North America
NOTE: For additional resources, see the Popular Music Research Guide and the page Spirituals and Folk Music at the African American Music Research Guide.
Recommended Books
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The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, Volume 3: The United States and Canada
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This volume makes available the full range of the American/Canadian musical experience, covering-for the first time in print-all major regions, ethnic groups, and traditional and popular contexts. From musical comedy to world beat, from the songs of the Arctic to rap and house music, from Hispanic Texas to the Chinese communities of Vancouver, the coverage captures the rich diversity and continuities of the vibrant music we hear around us. Special attention is paid to recent immigrant groups, to Native American traditions, and to such socio-musical topics as class, race, gender, religion, government policy, media, and technology.
Call Number: ML100 .G16 1998 V.3 and Music OnlinePublication Date: 2000 -
The Cambridge History of American Music
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The Cambridge History of American Music, first published in 1998, celebrates the richness of America's musical life. It was the first study of music in the United States to be written by a team of scholars. American music is an intricate tapestry of many cultures, and the History reveals this wide array of influences from Native, European, African, Asian, and other sources. The History begins with a survey of the music of Native Americans and then explores the social, historical, and cultural events of musical life in the period until 1900. Other contributors examine the growth and influence of popular musics, including film and stage music, jazz, rock, and immigrant, folk, and regional musics. The volume also includes valuable chapters on twentieth-century art music, including the experimental, serial, and tonal traditions.
Call Number: ML200 .C36 2004Publication Date: 2004 -
Music in the USA: A Documentary Companion
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Music in the USA: A Documentary Companion charts a path through American music and musical life using as guides the words of composers, performers, writers and the rest of us ordinary folks who sing, dance, and listen. The anthology of primary sources contains about 160 selections from 1540 to 2000. Sometimes the sources are classics in the literature around American music, for example, the Preface to the Bay Psalm Book, excerpts from Slave Songs of the United States, and Charles Ives extolling Emerson. But many other selections offer uncommon sources, including a satirical story about a Yankee music teacher; various columns from 19th-century German American newspapers; the memoirs of a 19th-century diva; Lottie Joplin remembering her husband Scott; a little-known reflection of Copland about Stravinsky; an interview with Muddy Waters from the Chicago Defender; a letter from Woody Guthrie on the "spunkfire" attitude of a folk song; a press release from the Country Music Association; and the Congressional testimony around "Napster." "Sidebar" entries occasionally bring a topic or an idea into the present, acknowledging the extent to which revivals of many kinds of music play a role in American contemporary culture. This book focuses on the connections between theory and practice to enrich our understanding of the diversity of American musical experiences. Designed especially to accompany college courses which survey American music as a whole, the book is also relevant to courses in American history and American Studies.
Call Number: ML200 .M89 2008Publication Date: 2008 -
Music in America: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture
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Music in America is one of several case-study volumes that can be used along with Thinking Musically, the core book in the Global Music Series. Thinking Musically incorporates music from many diverse cultures and establishes the framework for exploring the practice of music around the world. It sets the stage for an array of case-study volumes, each of which focuses on a single area of the world. Each case study uses the contemporary musical situation as a point of departure, covering historical information and traditions as they relate to the present. America's music is a perennial work in progress. Music in America looks at both the roots of American musical identity and its many manifestations, seeking to answer the complex question: "What does American music sound like?" Focusing on three themes--identity, diversity, and unity--itexplores where America's music comes from, who makes it, and for what purpose. Rather than chronologically tracing America's musical history, author Adelaida Reyes considers how musical culture is shaped by space and time, by geography and history, by social, economic, and political factors, and by people who use music to express themselves within a community. Introducing the diversity that dominates the contemporary American musical landscape, Reyes draws on a dazzling range of musical styles--from ethnic and popular music idioms to contemporary art music--to highlight the ways in which sounds from various cultural origins come to share a national identity. Packaged with a 65-minute CD containing examples of the music discussed in the book, Music in America features guided listening and hands-on activities that allow readers to become active participants in the music.
Call Number: ML200 .R48 2005Publication Date: 2005 -
The Music of Canada
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Written by Timothy McGee, professor of music at the University of Toronto, the narrative ranges across the many genres of music that have flourished in Canada: art music, folk and popular music, church music, and jazz. Since the book is non-technical in its approach so that it may be easily understood by those not specifically trained in music, the author has thoughtfully provided separate analytical sections for the more advanced reader. Abounding in music examples and replete with illustrations which vividly reflect each era of Canadian history, the volume also includes an anthology of thirteen complete works (or movements) by prominent Canadian composers, past and present. Each chapter begins with a brief summary of the social and political background of the period under discussion, so that its music may be understood within the context of Canadian history. The double heritage--French and English--which has both enriched and troubled Canadian cultural life, is traced from its origins to the present day. A final chapter departs from this chronological format to focus on the music of the Indian and Inuit people and comment on its sociocultural significance. Finally, an appendix including the sources of all the music discussed, a bibliography, discography, and filmography rounds out this ground-breaking volume. This book is addressed to all those interested in Canada: its history, its culture, its music.
Call Number: ML205 .M37 1985Publication Date: 1985 -
Making People's Music: Moe Asch and Folkways Records
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As the founder of Folkways Records in 1948 and its director for nearly forty years, Moe Asch was committed to preserving the entire range of the world's musical and oral traditions. By his death in 1986 he had amassed a catalog of almost 2,200 recordings that had expanded the definition of American folk music and introduced listeners to sounds from every corner of the world. Asch is best remembered for recording such folk and blues singers as Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, Cisco Houston, Ella Jenkins, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, and Pete Seeger. But he also pioneered the release of music from Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, and the Caribbean and documented the full range of African American culture, from jazz and poetry to children's songs. Peter D. Goldsmith uses Asch's career as a lens through which to view folk music, leftist politics, and the recording industry during the middle decades of the twentieth century. Like his father, the prominent Yiddish novelist Sholem Asch, Moe Asch was temperamental, iconoclastic, and financially unreliable. But Making People's Music, published to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Folkways Records, shows that his inclusive spirit and breadth of vision prevailed in the extraordinary cultural wealth of his recorded legacy.
Call Number: ML429.A83 G65 1998Publication Date: 1998 -
Adventures of a Ballad Hunter
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Growing up beside the Chisholm Trail, captivated by the songs of passing cowboys and his bosom friend, an African American farmhand, John A. Lomax developed a passion for American folk songs that ultimately made him one of the foremost authorities on this fundamental aspect of Americana. Across many decades and throughout the country, Lomax and his informants created over five thousand recordings of America's musical heritage, including ballads, blues, children's songs, fiddle tunes, field hollers, lullabies, play-party songs, religious dramas, spirituals, and work songs. He acted as honorary curator of the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress, directed the Slave Narrative Project of the WPA, and cofounded the Texas Folklore Society. Lomax's books include Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, American Ballads and Folk Songs, Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Leadbelly, and Our Singing Country, the last three coauthored with his son Alan Lomax. Adventures of a Ballad Hunter is a memoir of Lomax's eventful life. It recalls his early years and the fruitful decades he spent on the road collecting folk songs, on his own and later with son Alan and second wife Ruby Terrill Lomax. Vibrant, amusing, often haunting stories of the people he met and recorded are the gems of this book, which also gives lyrics for dozens of songs. Adventures of a Ballad Hunter illuminates vital traditions in American popular culture and the labor that has gone into their preservation.
Call Number: ML429.L68 A3Publication Date: 1947 -
American Roots Music
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American roots music - encompassing blues, country & western, gospel, Cajun, zydeco, Tejano, Native American, and other uniquely American genres of folk music - originated and was nurtured in small communities and spread across the nation." "American Roots Music is the companion book based on the PBS series of the same name, resulting from three years of research and a unique collaboration between the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, Experience Music Project, and Ginger Group Productions, with major support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Public Broadcasting Service, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and AT&T.
Call Number: ML3551 .A54 2001 (Oversize)Publication Date: 2001 -
Folk Music: A Regional Exploration
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American folk music has provided a narrative thread to the fiber of the nation since its earliest days. Folk music scholar Norm Cohen presents a thorough exploration of the many ways in which folk music genres and subgenres have arisen in different regions of America. Chapters on folk song types, folk instrumentation, and the urban folk revival set further context to the discussion, and an itemized summary of noted folksong collections serves as an additional tool for both general readers and folk music scholars. American folk music has provided a narrative thread to the fiber of the nation since its earliest days. Forms ranging from New England sea chanteys to Pennsylvania Dutch worksongs helped shape life in the Northeast. Appalachian ballads evolved in the South, as did slave spirituals that served as codes for the Underground Railroad. Folk ballads on lumbering and mining grew in the Midwest and Northwest, while cowboy ballads emerged across the Great Plains and the West, and railroad songs accompanied expansion along the American frontier. Folk music scholar Norm Cohen presents a thorough exploration of the many ways in which folk music genres and subgenres have arisen in different regions of America. Chapters on folk song types, folk instrumentation, and the urban folk revival set further context to the discussion, and an itemized summary of noted folksong collections serves as an additional tool for both general readers and folk music scholars. The Greenwood Guide to American Roots Music series includes volumes on musical genres that have pervaded American culture. Each volume explores the different ways that selected genres, such as folk music, have evolved naturally in different regions and scenes throughout the nation.
Call Number: ML3551 .C56 2005Publication Date: 2005 -
Rainbow Quest: The Folk Music Revival and American Society, 1940-1970
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For a brief period from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s, folk music captured a mass audience in the United States, as college students and others swarmed to concerts by the likes of Peter, Paul & Mary, Joan Baez, and Bob Dylan. In this comprehensive study, Ronald D. Cohen reconstructs the history of this singular cultural moment, tracing its origins to the early decades of the twentieth century. Drawing on scores of interviews and numerous manuscript collections, as well as his own extensive files, Cohen shows how a broad range of traditions from hillbilly, gospel, blues, and sea shanties to cowboy, ethnic, and political protest music all contributed to the genre known as folk. He documents the crucial work of John Lomax and other collectors who, with the assistance of recording companies, preserved and distributed folk music in the 1920s. During the 1930s and 1940s, the emergence of left-wing politics and the rise of the commercial music marketplace helped to stimulate wider interest in folk music. Stars emerged, such as Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, Pete Seeger, Burl Ives, and Josh White. With the success of the Weavers and the Kingston Trio in the 1950s, the stage was set for the full-blown "folk revival" of the early 1960s. Centered in New York's Greenwich Village and sustained by a flourishing record industry, the revival spread to college campuses and communities across the country. It included a wide array of performers and a supporting cast of journalists, club owners, record company executives, political activists, managers, and organizers. By 1965 the boom had passed its peak, as rock and roll came to dominate the marketplace, but the folk revival left an enduring musical legacy in American culture.
Call Number: ML3551 .C58 2002Publication Date: 2002 -
Exploring American Folk Music: Ethnic, Grassroots, and Regional Traditions in the United States
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Exploring American Folk Music: Ethnic, Grassroots, and Regional Traditions in the United States reflects the fascinating diversity of regional and grassroots music in the United States. The book covers the diverse strains of American folk music--Latin, Native American, African, French-Canadian, British, and Cajun--and offers a chronology of the development of folk music in the United States. The book is divided into discrete chapters covering topics as seemingly disparate as sacred harp singing, conjunto music, the folk revival, blues, and ballad singing. It is among the few textbooks in American music that recognizes the importance and contributions of Native Americans as well as those who live, sing, and perform music along our borderlands, from the French speaking citizens in northern Vermont to the extensive Hispanic population living north of the Rio Grande River, recognizing and reflecting the increasing importance of the varied Latino traditions that have informed our folk music since the founding of the United States. Another chapter includes detailed information about the roots of hip hop and this new edition features a new chapter on urban folk music, exploring traditions in our cities, with a case study focusing on Washington, D.C. Exploring American Folk Music also introduces you to such important figures in American music as Bob Wills, Lydia Mendoza, Bob Dylan, and Muddy Waters, who helped shape what America sounds like in the twenty-first century. It also features new sections at the end of each chapter with up-to-date recommendations for ""Suggested Listening,"" ""Suggested Reading,"" and ""Suggested Viewing.""
Call Number: ML3551 .L67 2012Publication Date: 2012 -
Rise Up!: Indigenous Music in North America
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Music historian Craig Harris explores more than five hundred years of Indigenous history, religion, and cultural evolution in Rise Up!: Indigenous Music in North America. More than powwow drums and wooden flutes, Indigenous music intersects with rock, blues, jazz, folk music, reggae, hip-hop, classical music, and more. Combining deep research with personal stories by nearly four dozen award-winning Indigenous musicians, Harris offers an eye-opening look at the growth of Indigenous music.
Call Number: ML3557 .H3805 2023Publication Date: 2023 -
Intertribal Native American Music in the United States: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture
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The development of a shared musical heritage amongst the various Native American tribes reveals a history fraught with the tension of the give-and-take between cultural maintenance and new cultural creation. In Intertribal Native American Music in the United States, author John-Carlos Perea explores this tension and shows how traditional sounds, such as the powwow song and cedar flute, have developed into increasingly recognizable forms, like Native jazz and rock. These older sounds and their modern incarnations form the four themes around which Perea frames his discussion. First, he examines powwows - American Indian social gatherings founded upon an intertribal repertoire of music and dance - and shows how the assemblies of Northern and Southern Plains and Navajo tribes represent a singular performance encompassing disparate stories and sounds. From the relative insularity of the powwow, Perea then looks at the mainstreaming of the cedar flute and its role in introducing Native American music to broader audiences. From there, he surveys Native rock and jazz, considering their roots and their trajectories, as well as the milestone creation of the Best Native American Music Grammy Award in 2000.
Call Number: ML3557 .P47 2014Publication Date: 2014 -
Worlds of Sound: The Story of Smithsonian Folkways
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A man, a microphone, and a dream When he opened his tiny recording studio in New York in 1940, Moses Asch had a larger-than-life dream: To document and record all the sounds of his time. He created Folkways Records to achieve his goal, not just a record label but a statement that all sounds are equal and every voice deserves to be heard. The Folkways catalog grew to include a myriad of voices, from world- and roots-music to political speeches; the voices of contemporary poets and steam engines; folk singers Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie and jazz pianists Mary Lou Williams and James P. Johnson; Haitian vodoun singers and Javanese court musicians; deep-sea sounds and sounds from the outer ring of Earth's atmosphere. Until his death in 1986, Asch--with the help of collaborators ranging from the eccentric visionary Harry Smith to academic musicologists--created more than 2000 albums, a sound-scape of the contemporary world still unequalled in breadth and scope. Worlds of Sound documents this improbable journey. Along the way you'll meet: A young Pete Seeger, revolutionizing the world with his five-string banjo The amazing vocal ensembles of the Ituri Pygmies North American tree frogs Ella Jenkins's children's music Lead Belly singing "The Midnight Special" The nueva canción of Suni Paz. Folkways became a part of the Smithsonian Institution's collections shortly after Asch's death. Today Smithsonian Folkways continues to make the "worlds of sound" Moe Asch first dreamed of 60 years ago available to all. The Folkways vision is expansive and all-inclusive, and Worlds of Sound advances its rich and lively spirit.
Call Number: ML3792.F65 C37 2008Publication Date: 2008
Smithsonian Folkways Curated Playlists
Smithsonian Folkways Recordings routinely publishes playlists centered on a given topic or theme. Anyone can listen to these tracks free of charge through platforms like Spotify, Pandora, and YouTube. Short descriptions which contextualize the tracks can be found at the Folkways website. Several of the playlists are linked below, including playlists from their new Field Guides series. All Folkways playlists can be found here.
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A Field Guide to... Appalachia Explore and learn about the world of sound and music found in the Smithsonian Folkways collection from the comfort of your little device. A Field Guide to... Appalachia was curated by Smithsonian Folkways head curator Jeff Place.
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A Field Guide to... North Carolina Explore and learn about the world of sound and music found in the Smithsonian Folkways collection from the comfort of your little device. A Field Guide to... North Carolina was curated by Steve Weiss of the Southern Folklife Collection and Interim Music Librarian of UNC Chapel Hill.
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A Field Guide to... The Ozarks Explore and learn about the world of sound and music found in the Smithsonian Folkways collection from the comfort of your little device. A Field Guide to… the Ozarks was curated by Jason Morris (Smithsonian Folklife Festival) with support from Drew Beisswenger (Performing Arts Librarian, University of Arkansas) and the curatorial team of the upcoming 2023 Festival program The Ozarks: Faces and Facets of a Region.
Interlibrary Loan
Users are encouraged to search for items beyond University Libraries' catalog via RILM Abstracts of Music Literature and WorldCat. Materials not available in print or online may be requested through Interlibrary Loan. Please allow up to seven days for electronic delivery and up to fourteen days for delivery of physical items.