Books in the American Musicspheres series

Music and the choice of musical settings function as one of the most basic forms of affiliation and identity in American Jewish congregations. This book examines how choice of melody helps Jews present and maintain their cultural identity. An audio CD packaged with the book includes field recordings of the most important tunes discussed.

Cajun Breakdown examines the social and cultural roots of Cajun music's development through 1950. The idiom's synthetic nature suggests an extensive and intensive dialogue with popular culture that extinguishes the myth that Cajuns were an insular folk group astray in the American South.

Jump Up! Caribbean Carnival Music in New York City presents the first thorough history of calypso and steelband music outside the Caribbean, that emerged first in Harlem and later, Brooklyn.

Resounding Afro Asia examines black-Asian musical collaborations as part of a genealogy of cross-racial culture and politics in the U.S. Roberts argues these projects offer a glimpse into how artists live multiracial lives that inhabit yet exceed multicultural frameworks built on racial essentialism and segregation.

In Balkan Fascination, ethnomusicologist Mirjana Lausevic, a native of the Balkans, investigates this remarkable phenomenon to explore why so many Americans actively participate in specific Balkan cultural practices to which they have no familial or ethnic connection.

In this book, Silverman introduces readers to the people and cultures who produce this music, offering a sensitive and incisive analysis of how Romani musicians function successfully within oppressive circumstances.

Holehole bushi, folk songs of Japanese workers in Hawaii's plantations, describe the experiences of this particular group caught in the global movements of capital, empire, and labor during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this book author Franklin Odo situates over two hundred of these songs, in translation, in a hitherto largely unexplored historical context.

'Four Parts, No Waiting' investigates the role that vernacular, barbershop-style close harmony has played in American musical history, in American life, and in the American imagination.

Documenting the history and development of bluegrass in and around the nation's capital since it emerged in the 1950s, Capital Bluegrass: Hillbilly Music Meets Washington, D.C. is central to our understanding of bluegrass in the United States and its place in our nation's capital.

Contemporary klezmer music is a rapidly expanding revival of repertories and styles used by old-time professional musical entertainers in Jewish Eastern Europe. Fiddler on the Move, a volume (with CD) in the American Musicspheres series, is an attempt to position klezmer within American music studies, cultural studies, and ethnomusicology.

This book addresses the increasingly plural nature of American cultural identity thrugh a study of the thriving contemporary music culture of Chinese America, ranging from traditional opera to Cantonese pop and from storytelling songs about the immigrant experience to the work of academically trained composers.

By tracing the dynamic history of the radio show Louisiana Hayride and its sponsoring station, ethnomusicologist Tracey Laird reveals the critical role that this part of northwestern Louisiana played in the development of both country music and rock and roll.

Lydia Mendoza began her legendary musical career as a child in the 1920s, singing for pennies and nickels on the streets of downtown San Antonio. She lived most of her adult life in Houston, Texas, where she was born. The life story of this Chicana icon encompasses a 60-year singing careerthat began with the dawn of the recording industry in the 1920s and continued well into the 1980s, ceasing only after she suffered a devastating stroke. Her status as a working-class idol continues to this day, making her one of the most prominent and long-standing performers in the history of therecording industry and a champion of Chicana/o music. This bilingual edition presents Lydia Mendoza's historia in an interview between the artist and Yolanda Broyles-Gonz'alez: first is the English translation, then the Spanish original, as told by Mendoza herself. Broyles-Gonz'alez concludes thevolume with an extended essay on the significance of Mendoza's career and her place in Tejana music and Chicana studies.

Cajun Breakdown examines the social and cultural roots of Cajun music's development through 1950. The idiom's synthetic nature suggests an extensive and intensive dialogue with popular culture that extinguishes the myth that Cajuns were an insular folk group astray in the American South

This book is an examination of northwest Louisiana's unique musical milieu, home to the Louisiana Hayride, a groundbreaking radio barn dance between 1948 and 1960. The region's history, geography, race relations, media, and other forces set the stage for the Hayride's critical role in both country music and rock-and-roll.