Category: Folk music

  • Green Corn

    (Poster for Gordon Parks’s 1976 film Leadbelly.) In their 1936 book Negro Folk Songs As Sung by Lead Belly, “King of the Twelve-String Guitar Players of the World,” Long-Time Convict in the Penitentiaries of Texas and Louisiana, John Lomax and his son Alan published their transcriptions of many of the songs Leadbelly played. Of the song “Green…

  • An Introductory Blues Playlist

    Examples of the blues from the 1920s to the 1960s, from the Mississippi Delta to Texas to Chicago. As you listen, keep in mind the great themes of the genre: betrayal, unhappiness in love, poverty, mistreatment, hard work, crime, violence, addiction. A woman’s unique perspective on the fate of a prisoner: Robert Johnson (1911-1938), the…

  • North and South: The Great Migration and the Lomaxes’ Southern Journey

    The early twentieth-century white folklorist Dorothy Scarborough once interviewed composer and bandleader W.C. Handy (1873- 1958), known as the Father of the Blues, about the origin of the blues. Handy, of course, was not the inventor of the blues, but he was the first musician to notate the folk music that he heard while traveling…

  • Booker T. vs. W.E.B.

    (W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington) I subscribe to the Poem-A-Day email offered for free by the Academy of American Poets. It’s nice to wake up to a poem before you start dealing with your to-do lists and putting out the various fires of everyday life. During the week, the Academy sends out a…

  • Birmingham Sunday

    On Sunday, September 15, 1963, the KKK bombed of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. Four young girls on their way to Bible study were killed. The (white) folksinger Richard Fariña wrote a song to commemorate the tragedy, “Birmingham Sunday”: The tune of Fariña’s song is taken from the Scottish folksong “I Loved A…

  • Juba

    If you’ve seen the film 12 Years A Slave, you may remember that Solomon Northup (shown in a sketch above), whose memoir was the basis for the movie, was a musician. Northup wrote of his life as a free black violinist in New York State: In the winter season I had numerous calls to play on…

  • Authenticity, part III: White Tears

    As you know by now, White Tears is the story (among other things!) of Seth, a young, white, college-educated sound engineer, who accidentally records a line from an old blues song while picking up ambient sounds in Washington Square Park. His business partner Carter, the scion of a wealthy family whose riches come from running…

  • “Ethiopian” Songs: Love and Theft

    [Trigger/content warnings: lots of racist and ableist imagery and language.] In 1768, English playwright Isaac Bickerstaffe and Charles Dibdin — librettist and composer, respectively — presented their comic opera The Padlock at London’s Drury Lane Theatre. Dibdin portrayed the role of Mungo, a black slave from the West Indies, and his aria “Dear Heart! What a…

  • The Sorrow Songs

    W.E.B. Du Bois published The Souls of Black Folk in 1903. It remains a classic in the fields of both sociology and African-American literature. Du Bois believed that there were ten “master songs” that defined the African diaspora in America, and, in a kind of meta-narrative, he prefaced each chapter of the book with a quotation…

  • Traditional African Music and Cross-Cultural Encounters

    Saint Maurice, patron saint of soldiers. Here are some examples of what African music from the earliest days of cross-Atlantic cultural encounters might have sounded like. When we talk about traditional African folk music, we have to qualify what we mean by “traditional.” We know about certain west African dances, like the Pandulungu, Guandu, or…