Homegrown Music

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.

The Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina are the heart of a region where traditional music and dance are performed and celebrated as nowhere else in America. This guide puts readers on the trail to discover many sites where the unique musical legacy thrives, covering bluegrass and stringband music, clogging, and other traditional forms of music and dance. The book includes stories of the legendary music of the Blue Ridge Mountains, maps, and contact information for the featured sites, as well as color illustrations and profiles of prominent musicians and music traditions. Chapters are organized county by county, and sidebars include interviews with and profiles of performers, information about various performance styles, and a brief history of Blue Ridge music. The updated second edition adds three new music venues, along with updated information on the almost sixty music sites in Western North Carolina profiled in the previous edition. Also included are new full-color photos, two new artist profiles, and a CD of twenty-six classic songs from the mountains and the foothills.

From Ani DiFranco to Bob Dylan to Woodie Guthrie, American folk music comprises a truly diverse and rich tradition—one that's almost impossible to define in broad terms. This book explains why folk music is still highly relevant in the digital age. From indigenous music to Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen singing "This Land Is Your Land" side-by-side at the pre-inaugural concert for our first African American president, folk music has been at the center of America's history. Thomas Jefferson wooed his bride-to-be with fiddle playing. Stephen Foster captured the mood of our country in transition. The Carter Family adapted music from across the pond to Appalachia. Paul Robeson carried folk music of many lands to the world stage. Woody Guthrie's dust bowl ballads spoke to the common man, while Sixties protest music put folk on the map, following the Kingston Trio's hit, "Tom Dooley." Folk music has evolved with America's changing landscape, celebrating its multi-cultural traditions. From Irish step dancers to rap, parlor songs to Dixieland, blues to classical, Discovering Folk Music presents the genre as surprisingly diverse, every bit the product of our national melting pot. Demonstrating continuing relevance of folk music in our everyday lives, the book spotlights an amazing array of personalities, with special emphasis on the folk revival era when Dylan, Baez, Odetta, and Peter, Paul and Mary sang out. These and others influenced such contemporary performers as Shawn Colvin and Ani DiFranco. Those on today's "fringes of folk" scene continue to look to these deep roots while embracing alternative sounds. Included are interviews with such legendary artists as Janis Ian, Tom Paxton, and Jean Ritchie. Nora Guthrie, Woody's daughter, also weighs in. Discovering Folk Music is a ground-breaking look at 21st-century folk music in our rapidly changing digital world, family friendly while ripe for rediscovery by the Woodstock generation.

With roots in Appalachia, the Mississippi Delta, New Orleans, the Piedmont, Memphis, and the prairies of Texas and the American West, the musical genre called Americana can prove difficult to define. Nevertheless, this burgeoning trend in American popular music continues to expand and develop, winning new audiences and engendering fresh, innovative artists at an exponential rate. As Lee Zimmerman illustrates in Americana Music: Voices, Visionaries, and Pioneers of an Honest Sound, “Americana” covers a gamut of sounds and styles. In its strictest sense, it is a blanket term for bluegrass, country, mountain music, rockabilly, and the blues. By a broader definition, it can encompass roots rock, country rock, singer/songwriters, R&B, and their various combinations. Bob Dylan, Hank Williams, Carl Perkins, and Tom Petty can all lay valid claims as purveyors of Americana, but so can Elvis Costello, Solomon Burke, and Jason Isbell. Americana is new and old, classic and contemporary, trendy and traditional. Mining the firsthand insights of those whose stories help shape the sound—people such as Ralph Stanley, John McEuen (Nitty Gritty Dirt Band), Chris Hillman (Byrds, Flying Burrito Brothers), Paul Cotton and Rusty Young (Poco), Shawn Colvin, Kinky Friedman, David Bromberg, the Avett Brothers, Amanda Shires, Ruthie Foster, and many more—Americana Music provides a history of how Americana originated, how it reached a broader audience in the ’60s and ’70s with the merging of rock and country, and how it evolved its overwhelmingly populist appeal as it entered the new millennium.

With an influx of Appalachian migrants who came looking for work in the 1940s and 1950s, Baltimore found itself populated by some extraordinary mountain musicians and was for a brief time the center of the bluegrass world. Life in Baltimore for these musicians was not easy. There were missed opportunities, personal demons and always the up-hill battle with prejudice against their hillbilly origins. Based upon interviews with legendary players from the golden age of Baltimore bluegrass, this book provides the first in-depth coverage of this transplanted-roots music and its broader influence, detailing the struggles Appalachian musicians faced in a big city that viewed the music they made as the “poorest example of poor man’s music.”

The author of The Last Leaves Falling delivers a harrowing and beautifully written novel that explores the relationship between two girls obsessed with music, the practice of corrective rape, and the risks and power of using one's voice. 5 1/2 x 8 5/16.