This ground-breaking book is the first-ever study of the role played in musical history by song collectors.This is the first-ever book about song collectors, music''s unsung heroes. They include the Armenian priest who sacrificed his life to preserve the folk music which the Turks were trying to erase in the 1915 Genocide; the prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp who secretly noted down the songs of doomed Jewish inmates; the British singer who went veiled into Afghanistan to learn, record and perform the music the Taliban wanted to silence. Some collectors have been fired by political idealism - Bartok championing Hungarian peasant music, the Lomaxes bringing the blues out of Mississippi penitentiaries, and transmitting them to the world. Many collectors have been priests - French Jesuits noting down labyrinthine forms in eighteenth-century Beijing, English vicars tracking songs in nineteenth-century Somerset. Others have been wonderfully colourful oddballs.Today''s collectors are striving heroically to preserve endangered musics, whether rare forms of Balinese gamelan, the wind-band music of Chinese villages, or the sophisticated polyphony of Central African Pygmies. With globalisation, urbanisation and Westernisation causing an irreversible erosion of the world''s musical diversity, Michael Church suggests we may be seeing folk music''s ''end of history''. Old forms are dying as the conditions for their survival - or replacement - disappear; the death of villages means the death of village musical culture.This ground-breaking book is the sequel to the author''s award-winning The Other Classical Musics, and it concludes with an inventory of the musics now under threat, or already lost for ever.rve endangered musics, whether rare forms of Balinese gamelan, the wind-band music of Chinese villages, or the sophisticated polyphony of Central African Pygmies. With globalisation, urbanisation and Westernisation causing an irreversible erosion of the world''s musical diversity, Michael Church suggests we may be seeing folk music''s ''end of history''. Old forms are dying as the conditions for their survival - or replacement - disappear; the death of villages means the death of village musical culture.This ground-breaking book is the sequel to the author''s award-winning The Other Classical Musics, and it concludes with an inventory of the musics now under threat, or already lost for ever.rve endangered musics, whether rare forms of Balinese gamelan, the wind-band music of Chinese villages, or the sophisticated polyphony of Central African Pygmies. With globalisation, urbanisation and Westernisation causing an irreversible erosion of the world''s musical diversity, Michael Church suggests we may be seeing folk music''s ''end of history''. Old forms are dying as the conditions for their survival - or replacement - disappear; the death of villages means the death of village musical culture.This ground-breaking book is the sequel to the author''s award-winning The Other Classical Musics, and it concludes with an inventory of the musics now under threat, or already lost for ever.rve endangered musics, whether rare forms of Balinese gamelan, the wind-band music of Chinese villages, or the sophisticated polyphony of Central African Pygmies. With globalisation, urbanisation and Westernisation causing an irreversible erosion of the world''s musical diversity, Michael Church suggests we may be seeing folk music''s ''end of history''. Old forms are dying as the conditions for their survival - or replacement - disappear; the death of villages means the death of village musical culture.This ground-breaking book is the sequel to the author''s award-winning The Other Classical Musics, and it concludes with an inventory of the musics now under threat, or already lost for ever.sic''s ''end of history''. Old forms are dying as the conditions for their survival - or replacement - disappear; the death of villages means the death of village musical culture.This ground-breaking book is the sequel to the author''s award-winning The Other Classical Musics, and it concludes with an inventory of the musics now under threat, or already lost for ever.

Even with just forty-one recordings to his credit, Robert Johnson (1911-38) is a towering figure in the history of the blues. His vast influence on twentieth-century American music, combined with his mysterious death at the age of twenty-seven, still encourage the speculation and myth that have long obscured the facts about his life. The most famous legend depicts a young Johnson meeting the Devil at a dusty Mississippi crossroads at midnight and selling his soul in exchange for prodigious guitar skills. Barry Lee Pearson and Bill McCulloch examine the full range of writings about Johnson and weigh the conflicting accounts of Johnson's life story against interviews with blues musicians and others who knew the man. Their extensive research uncovers a life every bit as compelling as the fabrications and exaggerations that have sprung up around it. In examining the bluesman's life and music, and the ways in which both have been reinvented and interpreted by other artists, critics, and fans, Robert Johnson: Lost and Found charts the cultural forces that have mediated the expression of African American artistic traditions.

Melancholy because he and his children have lost their music in a world filled with nasty noise, Gustav Mole circles the globe and shows his children the music of the world.

New Yorkers Grant and his girlfriend Mariah decided on a whim to buy an old plantation house in the Mississippi Delta. This is their journey of discovery to a remote, isolated strip of land, three miles beyond the tiny community of Pluto. They learn to hunt, grow their own food, and fend off alligators, snakes, and varmints galore. They befriend an array of unforgettable local characters, capture the rich, extraordinary culture of the Delta, and delve deeply into the Delta's lingering racial tensions. As the nomadic Grant learns to settle down, he falls not just for his girlfriend but for the beguiling place they now call home.

“An excellent choice for any library.” —School Library Journal It's a busy day at Rabbit's Lost and Found. Poor Squirrel has lost his drum, Elephant has lost her piano, and Bat has lost his entire band! Will Rabbit find their lost instruments before show time? With lively rhyming text and colorful illustrations, this sturdy board book from brother-and-sister team Jonathan and Victoria Ying (Not Quite Black and White) is perfect for little hands.

The ideal handbook for every rock-n-roll pilgrim, Music USA tours the musical heritage of America, from New York to Seattle, stopping at all the shrines of sound in between. Coverage includes background on the development of local music styles, with details on clubs and venues, radio stations and record stores nationwide.

The Other Classical Musics will help both students and general readers to appreciate musical traditions mostly unfamiliar to them.