The Beautiful Music All Around Us: Field Recordings and the American Experience
The Beautiful Music All Around Us: Field Recordings and the American Experience
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Abstract
This book presents the 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. 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. The book's author sought out the performers on these recordings, their families, fellow musicians, and others who remembered them. The book 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: for example, prisoners at the Arkansas State Penitentiary jumping on “the Library's recording machine” in a rendering of Rock Island Line. The profiles and abundant photos in the book 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. By exploring how these singers and instrumentalists exerted their own creativity on inherited forms, “amplifying tradition's gifts,” the book shows how a single artist can make a difference within a democracy.
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Front Matter
- Introduction
- 1 Bill Stepp: Retreat across America
- 2 Kelly Pace: Coworker in the Kingdom of Culture
- 3 Ora Dell Graham: A Little Black Girl from Mississippi
- 4 Christine and Katherine Shipp: In a Chromatic Light
- 5 Nashville Washboard Band: Something Out of Nothing
- 6 Vera Hall: The Life That We Live
- 7 Bozie Sturdivant: A Song That Went with Him
- 8 Pete Steele: It’s What Folks Do
- 9 Texas Gladden: From Here to the Mississippi
- 10 Luther Strong: Way behind His Time
- 11 Charlie Butler: Call Me to Home
- 12 Jess Morris: Boiled Shirt and Cowboy Boots
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End Matter
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