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by: Benjamin Filene
Amazon.com's Price: $25.00 Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 781.621300904
EAN: 9780807848623
ISBN: 080784862X
Label: The University of North Carolina Press
Manufacturer: The University of North Carolina Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 344
Publication Date: June 26, 2000
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Release Date: June 07, 2000
Sales Rank: 597971
Studio: The University of North Carolina Press
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
In American music, the notion of 'roots' has been a powerful refrain, but just what constitutes our true musical traditions has often been a matter of debate. As Benjamin Filene reveals, a number of competing visions of America's musical past have vied for influence over the public imagination in this century.
Filene builds his story around a fascinating group of characters—folklorists, record company executives, producers, radio programmers, and publicists—who acted as middlemen between folk and popular culture. These cultural brokers 'discovered' folk musicians, recorded them, and promoted them. In the process, Filene argues, they shaped mainstream audiences' understanding of what was 'authentic' roots music.
Filene moves beyond the usual boundaries of folk music to consider a wide range of performers who drew on or were drawn into the canon of American roots music—from Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie, to Muddy Waters and Willie Dixon, to Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan. Challenging traditional accounts that would confine folk music revivalism to the 1930s and 1960s, he argues instead that the desire to preserve and popularize America's musical heritage is a powerful current that has run throughout this century's culture and continues to flow today.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Strong and Engaging, and Very Readable
Benjamin Filene's account of the origins of the category of "American roots music" is inexorably aimed at peeling away discursive layers within that very term itself to reveal the historical continuities and disjunctures at the heart of it. As Filene puts it: "What makes the formation of America's folk canon so fascinating, though, is that just as isolated cultures became harder to define and locate in industrialized America. the notions of musical purity and primitivism took on enhanced value, even ... Read More
Rating:  - Clamoring for more from Filene
This is a historically thorough yet immensely enjoyable work. Filene's take on "roots music" is refreshing--honest and free of gushing hyperbole; just cynical enough without ever becoming acerbic.
The stories Filene chooses to tell are illuminating and often funny--Leonard Chess faking his way through Blues hitmaking; Leadbelly being marketed as a country bumpkin in overalls when he preferred to wear suits.
There are so many more stories to be told, though--musicians to discuss, ... Read More
Rating: - The Roots Behind Roots Music
Most books about popular music fall into one of two categories. You have your pretentious rock n' roll critic who writes in impenetrable and cryptic prose (Hello Anthony DeCurtis and Robert Christgau) or you have purely academic writings that miss the heart of what is often music felt at a gut level. Then along comes Benjamin Filene. Filene offers up a brilliant discussion of the ways in which folk music became a part of our American consciousness. Profiling the careers of such artists as Leadbelly, ... Read More
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