Romancing the Folk: Public Memory and American Roots Music (Cultural Studies of the United States)
For the first half of this country!s existence, our folk song heritage could be traced directly to British peasant culture. Early in the 20th century, musicologists began taking note of such distinctly American musical genres as the Negro spiritual and the cowboy song. When recording became popular in the 1920s, these two styles, now known as race and hillbilly music, established themselves as surprisingly profitable forms of musical expression. In the early 1930s John Lomax, whose 1910 Cowboy Songs and Other Ballads was a folklorist!s staple, traveled more than 30,000 miles with a 350 Dictaphone built into the backseat of his car to record our indigenous music. These recordings featured the likes of Lead Belly, Muddy Waters, and Woody Guthrie and laid the groundwork for each succeeding musical generation. Here, Filene tells the story of the musicologists who preserved our indigenous music and the producers, radio programmers, and publicists who made it available to mainstream audiences. A public historian at the Minnesota Historical Society, he has researched such sources as the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Institute to produce a learned and lively look at the development of our national music. Much of the territory covered here is overlooked in books on folk music, making this a reasonable purchase despite the steep hardcover price."Dan Bogey, Clearfield Cty. P.L. Federation, Curwensville, PACopyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.