DIVThe place of music in different forms of work from the earliest hunting and planting to the contemporary office./div

These essays offer striking portraits of working environments where song arose in response to prevailing conditions. Included are the protest blues of African American levee workers, the corridos of Chicano farm workers, and the European songs of immigrant lumber workers in the Midwest.

When society tries to put you in a box, knock the walls down. -Tati Green "You have a pretty face" is such a back-handed compliment. It's like telling me that my face is beautiful, but the rest of me is not. Despite what society says, my curves are hot. My love life, on the other hand, is not. My mom says I'll never find love because of my weight. My sister says I'll never find love because of my personality. My almost-fiance says I'll never find love because I'm incapable of loving anyone. My mom and sister are full of it, but my ex kind of has a point. At twenty-seven years old, I've never been in love. I date a lot, yet sparks never fly. But when I experienced the heart-pounding, skin tingling feeling for the first time, I didn't think it would be caused by a guy I've never met. And I damn sure didn't think he would end up holding my future in his hands in more ways than one."

A career-spanning account of the artistry and politics of Bob Dylan’s songwriting Bob Dylan’s reception of the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature has elevated him beyond the world of popular music, establishing him as a major modern artist. However, until now, no study of his career has focused on the details and nuances of the songs, showing how they work as artistic statements designed to create meaning and elicit emotion. Bob Dylan: How the Songs Work (originally published as Bob Dylan's Poetics) is the first comprehensive book on both the poetics and politics of Dylan’s compositions. It studies Dylan, not as a pop hero, but as an artist, as a maker of songs. Focusing on the interplay of music and lyric, it traces Dylan’s innovative use of musical form, his complex manipulation of poetic diction, and his dialogues with other artists, from Woody Guthrie to Arthur Rimbaud. Moving from Dylan’s earliest experiments with the blues, through his mastery of rock and country, up to his densely allusive recent recordings, Timothy Hampton offers a detailed account of Dylan’s achievement. Locating Dylan in the long history of artistic modernism, the book studies the relationship between form, genre, and the political and social themes that crisscross Dylan’s work. Bob Dylan: How the Songs Work offers both a nuanced engagement with the work of a major artist and a meditation on the contribution of song at times of political and social change.

"[A] novel that best expresses the American spirit." –The Chicago Tribune “If America was a melting pot, Butte seemed to be its boiling point,” observes Morrie Morgan, the itinerant teacher and inveterate charmer who stole readers’ hearts in The Whistling Season. A decade later, he steps off the train and into the copper mining capital of the world in its jittery 1919 heyday. While the riches of “the Richest Hill on Earth” may elude him, once again a colorful cast of local characters seek him out. Before long, Morrie is caught up in the clash between the ironfisted Anaconda Mining Company, radical “outside agitators,” and the beleaguered miners. As tensions build aboveground and below, Morrie finds a unique way to give a voice to those who truly need one, and Ivan Doig proves yet again why he’s reigning king of Western fiction.

Provides lyrics, music, and chord notation for work and protest songs and discusses each tune's significance in the labor movement