The Chicago Tribune's Bill Dahl praised Robert Pruter's Doowop for ''vividly describ[ing] an enchanting time on the local music scene, when a handful of teenagers could taste rock 'n' roll stardom with harmonies they cooked up on a street corner.''Pruter foraged sources from fanzines to the Chicago Defender and conducted extensive interviews in ......
Whether in the private parlor, public hall, commercial ''dance palace,'' or sleazy dive, dance has long been opposed by those who viewed it as immoral--more precisely as being a danger to the purity of those who practiced it, particularly women. In Adversaries of Dance, Ann Wagner presents a major study of opposition to dance over a period of four ......
What is music education, and what ought it to be? By challenging narrow and inadequate conceptions of the field, Estelle Jorgensen raises the possibility of alternative views that can dignify the teacher's task, enrich and enliven the profession, and validate an exciting range of additional ways in which music education can be undertaken in the ......
''An excellent addition to . . . ethnomusicological studies of nontraditional music in America.''-- Choice ''A well-deserved look at the musical world of immigrant Jews, who, in finding and creating an expressive medium for self-identity, helped shape and give life to American popular culture.''-- Ethnomusicology ''Employing the tools of the ......
A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title, 1996.In this lively exploration of folksongs and their meanings, Barre Toelken looks closely at riddle songs and other ambiguous folksongs, as well as the various ''ballad commonplaces.'' Ranging through metaphors such as weaving, plowing, plucking flowers, and walking in the dew, Toelken shows how each ......
Never Without a Song focuses on the centrality of folksong in the life of Jennie Devlin, a woman who worked for fourteen years as a ''bound-out girl'' along the New York-Pennsylvania border and later lived in Philadelphia and Gloucester, New Jersey. Katharine Newman met Devlin in 1936 and compiled information about the older woman's life and ......
Ethnomusicological Reflections on Schools of Music
In Heartland Excursions, one of today's foremost ethnomusicologists takes the reader along for a delightful, wide-ranging tour of his workplace. Bruno Nettl provides an insightful, sometimes tongue-in-cheek, always pithy ethnography of midwestern university schools of music from a different perspective in each of four chapters, alternating among ......
Ralph Stanley and the World of Traditional Bluegrass Music
Reading John Wright's book is like sitting around a campfire at a bluegrass festival, listening as the oldtimers weave their yarns far into the night. Told by those who create, produce, stage, love, and virtually live for old-time mountain music, the tales come from the longtime coworkers, sidemen, promoters, friends a neighbor, a scholar who has ......
The complete story of the origins and evolution of the black American blues tradition, drawing extensively on oral history interviews. ''The opening chapters are among the best things ever published on the blues. It's a thoughtful, substantial, solidly constructed, information packed work, and should be in every serious blues enthusiast's library. ......
