(Music Express Books). Experience the songs of our heritage with the music that makes our country unique. Learn the background of each song, a flexible teaching sequence, and how to adapt each song for any grade level. These cross-curricular classroom songs will also translate easily to a concert presentation for school assemblies or community engagement. The collection includes piano/vocal arrangements and reproducible singer songsheets. Accompany your singers live with simple piano parts, or use quality performance/accompaniment MP3 recordings available via audio access in the Performance Kit. Songs include: I've Been Working on the Railroad, I've Got Peace Like a River, My Country 'Tis of Thee, Nine Hundred Miles, Old Joe Clark, Ramblin' Blues, and more! Suggested for grades 3-6.

The music of Texas and the American Southwest is as diverse and distinctive as the many different groups who have lived in the region over the past several centuries,” writes Gary Hartman in his introduction to this refreshingly different look at various genres of Texas music. Roots of Texas Music celebrates the diverse sources of the music of the Lone Star State by gathering chapters by specialists on each of them—specialists whose views may not have dominated the perception of Texas music to date. Editor Lawrence Clayton conceived this project as one that would not simply repeat the common wisdom about Texas music traditions, but rather would offer new perspectives. He therefore called on contributors whose work had been well-grounded but not necessarily widely published. The result is a lively, captivating, and original look at the musical traditions of Texas Germans and Czechs, black Creoles and Chicanos, and blues and gospel singers. Hartman’s introduction places these repertoires within the larger picture of one of the most fertile musical seedbeds the nation knows. The diverse genres included in the anthology also provide an introduction to the classes, cultures, races, and ethnic groups of Texas and highlight the ways in which the state’s musical wealth has influenced the listening habits of the nation.

This lavishly illustrated celebration of America's most popular music turns to those who know it best--the performers. In a vivid oral history of the rich heritage of contemporary country music, the hottest names of yesterday and today look back at the stars, styles and scenes of an earlier era. Hear from Chet Atkins, Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, Alan Jackson, Clint Black and many more. 200 photos, 100 in full color.

This book presents a collection of essays on the debates about origins, authenticity, and identity in folk and blues music. The essays had their origins in an international conference on the Transatlantic routes of American roots music, out of which emerged common themes and questions of origins and authenticity in folk music, black and white, American and British. The central theme is musical influences, but issues of identity—national, local, and racial—are also recurring subjects. The extent to which these identities were invented, imagined, or constructed by the performers, or by those who recorded their work for posterity, is also a prominent concern and questions of racial identity are particularly central. The book features a new essay on the blues by Paul Oliver alongside an essay on Oliver's seminal blues scholarship. There are also several essays on British blues and the links between performers and styles in the United States and Britain and new essays on critical figures such as Alan Lomax and Woody Guthrie. This volume uniquely offers perspectives from both sides of the Atlantic on the connections and interplay of influences in roots music and the debates about these subjects drawing on the work of eminent established scholars and emerging young academics who are already making a contribution to the field. Throughout, the contributors offer the most recent scholarship available on key issues.

This is the first biography of Ralph Peer, the adventurous—even revolutionary—A&R man and music publisher who saw the universal power locked in regional roots music and tapped it, changing the breadth and flavor of popular music around the world. It is the story of the life and fifty-year career, from the age of cylinder recordings to the stereo era, of the man who pioneered the recording, marketing, and publishing of blues, jazz, country, gospel, and Latin music. The book tracks Peer’s role in such breakthrough events as the recording of Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues” (the record that sparked the blues craze), the first country recording sessions with Fiddlin’ John Carson, his discovery of Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family at the famed Bristol sessions, the popularizing of Latin American music during World War II, and the postwar transformation of music on the airwaves that set the stage for the dominance of R&B, country, and rock ‘n’ roll. But this is also the story of a man from humble midwestern beginnings who went on to build the world’s largest independent music publishing firm, fostering the global reach of music that had previously been specialized, localized, and marginalized. Ralph Peer redefined the ways promising songs and performers were identified, encouraged, and promoted, rethought how far regional music might travel, and changed our very notions of what pop music can be. This enhanced e-book includes 49 of the greatest songs Ralph Peer was involved with, from groundbreaking numbers that changed the history of recorded music to revelatory obscurities, all linked to the text so that the reader can hear the music while reading about it.

In American music, the notion of "roots" has been a powerful refrain, but just what constitutes our true musical traditions has often been a matter of debate. As Benjamin Filene reveals, a number of competing visions of America's musical past have vied fo

This authoritative and fascinating study of the origins of black music reflects the author's own life experiences growing up in Ethiopia, fieldwork in Africa, and a wealth of research in the US. Tracing the development of songs, instrumental music, dance, blues, and jazz, the book includes biographical sketches of some of the most outstanding musicians of Africa and North America. Essential for all with an interest in black music.

"Contributes new perspectives on historical black identity formation and contemporary activism in Cuba."--Choice "Provides invaluable insight into the histories and lives of Cubans who trace their origins to the Anglo-Caribbean."--Robert Whitney, author of State and Revolution in Cuba: Mass Mobilization and Political Change, 1920-1940 "Adds a missing piece to the existing literature about the renewal of black activism in Cuba, all the while showing the links and fractures between pre- and post-1959 society."--Devyn Spence Benson, Davidson College In the early twentieth century, laborers from the British West Indies immigrated to Cuba, attracted by employment opportunities. The Anglo-Caribbean communities flourished, but after 1959, many of their cultural institutions were dismantled: the revolution dictated that in the name of unity there would be no hyphenated Cubans. This book turns an ethnographic lens on their descendants who--during the Special Period in the 1990s--moved to "rescue their roots" by revitalizing their ethnic associations and reestablishing ties outside the island. Based on Andrea J. Queeley's fieldwork in Santiago and Guantánamo, Rescuing Our Roots looks at local and regional identity formations as well as racial politics in revolutionary Cuba. Queeley argues that, as the island experienced a resurgence in racism due in part to the emergence of the dual economy and the reliance on tourism, Anglo-Caribbean Cubans revitalized their communities and sought transnational connections not just in the hope of material support but also to challenge the association between blackness, inferiority, and immorality. Their desire for social mobility, political engagement, and a better economic situation operated alongside the fight for black respectability. Unlike most studies of black Cubans, which focus on Afro-Cuban religion or popular culture, Queeley's penetrating investigation offers a view of strategies and modes of black belonging that transcend ideological, temporal, and spatial boundaries. A volume in the series Contemporary Cuba, edited by John M. Kirk

Roots of the Classical identifies and traces to their sources the patterns that make Western classical music unique, setting out the fundamental laws of melody and harmony, and sketching the development of tonality between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. The author then focuses on the years 1770-1910, treating the Western music of this period - folk, popular, and classical - as a single, organically developing, interconnected unit in which the popular idiom was constantly feeding into 'serious' music, showing how the same patterns underlay music of all kinds.

Giving music-making women the serious attention they deserve but rarely receive, Right by Her Roots is an especially important and engaging account.