The well-known folksinger explores the appeal, traditions, significance and performers of folk music from America, Asia, Europe, and Africa

Long a symbol of American culture, the banjo actually originated in Africa before European-Americans adopted it. Karen Linn shows how the banjo--despite design innovations and several modernizing agendas--has failed to escape its image as a "half-barbaric" instrument symbolic of antimodernism and sentimentalism. Caught in the morass of American racial attitudes and often used to express ambivalence toward modern industrial society, the banjo stood in opposition to the "official" values of rationalism, modernism, and belief in the beneficence of material progress. Linn uses popular literature, visual arts, advertisements, film, performance practices, instrument construction and decoration, and song lyrics to illustrate how notions about the banjo have changed. Linn also traces the instrument from its African origins through the 1980s, alternating between themes of urban modernization and rural nostalgia. She examines the banjo fad of bourgeois Northerners during the late nineteenth century; the African-American banjo tradition and the commercially popular cultural image of the southern black banjo player; the banjo's use in ragtime and early jazz; and the image of the white Southerner and mountaineer as banjo player.

“A very engaging collection of essays that adds much to an evolving literature on the social history of the Soviet Union and broader socialist societies.” —Choice The 1960s have reemerged in scholarly and popular culture as a protean moment of cultural revolution and social transformation. In this volume socialist societies in the Second World (the Soviet Union, East European countries, and Cuba) are the springboard for exploring global interconnections and cultural cross-pollination between communist and capitalist countries and within the communist world. Themes explored include flows of people and media; the emergence of a flourishing youth culture; sharing of songs, films, and personal experiences through tourism and international festivals; and the rise of a socialist consumer culture and an esthetics of modernity. Challenging traditional categories of analysis and periodization, this book brings the sixties problematic to Soviet studies while introducing the socialist experience into scholarly conversations traditionally dominated by First World perspectives.

How was Africa seen by the West during the colonial period? How do Europeans and Americans conceive of Africa in today's postcolonial era? Such questions have preoccupied anthropologists, historians, and literary scholars for years. But few have asked the reverse: how did--and do--Africans see Europe and the United States? Fewer still have wondered how Western images of Africa and African representations of the West might mirror one another. In a detailed study spanning from the late nineteenth century to the present, renowned anthropologist and ethnomusicologist Veit Erlmann examines the very creation of a global imagination for black South Africans, Europeans, and African Americans. To this end, he explores two striking episodes in the history of black South African music. The first is a pair of tours made by two black South African choirs in England and America in the early 1890s; the second is a series of engagements with the international music industry as experienced by the premier choral group Ladysmith Black Mambazo after the release of Paul Simon's celebrated Graceland album in 1986. Readers will find the cast of characters involved in these intertwined and international dramas at once telling and impressive. Among the many players are African National Congress co-founder Saul Msane, Queen Victoria, African-American musician and impresario Orpheus McAdoo, Xhosa Christian prophet Ntsikana, W. E. B. Du Bois, Michael Jackson, and Spike Lee. Music, Modernity, and the Global Imagination tells the story of how these artists, activists, and agents effectively invented each other in travel diaries, religious hymns, concert performances, music videos, Broadway plays, and autobiographies. Erlmann also argues that the resultant mixture of myths and fictions--as distinctly imagined by these diverse historical actors--entangled South Africa and the West in ways that often obscured the newly emergent global imbalances of power, or else blurred the polarities of the colonial and postcolonial world. Ultimately, this book reports on a transatlantic dialogue that carries direct and profound implications for the world's arts and cultures. It is the black diasporic discussion between South Africa and the West, and it is a conversation--about society, music, and Utopia--that is still in progress.

The remarkable life and times of the man who popularized American folk music and created the science of song Folklorist, archivist, anthropologist, singer, political activist, talent scout, ethnomusicologist, filmmaker, concert and record producer, Alan Lomax is best remembered as the man who introduced folk music to the masses. Lomax began his career making field recordings of rural music for the Library of Congress and by the late 1930s brought his discoveries to radio, including Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and Burl Ives. By the 1940s he was producing concerts that brought white and black performers together, and in the 1950s he set out to record the whole world. Lomax was also a controversial figure. When he worked for the U. S. government he was tracked by the FBI, and when he worked in Britain, MI5 continued the surveillance. In his last years he turned to digital media and developed technology that anticipated today's breakthroughs. Featuring a cast of characters including Eleanor Roosevelt, Leadbelly, Carl Sandburg, Carl Sagan, Jelly Roll Morton, Muddy Waters, and Bob Dylan, Szwed's fascinating biography memorably captures Lomax and provides a definitive account of an era as seen through the life of one extraordinary man.