Music and lyrics for over 200 songs. John Henry, Goin' Home, Little Brown Jug, Alabama-Bound, Black Betty, The Hammer Song, Jesse James, Down in the Valley, The Ballad of Davy Crockett, and many more.

The study aims to analyse the impact of Luther's theology on his thoughts about music. It limits itself to an analysis of the topic by focusing on the three most important statements of Luther about music in his unfinished treatise Περι της μουσικης [On Music]. The first statement is that music is "a gift of God and not of man" [Dei donum hominum est], second, music "creates joyful soul" [facit letos animos], and third, music "drives away the devil" [fugat diabolum]. The relation between these three statements to each other and to Luther's theology in general can be understood in connection with his personal experiences and commitments to music, which were undergirded by his theology. Luther, as a man of medieval times, took for granted the existence of the devil, and many of his writings contained frequent references to the personal attacks of the devil, where it influenced his thoughts about music.

Over the first four decades of the Reformation, hundreds of songs written in popular styles and set to well-known tunes appeared across the German territories. These polemical songs included satires on the pope or on Martin Luther, ballads retelling historical events, translations of psalms and musical sermons. They ranged from ditties of one strophe to didactic Lieder of fifty or more. Luther wrote many such songs and this book contends that these songs, and the propagandist ballads they inspired, had a greater effect on the German people than Luther’s writings or his sermons. Music was a major force of propaganda in the German Reformation. Rebecca Wagner Oettinger examines a wide selection of songs and the role they played in disseminating Luther’s teachings to a largely non-literate population, while simultaneously spreading subversive criticism of Catholicism. These songs formed an intersection for several forces: the comfortable familiarity of popular music, historical theories on the power of music, the educational beliefs of sixteenth-century theologians and the need for sense of community and identity during troubled times. As Oettinger demonstrates, this music, while in itself simple, provides us with a new understanding of what most people in sixteenth-century Germany knew of the Reformation, how they acquired their knowledge and the ways in which they expressed their views about it. With full details of nearly 200 Lieder from this period provided in the second half of the book, Music as Propaganda in the German Reformation is both a valuable investigation of music as a political and religious agent and a useful resource for future research.

Explores a long-neglected aspect of Martin Luther his life and ministry as a pastor. / Sixteen church historians here examine Martin Luther in an uncommon way ? not as Reformer or theologian but as pastor. Luther's work as parish pastor commanded much of his time and energy in Wittenberg. / After first introducing the pastoral Luther, including his theology of the cross, these chapters discuss Luther's preaching and use of language (including humor), investigate his teaching ministry in depth, especially in light of the catechism, and explore his views on such things as the role of women, the Virgin Mary, and music. The book finally probes Luther's sentiments on monasticism and secular authority. / Contributors: Charles P. Arand, James M. Estes, Eric W. Gritsch, Robert Kolb, Beth Kreitzer, Robin A. Leaver, Mickey L. Mattox, Ronald Rittgers, Robert Rosin, Reinhard Schwarz, Jane E. Strohl, Christoph Weimer, Dorothea Wendebourg, Timothy J. Wengert, V?tor Westhelle, H. S. Wilson.

Martin Luther's relationship to music has been largely downplayed, yet music played a vital role in Luther's life -- and he in turn had a deep and lasting effect on Christian hymnody. In Luther's Liturgical Music Robin Leaver comprehensively explores these connections. Replete with tables, figures, and musical examples, this volume is the most extensive study on Luther and music ever published. Leaver's work makes a formidable contribution to Reformation studies, but worship leaders, musicians, and others will also find it an invaluable, very readable resource.

The sweetness of music is something that has puzzled Christian theologians for centuries. In this study, Luther’s theology of music is approached from the point of view of pleasure. It examines the significance of joy, beauty and pleasure in relationship with music and Luther’s theology. The notion of music as the supreme gift of God requires also a discussion about the idea of ‘gift’. Music opens up new perspectives into Luther’s thinking. Luther has seldom been reckoned among aesthetic theologians. Nevertheless, Luther has a peculiar view on beauty, understanding faith as a kind of aesthetic contemplation.

The Beautiful Music All Around Us presents the extraordinarily rich backstories of thirteen performances captured on Library of Congress field recordings between 1934 and 1942 in locations reaching from Southern Appalachia to the Mississippi Delta and the Great Plains. Including the children's play song "Shortenin' Bread," the fiddle tune "Bonaparte's Retreat," the blues "Another Man Done Gone," and the spiritual "Ain't No Grave Can Hold My Body Down," these performances were recorded in kitchens and churches, on porches and in prisons, in hotel rooms and school auditoriums. Documented during the golden age of the Library of Congress recordings, they capture not only the words and tunes of traditional songs but also the sounds of life in which the performances were embedded: children laugh, neighbors comment, trucks pass by. Musician and researcher Stephen Wade sought out the performers on these recordings, their families, fellow musicians, and others who remembered them. He reconstructs the sights and sounds of the recording sessions themselves and how the music worked in all their lives. Some of these performers developed musical reputations beyond these field recordings, but for many, these tracks represent their only appearances on record: prisoners at the Arkansas State Penitentiary jumping on "the Library's recording machine" in a rendering of "Rock Island Line"; Ora Dell Graham being called away from the schoolyard to sing the jump-rope rhyme "Pullin' the Skiff"; Luther Strong shaking off a hungover night in jail and borrowing a fiddle to rip into "Glory in the Meetinghouse." Alongside loving and expert profiles of these performers and their locales and communities, Wade also untangles the histories of these iconic songs and tunes, tracing them through slave songs and spirituals, British and homegrown ballads, fiddle contests, gospel quartets, and labor laments. By exploring how these singers and instrumentalists exerted their own creativity on inherited forms, "amplifying tradition's gifts," Wade shows how a single artist can make a difference within a democracy. Reflecting decades of research and detective work, the profiles and abundant photos in The Beautiful Music All Around Us bring to life largely unheralded individuals--domestics, farm laborers, state prisoners, schoolchildren, cowboys, housewives and mothers, loggers and miners--whose music has become part of the wider American musical soundscape. The hardcover edition also includes an accompanying CD that presents these thirteen performances, songs and sounds of America in the 1930s and '40s.

Written by one of contemporary music's most noted journalists, readers finally get an inside peek at the reclusive balladeer who has sold more than 20 million albums over two decades.

In the five hundred years since the publication of Martin Luther's Ninety- Five Theses, a rich set of traditions have grown up around that action and the subsequent events of the Reformation. This up-to-date dictionary by leading theologians and church historians covers Luther's life and thought, key figures of his time, and the various traditions he continues to influence. Prominent scholars of the history of Lutheran traditions have brought together experts in church history representing a variety of Christian perspectives to offer a major, cutting-edge reference work. Containing nearly six hundred articles, this dictionary provides a comprehensive overview of Luther's life and work and the traditions emanating from the Wittenberg Reformation. It traces the history, theology, and practices of the global Lutheran movement, covering significant figures, events, theological writings and ideas, denominational subgroups, and congregational practices that have constituted the Lutheran tradition from the Reformation to the present day.