Little money street
Subtitle: Gypsy music in the south of France
By: Fernanda Eberstadt.
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: Knopf
Published: 2006
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 242
Subjects: Romanies -- France -- Perpignan -- Social life and customs.; Romanies -- France -- Perpignan -- Music.; Romanies -- France -- Perpignan -- Economic conditions.
Genres: Music.
Description: In 1998, Eberstadt and her family moved from New York to Perpignan, France, a city with one of the largest Gypsy populations in Western Europe. Always fascinated with Gypsy music, Eberstadt became obsessed with a local band called Tekameli, perhaps the greatest Gypsy band between Barcelona and Budapest. After eighteen futile months, she was at last invited into the home of Tekameli's lead singer, Moïse Espinas. Here she found a jealously guarded culture--a society made, in part, of lawlessness and defiance of non-Gypsy norms--that nonetheless made room for her, "a privileged American in a Mediterranean underworld." As her relationship with the Espinas family changed over the years from mutual bafflement to friendship, Eberstadt found herself a part of Gypsy life, moving about in a large group--at cockfights, in storefront churches, at malls, in homes, and at rehearsals, discovering lives lived "between biblical laws and strip-mall consumerism."--Publisher description.