Folk Music: A Very Short Introduction [Paperback]

When we think of folk music, most of us picture Pete Seeger singing This Land is My Land or Joan Baez singing Barbara Allen. But this stimulatingVery Short Introductionthrows open the doors on a remarkably diverse musical genre, in a wide-ranging portrait that goes far beyond America's shores to discuss folk music of every possible kind and in every corner of the globe. Written by award-winning musicologist Mark Slobin, this is the first compact introduction to folk music that offers a truly global perspective. Slobin offers an extraordinarily generous portrait of folk music, one that embraces a Russian wedding near the Arctic Circle, a group song in a small rainforest village in Brazil, and an Uzbek dance tune in Afghanistan. He looks in detail at three poignant songs from three widely separated regions--northern Afghanistan, Jewish Eastern Europe, and the Anglo-American world--with musical notation and lyrics included. And he also describes the efforts of scholars who fanned out across the globe, to find and document this ever-changing music.

List of Illustrations

Preface

1. Overview: Sound and Setting

2. Close-up: Songs, Strums, and Ceremonies

3. Intellectual Intervention: Scholars and Bureaucrats

4. Collecting and Circulating: Recording and Distributing

5. Internal Upsurge: Movements and Stars

6. Folk Music Today and Tomorrow

References

Further reading

Index

A masterful survey of the many manifestations of folk music in the cultures of the world, by one of America's most eminent and most widely experienced ethnomusicologists. Contemplating the varied sounds of folk music, Slobin explains how it has been perceived, distributed, researched, and exploited, in the world's nations and by scholars past and present. --Bruno Nettl, author ofNettl's Elephant: On the History of Ethnomusicology