You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
With retail sales of the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack exceeding 6.5 million copies since its 2000 release, bluegrass music has re-entered the spotlight as a major American style, spawning huge successes with subsequent albums. Author Stephanie P. Ledgin has captured the rich history of this music in Homegrown Music, a lively, informative book that is perfect for newcomers and devoted fans, musicians, and non-musicians. Though recognized and embraced internationally, bluegrass is one of only two musical genres native to America and, like jazz, it boasts a colorful and lively history, one that is captured here in all its detail complete with candid interviews with such legends as Earl Scruggs, Ralph Stanley, and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. Covering such aspects of bluegrass as instrumentation, songs, the festival experience, and parking lot picking, Homegrown Music also offers candid interviews with many celebrated bluegrass figures. An extensive up-to-the-minute resource guide of print, audio-visual, and Internet materials rounds out the volume. Enthusiasts of all ages will find much to discover and much to enjoy.
In recent years, there has been an upsurge in interest in "roots music" and "world music," popular forms that fuse contemporary sounds with traditional vernacular styles. In the 1950s and 1960s, the music industry characterized similar sounds simply as "folk music." Focusing on such music since the 1950s, The Never-Ending Revival: Rounder Records and the Folk Alliance analyzes the intrinsic contradictions of a commercialized folk culture. 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. By tracing the histories of these organizatio...
Kentucky is richly blessed with rivers. This book tells the stories of three of the most beautiful and historic: the Rolling Fork, the Nolin, and the Rough. Each is an unpredictable force of nature flowing through a land that varies from wide, sunny meadows to dark, rock-bound hollows. Chapters describe the people who lived in the river valleys, including pioneers, frontier preachers, a future president, cave explorers, Confederate and Union soldiers, desperate killers, hardscrabble farmers, and inspired visionaries. Sometimes they were wasteful and violent and vain; at other times they were inventive and graceful and kind. Their descendants realized that survival had come to mean something new: living in harmony with the land and the rivers.
None
This authoritative reference work investigates the roots of the Sacred Harp, the central collection of the deeply influential and long-lived southern tradition of shape-note singing. Where other studies of the Sacred Harp have focused on the sociology of present-day singers and their activities, David Warren Steel and Richard H. Hulan concentrate on the regional culture that produced the Sacred Harp in the nineteenth century and delve deeply into history of its authors and composers. They trace the sources of every tune and text in the Sacred Harp, from the work of B. F. White, E. J. King, and their west Georgia contemporaries who helped compile the original collection in 1844 to the contrib...
A compelling account of the vibrant musical tradition of Sacred Harp singing, Traveling Home describes how song brings together Americans of widely divergent religious and political beliefs. Named after the most popular of the nineteenth-century shape-note tunebooks - which employed an innovative notation system to teach singers to read music - Sacred Harp singing has been part of rural Southern life for over 150 years. In the wake of the folk revival of the 1950s and 60s, this participatory musical tradition attracted new singers from all over America. All-day "singings" from The Sacred Harp now take place across the country, creating a diverse and far-flung musical community. Blending historical scholarship with wide-ranging fieldwork, Kiri Miller presents an engagingly written study of this important music movement.
This biography charts the career and legacy of the pioneering American music manager Arthur Judson (1881–1975), who rose to prominence in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. A violinist by training, Judson became manager of the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1915 under the iconic conductor Leopold Stokowski. Within a few years, Judson also took on management of the New York Philharmonic, navigating a period of change and the tenures of several important conductors who included William Mengelberg, Arturo Toscanini, and John Barbirolli. Judson also began managing individual artists, including pianists Alfred Cortot and Vladimir Horowitz, violinist Jasha Heifetz, a...
The first comprehensive examination of the early blues industry and the music it produced
One of the most influential and acclaimed female vocalists of the twentieth century, Patsy Cline (1932–63) was best known for her rich tone and emotionally expressive voice. Born Virginia Patterson Hensley, she launched her musical career during the early 1950s as a young woman in Winchester, Virginia, and her heartfelt songs reflect her life and times in this community. A country music singer who enjoyed pop music crossover success, Cline embodied the power and appeal of women in country music, helping open the lucrative industry to future female solo artists. Bringing together noted authorities on Patsy Cline and country music, Sweet Dreams: The World of Patsy Cline examines the regional...
In this ambitious book on southern gospel music, Douglas Harrison reexamines the music's historical emergence and its function as a modern cultural phenomenon. Rather than a single rhetoric focusing on the afterlife as compensation for worldly sacrifice, Harrison presents southern gospel as a network of interconnected messages that evangelical Christians use to make individual sense of both Protestant theological doctrines and their own lived experiences. Harrison explores how listeners and consumers of southern gospel integrate its lyrics and music into their own religious experience, building up individual--and potentially subversive--meanings beneath a surface of evangelical consensus. Re...