to differing performance practices. Additionally, DjeDje delves into the music, the performance conte...

Bound for Glory is the funny, cynical and earthy autobiography of Woody Guthrie, the father of American folk music. He tells of his childhood running wild in an Oklahoma oil-boom town, the tragedies that struck his family and of his life on the open road during the Great Depression - hell-raising and brawling in boxcars, all the while singing a dime for his next meal. But above all, this is a song for an America Woody saw from the lonesome highway, as he travelled from one of the country to the...

A memoir by the influential Grammy Award-winning singer and acto - son of journalist Loudon Wainwright, father of Rufus, Martha, Lucy, and Lexie - a captivating meditation on relationships and creativity from the patriarch of one of America's great musical families. Wainwright's song lyrics are represented throughout the book, amplifying his prose and showing the connections between the songs and real life. A funny and insightful meditation on family, inspiration, and art, Wainwright's memoir wi...

Taking as its subject the small Gaelic-speaking community of Tory Island off the Donegal coast of Ireland, On a Rock in the Middle of the Ocean tries to answer the deceptively simple question of why people sing. The book focuses on aspects of song transmission and performance, showing how early exposure to musical culture led certain individuals to be singled out and given special encouragement to express themselves. Individual desire and ability to overcome the rigors of social scrutiny are imp...

Focus: Scottish Traditional Music engages methods from ethnomusicology, popular music studies, cultural studies, and media studies to explain how complex Scottish identities and culture are constructed in the traditional music and culture of Scotland. This book examines Scottish music through their social and performative contexts, outlining vocal traditions such as lullabies, mining songs, Scottish ballads, herding songs, and protest songs as well as instrumental traditions such as fiddle music...

Essay collection on Leonard Cohen's work organized by the concept of "the contemporary," which helps to explain Cohen's staying power and existential depth. The chapters offer related but diverse perspectives-historical, artistic, spiritual-on his songs, poems, novels, and drawings, and examine how Cohen's different types of art fit together.

Music / Folklore / Ethnic & Native American Studies / American Midwest. America's Upper Midwest is a distinctive region where many indigenous and immigrant peoples have maintained, merged, and modified their folk song traditions for more than two centuries. In the 1930s and 40s, Sidney Robertson, Alan Lomax, and Helene Stratman-Thomas with support from the Library of Congress and armed with bulky microphones, blank disks, spare needles, and cumbersome disk-cutting machines recorded roughly 2000...

This is a translation of the diaries of Seamus Ennis, fulltime collector of music and song with the Irish Folklore Commission describing his day-to-day work, the people he met, the material he gathered and his constant communication with the head office of the commission in Dublin. In addition to presenting the history of folklore collecting, the book also illustrates life in the Gaeltacht during the Second World War. Although best known as a piper, Ennis was a collector par excellence. The book...