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The cowboy songs and dusty Texas car rides of his youth set Patrick B. Mullen on a lifelong journey into the sprawling Arcadia of American music. That music fused so-called civilized elements with native forms to produce everything from Zydeco to Conjunto to jazz to Woody Guthrie. The civilized/native idea, meanwhile, helped develop Mullen's critical perspective, guide his love of music, and steer his life's work. Part scholar's musings and part fan's memoir, Right to the Juke Joint follows Mullen from his early embrace of country and folk to the full flowering of an idiosyncratic, omnivorous interest in music. Personal memory merges with a lifetime of fieldwork in folklore and anthropology to provide readers with a deeply informed analysis of American roots music. Mullen opens up on the world of ideas and his own tireless fandom to explore how his cultural identity--and ours--relates to concepts like authenticity and "folkness." The result is a charming musical map drawn by a gifted storyteller whose boots have traveled a thousand tuneful roads.
Patrick Mullen examines how elderly people use folk traditions to engage others and pass on their wisdom and knowledge to succeeding generations. Based on interviews with nine people in their seventies and eighties who live in rural Virginia, North Carolina, and southern Ohio, this book shows how folklore enriches people's lives. Mullen places the folklore - local legends, jokes, personal-experience narratives, family history, folk medicine, planting signs, foodways, wood carving, belief systems, customs, folk architecture - within the context of the individuals' life stories and the culture of their local communities. The analysis concentrates on recurring themes in each person's folklore and the rhetorical strategies the storytellers use to interest listeners and assure that their traditions will be passed on.
The challenges of interracial fieldwork
A central criticism emerging from Black and Creole thinkers is that mainstream, white dominated, culture, consumes sounds and images of Creole and Black people in music, theater, and the white press, while ignoring critiques of the white consumption of black culture. Ironically, critiques of whiteness are found not only in black literature and media, but also within the blues, jazz, and spirituals that whites listened to, loved, collected, and archived. This book argues that whiteness is not only a visual orientation; it is a way of hearing. Inspired by formulations of the race and whiteness in the existential writings of Frantz Fanon, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, W.E.B. Du Bois, Ri...
The arson attacks in 2006 on a number of small Baptist churches in rural Alabama recall the rash of burnings at predominantly black houses of worship that damaged or destroyed dozens of southern churches in the mid-1990s. One of the churches struck by pro
* How black people established their identities in the African diaspora.
The first major autobiography by a Texas poet, this noteworthy account traces the life and times of a poet, publisher, critic, and teacher from his childhood to the present day. This remarkable life is examined through the works it produced--25 books in the fields of poetry, fiction, translation, jazz history, and book reviewing. Proving that the literary and intellectual life in Texas far surpasses the state's stereotypes, this record shows how the poet was instrumental in connecting Texas with many Latin American writers as well as with a wide world of music.