Work Songs

DIVThe place of music in different forms of work from the earliest hunting and planting to the contemporary office./div

These essays offer striking portraits of working environments where song arose in response to prevailing conditions. Included are the protest blues of African American levee workers, the corridos of Chicano farm workers, and the European songs of immigrant lumber workers in the Midwest.

A career-spanning account of the artistry and politics of Bob Dylan’s songwriting Bob Dylan’s reception of the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature has elevated him beyond the world of popular music, establishing him as a major modern artist. However, until now, no study of his career has focused on the details and nuances of the songs, showing how they work as artistic statements designed to create meaning and elicit emotion. Bob Dylan: How the Songs Work (originally published as Bob Dylan's Poetics) is the first comprehensive book on both the poetics and politics of Dylan’s compositions. It studies Dylan, not as a pop hero, but as an artist, as a maker of songs. Focusing on the interplay of music and lyric, it traces Dylan’s innovative use of musical form, his complex manipulation of poetic diction, and his dialogues with other artists, from Woody Guthrie to Arthur Rimbaud. Moving from Dylan’s earliest experiments with the blues, through his mastery of rock and country, up to his densely allusive recent recordings, Timothy Hampton offers a detailed account of Dylan’s achievement. Locating Dylan in the long history of artistic modernism, the book studies the relationship between form, genre, and the political and social themes that crisscross Dylan’s work. Bob Dylan: How the Songs Work offers both a nuanced engagement with the work of a major artist and a meditation on the contribution of song at times of political and social change.

Provides lyrics, music, and chord notation for work and protest songs and discusses each tune's significance in the labor movement

An award-winning and beloved novelist of the American West spins the further adventures of a favorite character, in one of his richest historical settings yet. "If America was a melting pot, Butte would be its boiling point," observes Morrie Morgan, the itinerant teacher, walking encyclopedia, and inveterate charmer last seen leaving a one-room schoolhouse in Marias Coulee, the stage he stole in Ivan Doig's 2006 The Whistling Season. A decade later, Morrie is back in Montana, as the beguiling narrator of Work Song. Lured like so many others by "the richest hill on earth," Morrie steps off the train in Butte, copper-mining capital of the world, in its jittery heyday of 1919. But while riches elude Morrie, once again a colorful cast of local characters-and their dramas-seek him out: a look-alike, sound-alike pair of retired Welsh miners; a streak-of-lightning waif so skinny that he is dubbed Russian Famine; a pair of mining company goons; a comely landlady propitiously named Grace; and an eccentric boss at the public library, his whispered nickname a source of inexplicable terror. When Morrie crosses paths with a lively former student, now engaged to a fiery young union leader, he is caught up in the mounting clash between the iron-fisted mining company, radical "outside agitators," and the beleaguered miners. And as tensions above ground and below reach the explosion point, Morrie finds a unique way to give a voice to those who truly need one. Watch a Video

When society tries to put you in a box, knock the walls down. -Tati Green "You have a pretty face" is such a back-handed compliment. It's like telling me that my face is beautiful, but the rest of me is not. Despite what society says, my curves are hot. My love life, on the other hand, is not. My mom says I'll never find love because of my weight. My sister says I'll never find love because of my personality. My almost-fiance says I'll never find love because I'm incapable of loving anyone. My mom and sister are full of it, but my ex kind of has a point. At twenty-seven years old, I've never been in love. I date a lot, yet sparks never fly. But when I experienced the heart-pounding, skin tingling feeling for the first time, I didn't think it would be caused by a guy I've never met. And I damn sure didn't think he would end up holding my future in his hands in more ways than one."

The Routledge Handbook of Women’s Work in Music presents a unique collection of core research by academics and music practitioners from around the world, engaging with an extraordinarily wide range of topics on women’s contributions to Western and Eastern art music, popular music, world music, music education, ethnomusicology as well as in the music industries. The handbook falls into six parts. Part I serves as an introduction to the rich variety of subject matter the reader can expect to encounter in the handbook as a whole. Part II focuses on what might be termed the more traditional strand of feminist musicology – research which highlights the work of historical and/or neglected composers. Part III explores topics concerned with feminist aesthetics and music creation and Part IV focuses on questions addressing the performance and reception of music and musicians. The narrative of the handbook shifts in Part V to focus on opportunities and leadership in the music professions from a Western perspective. The final section of the handbook (Part VI) provides new frames of context for women’s positions as workers, educators, patrons, activists and promoters of music. This is a key reference work for advanced undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers in music and gender.

The Church of Rome, though admitting no women to a share in performing its services, has yet made a woman the patron saint of music. The religions of antiquity have paid even more homage to the weaker sex in the matter, as the multitude of musical nymphs and fostering goddesses will show. Of Saint Cecilia herself little is known accurately. The very apocryphal legend states that about the year 230 a noble Roman lady of that name, who had been converted to Christianity, was forced into an unwilling marriage with a certain Valerian, a pagan. She succeeded in converting her husband and his brother, but all were martyred because of their faith. This it is stated, took place under the Prefect Almacus, but history gives no such name. It is unfortunate, also, that the earliest writer mentioning her, Fortunatus, Bishop of Poitiers, speaks of her as having died in Sicily between the years 176 and 180. It is doubtful whether she would have been known at all, in connection with the art, but for a passing phrase in her story, which relates that she often united instrumental music to that of her voice in sounding the praises of the Lord. Because of these few words, she is famed throughout musical Christendom, half the musical societies in Europe are named after her, and Raphael's picture, Dryden's ode, Stefano Maderno's statue, and a hundred other great art works have come into existence. The earliest inferences of woman's influence in music are to be drawn from the Hindoo mythology. According to the tabular schedule of all knowledge, found in the ancient Brahmin records, music as an art belongs in the second chief division of lesser sciences, but on its mathematical and philosophical side it is accorded a much higher position, and is treated of in the oldest and most sacred Hindoo work, the Veda. This authority tells us that when Brahma had lain in the original egg some thousand billion years, he split it by the force of his thought, and made heaven and earth from the two fragments. After this, Manu brought into being ten great forces, whence came all the gods, goddesses, good and evil spirits. Among the lesser deities were the genii of music (Gandharbas) and those of the dance (Apsarasas), who furnished entertainment for the gods before man possessed the art.