American Musicspheres – serie

As the Soviet Union stood on the brink of collapse, thousands of Bukharian Jews left their homes from across the predominantly Muslim cities of Central Asia, to reestablish their lives in the United States, Israel and Europe. Today, about thirty thousand Bukharian Jews reside in New York City, settled into close-knit communities and existing as a quintessential American immigrant group. For Bukharian immigrants, music is an essential part of their communal self-definition, and musicians frequently act as cultural representatives for the group as a whole. Greeted with Smiles: Bukharian Jewish Music and Musicians in New York explores the circumstances facing new American immigrants, using the music of the Bukharian Jews to gain entrance into their community and their culture. Author Evan Rapport investigates the transformation of Bukharian identity through an examination of corresponding changes in its music, focusing on three of these distinct but overlapping repertoires - maquom (classical or "heavy" music), Jewish religious music and popular music. Drawing upon interviews, participant observation and music lessons, Rapport interprets the personal perspectives of musicians who serve as community leaders and representatives. By adapting strategies acquired as an ethno-religious minority among Central Asian Muslim neighbors, Bukharian musicians have adjusted their musical repertoire in their new American home. The result is the creation of a distinct Bukharian Jewish American identity-their musical activities are changing the city's cultural landscape while at the same time providing for an understanding of the cultural implications of Bukharian diaspora. Greeted with Smiles is sure to be an essential text for ethnomusicologists and scholars of Jewish and Central Asian music and culture, Jewish-Muslim interaction and diasporic communities.

Divi Zheni identifies itself as a Bulgarian women's chorus and band, but it is located in Boston and none of its members come from Bulgaria. Zlatne Uste is one of the most popular purveyors of Balkan music in America, yet the name of the band is grammatically incorrect. The members of Sviraci hail from western Massachusetts, upstate New York, and southern Vermont, but play tamburica music on traditional instruments. Curiously, thousands of Americans not only participate in traditional music and dance from the Balkans, but in fact structure their social practices around it without having any other ties to the region. In Balkan Fascination, ethnomusicologist Mirjana Lausevic, a native of the Balkans, investigates this remarkable phenomenon to explore why so many Americans actively participate in specific Balkan cultural practices to which they have no familial or ethnic connection. Going beyond traditional interpretations, she challenges the notion that participation in Balkan culture in North America is merely a specialized offshoot of the 1960s American folk music scene. Instead, her exploration of the relationship between the stark sounds and lively dances of the Balkan region and the Americans who love them reveals that Balkan dance and music has much deeper roots in America's ideas about itself, its place in the world, and the place of the world's cultures in the American melting pot. Examining sources that span more than a century and come from both sides of the Atlantic, Lausevic shows that an affinity group's debt to historical movements and ideas, though largely unknown to its members, is vital in understanding how and why people make particular music and dance choices that substantially change their lives.

Folk songs are short stories from the souls of common people. Some, like Mexican corridos or Scottish ballads reworked in the Appalachias, are stories of tragic or heroic episodes. Others, like the African American blues, reach from a difficult present back into slavery and forward into a troubled future. Japanese workers in Hawaii's plantations created their own versions, in form more akin to their traditional tanka or haiku poetry. These holehole bushi describe the experiences of one particular group caught in the global movements of capital, empire, and labor during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In Voices from the Canefields author Franklin Odo situates over two hundred of these songs, in translation, in a hitherto largely unexplored historical context. Japanese laborers quickly comprised the majority of Hawaiian sugar plantation workers after their large-scale importation as contract workers in 1885. Their folk songs provide good examples of the intersection between local work/life and the global connection which the workers clearly perceived after arriving. While many are songs of lamentation, others reflect a rapid adaptation to a new society in which other ethnic groups were arranged in untidy hierarchical order - the origins of a unique multicultural social order dominated by an oligarchy of white planters. Odo also recognizes the influence of the immigrants' rapidly modernizing homeland societies through his exploration of the "cultural baggage" brought by immigrants and some of their dangerous notions of cultural superiority. Japanese immigrants were thus simultaneously the targets of intense racial and class vitriol even as they took comfort in the expanding Japanese empire. Engagingly written and drawing on a multitude of sources including family histories, newspapers, oral histories, the expressed perspectives of women in this immigrant society, and accounts from the prolific Japanese language press into the narrative, Voices from the Canefields will speak not only to scholars of ethnomusicology, migration history, and ethnic/racial movements, but also to a general audience of Japanese Americans seeking connections to their cultural past and the experiences of their most recently past generations.

On a Saturday night in 1948, Hank Williams stepped onto the stage of the Louisiana Hayride and sang "Lovesick Blues." Up to that point, Williams's yodeling style had been pigeon-holed as hillbilly music, cutting him off from the mainstream of popular music. Taking a chance on this untried artist, the Hayride--a radio "barn dance" or country music variety show like the Grand Ole Opry--not only launched Williams's career, but went on to launch the careers of well-known performers such as Jim Reeves, Webb Pierce, Kitty Wells, Johnny Cash, and Slim Whitman.Broadcast from Shreveport, Louisiana, the local station KWKH's 50,000-watt signal reached listeners in over 28 states and lured them to packed performances of the Hayride's road show. By tracing the dynamic history of the Hayride and its sponsoring station, ethnomusicologist Tracey Laird reveals the critical role that this part of northwestern Louisiana played in the development of both country music and rock and roll. Delving into the past of this Red River city, she probes the vibrant historical, cultural, and social backdrop for its dynamic musical scene. Sitting between the Old South and the West, this one-time frontier town provided an ideal setting for the cross-fertilization of musical styles. The scene was shaped by the region's easy mobility, the presence of a legal "red-light" district from 1903-17, and musical interchanges between blacks and whites, who lived in close proximity and in nearly equal numbers. The region nurtured such varied talents as Huddie Ledbetter, the "king of the twelve-string guitar," and Jimmie Davis, the two term "singing governor" of Louisiana who penned "You Are My Sunshine."Against the backdrop of the colorful history of Shreveport, the unique contribution of this radio barn dance is revealed. Radio shaped musical tastes, and the Hayride's frontier-spirit producers took risks with artists whose reputations may have been shaky or whose styles did not neatly fit musical categories (both Hank Williams and Elvis Presley were rejected by the Opry before they came to Shreveport). The Hayride also served as a training ground for a generation of studio sidemen and producers who steered popular music for decades after the Hayride's final broadcast. While only a few years separated the Hayride appearances of Hank Williams and Elvis Presley--who made his national radio debut on the show in 1954--those years encompassed seismic shifts in the tastes, perceptions, and self-consciousness of American youth. Though the Hayride is often overshadowed by the Grand Ole Opry in country music scholarship, Laird balances the record and reveals how this remarkable show both documented and contributed to a powerful transformation in American popular music.

Bright Star of the West traces the life, repertoire, and influence of Joe Heaney, Ireland's greatest sean-nós ("old style") singer. Born in 1919, Joe Heaney grew up in a politically volatile time, as his native Ireland became a democracy. He found work and relative fame as a singer in London before moving to Scotland. Eventually, like many others searching for greater opportunity, he emigrated to the United States, where he worked as a doorman while supplementing his income with appearances at folk festivals, concerts and clubs. As his reputation and following grew, Heaney gained entry to the folk music scene and began leading workshops as a visiting artist at several universities. In 1982 the National Endowment for the Arts awarded Heaney America's highest honor in folk and traditional arts, the prestigious National Heritage Fellowship. Although Heaney's works did not become truly popular in his homeland until many years after his death, today he is hailed as a seminal figure of traditional song and is revered by those who follow traditional music. Authors Sean Williams and Lillis Ó Laoire address larger questions about song, identity, and culture. They explore the deep ambivalence both the Irish and Irish-Americans felt toward the traditional aspects of their culture, examining other critical issues, such as gender and masculinity, authenticity, and contemporary marketing and consumption of sean-nós singing in both Ireland and the United States. Comingling Heaney's own words with the authors' comprehensive research and analysis, Bright Star of the West weaves a poignant critical biography of the man, the music, and his continuing legacy in Ireland and the United States.

Singing God's Words is the first in-depth study of the experience and meaning of chanting or "reading" Torah among contemporary American Jews. This experience has been transformed dramatically in recent years by the impact of digital technology, feminism, the empowerment of lay people and a search for self-fulfillment through involvement with community. At a time when worshippers seek deeper spiritual experience, many Jews have found new meaning in the experience of reading Torah, an act that is broadly accessible to Jewish adults even as it requires intensive immersion with the text of the Bible in Hebrew.This book examines why and how growing numbers of American Jews in all denominations see the public chanting of Biblical texts during the synagogue service as one of the most authentic and personal expressions of their religious identity. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with men and women, both professionals and congregants, Jeffrey A. Summit describes how the reading of Torah embodies their understanding of historical religious practice, even as it is shaped by contemporary views of spiritual experience. Through this act, holiness becomes manifest at the intersection of Biblical chant, sacred text, the individual, and the community.

In 1946, Harry Choates, a Cajun fiddle virtuoso, changed the course of American musical history when his recording of the so-called Cajun national anthem "Jole Blon" reached number four on the national Billboard charts. Cajun music became part of the American consciousness for the first time thanks to the unprecedented success of this issue, as the French tune crossed cultural, ethnic, racial, and socio-economic boundaries. Country music stars Moon Mullican, Roy Acuff, Bob Wills, and Hank Snow rushed into the studio to record their own interpretations of the waltz-followed years later by Waylon Jennings and Bruce Springsteen. The cross-cultural musical legacy of this plaintive waltz also paved the way for Hank Williams Sr.'s Cajun-influenced hit "Jamabalaya." Choates' "Jole Blon" represents the culmination of a centuries-old dialogue between the Cajun community and the rest of America. Joining into this dialogue is the most thoroughly researched and broadly conceived history of Cajun music yet published, Cajun Breakdown. Furthermore, the book examines the social and cultural roots of Cajun music's development through 1950 by raising broad questions about the ethnic experience in America and nature of indigenous American music. Since its inception, the Cajun community constantly refashioned influences from the American musical landscape despite the pressures of marginalization, denigration, and poverty. European and North American French songs, minstrel tunes, blues, jazz, hillbilly, Tin Pan Alley melodies, and western swing all became part of the Cajun musical equation. The idiom's synthetic nature suggests an extensive and intensive dialogue with popular culture, extinguishing the myth that Cajuns were an isolated folk group astray in the American South. Ryan André Brasseaux's work constitutes a bold and innovative exploration of a forgotten chapter in America's musical odyssey.

Jump Up! Caribbean Carnival Music in New York City is the first comprehensive history of Trinidadian calypso and steelband music in the diaspora. Carnival, transplanted from Trinidad to Harlem in the 1930s and to Brooklyn in the late 1960s, provides the cultural context for the study. Blending oral history, archival research, and ethnography, Jump Up! examines how members of New York's diverse Anglophile-Caribbean communities forged transnational identities through the self-conscious embrace and transformation of select Carnival music styles and performances. The work fills a significant void in our understanding of how Caribbean Carnival music-specifically calypso, soca (soul/calypso), and steelband-evolved in the second half of the twentieth century as it flowed between its Island homeland and its bourgeoning New York migrant community. Jump Up! addresses the issues of music, migration, and identity head on, exploring the complex cycling of musical practices and the back-and-forth movement of singers, musicians, arrangers, producers, and cultural entrepreneurs between New York's diasporic communities and the Caribbean.

Jump Up! Caribbean Carnival Music in New York City is the first comprehensive history of Trinidadian calypso and steelband music in the diaspora. Carnival, transplanted from Trinidad to Harlem in the 1930s and to Brooklyn in the late 1960s, provides the cultural context for the study. Blending oral history, archival research, and ethnography, Jump Up! examines how members of New York's diverse Anglophile-Caribbean communities forged transnational identities through the self-conscious embrace and transformation of select Carnival music styles and performances. The work fills a significant void in our understanding of how Caribbean Carnival music-specifically calypso, soca (soul/calypso), and steelband-evolved in the second half of the twentieth century as it flowed between its Island homeland and its bourgeoning New York migrant community. Jump Up! addresses the issues of music, migration, and identity head on, exploring the complex cycling of musical practices and the back-and-forth movement of singers, musicians, arrangers, producers, and cultural entrepreneurs between New York's diasporic communities and the Caribbean.

Sound Relations delves into histories of Inuit musical life in Alaska to register the significance of sound as integral to self-determination and sovereignty. Offering radical and relational ways of listening to Inuit performances across a range of genres--from hip hop to Christian hymnody and traditional drumsongs to funk and R&B --author Jessica Bissett Perea registers how a density (not difference) of Indigenous ways of musicking from a vast archive of presence sounds out entanglements between structures of Indigeneity and colonialism. This work dismantles stereotypical understandings of "Eskimos," "Indians," and "Natives" by addressing the following questions: What exactly is "Native" about Native music? What does it mean to sound (or not sound) Native? Who decides? And how can in-depth analyses of Native music that center Indigeneity reframe larger debates of race, power, and representation in twenty-first century American music historiography? Instead of proposing singular truths or facts, this book invites readers to consider the existence of multiple simultaneous truths, a density of truths, all of which are culturally constructed, performed, and in some cases politicized and policed. Native ways of doing music history engage processes of sound worlding that envision otherwise, beyond nation-state notions of containment and glorifications of Alaska as solely an extraction site for U.S. settler capitalism, and instead amplifies possibilities for more just and equitable futures.

Sound Relations delves into histories of Inuit musical life in Alaska to register the significance of sound as integral to self-determination and sovereignty. Offering radical and relational ways of listening to Inuit performances across a range of genres--from hip hop to Christian hymnody and traditional drumsongs to funk and R&B --author Jessica Bissett Perea registers how a density (not difference) of Indigenous ways of musicking from a vast archive of presence sounds out entanglements between structures of Indigeneity and colonialism. This work dismantles stereotypical understandings of "Eskimos," "Indians," and "Natives" by addressing the following questions: What exactly is "Native" about Native music? What does it mean to sound (or not sound) Native? Who decides? And how can in-depth analyses of Native music that center Indigeneity reframe larger debates of race, power, and representation in twenty-first century American music historiography? Instead of proposing singular truths or facts, this book invites readers to consider the existence of multiple simultaneous truths, a density of truths, all of which are culturally constructed, performed, and in some cases politicized and policed. Native ways of doing music history engage processes of sound worlding that envision otherwise, beyond nation-state notions of containment and glorifications of Alaska as solely an extraction site for U.S. settler capitalism, and instead amplifies possibilities for more just and equitable futures.

Four Parts, No Waiting investigates the role that vernacular, barbershop-style close harmony has played in American musical history, in American life, and in the American imagination. Starting with a discussion of the first craze for Austrian four-part close harmony in the 1830s, Averill traces the popularity of this musical form in minstrel shows, black recreational singing, vaudeville, early recordings, and in the barbershop revival of the 1930s. In his exploration of barbershop, Averill uncovers a rich musical tradition--a hybrid of black and white cultural forms, practiced by amateurs, and part of a mythologized vision of small-town American life. This engagingly-written, often funny book critiques the nostalgic myths (especially racial myths) that have surrounded the barbershop revival, but also celebrates the civic-minded, participatory spirit of barbershop harmony. The text is accompanied by an audio CD.

Claiming Diaspora explores the thriving contemporary musical culture of Asian/Chinese America. Ranging from traditional operas to modern instrumental music, from ethnic media networks to popular music, from Asian American jazz to the work of recent avant-garde composers, author Su Zheng reveals the rich and diverse musical activities among Chinese Americans and tells of the struggles and creative searches by Chinese Americans to gain a foothold in the American cultural terrain. In doing so, she not only tells their stories, but also examines the transnational and racialized experiences of this musical culture, challenging us to take a fresh look at the increasingly plural and complex nature of American cultural identity. Until recently, two intersected models have dominated studies of Asian American cultural expressions. The notion of "claiming America" has been a fundamental political strategy for the Asian American movement; while the Americanization model for European immigrants has minimized the impact of the "old country" on immigrant life and cultural expression. In Claiming Diaspora, Zheng critically analyzes the controversies surrounding these two models. She unveils the fluid and evolving nature of music in Chinese America, discussing current cultural struggles, while acknowledging an unavoidable connection to a history of Asian exclusion in the U.S. Furthermore, Zheng breaks from traditional approaches which have portrayed the music of non-Western people as rooted and immobile to examine the concept of "diaspora" in the context of Asian American experiences and cultural theories of space, place, and displacement. She calls into question the contested meaning of "Asian American" and "Asian American cultural identity" in cultural productions, and builds a comprehensive picture of community and cultural transformation in Chinese and Asian America. Zheng taps unpublished historical sources of immigrant narrative songs, extensive fieldwork in New York City and China, in-depth interviews in which musicians narrate their life stories and music experiences, and her own longstanding involvement as community member, musician, presenter, and cultural broker. The book delineates the introduction of each music genre from its homeland and its subsequent development in New York, and explains how Chinese Americans express their cultural longings and belongings. Ultimately, Zheng reveals how Chinese American musical activities both reflect and contribute to local, national, and transnational cultural politics.

A freewheeling blend of continental European folk music and the songs, tunes, and dances of Anglo and Celtic immigrants, polkabilly has enthralled American musicians and dancers since the mid-19th century. From West Virginia coal camps and east Texas farms to the Canadian prairies and America's Upper Midwest, scores of groups have wed squeezeboxes with string bands, hoe downs with hambos, and sentimental Southern balladry with comic "up north" broken-English comedy, to create a new and uniquely American sound. The Goose Island Ramblers played as a house band for a local tavern in Madison, Wisconsin from the early 1960s through the mid-1970s. The group epitomized the polkabilly sound with their wild mixture of Norwegian fiddle tunes, Irish jigs, Slovenian polkas, Swiss yodels, old time hillbilly songs, "Scandihoovian" and "Dutchman" dialect ditties, frost-bitten Hawaiian marches, and novelty numbers on the electric toilet plunger. In this original study, James P. Leary illustrates how the Ramblers' multiethnic music combined both local and popular traditions, and how their eclectic repertoire challenges prevailing definitions of American folk music. He thus offers the first comprehensive examination of the Upper Midwest's folk musical traditions within the larger context of American life and culture. Impeccably researched, richly detailed and illustrated, and accompanied by a compact disc of interviews and performances, James P. Leary's Polkabilly: How the Goose Island Ramblers Redefined American Folk Music creates an unforgettable portrait of a polkabilly band and its world.

"Klezmer" is a Yiddish word for professional folk instrumentalist-the flutist, fiddler, and bass player that made brides weep and guests dance at weddings throughout Jewish eastern Europe before the culture was destroyed in the Holocaust, silenced under Stalin, and lost out to assimilation in America. Klezmer music is now experiencing a tremendous new spurt of interest worldwide with both Jews and non-Jews recreating this restless volatile, and vibrant musical culture. Firmly centered in the United States, klezmer has paradoxically moved back across the Atlantic as a distinctly "American" music, played throughout central and eastern Europe, as well as in many other parts of the world. Fiddler on the Move places klezmer music squarely within American music studies, cultural studies, and ethnomusicology. Neither a chronology nor a comprehensive survey, the book describes a variety of approaches and perspectives for coming to terms with the highly diverse array of activities found under the klezmer umbrella. Bringing to his subject the insights of an accomplished ethnomusicologist, Slobin addresses such questions as: How does klezmer overlap with, and differ from, the many other contemporary "heritage" musics based on an assumed connection with a group identity and links to a tradition? How do economics, artistic expression, and the evocation of the past interact in motivating klezmer performers and audiences? In what kinds of environment does klezmer flourish? How do stylistic features such as genre, form, and ornamentation help to define the technique, affect, and aesthetic of klezmer? Featuring a music CD with many of the archival and contemporary recordings discussed in the text, this fascinating study will interest scholars, students, musicians, and music lovers

Across the United States, Jews come together every week to sing and pray in a wide variety of worship communities. Through this music, made by and for ordinary folk, these Jews define and re-define their relationship to the continuity of Jewish tradition and the realities of American life. Combining oral history and an analysis of recordings, The Lord's Song in a Strange Land examines the music in contemporary Jewish worship and explores the diverse links between the music and spiritual and cultural identities. Alive with detail, the book focuses on metropolitan Boston and covers the full range of Jewish communities there, from Hasidim to Jewish college students in a transdenominational setting. It documents a remarkably fluid musical tradition, where melodies are often shared, where sources can be as as diverse as Sufi chant, Christmas carols, rock and roll, and Israeli popular music, and where the meaning of a song can change from one block to the next.

On a Saturday night in 1948, Hank Williams stepped onto the stage of the Louisiana Hayride and sang "Lovesick Blues." Up to that point, Williams's yodeling style had been pigeon-holed as hillbilly music, cutting him off from the mainstream of popular music. Taking a chance on this untried artist, the Hayride--a radio "barn dance" or country music variety show like the Grand Ole Opry--not only launched Williams's career, but went on to launch the careers ofwell-known performers such as Jim Reeves, Webb Pierce, Kitty Wells, Johnny Cash, and Slim Whitman.Broadcast from Shreveport, Louisiana, the local station KWKH's 50,000-watt signal reachedlisteners in over 28 states and lured them to packed performances of the Hayride's road show. By tracing the dynamic history of the Hayride and its sponsoring station, ethnomusicologist Tracey Laird reveals the critical role that this part of northwestern Louisiana played in the development of both country music and rock and roll. Delving into the past of this Red River city, she probes the vibrant historical, cultural, and social backdrop for its dynamic musical scene. Sitting between the OldSouth and the West, this one-time frontier town provided an ideal setting for the cross-fertilization of musical styles. The scene was shaped by the region's easy mobility, the presence of a legal"red-light" district from 1903-17, and musical interchanges between blacks and whites, who lived in close proximity and in nearly equal numbers. The region nurtured such varied talents as Huddie Ledbetter, the "king of the twelve-string guitar," and Jimmie Davis, the two term "singing governor" of Louisiana who penned "You Are My Sunshine."Against the backdrop of the colorful history of Shreveport, the unique contribution of this radio barn dance is revealed. Radio shapedmusical tastes, and the Hayride's frontier-spirit producers took risks with artists whose reputations may have been shaky or whose styles did not neatly fit musical categories (both Hank Williams andElvis Presley were rejected by the Opry before they came to Shreveport). The Hayride also served as a training ground for a generation of studio sidemen and producers who steered popular music for decades after the Hayride's final broadcast. While only a few years separated the Hayride appearances of Hank Williams and Elvis Presley--who made his national radio debut on the show in 1954--those years encompassed seismic shifts in the tastes, perceptions, and self-consciousness of American youth.Though the Hayride is often overshadowed by the Grand Ole Opry in country music scholarship, Laird balances the record and reveals how this remarkable show both documented and contributed to a powerfultransformation in American popular music.

Over the past two decades, a steady stream of recordings, videos, feature films, festivals, and concerts has presented the music of Balkan Gypsies, or Roma, to Western audiences, who have greeted them with exceptional enthusiasm. Yet, as author Carol Silverman notes, "Roma are revered as musicians and reviled as people." In this book, Silverman introduces readers to the people and cultures who produce this music, offering a sensitive and incisive analysis of how Romani musicians address the challenges of discrimination. Focusing on southeastern Europe then moving to the diaspora, her book examines the music within Romani communities, the lives and careers of outstanding musicians, and the marketing of music in the electronic media and "world music" concert circuit. Silverman touches on the way that the Roma exemplify many qualities-- adaptability, cultural hybridity, transnationalism--that are taken to characterize late modern experience. Rather than just celebrating these qualities, she presents the musicians as complicated, pragmatic individuals who work creatively within the many constraints that inform their lives. As both a performer and presenter on the world music circuit, Silverman has worked extensively with Romani communities for more than two decades both in their home countries and in the diaspora. At a time when the political and economic plight of European Roma and the popularity of their music are objects of international attention, Silverman's book is incredibly timely.

Lydia Mendoza began her legendary musical career as a child in the 1920s, singing for pennies and nickels on the streets of downtown San Antonio. She lived most of her adult life in Houston, Texas, where she was born. The life story of this Chicana icon encompasses a 60-year singing career that began with the dawn of the recording industry in the 1920s and continued well into the 1980s, ceasing only after she suffered a devastating stroke. Her status as a working-class idol continues to this day, making her one of the most prominent and long-standing performers in the history of the recording industry and a champion of Chicana/o music. This bilingual edition presents Lydia Mendoza's historia in an interview between the artist and Yolanda Broyles-González: first is the English translation, then the Spanish original, as told by Mendoza herself. Broyles-González concludes the volume with an extended essay on the significance of Mendoza's career and her place in Tejana music and Chicana studies.

Bright Star of the West traces the life, repertoire, and influence of Joe Heaney, Ireland's greatest sean-nós ("old style") singer. Born in 1919, Joe Heaney grew up in a politically volatile time, as his native Ireland became a democracy. He found work and relative fame as a singer in London before moving to Scotland. Eventually, like many others searching for greater opportunity, he emigrated to the United States, where he worked as a doorman while supplementing his income with appearances at folk festivals, concerts and clubs. As his reputation and following grew, Heaney gained entry to the folk music scene and began leading workshops as a visiting artist at several universities. In 1982 the National Endowment for the Arts awarded Heaney America's highest honor in folk and traditional arts, the prestigious National Heritage Fellowship. Heaney's works did not become truly popular in his homeland until many years after his death. Today he is hailed as a seminal figure of traditional song and is revered by those who follow traditional music. Authors Sean Williams and Lillis Ó Laoire address larger questions about song, identity, and culture. They explore the deep ambivalence both the Irish and Irish-Americans felt toward the traditional aspects of their culture, examining other critical issues, such as gender and masculinity, authenticity, and contemporary marketing and consumption of sean-nós singing in both Ireland and the United States. Comingling Heaney's own words with the authors' comprehensive research and analysis, Bright Star of the West weaves a poignant critical biography of the man, the music, and his continuing legacy in Ireland and the United States.

Four Parts, No Waiting investigates the role that vernacular, barbershop-style close harmony has played in American musical history, in American life, and in the American imagination. Starting with a discussion of the first craze for Austrian four-part close harmony in the 1830s, Averill traces the popularity of this musical form in minstrel shows, black recreational singing, vaudeville, early recordings, and in the barbershop revival of the 1930s. In his exploration of barbershop, Averill uncovers a rich musical tradition-a hybrid of black and white cultural forms, practiced by amateurs, and part of a mythologized vision of small-town American life. Barbershop harmony played a central - and overlooked - role in the panorama of American music. Averill demonstrates that the barbershop revival was part of a depression-era neo-Victorian revival, spurred on by insecurities of economic and social change. Contemporary barbershop singing turns this nostalgic vision into lived experience. Arguing that the "old songs" function as repositories of idealized social memory, Averill reveals ideologies of gender, race, and class. This engagingly-written, often funny book critiques the nostalgic myths (especially racial myths) that have surrounded the barbershop revival, but also celebrates the civic-minded, participatory spirit of barbershop harmony. The text is accompanied by a companion website.

In 1946, Harry Choates, a Cajun fiddle virtuoso, changed the course of American musical history when his recording of the so-called Cajun national anthem "Jole Blon" reached number four on the national Billboard charts. Cajun music became part of the American consciousness for the first time thanks to the unprecedented success of this issue, as the French tune crossed cultural, ethnic, racial, and socio-economic boundaries. Country music stars Moon Mullican, Roy Acuff, Bob Wills, and Hank Snow rushed into the studio to record their own interpretations of the waltz-followed years later by Waylon Jennings and Bruce Springsteen. The cross-cultural musical legacy of this plaintive waltz also paved the way for Hank Williams Sr.'s Cajun-influenced hit "Jamabalaya." Choates' "Jole Blon" represents the culmination of a centuries-old dialogue between the Cajun community and the rest of America. Joining into this dialogue is the most thoroughly researched and broadly conceived history of Cajun music yet published, Cajun Breakdown. Furthermore, the book examines the social and cultural roots of Cajun music's development through 1950 by raising broad questions about the ethnic experience in America and nature of indigenous American music. Since its inception, the Cajun community constantly refashioned influences from the American musical landscape despite the pressures of marginalization, denigration, and poverty. European and North American French songs, minstrel tunes, blues, jazz, hillbilly, Tin Pan Alley melodies, and western swing all became part of the Cajun musical equation. The idiom's synthetic nature suggests an extensive and intensive dialogue with popular culture, extinguishing the myth that Cajuns were an isolated folk group astray in the American South. Ryan André Brasseaux's work constitutes a bold and innovative exploration of a forgotten chapter in America's musical odyssey.

Since the 1990s, migrant musicians have become increasingly prominent in New York City's jazz scene. Challenging norms about who can be a jazz musician and what immigrant music should sound like, these musicians create mobile and diverse notions of jazz while inadvertently contributing to processes of gentrification and cultural institutionalization. In Jazz Migrations, author Ofer Gazit discusses the impact of contemporary transnational migration on New York jazz, examining its effects on educational institutions, club scenes, and jam sessions. Drawing on four years of musical participation in the scene, as well as interviews with musicians, audience members, venue owners, industry professionals, and institutional actors, Gazit transports readers from music schools in Japan, Israel, and India to rehearsals and private lessons in American jazz programs, and to New York's immigrant jazz hangouts: an immigrant-owned music school in the Bronx; a weekly jam session in a Haitian bar in central Brooklyn; a Colombian-owned jazz room in Jackson Heights, Queens; and a members-only club in Manhattan. Along the way, he introduces the improvisatory practices of a cast of well-known and aspiring musicians: a South Indian guitarist's visions of John Coltrane and Carnatic music; a Chilean saxophonist's intimate dialogue with the sound of Sonny Rollins; an Israeli clarinetist finding a home in Brazilian Choro and in Louis Armstrong's legacy; and a multiple Grammy-nominated Cuban drummer from the Bronx. Jazz Migrations concludes with a call for a collective reconsideration of the meaning of genre boundaries, senses of belonging, and ethnic identity in American music.

Since the 1990s, migrant musicians have become increasingly prominent in New York City's jazz scene. Challenging norms about who can be a jazz musician and what immigrant music should sound like, these musicians create mobile and diverse notions of jazz while inadvertently contributing to processes of gentrification and cultural institutionalization. In Jazz Migrations, author Ofer Gazit discusses the impact of contemporary transnational migration on New York jazz, examining its effects on educational institutions, club scenes, and jam sessions. Drawing on four years of musical participation in the scene, as well as interviews with musicians, audience members, venue owners, industry professionals, and institutional actors, Gazit transports readers from music schools in Japan, Israel, and India to rehearsals and private lessons in American jazz programs, and to New York's immigrant jazz hangouts: an immigrant-owned music school in the Bronx; a weekly jam session in a Haitian bar in central Brooklyn; a Colombian-owned jazz room in Jackson Heights, Queens; and a members-only club in Manhattan. Along the way, he introduces the improvisatory practices of a cast of well-known and aspiring musicians: a South Indian guitarist's visions of John Coltrane and Carnatic music; a Chilean saxophonist's intimate dialogue with the sound of Sonny Rollins; an Israeli clarinetist finding a home in Brazilian Choro and in Louis Armstrong's legacy; and a multiple Grammy-nominated Cuban drummer from the Bronx. Jazz Migrations concludes with a call for a collective reconsideration of the meaning of genre boundaries, senses of belonging, and ethnic identity in American music.

With its rich but underappreciated musical heritage, Washington, D.C. is often overlooked as a cradle for punk, the birthplace of go go, and as the urban center for bluegrass in the Untied States. Capital Bluegrass: Hillbilly Music Meets Washington, D.C. richly documents the history and development of bluegrass in and around the nation's capital since it emerged in the 1950s. In his seventeenth book, American vernacular music scholar Kip Lornell discusses both well-known progressive bluegrass bands including the Country Gentlemen and the Seldom Scene, and lesser known groups like the Happy Melody Boys, Benny and Vallie Cain and the Country Clan, and Foggy Bottom. Lornell focuses on colorful figures such as the brilliant and eccentric mandolin player, Buzz Busby, and Connie B. Gay, who helped found the Country Music Association in Nashville. Moving beyond the musicians to the institutions that were central to the development of the genre, Lornell brings the reader into the nationally recognized Birchmere Music Hall, and tunes in to NPR powerhouse WAMU-FM, which for five decades broadcast as much as 40 hours a week of bluegrass programming. Dozens of images illuminate the story of bluegrass in the D.C. area, photographs and flyers that will be new to even the most veteran bluegrass enthusiast. Bringing to life a music and musical community integral to the history of the city itself, Capital Bluegrass tells an essential tale of bluegrass in the United States.

Over the past two decades, a steady stream of recordings, videos, feature films, and concerts has presented the music of European Gypsies, or Roma, to Western audiences, who have greeted them with exceptional enthusiasm. Yet, as author Carol Silverman notes, "Roma are revered as musicians and reviled as people." In this book, Silverman introduces readers to the people and cultures who produce this music, offering a sensitive and incisive analysis of how Romani musicians function successfully within oppressive circumstances. Focusing on the Romani communities in southeastern Europe then moving to the diaspora communities, her book examines the music within these diverse Gypsy communities, the lives and careers of outstanding musicians, and the presentation of music in the electronic media and world music concert circuit. Silverman touches on the way that the Roma exemplify many qualities -- rootlessness, cultural hybridity, transnationalism -- that are taken to characterize late modern experience. Rather than just celebrating these qualities, she presents the musicians as complicated, pragmatic individuals who work creatively within the many constraints that inform their lives. As both a performer and presenter of world music, Silverman has worked extensively with Romani communities for more than two decades both in their home countries and in the diaspora. At a time when the political and economic plight of European Roma and the popularity of their music are objects of international attention, Silverman's book is incredibly timely.

Though cultural hybridity is celebrated as a hallmark of U.S. American music and identity, hybrid music is all too often marked and marketed under a single racial label.Tamara Roberts' book Resounding Afro Asia examines music projects that foreground racial mixture in players, audiences, and sound in the face of the hypocrisy of the culture industry. Resounding Afro Asia traces a genealogy of black/Asian engagements through four contemporary case studies from Chicago, New York, and California: Funkadesi (Indian/funk/reggae), Yoko Noge (Japanese folk/blues), Fred Ho and the Afro Asian Music Ensemble (jazz/various Asian and African traditions), and Red Baraat (Indian brass band and New Orleans second line). Roberts investigates Afro Asian musical settings as part of a genealogy of cross-racial culture and politics. These musical settings are sites of sono-racial collaboration: musical engagements in which participants pointedly use race to form and perform interracial politics. When musicians collaborate, they generate and perform racially marked sounds that do not conform to their racial identities, thus splintering the expectations of cultural determinism. The dynamic social, aesthetic, and sonic practices construct a forum for the negotiation of racial and cultural difference and the formation of inter-minority solidarities. Through improvisation and composition, artists can articulate new identities and subjectivities in conversation with each other.Resounding Afro Asia offers a glimpse into how artists live multiracial lives in which they inhabit yet exceed multicultural frameworks built on racial essentialism and segregation. It joins a growing body of literature that seeks to write Asian American artists back into U.S. popular music history and will surely appeal to students of music, ethnomusicology, race theory, and politics, as well as those curious about the relationship between race and popular music.

Though cultural hybridity is celebrated as a hallmark of U.S. American music and identity, hybrid music is all too often marked and marketed under a single racial label.Tamara Roberts' book Resounding Afro Asia examines music projects that foreground racial mixture in players, audiences, and sound in the face of the hypocrisy of the culture industry. Resounding Afro Asia traces a genealogy of black/Asian engagements through four contemporary case studies from Chicago, New York, and California: Funkadesi (Indian/funk/reggae), Yoko Noge (Japanese folk/blues), Fred Ho and the Afro Asian Music Ensemble (jazz/various Asian and African traditions), and Red Baraat (Indian brass band and New Orleans second line). Roberts investigates Afro Asian musical settings as part of a genealogy of cross-racial culture and politics. These musical settings are sites of sono-racial collaboration: musical engagements in which participants pointedly use race to form and perform interracial politics. When musicians collaborate, they generate and perform racially marked sounds that do not conform to their racial identities, thus splintering the expectations of cultural determinism. The dynamic social, aesthetic, and sonic practices construct a forum for the negotiation of racial and cultural difference and the formation of inter-minority solidarities. Through improvisation and composition, artists can articulate new identities and subjectivities in conversation with each other.Resounding Afro Asia offers a glimpse into how artists live multiracial lives in which they inhabit yet exceed multicultural frameworks built on racial essentialism and segregation. It joins a growing body of literature that seeks to write Asian American artists back into U.S. popular music history and will surely appeal to students of music, ethnomusicology, race theory, and politics, as well as those curious about the relationship between race and popular music.

As the Soviet Union stood on the brink of collapse, thousands of Bukharian Jews left their homes from across the predominantly Muslim cities of Central Asia, to reestablish their lives in the United States, Israel and Europe. Today, about thirty thousand Bukharian Jews reside in New York City, settled into close-knit communities and existing as a quintessential American immigrant group. For Bukharian immigrants, music is an essential part of their communal self-definition, and musicians frequently act as cultural representatives for the group as a whole. Greeted with Smiles: Bukharian Jewish Music and Musicians in New York explores the circumstances facing new American immigrants, using the music of the Bukharian Jews to gain entrance into their community and their culture. Author Evan Rapport investigates the transformation of Bukharian identity through an examination of corresponding changes in its music, focusing on three of these distinct but overlapping repertoires - maquom (classical or "heavy" music), Jewish religious music and popular music. Drawing upon interviews, participant observation and music lessons, Rapport interprets the personal perspectives of musicians who serve as community leaders and representatives. By adapting strategies acquired as an ethno-religious minority among Central Asian Muslim neighbors, Bukharian musicians have adjusted their musical repertoire in their new American home. The result is the creation of a distinct Bukharian Jewish American identity-their musical activities are changing the city's cultural landscape while at the same time providing for an understanding of the cultural implications of Bukharian diaspora. Greeted with Smiles is sure to be an essential text for ethnomusicologists and scholars of Jewish and Central Asian music and culture, Jewish-Muslim interaction and diasporic communities.