Introduction to anglo-american folk music

Lectures: 2 sessions / week, 1.5 hours / session

This subject will introduce students to scholarship about folk music of the British Isles and North America. We will define the qualities of "folk music" and "folk poetry," such as the narrative qualities of ballads, and will try to understand the historical context in which such music was an essential part of everyday life. We will survey the history of collecting, beginning with Percy's Reliques and the Gow collections of fiddle tunes. The urge to collect folk music will be placed in its larger historical, social, and political contexts. We will trace the migrations of fiddle styles and of sung ballads to North America - with their attendant changes and continuities - and examine the influences of the African-American musics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We will conclude with a look at the broad outlines of the story of the "folk revivals" in the U.S.A. and Britain, especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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