Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music : America changed through music
- Submitting institution
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The University of East Anglia
- Unit of assessment
- 25 - Area Studies
- Output identifier
- 182632182
- Type
- B - Edited book
- DOI
-
-
- Publisher
- Routledge
- ISBN
- 9781472479204
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- December
- Year of publication
- 2016
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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1
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This ambitious, interdisciplinary collection of essays offers the first extensive study of Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music – a key document of American vernacular music, art, and culture, and one of the most influential releases in the history of recorded sound. Hair as co-editor wanted to assess the cultural impact and legacies of Smith’s Anthology and examine the ways in which its music continues to engage issues of race, ethnicity, and gender while reflecting on larger questions about American national identity and its transnational heritages. The breadth of the contributors, selected by the Hair and Smith, includes established and emerging scholars as well as celebrated musicians. As they explain in their substantial co-written introduction, the editors considered the participation of the latter essential for emphasizing how the Anthology continues in the new millennium to inspire, impel, and provoke. All of the collection’s peer-reviewed essays break new ground and offer new perspectives for assessing the complex cultural interchanges that the Anthology affords. Hair’s contribution, by focusing on the Anthology’s influence on the American guitarist John Fahey, presents a rigorously researched and incisively argued assessment of the racial politics underpinning the Anthology and the Folk Music Revival that it birthed. Drawing on Fahey’s writings, Hair uses his expertise in American literature to present a compelling reading of Fahey’s troubled relationship with the Folk Music Revival of the 1960s. Within the dynamics of that relationship, Hair argues, the Anthology plays a decisive part in Fahey’s understanding of ‘folk’ music as a living, miscegenated tradition that defies the racialised segregations of genre promulgated by musicologists and revivalists alike throughout the 1950s and 60s.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
