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Provides lyrics, music, and chord notation for work and protest songs and discusses each tune's significance in the labor movement
The British Folk Revival is the very first historical and theoretical work to consider the post-war folk revival in Britain from a popular music studies perspective. Michael Brocken provides a historical narrative of the folk revival from the 1940s up until the 1990s, beginning with the emergence of the revival from within and around the left-wing movements of the 1940s and 1950s. Key figures and organizations such as the Workers' Music Association, the BBC, the English Folk Dance and Song Society, A.L. Lloyd and Ewan MacColl are examined closely. By looking at the work of British Communist Party splinter groups it is possible to see the refraction of folk music as a political tool. Brocken ...
Victorian Songhunters is a pioneering history of the rediscovery of vernacular song—street songs that have entered oral tradition and have been passed from generation to generation—in England during the late Georgian and Victorian eras. In the nineteenth century there were four main types of vernacular song: ballads, folk lyrics, occupational songs, and national songs. The discovery, collecting, editing, and publishing of all four varieties are examined in the book, and over seventy-five selected examples are given for illustrative purposes. Key concepts, such as traditional balladry, broadside balladry, folksong, and national song, are analyzed, as well as the complicated relationship b...
Sociologists have always been fascinated with music. In one way or another they have encountered music as an important social force in its own right, as an accompaniment or byproduct of phenomena they studied (such as youth culture or the drug scene), or as a means for obtaining social compliance (as in religious ceremonies or in the military). This book goes one step toward remedying this situation by culling the existing literature for building blocks toward introducing sociological synthesis and by presenting the English version of the extensive writings on music and society by Paul Honigsheim.
A comprehensive exploration of the profound influence of Marxist ideas on the development of Cultural Studies in Britain, this volume covers a century of Marxist writing, balancing synoptic accounts of the various schools of Marxist thought with detailed analyses of the most important writers. Arguing that a recognisably Marxist tradition of cultural analysis began in the last two decades of the nineteenth century and continues unbroken to the present day, British Marxism and Cultural Studies traces the links between contemporary developments in the field and the extended tradition of which they form a part. With discussion of figures such as Jack Lindsay, C.L.R. James, Julian Stallabrass and Mike Wayne, as well as the cultural thinking of the New Left, Gramscian, Althusserian and Political Economy schools, this book shows that the history of British cultural Marxism is broader and richer than many people realise. As such, it will be of interest to scholars and students of sociology, cultural studies, intellectual history and the history of the Left.
This is the first title in a new series called Poetry and Song in the Age of Revolution. This series will appeal to those involved in English literary studies, as well as those working in fields of study that cover Enlightenment, Romanticism and Revolution in the last quarter of the eighteenth century.
This text focuses on the theory of class as it relates to women. It debates questions such as: how do women define themselves in terms of social class and why?; is definition important or not?; what part does education play in our understanding of class?; and how does class affect relationships?
“corrupt and moronic though the common people are seemingly becoming ... only in the common people can the true work be rooted, the true tradition rediscovered and re-informed” Charles Parker, BBC Radio Producer 1959. In 1958, in his best-selling book Culture and Society, Raymond Williams identified working-class culture as ‘a key issue in our own time’. Why this happened and how this subject was thought about and acted upon is the focus of this book. Paul Long investigates a variety of projects and practices that were designed to describe, validate, reclaim, rejuvenate or generate ‘authentic’ working-class culture as part of the re-imagining of Britishness in the context of the ...
When considering the role music played in the major totalitarian regimes of the century it is music's usefulness as propaganda that leaps first to mind. But as a number of the chapters in this volume demonstrate, there is a complex relationship both between art music and politicised mass culture, and between entertainment and propaganda. Nationality, self/other, power and ideology are the dominant themes of this book, whilst key topics include: music in totalitarian regimes; music as propaganda; music and national identity; émigré communities and composers; music's role in shaping identities of 'self' and 'other' and music as both resistance to and instrument of oppression. Taking the contributions together it becomes clear that shared experiences such as war, dictatorship, colonialism, exile and emigration produced different, yet clearly inter-related musical consequences.
In Circular Breathing, George McKay, a leading chronicler of British countercultures, uncovers the often surprising ways that jazz has accompanied social change during a period of rapid transformation in Great Britain. Examining jazz from the founding of George Webb’s Dixielanders in 1943 through the burgeoning British bebop scene of the early 1950s, the Beaulieu Jazz Festivals of 1956–61, and the improvisational music making of the 1960s and 1970s, McKay reveals the connections of the music, its players, and its subcultures to black and antiracist activism, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, feminism, and the New Left. In the process, he provides the first detailed cultural history o...