Folk & Traditional Music

This stimulating Very Short Introduction throws open the doors on a remarkably diverse musical genre, with a world-wide reach that goes far beyond ...

At the heart of traditional song rest the concerns of ordinary people - the folk. And folk throughout the centuries have found themselves entangled...

Twenty-seven years in the making (1940–67), this tapestry of nearly two hundred American popular and protest songs was created by three giants of p...

From countercultural resistance to world music craze, Balkan music captured the attention of global audiences. Balkanology, the 1991 quintessential...

This is a study of vocal expressions in the borderland between speech and song, based on performances from cultural contexts where oral transmissio...

A traveling salesman with little formal education, Max Hunter gravitated to song catching and ballad hunting while on business trips in the Ozarks....

America's greatest folk singer and songwriter, philosopher, political analyst, and man-of-the-people, Woody Guthrie and his passionate social polit...

In 2015, Bob Dylan said, "I learned lyrics and how to write them from listening to folk songs. And I played them, and I met other people that playe...

A traveling salesman with little formal education, Max Hunter gravitated to song catching and ballad hunting while on business trips in the Ozarks....

Bluegrass has found an unlikely home, and avid following, in the Czech Republic. The music’s emergence in Central Europe places it within an increa...

This study of Bob Dylan’s art employs a performance studies lens, exploring the distinctive ways he brings words and music to life on recordings, o...

The story of the banjo's journey from Africa to the western hemisphere blends music, history, and a union of cultures. In Banjo Roots and Branches,...

Francis James Child's English and Scottish Popular Ballads, published in ten parts from 1882 to 1898, contained the texts and variants of 305 extan...

The islands of Chiloé, in southern Chile, have developed a distinct culture over several centuries, blending indigenous traditions and Spanish sett...

Islands are concentrated "instances" of place, in every sense of the term. As such, there are no better candidates for observing and critiquing the...

Much has been written about the songs gathered in North America in the first half of the 20th century. However, there is scant information on those...

We seldom consider how much we mistakenly presume in hewing to definitions of music that differ dramatically from the standpoint of other cultures....

A No Depression Most Memorable Music Book of 2022 Roland White’s long career has taken him from membership in Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys and Les...

One of the pioneers of gender studies in music, Ellen Koskoff edited the foundational text Women and Music in Cross Cultural Perspective, and her c...

In The Late Victorian Folksong Revival: The Persistence of English Melody, 1878-1903, E. David Gregory provides a reliable and comprehensive histor...

The Appalachian dulcimer is one of America's major contributions to world music and folk art. Homemade and handmade, played by people with no forma...

In African American Folksong and American Cultural Politics: The Lawrence Gellert Story, scholar and musician Bruce Conforth tells the story of one...

Modernity, Complex Societies, and the Alphorn provides a fascinating examination of the musical instrument the alphorn, alphorn music and its perfo...

Tempo: A Scarecrow Press Music Series on Rock, Pop, and Culture offers titles that explore rock and popular music through the lens of social and cu...

In 2003, the Korean singing tradition of p’ansori joined the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, a distinctive hon...

A No Depression Most Memorable Music Book of 2022 Roland White’s long career has taken him from membership in Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys and Les...

In 1960s and 1970s singer-songwriter music, some artists used malleable metric settings alongside other features of self-expression in performance....

This book is a substantial and thorough musicological analysis of Turkish folk music. It reproduces in facsimile Bartok's autograph record of eight...

This study of Bob Dylan’s art employs a performance studies lens, exploring the distinctive ways he brings words and music to life on recordings, o...

Israel G. “Izzy” Young was the proprietor of the Folklore Center in Greenwich Village from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. The literal center of...

How big an act was the Kingston Trio?  Big enough that the their first 19 albums not only reached Billboard's Top 100, but 14 of them entered the t...

In applying the term "folk music" to the music they were collecting, early nineteenth-century Swedish folklorists saturated it with the cultural cu...

Profiles of artists and performers from around the world form the basis of this innovative volume that explores the many ways individuals engage wi...

One of the secrets to Bruce Springsteen’s enduring popularity over the past fifty years is the way fans feel a deep personal connection to his work...

One of the secrets to Bruce Springsteen’s enduring popularity over the past fifty years is the way fans feel a deep personal connection to his work...

Explores the world of women's professional and amateur musical activity as it developed on and beyond the island of Ireland. In a story which span...