Category: Folk music

  • Fare Thee Well/Careless Love

    In his memoirs, John Lomax described collecting “Dink’s Song” in Texas in 1904, at a work-camp for skilled black builders from Mississippi who were constructing a levee on the Brazos River. Dink was one of a group of women imported from Memphis by the camp overseers to keep the workers happy and discourage them from…

  • Mountain Music

    The sound of the French horn provides one of the most emblematically Romantic timbres in nineteenth-century music. Why is that? The French horn derives its origin from the hunting horn (in German, waldhorn or forest horn) — a brass instrument played while hunting on horseback to call back the hounds from the hunt. Some horns,…

  • More Call and Response

    The musical forms brought to the Americas by slaves from west Africa were generally functional: that is, they were used to aid in ritual, work, daily life, and war. Antiphonal singing also facilitated communication across distances. As the Malinke people of West Africa say, “There is no movement without rhythm.” Notice that rhythm aids with the…

  • Call and Response

    Call-and-response form is a structure imported to the Americas by enslaved African people in the seventeenth century. A brief history: A prison work song: (“Hammer, Ring,” Jesse Bradley and group, State Penitentiary, Huntsville, Texas, 1930s) A spiritual: “Talking ‘Bout a Good Time” (Moving Star Hall Singers, 1967) A sharecroppers’ work song: (“Arwhoolie,” Thomas J. Marshall,…

  • Gypsy Kings

    The verbunkos, a Hungarian Roma dance. The musician is playing a gajda, a free-reed pipes made from goatskin (the goat’s head is still attached!). The third movement of Brahms’s Violin Concerto in D Major. The young Brahms first heard Roma music as a boy in Hamburg, which, as a major port on the North Sea, was a way-station…

  • Calinda

    The earliest-known published book of African-American music, the 1867 Slave Songs of the United States, is primarily devoted to the religious vocal music of the slaves of the eastern seaboard. However, there are several songs at the end that are of a very different nature. These songs are in French and were collected in Louisiana, and…

  • Tracing the Sources

    [Content warning: racist language and imagery.] In the 1940s, the American composer Ruth Crawford Seeger, also a folklorist and musicologist, published a collection of American children’s folksongs she had compiled. One of the numbers in this volume of 43 songs is “Such a Getting Upstairs.” This singer asserts that it is a “going-up-to-bed-song” from Indiana.…

  • Authenticity, part II: Living Music Inspired by Ghosts

    When you hear a musical recording that’s scratchy and distant, you might naturally assume it’s old: a relic from the early days of sound recording. But what would modern music sound like were it subject to the same limitations that musicians faced in those days? That’s the question posed by The 78 Project, which gives musicians the…

  • Authenticity (part I)

    The protagonist of Hari Kunzru’s 2017 novel White Tears, a young white recording engineer named Seth, describes days spent listening to music with his college friend, Carter Wallace: We worshipped music like [Lee “Scratch”] Perry’s but we knew we didn’t own it, a fact we tried to ignore as far as possible, masking our disabling…

  • Affrilachia

    A diagram of the major themes of country music. Country music may seem like the whitest of music genres, and has even been called “The White Man’s Blues.” Songs like Merle Haggard’s “I’m a White Boy” certainly advance that narrative. But is that narrative reliable? It’s true that some of the major themes of country…