Tennessee Folklore Society Bulletin

Includes music (unaccompanied melodies)

Since 1934 the Tennessee Folklore Society Bulletin has been a respected source on the wonderfully diverse history and traditions of the Volunteer State, but until now that publication's wide-ranging articles have been largely restricted to the society's membership. With the appearance of A Tennessee Folklore Sampler, editors Ted Olson and Anthony P. Cavender provide a broad audience with a rich selection of the work published over the course of this acclaimed journal's seventy-five-year history. Packed with colorful descriptions and analysis of the state's folkways, A Tennessee Folklore Sampler covers all three of the grand divisions of Tennessee--East, Middle, and West-- and includes articles by some prominent students of folklore, among them Charles Wolfe, Charles Faulkner Bryan, Thomas Burton, Donald Davidson, Herbert Halpert, Mildred Haun, Michael Lofaro, Michael Montgomery, and Tom Rankin. Following an introductory section that places the book into historical, cultural, and socioeconomic contexts, A Tennessee Folklore Sampler is divided into ten parts covering material culture, medicine, beliefs and practices, customs, play and recreation lore, speech, legends, ballad and song, instrumental traditions and music collecting, and folk communities. Each part begins with an introduction that places the selections in context and concludes with suggestions for further reading. The appendix features an essay that explores the history of the Tennessee Folklore Society and the evolution of folklore studies of the state. The anthology will be a welcome resource for folklorists and scholars in many fields as well as a special treasure for general readers. With more than sixty illustrations complementing the text, A Tennessee Folklore Sampler presents a vivid overview of Tennessee folk culture that illuminates the very soul of the state. Ted Olson is the author of Blue Ridge Folklife and Breathing in Darkness: Poems, and the coeditor of The Bristol Sessions: Writings about the Big Bang of Country Music. He teaches at East Tennessee State University. Anthony P. Cavender is professor of anthropology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at East Tennessee State University. He is the author of Folk Medicine in Southern Appalachia and has published articles in Social Science and Medicine, Journal of Folklore Research, Journal of Ethnopharmacology, Human Organization, Appalachian Journal, and American Speech, among others.

Includes music (unaccompanied melodies).

Includes music (unaccompanied melodies)

"Folk Songs of Middle Tennessee ... is superior to most collections because Boswell cast a wide net in his collecting, recording many items from people not usually thought of as folksingers, and because, unlike most collectors of his day, he was equally skilled at music and lyric transcription". -- W. K. McNeil, The Ozark Folk Center This volume brings together, for the first time, more than one hundred traditional songs from Middle Tennessee -- a region that is synonymous in the popular mind with music but one that has been curiously neglected in folksong scholarship. The songs presented here were originally collected in the late 1940s and early 1950s by George Boswell, a distinguished scholar and field researcher who died in 1995. While living in Nashville, Boswell scoured the city and surrounding counties for old ballads and folk songs. Sometimes using a wire or tape recorder, at other times employing a stenographer, he visited numerous singers and transcribed the words and tunes to hundreds of songs. Even after moving from Tennessee to assume a teaching position at the University of Mississippi, Boswell continued to work on his collection, annotating and comparing texts, and publishing occasional samples. In 1950, he noted that Tennessee, virtually alone among southern states, had no published collection of its folk songs. That has remained the case until now. The songs chosen for this book are presented with musical notation and extensive backgound notes, including biographical data on the original informants (many of whom were business and professional people) and fascinating histories of each song. A number of the songs are rare and previously uncollected; others arelocal variants of long-popular ballads. The publication of this volume -- the first major collection of southern folk songs in many years -- is not only a testament to Boswell's scholarship but a marvelous contribution to our understanding of southern folk culture and

Livingston discusses selected examples of his music in detail."--BOOK JACKET.