Yankee Twang

Merging scholarly insight with a professional guitarist's sense of the musical life, Yankee Twang delves into the rich tradition of country & western music that is played and loved in the mill towns and cities of the American northeast. Scholar and musician Clifford R. Murphy draws on a wealth of ethnographic material, interviews, and encounters with recorded and live music to reveal the central role of country and western in the social lives and musical activity of working-class New Englanders. As Murphy shows, an extraordinary multiculturalism sets New England country and western music apart from other regional and national forms. Once segregated at work and worship, members of different ethnic groups used the country and western popularized on the radio and by barnstorming artists to come together at social events, united by a love of the music. Musicians, meanwhile, drew from the wide variety of ethnic musical traditions to create the New England style. But the music also gave--and gives--voice to working-class feeling. Murphy explores how the Yankee love of country and western emphasizes the western, reflecting the longing of many blue collar workers for the mythical cowboy's life of rugged but fulfilling individualism. Indeed, many New Englanders use country and western to comment on economic disenfranchisement and express their resentment of a mass media, government, and Nashville music establishment that they believe neither reflects their experiences nor considers them equal participants in American life.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1883.

This book recovers a major nineteenth-century literary figure, the American Claimant. For over a century, claimants offered a compelling way to understand cultural difference across the Anglophone Atlantic, especially between Britain and the United States. They also formed a political talisman, invoked against slavery and segregation, or privileges of gender and class. Later, claimants were exported to South Africa, becoming the fictional form for explaining black students who acquired American degrees. American Claimants traces the figure back to lost-heir romance, and explores its uses. These encompassed real, imagined, and textual ideas of inheritance, for writers and editors, and also for missionaries, artists, and students. The claimant dramatized tensions between tradition and change, or questions of exclusion and power: it offered ways of seeing activism, education, sculpture, and dress. The premise for dozens of novels and plays, a trope, a joke, even the basis for real claims: claimants matter in theatre history and periodical studies, they touch on literary marketing and reprinting, and they illuminate some unexpected texts. These range from Our American Cousin to Bleak House, Little Lord Fauntleroy to Frederick Douglass' Paper; writers discussed include Frances Trollope, Julia Griffiths, Alexander Crummell, John Dube, James McCune Smith, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Mark Twain. The focus on claimants yields remarkable finds: new faces, fresh angles, a lost column, and a forgotten theatrical genre. It reveals the pervasiveness of this form, and its centrality in imagining cultural contact and exchange.

This fascinating book is the first volume in a projected cultural history of the United States, from the earliest English settlements to our own time. It is a history of American folkways as they have changed through time, and it argues a thesis about the importance for the United States of having been British in its cultural origins. While most people in the United States today have no British ancestors, they have assimilated regional cultures which were created by British colonists, even while preserving ethnic identities at the same time. In this sense, nearly all Americans are "Albion's Seed," no matter what their ethnicity may be. The concluding section of this remarkable book explores the ways that regional cultures have continued to dominate national politics from 1789 to 1988, and still help to shape attitudes toward education, government, gender, and violence, on which differences between American regions are greater than between European nations.

Provides definitions and examples of words and phrases used in different geographical regions of the United States.