An American Singing Heritage

This edition brings together representative transcriptions of folk songs and ballads in the British-Irish-American oral tradition that have enjoyed widespread familiarity throughout twentieth-century America. Within are the one hundred folk songs that most frequently occurred in a methodical survey of Roud’s Folk Song Index, catalogues of commercial early country (or "hillbilly") recordings, and relevant archival collections. The editors selected sources for transcriptions in a broad range of singing styles and representing many regions of the United States. The selections attempt to avoid the biases of previous collections and provide a fresh group of examples, many heretofore unseen in print. The sources for the transcriptions are recordings of traditional musicians from the 1920s through the early 1940s drawn from (1) commercial recordings of "hillbilly" musicians, and (2) field recordings in the collection of the Library of Congress’s Archive of American Folk Song, now part of the Archive of Folk Culture. Each transcription is accompanied by a brief contextualizing essay discussing the song’s history and influence, recording and performance information (whenever available), and an examination of the tune. The edition begins with a substantive essay about the history of folk song recordings and folk song scholarship, and the nature of traditional vocal music in the United States.

New folk music and folk-song materials in this comprehensive study are particularly important for singers, folk music enthusiasts, ethnomusicologists, comparative and cultural studies scholars, and those interested in Canadian culture. LaRena Clark was a great singer and knew many fine songs. Her wide repertoire covers almost the complete range of types and topics of traditional Anglo-Canadian songs. Comparison with other collections in Canada, the United States, the British Isles, and Australia indicate just how unique and far-reaching it was. Clark's background and her varied ancestry shaped her repertoire. The account of her parents' activities gives a vivid picture of folk life in rural Ontario during the early years of this century. She knew some Canadian songs previously unreported, and she wrote songs with a strong Canadian flavour. Musically, Clark's songs are a microcosm of practices characteristic of British folk music throughout the English-speaking world. Particularly noteworthy is her constant reworking of traditional materials, procedures, forms, and individual tunes.

A collection of 27 original essays, some formal and some personal, document the history of Italian American culture for general readers and for teachers of multicultural studies. They investigate Italian-American identity and contributions to American culture through accounts of everyday life, fiction, films, poetry, music, customs, traditions, social mores, religion, and other features. Among the contributors are an anthropologist, a playwright, several poets and novelists, a singer, an opera critic, and several literary critics and cultural historians. The chronology begins of course with 1492; the lexicon does not indicate pronunciation. Double spaced. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

This book , originally published in 1985 by Texian Press, Waco, Texas, has now been updated and expanded.

This book addresses the interconnected issues of public memory, race, and heritage tourism, exploring the ways in which historical tourism shapes collective understandings of America’s earliest engagements with race. It includes contributions from a diverse group of humanities scholars, including early Americanists, and scholars from communication, English, museum studies, historic preservation, art and architecture, Native American studies, and history. Through eight chapters, the collection offers varied perspectives and original analyses of memory-making and re-making through travel to early American sites, bringing needed attention to the considerable role that tourism plays in producing—and possibly unsettling—racialized memories about America’s past. The book is an interdisciplinary effort that analyses lesser-known sites of historical and racial significance throughout North America and the Caribbean (up to about 1830) to unpack the relationship between leisure travel, processes of collective remembering or forgetting, and the connections of tourist sites to colonialism, slavery, genocide, and oppression. Public Memory, Race, and Heritage Tourism of Early America provides a deconstruction of the touristic experience with racism, slavery, and the Indigenous experience in America that will appeal to students and academics in the social sciences and humanities.

In American music, the notion of "roots" has been a powerful refrain, but just what constitutes our true musical traditions has often been a matter of debate. As Benjamin Filene reveals, a number of competing visions of America's musical past have vied fo

This book explores a variety of heritage dialogues, from global and specific approaches, combining different views, perceptions and senses. Following the first volume on Latin American Heritage as published in this book series in 2019, this new volume focuses on music, dance and railway heritage, considering artistic, archaeological, natural, ethnological and industrial aspects. It is divided into four thematic sections – 1) parties and cultural heritage, 2) railway heritage and museums, 3) archaeological heritage and tourism, and 4) cultural landscape and tourism – and presents chapters on a diverse range of topics, from samba and cultural identities in Rio de Janeiro and London to the "musealization" of railway assets, the history of Antarctic archaeology, the value of scenic landscapes and urban memory in Spain, and the cultural landscape of Brazil. This unique book explores a variety of heritage dialogues, pursuing global and specific approaches, and combining different views, perceptions and senses, including video fragments.