- published: 08 Apr 2009
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- author: RhettandLink
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Appalachia
Appalachia is a term used to describe a cultural region in the eastern United States that stretches from the Southern Tier of New York state to northern Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia. While the Appalachian Mountains stretch from Belle Isle in Canada to Cheaha Mountain in the U.S. state of Alabama, the cultural region of Appalachia typically refers only to the central and southern portions of the range. As of 2005, the region was home to approximately 23 million people.
Since its recognition as a distinctive region in the late 19th century, Appalachia has been a source of enduring myths and distortions regarding the isolation, temperament, and behavior of its inhabitants. Early 20th-century writers focused on sensationalistic aspects of the region's culture, such as moonshining and clan feuding, and often portrayed the region's inhabitants as uneducated and prone to impulsive acts of violence. Sociological studies in the 1960s and 1970s helped to re-examine and dispel these stereotypes, although popular media continue to perpetuate the image of Appalachia as a culturally backward region into the 21st century.
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Argentina
Argentina
i/ˌɑrdʒənˈtiːnə/, officially the Argentine Republic (Spanish: República Argentina [reˈpuβlika aɾxenˈtina]), is a country in South America, the continent's second largest by land area, after Brazil. It is constituted as a federation of 23 provinces and an autonomous city, Buenos Aires. It is the eighth-largest country in the world by land area and the largest among Spanish-speaking nations.
Argentina's continental area is between the Andes mountain range in the west and the Atlantic Ocean in the east. It borders Paraguay and Bolivia to the north, Brazil and Uruguay to the northeast, and Chile to the west and south. Argentine claims over Antarctica, as well as overlapping claims made by Chile and the United Kingdom, are suspended by the Antarctic Treaty of 1961. Argentina also claims the Falkland Islands (Spanish: Islas Malvinas) and South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, which are administered by the United Kingdom as British Overseas Territories.
A recognised middle power, Argentina is Latin America's third-largest economy, with a "very high" rating on the Human development index. Within Latin America, Argentina has the fifth highest nominal GDP per capita and the highest in purchasing power terms. Analysts have argued that the country has a "foundation for future growth due to its market size, levels of foreign direct investment, and percentage of high-tech exports as share of total manufactured goods", and it is classed by investors as middle emerging economy. Argentina is a founding member of the United Nations, Mercosur, the Union of South American Nations, the Organization of Ibero-American States, the World Bank Group and the World Trade Organization, and is one of the G-15 and G-20 major economies.
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Australia
Australia (
/əˈstreɪljə/), officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent as well as the island of Tasmania and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area. Neighbouring countries include Indonesia, East Timor and Papua New Guinea to the north; the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and New Caledonia to the north-east; and New Zealand to the south-east.
For at least 40,000 years before European settlement in the late 18th century, Australia was inhabited by indigenous Australians, who belonged to one or more of roughly 250 language groups. After discovery by Dutch explorers in 1606, Australia's eastern half was claimed by Great Britain in 1770 and settled through penal transportation to the colony of New South Wales from 26 January 1788. The population grew steadily in subsequent decades; the continent was explored and an additional five self-governing Crown Colonies were established.
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Bangladesh
Coordinates: 23°N 90°E / 23°N 90°E / 23; 90
Bangladesh (i/ˈbɑːŋɡlədɛʃ/ or i/bæŋɡləˈdɛʃ/ (Anglicized pronunciation); Bengali: বাংলাদেশ), officially the People's Republic of Bangladesh (Bengali: গণপ্রজাতন্ত্রী বাংলাদেশ Gônoprojatontri Bangladesh) is a sovereign state located in South Asia. It is bordered by India and Burma and by the Bay of Bengal to the south. The capital (and largest city) is Dhaka, located in central Bangladesh. The official state language is Bengali. The name Bangladesh means "Land of Bengal" or "Country of Bengal" the in the Bengali language, from Bangla "Bengal" and desh holding a dual meaning of "land" and "country" as English "country," German land, French pays, etc.
The borders of present-day Bangladesh were established with the partition of Bengal during the reign and demise of the British India. Its map was chartered by Sir Cyril Radcliffe during the creation of Pakistan and India in 1947, when the region became East Pakistan, part of the newly formed nation of Pakistan. Due to political exclusion and economic exploitation by the politically dominant West Pakistan, popular agitation grew against West Pakistan and led to the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971, after the Bangladeshi Declaration of Independence on 26 March 1971. With the intervention of the Indian Army, the war came to an end on 16 December 1971 with the surrender of the Pakistan Army at Ramna Race Course.
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Bodleian Library
The Bodleian Library ( /ˈbɒdliən/ or /bɒdˈliːən/), the main research library of the University of Oxford, is one of the oldest libraries in Europe, and in Britain is second in size only to the British Library. Known to Oxford scholars as "Bodley" or simply "the Bod", under the Legal Deposit Libraries Act 2003 it is one of six legal deposit libraries for works published in the United Kingdom and under Irish Law it is entitled to request a copy of each book published in the Republic of Ireland. Though University members may borrow some books from dependent libraries (such as the Radcliffe Science Library), the Bodleian operates principally as a reference library and in general documents may not be removed from the reading rooms.
The Library occupies a group of five buildings near Broad Street: these range in date from the late medieval Duke Humfrey's Library to the New Bodleian of the 1930s. Since the 19th century a number of underground stores have been built below parts of these.
Today, the Bodleian also includes several off-site storage areas as well as many other libraries in central Oxford:
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Bolivia
Coordinates: 16°42′43″S 64°39′58″W / 16.712°S 64.666°W / -16.712; -64.666 Bolivia (i/bəˈlɪviə/, Spanish: [boliˈβja]) officially known as Plurinational State of Bolivia (Spanish: Estado Plurinacional de Bolivia, Quechua: Bulivya Mamallaqta, Aymara: Wuliwya Suyu), is a landlocked country in central South America. It is bordered by Brazil to the north and east, Paraguay and Argentina to the south, Chile to the southwest, and Peru to the west.
Prior to European colonization, the Andean region of Bolivia was a part of the Inca Empire – the largest state in Pre-Columbian America. The Spanish Empire conquered the region in the 16th century. During most of the Spanish colonial period, this territory was called Upper Peru and was under the administration of the Viceroyalty of Peru, which included most of Spain's South American colonies. After declaring independence in 1809, 16 years of war followed before the establishment of the Republic, named for Simón Bolívar, on 6 August 1825. Bolivia has struggled through periods of political instability, dictatorships and economic woes.
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Brittany
Brittany (French: Bretagne [bʁətaɲ] (
listen); Breton: Breizh, pronounced [brɛjs]; Gallo: Bertaèyn) is a cultural region in the north-west of France. Previously a kingdom and then a duchy, Brittany was united to the Kingdom of France in 1532 as a province. Brittany has also been referred to as Less, Lesser or Little Britain (as opposed to Great Britain). Brittany is considered as one of the six Celtic nations.
Brittany occupies the northwest peninsula of continental Europe in northwest France. It is bordered by the English Channel to the north, the Celtic Sea and the Atlantic Ocean to the west, and the Bay of Biscay to the south. Its land area is 34,023 km² (13,136 sq mi). The historical province of Brittany is divided into five departments: Finistère in the west, Côtes-d'Armor in the north, Ille-et-Vilaine in the north east, Loire-Atlantique in the south east and Morbihan in the south on the Bay of Biscay.
In 1956, French regions were created by gathering departments between them. The Region of Brittany comprises, since then, four of the five Breton departments (80% of historical Brittany), while the remaining area of the old Brittany, the Loire-Atlantique department, around Nantes, forms part of the Pays de la Loire region. This territorial organisation is regularly contested. The Kingdom and the Duchy of Brittany, the province of Brittany, and the modern Region of Brittany cover the Western part of Armorica, as it was known during the period of Roman occupation.
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Cambridge
The city of Cambridge (i/ˈkeɪmbrɪdʒ/ KAYM-brij) is a university town and the administrative centre of the county of Cambridgeshire, England. It lies in East Anglia, on the River Cam, about 50 miles (80 km) north of London. According to the United Kingdom Census 2001, its population was 108,863 (including 22,153 students), and was estimated to be 125,717 in mid-2010. There is archaeological evidence of settlement in the area in bronze age and Roman times, and under Viking rule Cambridge became an important trading centre. The first town charters were granted in the 12th century, although city status was not conferred until 1951.
Cambridge is most widely known as the home of the University of Cambridge, founded in 1209 and consistently ranked one of the top five universities in the world. The university includes the renowned Cavendish Laboratory, King's College Chapel, and the Cambridge University Library. The Cambridge skyline is dominated by the last two buildings, along with the chimney of Addenbrooke's Hospital in the far south of the city and St John's College Chapel tower.
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Canada
Canada ( /ˈkænədə/) is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean. Spanning over 9,900,000 km2 (3,800,000 sq mi), Canada is the world's second-largest country by total area, and its common border with the United States is the longest land border in the world.
The land that is now Canada has been inhabited for millennia by various Aboriginal peoples. Beginning in the late 15th century, British and French colonial expeditions explored, and later settled, along the region's Atlantic coast. France ceded nearly all of its colonies in North America in 1763 after the Seven Years' War. In 1867, with the union of three British North American colonies through Confederation, Canada was formed as a federal dominion of four provinces. This began an accretion of provinces and territories and a process of increasing autonomy; the Canada Act 1982 severed the vestiges of legal dependence on Britain.
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Chile
Chile (i/ˈtʃɪliː/ or /ˈtʃɪleɪ/), officially the Republic of Chile (Spanish: República de Chile [reˈpuβlika ðe ˈtʃile] ( listen)), is a country in South America occupying a long, narrow strip of land between the Andes mountains to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the west. It borders Peru to the north, Bolivia to the northeast, Argentina to the east, and the Drake Passage in the far south. Along with Ecuador, it is one of two countries in South America that do not border Brazil. Chilean territory includes the Pacific islands of Juan Fernández, Salas y Gómez, Desventuradas and Easter Island. Chile also claims about 1,250,000 square kilometres (480,000 sq mi) of Antarctica, although all claims are suspended under the Antarctic Treaty.
Chile's distinctive shape—4,300 kilometres (2,700 mi) long and on average 175 kilometres (109 mi) wide—makes it the longest country in the world, north to south, with the fifth lengthiest coastline at over 78 thousand kilometers. The diverse climate of Chile ranges from the world's driest desert in the north—the Atacama—through a Mediterranean climate in the centre, humid subtropical in Easter Island, to an Oceanic climate, including alpine tundra and glaciers in the east and south. The northern desert contains great mineral wealth, principally copper. The relatively small central area dominates in terms of population and agricultural resources, and is the cultural and political center from which Chile expanded in the late 19th century when it incorporated its northern and southern regions. Southern Chile is rich in forests and grazing lands, and features a string of volcanoes and lakes. The southern coast is a labyrinth of fjords, inlets, canals, twisting peninsulas, and islands.
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Colombia
Colombia (
/kəˈlʌmbiə/ kə-LUM-biə, or /kəˈlɒmbiə/ kə-LOM-biə), officially the Republic of Colombia (Spanish: República de Colombia [reˈpuβlika ðe koˈlombja]), is a unitary constitutional republic comprising thirty-two departments. The country is located in northwestern South America, bordered to the northwest by Panama; to the north by the Caribbean Sea; to the east by Venezuela and Brazil; to the south by Ecuador and Peru; and to the west by the Pacific Ocean. Colombia has maritime borders with Ecuador, Panama, Venezuela, Jamaica, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica. Colombia is the 26th largest country by area and the fourth largest in South America after Brazil, Argentina and Peru. With over 46 million people, Colombia is the 27th largest country in the world by population and has the second largest population of any Spanish-speaking country in the world, after Mexico. Colombia is a middle power, with the fourth largest economy in Latin America, and the third largest in South America. Colombia is famous for the production of coffee, flowers, emeralds, coal, and oil. All of these products make up the primary sector of economy.
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Denmark
The Kingdom of Denmark (Danish: Kongeriget Danmark, pronounced [ˈkɔŋəʁiːəð ˈdanmɑɡ̊] ( listen)) is a constitutional monarchy and sovereign state consisting the country of Denmark in northern Europe and two autonomous constituent countries, the Faroe Islands in the North Atlantic and Greenland in North America. The kingdom is a unitary state with some power being devolved from Denmark proper to Greenland and the Faroe Islands; this polity is referred to as the Danish Realm. Denmark proper is the hegemonial area, where judicial, executive, and legislative power resides. The Faroe Islands are defined to be a community of people within the kingdom, and the Greenlandic people are defined as a separate people with the right to self-determination.
Denmark is the southernmost of the Nordic countries, located southwest of Sweden and south of Norway, and bordered to the south by Germany. The country consists of a large peninsula, Jutland and many islands, most notably Zealand, Funen, Lolland, Falster and Bornholm, as well as hundreds of minor islands often referred to as the Danish Archipelago.
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Ecuador
Ecuador (i/ˈɛkwədɔr/ E-kwə-dawr), officially the Republic of Ecuador (Spanish: República del Ecuador [reˈpuβlika ðel ekwaˈðor], which literally translates to the "Republic of the Equator") is a representative democratic republic in South America, bordered by Colombia on the north, Peru on the east and south, and by the Pacific Ocean to the west. It is one of only two countries in South America, (along with Chile), that do not have a border with Brazil. The country also includes the Galápagos Islands in the Pacific, about 1,000 kilometres (620 mi) west of the mainland.
The main spoken language in Ecuador is Spanish. Ecuador straddles the equator, from which it takes its name, and has an area of 275,830 km2 (106,500 sq mi). Its capital city is Quito, which was declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in the 1970s for having the best preserved and least altered historic center in Latin America. The country's largest city is Guayaquil. The historic center of Cuenca, the third largest city in the country, was also declared a World Heritage Site in 1999, for being an outstanding example of a planned inland Spanish style colonial city in the Americas. Ecuador is also home—despite its size—to a great variety of species, many of them endemic, like those of the Galápagos islands. This species diversity makes Ecuador one of the 17 megadiverse countries in the world. The new constitution of 2008 is the first in the world to recognize legally enforceable Rights of Nature, or ecosystem rights.
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Edinburgh
Edinburgh (i/ˈɛdɪnbʌrə/ ED-in-burr-ə; Scottish Gaelic: Dùn Èideann) is the capital city of Scotland and the seat of the Scottish Parliament. It is the second largest city in Scotland and the seventh most populous in the United Kingdom. The City of Edinburgh Council governs one of Scotland's 32 local government council areas. The council area includes urban Edinburgh and a 30 square miles (78 km2) rural area. Located in the south-east of Scotland, Edinburgh lies on the east coast of the Central Belt, along the Firth of Forth, near the North Sea.
The city was one of the historical major centres of the Enlightenment, led by the University of Edinburgh, helping to earn it the nickname Athens of the North. The Old Town and New Town districts of Edinburgh were listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1995 in recognition of the unique character of the Medieval Old Town and the planned Georgian New Town. It covers both the Old and New Towns together with the Dean Village and the Calton Hill areas. There are over 4,500 listed buildings within the city. In May 2010, it had a total of 40 conservation areas covering 23% of the building stock and 23% of the population, the highest such ratios of any major city in the UK. In the 2011 mid-year population estimates, Edinburgh had a total resident population of 495,360.
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England
Englandi/ˈɪŋɡlənd/ is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, while the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separate it from continental Europe. Most of England comprises the central and southern part of the island of Great Britain in the North Atlantic. The country also includes over 100 smaller islands such as the Isles of Scilly and the Isle of Wight.
The area now called England was first inhabited by modern humans during the Upper Palaeolithic period, but it takes its name from the Angles, one of the Germanic tribes who settled during the 5th and 6th centuries. England became a unified state in AD 927, and since the Age of Discovery, which began during the 15th century, has had a significant cultural and legal impact on the wider world. The English language, the Anglican Church, and English law—the basis for the common law legal systems of many other countries around the world—developed in England, and the country's parliamentary system of government has been widely adopted by other nations. The Industrial Revolution began in 18th-century England, transforming its society into the world's first industrialised nation. England's Royal Society laid the foundations of modern experimental science.
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Estonia
Estonia
i/ɨsˈtoʊniə/ (Estonian: Eesti), officially the Republic of Estonia (Estonian: Eesti Vabariik), is a state in the Baltic region of Northern Europe. It is bordered to the north by the Gulf of Finland, to the west by the Baltic Sea, to the south by Latvia (343 km), and to the east by Lake Peipus and the Russian Federation (338.6 km). Across the Baltic Sea lies Sweden in the west and Finland in the north. The territory of Estonia covers 45,227 km2 (17,462 sq mi), and is influenced by a temperate seasonal climate. The Estonians are a Finnic people, and the official language, Estonian, is closely related to Finnish.
Estonia is a democratic parliamentary republic divided into 15 counties. The capital and largest city is Tallinn. With a population of 1.29 million, it is one of the least-populous members of the European Union, Eurozone and NATO. Estonia has the highest GDP per person among former Soviet republics. Estonia is listed as a "High-Income Economy" by the World Bank and as an "advanced economy" by the International Monetary Fund; the country is an OECD member. The United Nations lists Estonia as a developed country with a Human Development Index of "Very High". The country is also ranked highly for press freedom, economic freedom, democracy and political freedom and education.
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Finland
Coordinates: 65°N 27°E / 65°N 027°E / 65; 027
Finlandi/ˈfɪnlənd/ ( Finnish: Suomi; Swedish: Finland (help·info)), officially the Republic of Finland, is a Nordic country situated in the Fennoscandian region of Northern Europe. It is bordered by Sweden in the west, Norway in the north and Russia in the east, while Estonia lies to its south across the Gulf of Finland.
Around 5.4 million people reside in Finland, with the majority concentrated in the southern region. It is the eighth largest country in Europe in terms of area and the most sparsely populated country in the European Union. Finland is a parliamentary republic with a central government based in Helsinki and local governments in 336 municipalities, and an autonomous region of the Åland Islands. About one million residents live in the Greater Helsinki area, which consists of Helsinki, Espoo, Kauniainen and Vantaa, and a third of the country's GDP is produced there. Other larger cities include Tampere, Turku, Oulu, Jyväskylä, Lahti and Kuopio.
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Greenland
Greenland (Kalaallisut: Kalaallit Nunaat, "Land of the Kalaallit";Danish: Grønland) is an autonomous country within the Kingdom of Denmark, located between the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans, east of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. Though physiographically a part of the continent of North America, Greenland has been politically and culturally associated with Europe (specifically Norway and later Denmark) for more than a millennium. Greenland is, by area, the world's largest island. With a population of 56,615 (January 2011 estimate) it is the least densely populated dependency or country in the world.
Greenland has been inhabited, though not continuously, by Arctic peoples via Canada for 4500–5000 years. In the 10th century, Norsemen settled on the uninhabited southern part of Greenland. In the 13th century, the Inuit arrived, and in the late 15th century the Norse colonies were abandoned. In the early 18th century, contact between Scandinavia and Greenland was re-established and Denmark established rule over Greenland.
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Hungarian folk music
Hungarian folk music includes a broad array of styles, including the recruitment dance verbunkos, the csárdás and nóta.
During the 20th century, Hungarian composers were influenced by the traditional music of their nation which may be considered as a repeat of the early "nationalist" movement of the early 19th century (Beethoven) but is more accurately the artists' desire to escape the hegemony of the classical tradition manifold at that time. Béla Bartók took this departure into the abstract musical world in his appropriation of traditional Hungarian as the basis for symphonic creations.
Zoltán Kodály and Béla Bartók observed that Hungarian "peasant music" use isometric (with an even number of structures) stophe structure and certain pentatonic (five tone) formations, along with a liking for tempo giusto (rhythm consisting chiefly of equal values). These features jointly may be considered as altogether typical, and differentiate "Hungarian peasant music" from that of any other nation. Bartók studied over 300 melodies, and noted that more modern tunes used for dancing featured pentatonic turns with frequent leaps in fourths.
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Hungary
Hungaryi/ˈhʌŋɡəri/ (Hungarian: Magyarország [ˈmɒɟɒrorsaːɡ] ( listen)) is a country, which is located in Central Europe. It is situated in the Carpathian Basin and is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine and Romania to the east, Serbia and Croatia to the south, Slovenia to the southwest and Austria to the west. The country's capital, and largest city, is Budapest. Hungary is a member of the European Union, NATO, the OECD, the Visegrád Group, and is a Schengen state. The official language is Hungarian, also known as Magyar, which is part of the Finno-Ugric group and is the most widely spoken non-Indo-European language in Europe.
Following a Celt (after c. 450 BC) and a Roman (AD 9 - c. 430) period, the foundation of Hungary was laid in the late 9th century by the Hungarian prince Árpád, whose great-grandson Saint Stephen I was crowned with a crown sent by the pope from Rome in 1000 AD. The Kingdom of Hungary lasted for 946 years, and at various points was regarded as one of the cultural centres of the Western world. After about 150 years of partial Ottoman occupation (1541–1699), Hungary was integrated into the Habsburg Monarchy, and later constituted half of the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy (1867–1918).
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Iceland
Icelandi/ˈaɪslənd/ (Icelandic: Ísland, IPA: [ˈislant]) is a Nordic European island country in the North Atlantic Ocean, on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. The country has a population of about 320,000 and a total area of 103,000 km2 (40,000 sq mi). The capital and largest city is Reykjavík, with the surrounding areas in the southwestern region of the country being home to two-thirds of the country's population. Iceland is volcanically and geologically active. The interior mainly consists of a plateau characterised by sand fields, mountains and glaciers, while many glacial rivers flow to the sea through the lowlands. Iceland is warmed by the Gulf Stream and has a temperate climate despite a high latitude just outside the Arctic Circle.
According to Landnámabók, the settlement of Iceland began in AD 874 when the chieftain Ingólfur Arnarson became the first permanent Norse settler on the island. Others had visited the island earlier and stayed over winter. Over the following centuries, Norsemen settled Iceland, bringing with them thralls (slaves) of Gaelic origin. From 1262 to 1918 Iceland was part of the Norwegian and later the Danish monarchies. Until the 20th century, the Icelandic population relied largely on fisheries and agriculture, and the country was one of the poorest and least developed in the world. Industrialisation of the fisheries and aid from the Marshall Plan brought prosperity in the years after World War II, and by the 1990s it was one of the world's wealthiest countries. In 1994, Iceland became party to the European Economic Area, which made it possible for the economy to diversify into economic and financial services.
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India
India (i/ˈɪndiə/), officially the Republic of India (Bhārat Gaṇarājya), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the south, the Arabian Sea on the south-west, and the Bay of Bengal on the south-east, it shares land borders with Pakistan to the west;China, Nepal, and Bhutan to the north-east; and Burma and Bangladesh to the east. In the Indian Ocean, India is in the vicinity of Sri Lanka and the Maldives; in addition, India's Andaman and Nicobar Islands share a maritime border with Thailand and Indonesia.
Home to the ancient Indus Valley Civilisation and a region of historic trade routes and vast empires, the Indian subcontinent was identified with its commercial and cultural wealth for much of its long history. Four of the world's major religions—Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism—originated here, whereas Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and Islam arrived in the 1st millennium CE and also helped shape the region's diverse culture. Gradually annexed by and brought under the administration of the British East India Company from the early 18th century and administered directly by the United Kingdom from the mid-19th century, India became an independent nation in 1947 after a struggle for independence that was marked by non-violent resistance led by Mahatma Gandhi.
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Ireland
Coordinates: 53°20′N 08°00′W / 53.333°N 8°W / 53.333; -8
Ireland (pronounced [ˈaɪrlənd] ( listen); Irish: Éire [ˈeːɾʲə] ( listen); Ulster Scots: Airlann or Airlan) is an island to the northwest of continental Europe. It is the third-largest island in Europe and the twentieth-largest island on Earth. To its east is the larger island of Great Britain, from which it is separated by the Irish Sea.
Politically, Ireland is divided between the Republic of Ireland, which covers just under five-sixths of the island, and Northern Ireland, a part of the United Kingdom, which covers the remainder and is located in the northeast of the island. The population of Ireland is approximately 6.4 million. Just under 4.6 million live in the Republic of Ireland and just under 1.8 million live in Northern Ireland.
Relatively low-lying mountains surrounding a central plain epitomise Ireland's geography with several navigable rivers extending inland. The island has lush vegetation, a product of its mild but changeable oceanic climate, which avoids extremes in temperature. Thick woodlands covered the island until the 17th century. Today, it is one of the most deforested areas in Europe. There are twenty-six extant mammal species native to Ireland.
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Latvia
Latviai/ˈlætviə/ (Latvian: Latvija), officially the Republic of Latvia (Latvian: Latvijas Republika), is a country in the Baltic region of Northern Europe. It is bordered to the north by Estonia (border length 343 km), to the south by Lithuania (588 km), to the east by the Russian Federation (276 km), to the southeast by Belarus (141 km), and shares maritime borders to the west with Sweden. With 2,067,887 inhabitants and a territory of 64,589 km2 (24,938 sq mi) it is one of the least populous and least densely populated countries of the European Union. The capital of Latvia is Riga. The official language is Latvian and the currency is called Lats (Ls). The country has a temperate seasonal climate.
The Latvians are a Baltic people, culturally related to the Lithuanians. Together with the Finno-Ugric Livs (or Livonians), the Latvians are the indigenous people of Latvia.Latvian is an Indo-European language and along with Lithuanian the only two surviving members of the Baltic branch. Indigenous minority languages are Latgalian and the nearly extinct Finno-Ugric Livonian language. In terms of geography, territory and population Latvia is the middle of three Baltic states: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Latvia and Estonia share a long common history: historical Livonia, times of German (Teutonic Order), Polish-Lithuanian, Swedish, Russian, Nazi German and Soviet rule, 13th century Christianization and 16th century Protestant Reformation. Both countries are home to a large number of ethnic Russians (26.9% in Latvia and 25.5% in Estonia) of whom some are non-citizens. Latvia is historically predominantly Protestant, except for the region of Latgalia in the southeast which is historically predominantly Roman Catholic.
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Library of Congress
The Library of Congress is the research library of the United States Congress, de facto national library of the United States of America, and the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States. Located in four buildings in Washington, D.C., as well as the Packard Campus in Culpeper, Virginia, it is the largest library in the world by shelf space and number of books. The head of the Library is the Librarian of Congress, currently James H. Billington.
The Library of Congress was instituted for Congress in 1800, and was housed in the United States Capitol for most of the 19th century. After much of the original collection had been destroyed during the War of 1812, Thomas Jefferson sold 6,487 books, his entire personal collection, to the library in 1815. After a period of decline during the mid-19th century the Library of Congress began to grow rapidly in both size and importance after the American Civil War, culminating in the construction of a separate library building and the transference of all copyright deposit holdings to the Library. During the rapid expansion of the 20th century the Library of Congress assumed a preeminent public role, becoming a "library of last resort" and expanding its mission for the benefit of scholars and the American people.
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Lithuania
Lithuania (i/ˌlɪθuːˈeɪniə/ or /ˌlɪθjuːˈeɪniə/; Lithuanian: Lietuva), officially the Republic of Lithuania (Lithuanian: Lietuvos Respublika) is a country in Northern Europe, the largest of the three Baltic states. It is situated along the southeastern shore of the Baltic Sea, whereby to the west lie Sweden and Denmark. It borders Latvia to the north, Belarus to the east and south, Poland to the south, and a Russian exclave (Kaliningrad Oblast) to the southwest. Lithuania has an estimated population of 3.2 million as of 2011, and its capital and largest city is Vilnius. The Lithuanians are a Baltic people, and the official language, Lithuanian, is one of only two living languages (together with Latvian) in the Baltic branch of the Indo-European language family.
For centuries, the southeastern shore of the Baltic Sea was inhabited by various Baltic tribes. In the 1230s the Lithuanian lands were united by Mindaugas, who was crowned as King of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the first Lithuanian state, on 6 July 1253. During the 14th century, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was the largest country in Europe: present-day Belarus, Ukraine, and parts of Poland and Russia were territories of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. With the Lublin Union of 1569, Lithuania and Poland formed a voluntary two-state union, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Commonwealth lasted more than two centuries, until neighboring countries systematically dismantled it from 1772 to 1795, with the Russian Empire annexing most of Lithuania's territory.
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Nordic countries
The Nordic countries make up a region in Northern Europe and the North Atlantic which consists of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden and their associated territories, the Faroe Islands, Greenland and Åland. In English, Scandinavia is sometimes used as a synonym for the Nordic countries (but excluding Greenland), despite the fact that that word is most strictly defined to refer only to Denmark, Norway and Sweden.
The region's five nation-states and three autonomous regions share much common history as well as common traits in their respective societies, such as political systems and the Nordic model. Politically, Nordic countries do not form a separate entity, but they co-operate in the Nordic Council. The Nordic countries have a combined population of approximately 25 million spread over a land area of 3.5 million km² (Greenland accounts for around 60% of the total area).
Although the area is linguistically heterogeneous, with three unrelated language groups, the common linguistic heritage is one of the factors making up the Nordic identity. The continental Scandinavian languages – Danish, Norwegian and Swedish – are considered mutually intelligible. These languages are taught in school throughout the Nordic countries; Swedish, for example, is a mandatory subject in Finnish schools, whereas Danish is mandatory in Icelandic, Faroese and Greenlandic schools. For this reason, (continental) Scandinavian language is considered the lingua franca of all of the Nordic countries. Besides these and the insular North Germanic languages Faroese and Icelandic, all belonging to the Indo-European language group, there are the Finnic and Sami branches of the Uralic languages, spoken respectively in northern Norway, Sweden and Finland, and Greenlandic, an Eskimo–Aleut language, spoken in Greenland.
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Norway
Norwayi/ˈnɔrweɪ/ (Norwegian: Norge (Bokmål) or Noreg (Nynorsk)), officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic unitary constitutional monarchy whose territory comprises the western portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula, Jan Mayen, the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard and the subantarctic Bouvet Island. Norway has a total area of 385,252 square kilometres (148,747 sq mi) and a population of about 5 million. It is the second least densely populated country in Europe. The majority of the country shares a border to the east with Sweden; its northernmost region is bordered by Finland to the south and Russia to the east; in its south Norway borders the Skagerrak Strait across from Denmark. The capital city of Norway is Oslo. Norway's extensive coastline, facing the North Atlantic Ocean and the Barents Sea, is home to its famous fjords.
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Peru
Perui/pəˈruː/ (Spanish: Perú; Quechua: Perú;Aymara: Piruw), officially the Republic of Peru (Spanish: República del Perú, pronounced: [reˈpuβlika ðel peˈɾu] ( listen)), is a country in western South America. It is bordered on the north by Ecuador and Colombia, on the east by Brazil, on the southeast by Bolivia, on the south by Chile, and on the west by the Pacific Ocean.
Peruvian territory was home to ancient cultures, spanning from the Norte Chico civilization, one of the oldest in the world, to the Inca Empire, the largest state in Pre-Columbian America. The Spanish Empire conquered the region in the 16th century and established a Viceroyalty, which included most of its South American colonies. After achieving independence in 1821, Peru has undergone periods of political unrest and fiscal crisis as well as periods of stability and economic upswing.
Peru is a representative democratic republic divided into 25 regions. Its geography varies from the arid plains of the Pacific coast to the peaks of the Andes Mountains and the tropical forests of the Amazon Basin. It is a developing country with a high Human Development Index score and a poverty level around 31%. Its main economic activities include agriculture, fishing, mining, and manufacturing of products such as textiles.
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Riga
Riga (Latvian: Rīga, pronounced [riːɡa] ( listen)) is the capital and largest city of Latvia. With 657,424 inhabitants ( 2011) Riga is the largest city of the Baltic states, one of the largest cities in Northern Europe and home to more than one third of Latvia's population. The city is an important seaport and a major industrial, commercial, cultural and financial centre of the Baltic Sea region.[citation needed] The city lies on the Gulf of Riga, at the mouth of the river Daugava. Riga's territory covers 307.17 km2 (118.60 sq mi) and lies between 1 and 10 metres (3.3 and 33 ft) above sea level, on a flat and sandy plain.
Riga was founded in 1201 and is a former Hanseatic League member. Riga's historical centre is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, noted for its Art Nouveau/Jugendstil architecture and 19th century wooden architecture. The city will be the European Capital of Culture in 2014, along with Umeå in Sweden. The city hosted the 2006 NATO Summit, the Eurovision Song Contest 2003 and the 2006 IIHF Men's World Ice Hockey Championships. It is home to the European Union's office of European Regulators for Electronic Communications (BEREC). Riga is served by Riga International Airport, the largest airport in the Baltic states.
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Scotland
Scotland (Scottish Gaelic: Alba ([ˈalˠ̪apə] listen (help·info))) is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the southwest. In addition to the mainland, Scotland constitutes over 790 islands including the Northern Isles and the Hebrides.
Edinburgh, the country's capital and second largest city, is one of Europe's largest financial centres. Edinburgh was the hub of the Scottish Enlightenment of the 18th century, which transformed Scotland into one of the commercial, intellectual and industrial powerhouses of Europe. Glasgow, Scotland's largest city, was once one of the world's leading industrial cities and now lies at the centre of the Greater Glasgow conurbation. Scottish waters consist of a large sector of the North Atlantic and the North Sea, containing the largest oil reserves in the European Union. This has given Aberdeen, the third largest city in Scotland, the title of Europe's oil capital.
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Sweden
Sweden (i/ˈswiːdən/ SWEE-dən; Swedish: Sverige [ˈsværjɛ] ( listen)), officially the Kingdom of Sweden (Swedish: Konungariket Sverige (help·info)), is a Nordic country on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. Sweden borders with Norway and Finland, and is connected to Denmark by a bridge-tunnel across the Øresund.
At 450,295 square kilometres (173,860 sq mi), Sweden is the third largest country in the European Union by area, with a total population of about 9.4 million. Sweden has a low population density of 21 inhabitants per square kilometre (54 /sq mi) with the population mostly concentrated to the southern half of the country. About 85% of the population live in urban areas. Sweden's capital city is Stockholm, which is also the largest city.
Sweden emerged as an independent and unified country during the Middle Ages. In the 17th century, the country expanded its territories to form the Swedish Empire. The empire grew to be one of the great powers of Europe in the 17th and early 18th century. Most of the conquered territories outside the Scandinavian Peninsula were lost during the 18th and 19th centuries. The eastern half of Sweden, present-day Finland, was lost to Russia in 1809. The last war in which Sweden was directly involved was in 1814, when Sweden by military means forced Norway into a personal union. Since then, Sweden has been at peace, practicing "non-participation in military alliances during peacetime and neutrality during wartime". However, Sweden has been a member of the European Union since 1 January 1995 and is a member of the OECD.
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Turkey
Turkey (Turkish: Türkiye), known officially as the Republic of Turkey ( Türkiye Cumhuriyeti (help·info)), is a Eurasian country located in Western Asia (mostly in the Anatolian peninsula) and in East Thrace in Southeastern Europe. Turkey is bordered by eight countries: Bulgaria to the northwest; Greece to the west; Georgia to the northeast; Armenia, Azerbaijan (the exclave of Nakhchivan) and Iran to the east; and Iraq and Syria to the southeast. The Mediterranean Sea and Cyprus are to the south; the Aegean Sea is to the west; and the Black Sea is to the north. The Sea of Marmara, the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles (which together form the Turkish Straits) demarcate the boundary between East Thrace and Anatolia; they also separate Europe and Asia.
Turkey is one of the six independent Turkic states. The vast majority of the population are Muslims. The country's official language is Turkish, whereas Kurdish and Zazaki languages are spoken by Kurds and Zazas, who constitute 18% of the population.
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United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (commonly known as the United Kingdom, the UK, or Britain) is a sovereign state located off the north-western coast of continental Europe. The country includes the island of Great Britain, the north-eastern part of the island of Ireland and many smaller islands. Northern Ireland is the only part of the UK that shares a land border with another sovereign state—the Republic of Ireland. Apart from this land border the UK is surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean, the North Sea, the English Channel and the Irish Sea.
The United Kingdom is a unitary state governed under a constitutional monarchy and a parliamentary system, with its seat of government in the capital city of London. It is a country in its own right and consists of four countries: England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. There are three devolved administrations, each with varying powers, based in Belfast, Edinburgh and Cardiff, the capitals of Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. Associated with the UK, but not constitutionally part of it, are three Crown Dependencies. The United Kingdom has fourteen overseas territories. These are remnants of the British Empire which, at its height in 1922, encompassed almost a quarter of the world's land surface and was the largest empire in history. British influence can still be observed in the language, culture and legal systems of many of its former territories.
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United States
The United States of America (commonly abbreviated to the United States, the U.S., the USA, America, and the States) is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district. The country is situated mostly in central North America, where its forty-eight contiguous states and Washington, D.C., the capital district, lie between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, bordered by Canada to the north and Mexico to the south. The state of Alaska is in the northwest of the continent, with Canada to the east and Russia to the west, across the Bering Strait. The state of Hawaii is an archipelago in the mid-Pacific. The country also possesses several territories in the Pacific and Caribbean.
At 3.79 million square miles (9.83 million km2) and with over 312 million people, the United States is the third or fourth largest country by total area, and the third largest by both land area and population. It is one of the world's most ethnically diverse and multicultural nations, the product of large-scale immigration from many countries. The U.S. economy is the world's largest national economy, with an estimated 2011 GDP of $15.1 trillion (22% of nominal global GDP and over 19% of global GDP at purchasing-power parity). Per capita income is the world's sixth-highest.
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Venezuela
Venezuela (i/ˌvɛnɨˈzweɪlə/ VEN-ə-ZWAY-lə), officially called the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela (Spanish: República Bolivariana de Venezuela [repuˈβlika βoliβaˈɾjana ðe βeneˈswela]), is a tropical country on the northern coast of South America. It borders Colombia to the west, Guyana to the east, and Brazil to the south. Its northern coastline of roughly 2,800 kilometres (1,700 mi) includes numerous islands in the Caribbean Sea, and in the north east borders the northern Atlantic Ocean. Caribbean islands such as Trinidad and Tobago, Grenada, Curaçao, Bonaire, Aruba and the Leeward Antilles lie near the Venezuelan coast. Venezuela's territory covers around 916,445 square kilometres (353,841 sq mi) with an estimated population of 29,105,632. Venezuela is considered a state with extremely high biodiversity, with habitats ranging from the Andes mountains in the west to the Amazon Basin rainforest in the south, via extensive llanos plains and Caribbean coast in the center and the Orinoco River Delta in the east.
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Wesleyan University
Wesleyan University is a private liberal arts college in Middletown, Connecticut, United States founded in 1831. According to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Wesleyan is the only Baccalaureate College in the nation that emphasizes undergraduate instruction in the arts and sciences, also provides graduate research in many academic disciplines, and grants PhD degrees primarily in the sciences and mathematics. Wesleyan is the second most productive liberal arts college in the United States with respect to the number of undergraduates who go on to earn PhDs in all fields of study.
Founded under the auspices of the Methodist Episcopal Church and with the support of prominent residents of Middletown, the now secular university was the first institution of higher education to be named after John Wesley, the founder of Methodism. About 20 unrelated colleges and universities were subsequently named after Wesley. Wesleyan, along with Amherst College and Williams College, is a member of the historic Little Three colleges and has long been known as one of the Little Ivies.
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Alam Lohar
Muhammad Alam Lohar (Urdu: محمد عالم لوہار), (Punjabi: ਆਲਮ ਲੋਹਾਰ was a prominent Punjabi folk music singer of Pakistan. He died in 1979 in an accident. He is also credited with popularizing the term and song Jugni.
Lohar was born in the small village Achh in Gujrat District, in Punjab, British India into a family of blacksmiths.[citation needed] He was gifted with a melodious voice and began singing as a child.
Alam Lohar developed a new style of singing the Punjabi Vaar, an epic or folk tale. He is famous for his rendition of Waris Shah’s Heer, which he has memorized in 36 styles and forms. He recorded his first album at the age of 13 and has outsold all other singers in Pakistan (Verified in records kept with HMV Pakistan 1979)
In his childhood he used to read sufiana kalaams, Punjabi stories and participate as a young child in local elderly gatherings expressing a vocal only art form in reading passages of great poets. From many of the gatherings out of the rural background rose a great singer that could influence his audience with elements of joy peace, happiness and sadness. Further on: he started going to festivals and gatherings on a regular basis and within these performances he rose to become one of the most listened to singers in South Asia. In the 1970s it was the Queen's Jubilee event in the UK and there was a singing competition between all Commonwealth Countries and after all performances: Alam Lohar won the award as the best performance and was handed a gold medal for his unique and God given voice.
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Alan Lomax
Alan Lomax (January 31, 1915 – July 19, 2002) was one of the great American field collectors of folk music of the 20th century. He was also a folklorist, ethnomusicologist, archivist, writer, scholar, political activist, oral historian, and film-maker. Lomax also produced recordings, concerts, and radio shows in the U.S and in England, which played an important role in both the American and British folk revivals of the 1940s, '50s and early '60s. During the New Deal, with his father, famed folklorist and collector John A. Lomax and later alone and with others, Lomax recorded thousands of songs and interviews for the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress on aluminum and acetate discs.
After 1942, when Congress cut off the Library of Congress's funding for folk song collecting, Lomax continued to collect independently in Britain, Ireland, the Caribbean, Italy, and Spain, as well as the United States, using the latest recording technology, assembling a treasure trove of American and international culture. With the start of the Cold War, Lomax continued to speak out for a public role for folklore, even as academic folklorists turned inward. He devoted much of the latter part of his life to advocating what he called Cultural Equity, which he sought to put on a solid theoretical foundation through to his Cantometrics research (which included a prototype Cantometrics-based educational program, The Global Jukebox). In the 1970s and 80s Lomax advised the Smithsonian Institution's Folklife Festival and produced a series of films about folk music, American Patchwork, which aired on PBS in 1991. In his late seventies, Lomax completed a long-deferred memoir, The Land Where the Blues Began (1995), linking the birth of the blues to debt peonage, segregation, and forced labor in the American South.
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Alan Stivell
Alan Stivell (born Alan Cochevelou January 6, 1944) is a Breton musician and singer, recording artist and master of the celtic harp who from the early 1970s revived global interest in the Celtic (specifically Breton) harp and Celtic music as part of world music.
Alan was born in the Auvergnat town of Riom. His father Georges (Jord in Breton) Cochevelou was a civil servant in the French Ministry of Finance who achieved his dream of recreating a Celtic or Breton harp in the small town of Gourin, Brittany. In 1953, Alan began playing the instrument at the age of nine under the tutelage of his father and Denise Megevand, a concert harpist. Alan also learned Celtic mythology, art and history as well as the Breton language, traditional Breton dance and the Scottish bagpipe and the bombarde, a traditional Breton instrument, from the oboe family. Alan began playing concerts at eleven years and studying traditional Breton, English, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh folk music, also learning the drum, Irish flute, and tin whistle. He competed in and won several Breton traditional music competitions in the Bleimor Pipe band. Alan spent his childhood in Paris, with its cosmopolitan influences from France, Algeria, Morocco and elsewhere. But he fell in love with Breton music and Celtic culture in general, and often went back in his teens to Brittany.
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Alex Hassilev
Alex Hassilev (born in Paris, July 11, 1932) is one of the founding members of the group The Limeliters and produced the rock album The Zodiac : Cosmic Sounds. He was educated at Harvard and the University of Chicago. He is an actor with a number of film and television appearances to his credit. He is also a musician, switching from the guitar to the banjo. He speaks fluent French, Russian and Spanish and has contributed many foreign language songs to the Limeliters' repertoire.
When the Limeliters first broke up at the height of their fame in 1963, Alex Hassilev turned to acting and operating a recording studio in his home, producing records for a variety of other artists as well as the Limeliters. He appeared in the 1966 movie The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming as Hrushevsky, a Soviet sailor. For over thirty years he has been a successful record producer and songwriter, and today he continues to produce many of the Limeliters' recordings.
The original Limeliters (Lou Gottlieb, Alex Hassilev and Glenn Yarbrough) had numerous reunion tours throughout the 1970s. In the early 1980s, Alex and Lou wanted to keep the Limeliters together on a more full time basis. They brought on tenor Red Grammer, who stayed with the Limeliters for the next 10 years.
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Archie Fisher
Archie Fisher MBE (born 1939) is a Scottish folk singer and song writer.
Archie Fisher was born in Glasgow on 23 October 1939 into a large singing family. His sister Cilla Fisher is also a professional singer, as was his late sister Ray. In 1960 he moved to Edinburgh and appeared regularly at the "The Howff" folk club run by Roy Guest. In 1962 Ray and Archie released the single "Far Over the Forth" on the Topic Records label and appeared on the BBC 'Hootenanny' programme. In 1965 the whole family released the album "Traditional and New Songs from Scotland".
In 1963 Fisher ran a weekly fok club at the Crown Bar in Edinburgh, and it was there that he met acoustic musicians Robin Williamson and Clive Palmer who were performing together as a traditional folk duo. Mike Heron later auditioned to play rhythm guitar and the trio became The Incredible String Band.
By 1964 the Edinburgh Fringe could boast a folk festival in its own right. An album of the participants was released on Decca. It was called "Edinburgh Folk Festival vol 2" and contained tracks by Ray Fisher, Archie Fisher, Anne Briggs and the Ian Campbell Folk Group (including Dave Swarbrick). Jansch and Briggs performed together but this was never recorded. At an early stage Archie recognised the power of Barbara Dickson's singing and in 1969 invited her to guest on his albums. His live act included 'All Around My Hat', later to become a hit for Steeleye Span. His song "Witch of the Westmorland" was recorded by Barbara Dickson in 1971 on her album "From the Beggar's Mantle", by Archie on "The Man With a Rhyme" in 1976, by Stan Rogers in 1979 and by Golden Bough in 1983.
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Arlo Guthrie
Arlo Davy Guthrie (born July 10, 1947) is an American folk singer. Like his late father, Woody Guthrie, Arlo is known for singing songs of protest against social injustice. One of Guthrie's better-known works is "Alice's Restaurant Massacree", a satirical talking blues song about 18 minutes in length.
Arlo Guthrie was born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of folk singer and composer Woody Guthrie and his wife Marjorie Mazia Guthrie. His sister is Nora Guthrie. His mother was a one-time professional dancer with the Martha Graham Company and founder of the Committee to Combat Huntington's disease, the disease that took Woody's life in 1967. His maternal grandmother was renowned Yiddish poet Aliza Greenblatt. His father was from a Protestant family and his mother was Jewish; Guthrie received religious training for his bar mitzvah from Rabbi Meir Kahane, who would go on to form the Jewish Defense League. "Rabbi Kahane was a really nice, patient teacher," Guthrie later recalled, "but shortly after he started giving me my lessons, he started going haywire. Maybe I was responsible." Guthrie attended Woodward School in Clinton Hill Brooklyn 1st through 8th grades and later graduated from the Stockbridge School, in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, in 1965, and briefly attended Rocky Mountain College. He received an Honorary Doctorate from Westfield State College, in 2008.
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Ashley Hutchings
Ashley Stephen Hutchings (born 26 January 1945) is an English bassist, vocalist, songwriter, arranger, band leader, writer and record producer. He was a founder member of three of the most noteworthy English folk-rock bands in the history of the genre; Fairport Convention, Steeleye Span and The Albion Band. Hutchings has overseen numerous other projects, including records and live theatre, and has collaborated on film and television projects.
Hutchings was born in Southgate, Middlesex, England, but moved to Muswell Hill while still a child. As a teenager he became involved in the skiffle and blues movements and formed several groups, including 'Dr K's Blues Band' in 1964. He met guitarist Simon Nicol in 1966 when they both played in the 'Ethnic Shuffle Orchestra'. They rehearsed on the floor above Nicol's father's medical practice in a house called "Fairport" and lent its name to the group they formed together as Fairport Convention in 1967 with Richard Thompson, which soon included Martin Lamble, Judy Dyble and Iain Matthews.
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Aymara people
The Aymara or Aimara (Aymara: aymara listen (help·info)) are an indigenous ethnic group in the Andes and Altiplano regions of South America; about 2 million live in Bolivia, Peru and Chile. They lived in the region for many centuries before becoming a subject people of the Inca, and later of the Spanish in the 16th century. With the Spanish American Wars of Independence (1810-1825) Aymaras became subjects of Bolivia and Peru and after the War of the Pacific (1879-1883) Chile acquired an Aymaran population.
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Barry McGuire
Barry McGuire (born 15 October 1935) is an American singer-songwriter best known for the hit song "Eve of Destruction", and later as a pioneering singer and songwriter of Contemporary Christian music.
McGuire was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and moved to California in early childhood, when he was two years old. At age 16 he joined the United States Navy, but was discharged ten months later for being under age.
After working as a commercial fisherman, and then going onto become a journeyman pipe fitter, at age 25 McGuire got a job singing in a bar. In 1961, he released his first single called "The Tree", which was not a hit.
He formed a duo with Barry Kane called Barry & Barry. The new duo folk act performed their own brand of original folk arrangements—noticeably impressive melodies laced with rich harmonies—at The Ice House, a small folk club in Pasadena, CA. before moving on to The Troubadour in Hollywood in the spring of 1962. At The Troubadour they both joined The New Christy Minstrels, a large folk group performing there. They continued to perform their separate duo act there as well as performing with The New Christy Minstrels. They cut their first and only album as Barry & Barry called "Here And Now" which contained songs such as "Gold Wedding Ring", "Land Of Odin", "Another Man", "Summer's Over", "You Know My Name", "Bull 'Gine Run", "Far Side Of The Hill" and more. Their LP "Here And Now" on vinyl eventually went out of print, but has since been digitally remastered and rereleased on CD.
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Bedřich Smetana
Bedřich Smetana (Czech pronunciation: [ˈbɛdr̝ɪx ˈsmɛtana] ( listen); 2 March 1824 – 12 May 1884) was a Czech composer who pioneered the development of a musical style which became closely identified with his country's aspirations to independent statehood. He is thus widely regarded in his homeland as the father of Czech music. Internationally he is best known for his opera The Bartered Bride, for the symphonic cycle Má vlast ("My Fatherland") which portrays the history, legends and landscape of the composer's native land, and for his First String Quartet From My Life.
Smetana was naturally gifted as a pianist, and gave his first public performance at the age of six. After his conventional schooling, he studied music under Josef Proksch in Prague. His first nationalistic music was written during the 1848 Prague uprising, in which he briefly participated. After failing to establish his career in Prague, he left for Sweden, where he set up as a teacher and choirmaster in Gothenburg, and began to write large-scale orchestral works. During this period of his life Smetana was twice married; of six daughters, three died in infancy.
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Bert Jansch
Herbert "Bert" Jansch (3 November 1943 – 5 October 2011) was a Scottish folk musician and founding member of the band Pentangle. He was born in Glasgow and came to prominence in London in the 1960s, as an acoustic guitarist, as well as a singer-songwriter. He recorded at least 25 albums and toured extensively from the 1960s to the 21st century.
Jansch was a leading figure in the British folk music revival of the 1960s, touring folk clubs and recording several solo albums, as well as collaborating with other musicians such as John Renbourn and Anne Briggs. In 1968, he joined the band Pentangle, touring and recording with them until their break-up in 1972. He then took a few years' break from music, returning in the late 1970s to work on a series of projects with other musicians. He joined a reformed Pentangle in the early 1980s and remained with them as they evolved through various changes of personnel until 1995. Until his death, Jansch continued to work as a solo artist.
Jansch's work influenced such artists as Al Stewart, Paul Simon, Johnny Marr, Elton John, Bernie Taupin, Bernard Butler, Jimmy Page, Nick Drake, Graham Coxon, Donovan, Neil Young, Fleet Foxes, Devendra Banhart and Neil Halstead.
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Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan ( /ˈdɪlən/), born Robert Allen Zimmerman on May 24, 1941, is an American singer-songwriter, musician and artist. He has been an influential figure in popular music and culture for five decades. Much of his most celebrated work dates from the 1960s when he was an informal chronicler and a seemingly reluctant figurehead of social unrest. A number of Dylan's early songs, such as "Blowin' in the Wind" and "The Times They Are a-Changin'", became anthems for the US civil rights and anti-war movements. Leaving his initial base in the culture of folk music behind, Dylan's six-minute single "Like a Rolling Stone" has been described as radically altering the parameters of popular music in 1965. However, his recordings employing electric instruments attracted denunciation and criticism from others in the folk movement.
Dylan's lyrics incorporated a variety of political, social, philosophical, and literary influences. They defied existing pop music conventions and appealed hugely to the then burgeoning counterculture. Initially inspired by the songs of Woody Guthrie,Robert Johnson, and Hank Williams, as well as the music and performance styles of Buddy Holly and Little Richard, Dylan has both amplified and personalized musical genres. His recording career, spanning fifty years, has explored numerous distinct traditions in American song—from folk, blues and country to gospel, rock and roll, and rockabilly to English, Scottish, and Irish folk music, embracing even jazz and swing.
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Bob Shane
Bob Shane (born as Robert Castle Schoen, February 1, 1934) is an American singer and guitarist and, with Nick Reynolds' passing in October 2008, the only surviving founding member of The Kingston Trio. In that capacity, Shane became a seminal figure in the revival of folk and other acoustic music as a popular art form in the U.S. in the late 1950s through the mid 1960s.
The success of the Kingston Trio in its heyday had repercussions far beyond its unprecedented album sales (including the unsurpassed four albums simultaneously in the Top 10 in 1959), its host of imitators, and the relatively short-lived pop-folk boom it created. For the Kingston Trio's success took acoustic folk-based music out of the niche market it had occupied prior to the Trio's arrival and moved it into the mainstream of American popular music, opening the door for major record labels to record and market both more traditional folk musicians and singer-songwriters as well.
Shane was born to a well-established and prosperous family in Hilo on the Big Island of Hawaii; he is in his own words "a fourth-generation islander." He attended local schools, including the prestigious Punahou School for his junior high and high school years. Punahou's curriculum emphasized native Hawaiian culture, complementing Shane's already developing interest in music in general and Hawaiian music in particular.
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Bruce Cockburn
Bruce Douglas Cockburn OC ( /ˈkoʊbərn/ KOH-bərn; born May 27, 1945) is a Canadian folk/rock guitarist and singer-songwriter. His most recent album was released in March 2011. He has written songs in styles ranging from folk to jazz-influenced rock to rock and roll.
Bruce Cockburn was born in 1945 in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, and spent some of his early years on a farm outside Pembroke, Ontario. He has stated in interviews that his first guitar was one he found around 1959 in his grandmother's attic, which he adorned with golden stars and used to play along to radio hits. Cockburn was a student (but did not study music) at Nepean High School, where his 1964 yearbook photo states his desire "to become a musician." He attended Berklee School of Music in Boston for three semesters in the mid-1960s. In 1966 he joined an Ottawa band called The Children, which lasted for about a year. In the spring of 1967 he joined the final lineup of The Esquires. He moved to Toronto that summer to form The Flying Circus with former Bobby Kris & The Imperials members Marty Fisher and Gordon MacBain and ex-Tripp member Neil Lillie. The group recorded some material in late 1967 (which remains unreleased) before changing its name to Olivus in the spring of 1968, by which time Lillie (who changed his name to Neil Merryweather) had been replaced by Dennis Pendrith from Livingstone's Journey. Olivus opened for The Jimi Hendrix Experience and Cream in April 1968. That summer Cockburn broke up the band with the intention of going solo, but he ended up in the band 3's a Crowd with David Wiffen, Colleen Peterson, and Richard Patterson, who had played with him in The Children. Cockburn left this band in the spring of 1969 to pursue a solo career.
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Bruce Springsteen
Bruce Frederick Joseph Springsteen (born September 23, 1949), nicknamed "The Boss," is an American singer-songwriter-performer who records and tours with the E Street Band. Springsteen is widely known for his brand of heartland rock, poetic lyrics, and Americana sentiments centered on his native New Jersey.
Springsteen's recordings have included both commercially accessible rock albums and more somber folk-oriented works. His most successful studio albums, Born in the U.S.A. and Born to Run, showcase a talent for finding grandeur in the struggles of daily American life; he has sold more than 65 million albums in the United States and more than 120 million worldwide and he has earned numerous awards for his work, including 21 Grammy Awards, two Golden Globes and an Academy Award. He is widely regarded by many as one of the most influential songwriters of the 20th century, and in 2004, Rolling Stone ranked him as the 23rd Greatest Artist of all time.
Springsteen was born in Long Branch, New Jersey, and spent his childhood and high school years in Freehold Borough. He lived on South Street in Freehold Borough and attended Freehold Borough High School. His father, Douglas Frederick Springsteen, was of Dutch and Irish ancestry and worked, among other vocations, as a bus driver, although he was frequently unemployed; his surname is Dutch for jump stone. His mother, Adele Ann (née Zerilli), was a legal secretary and was of Italian ancestry. His maternal grandfather was born in Vico Equense, a city near Naples. He has two younger sisters, Virginia and Pamela. Pamela had a brief film career, but left acting to pursue still photography full time; she took photos for the Human Touch and Lucky Town albums.
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Burl Ives
Burl Icle Ivanhoe Ives (June 14, 1909 – April 14, 1995) was an American actor, writer and folk music singer. As an actor, Ives's work included comedies, dramas, and voice work in theater, television, and motion pictures. Music critic John Rockwell said, "Ives's voice ... had the sheen and finesse of opera without its latter-day Puccinian vulgarities and without the pretensions of operatic ritual. It was genteel in expressive impact without being genteel in social conformity. And it moved people."
Ives was born in 1909 near Hunt City, an unincorporated town in Jasper County, Illinois near Newton, Illinois; the son of Levi "Frank" Ives (1880–1947) and Cordelia "Dellie" White (1882–1954). He had six siblings: Audry, Artie, Clarence, Argola, Lillburn, and Norma. His father was at first a farmer and then a contractor for the county and others. One day Ives was singing in the garden with his mother, and his uncle overheard them. He invited his nephew to sing at the old soldiers' reunion in Hunt City. The boy performed a rendition of the folk ballad "Barbara Allen" and impressed both his uncle and the audience.
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Béla Bartók
Béla Viktor János Bartók ( /ˈbɑrtɒk/; Hungarian pronunciation: [ˈbeːlɒ ˈbɒrtoːk]; March 25, 1881 – September 26, 1945) was a Hungarian composer and pianist. He is considered one of the most important composers of the 20th century and is regarded, along with Liszt, as Hungary's greatest composer (Gillies 2001). Through his collection and analytical study of folk music, he was one of the founders of ethnomusicology.
Béla Bartók was born in the small Banatian town of Nagyszentmiklós in the Kingdom of Hungary, Austria-Hungary (since 1920 Sânnicolau Mare, Romania) on March 25, 1881. Bartók's family reflected some of the ethno-cultural diversities of the country. His father, Béla Sr., considered himself thoroughly Hungarian, because on his father's side the Bartók family was a Hungarian lower noble family, originating from Borsod county (Móser 2006a, 44; Bartók 1981, 13), though his mother was from a Roman Catholic Serbian family (Bayley 2001, 16). His mother, Paula (born Paula Voit), had German as a mother tongue, but was ethnically of "mixed Hungarian" origin: Her maiden name Voit is German, probably of Saxon origin from Upper Hungary (Since 1920 in Czechoslovakia, since 1993 in Slovakia), though she spoke Hungarian fluently.[citation needed] Among her closest forefathers there were family names like Polereczky (Magyarized Polish or Slovak) and Fegyveres (Magyar). Béla displayed notable musical talent very early in life: according to his mother, he could distinguish between different dance rhythms that she played on the piano before he learned to speak in complete sentences (Gillies 1990, 6). By the age of four, he was able to play 40 pieces on the piano; his mother began formally teaching him the next year.
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Cajun
Cajuns ( /ˈkeɪdʒən/; French: les Cadiens or les Acadiens, [le kadjɛ̃, lez‿akadjɛ̃]) are an ethnic group mainly living in the U.S. state of Louisiana, consisting of the descendants of Acadian exiles (French-speakers from Acadia in what are now the Canadian Maritimes). Today, the Cajuns make up a significant portion of south Louisiana's population, and have exerted an enormous impact on the state's culture.
While Lower Louisiana had been settled by French colonists since the late 18th century, the Cajuns trace their roots to the influx of Acadian settlers after the Great Expulsion from their homeland during the French and Indian War (1754 to 1763). The Acadia region to which modern Cajuns trace their origin consisted largely of what are now Nova Scotia and the other Maritime provinces, plus parts of eastern Quebec and northern Maine. Since their establishment in Louisiana the Cajuns have developed their own dialect, Cajun French, and developed a vibrant culture including folkways, music, and cuisine.
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Carrie Newcomer
Carrie Newcomer (born Dowagiac, Michigan) is an American singer and songwriter.
Carrie Newcomer was born in Dowagiac, Michigan, and raised in Elkhart, Indiana. She attended Ball State University, Goshen College and received a B.A. in visual art and education from Purdue University.
In the 1980s, Newcomer was a member of the pop-folk group Stone Soup which produced two albums. After leaving Stone Soup, she began a solo career and released her first album called Visions and Dreams. Between 1993-2010, she released twelve additional solo albums on Philo/Rounder.
In 2003 her song "I Should Have Known Better" was recorded by Nickel Creek on their Grammy Winning Best Contemporary Folk Album "This Side".
In 2007, her album The Geography of Light received the Artist of the Year and Album of the Year awards from Folk Wax Magazine. In 2003 her Album "The Gathering of Spirits" also received the Artist of the Year and Album of the Year awards from Folk Wax Magazine. That year she wrote the national theme song for the YMCA and collaborated with Scott Russell Sanders and folk songwriters Krista Detor, Tim Grimm, Michael White and Tom Roznoski on an album and theatrical production entitled Wilderness Plots.
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Cecil Sharp
Cecil James Sharp (22 November 1859 – 23 June 1924) was the founding father of the folklore revival in England in the early 20th century, and many of England's traditional dances and music owe their continuing existence to his work in recording and publishing them.
Sharp was born in Camberwell, London, the eldest son of James Sharp (a slate merchant who was interested in archaeology, architecture, old furniture and music) and his wife, Jane née Bloyd, was also a music lover. Sharp was educated at Uppingham, but left at 15 and was privately coached for the University of Cambridge, where he rowed in the Clare College boat and graduated B.A. in 1882.
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Charles Seeger
Charles (Louis) Seeger, Jr. (December 14, 1886 – February 7, 1979) was a noted musicologist, composer, and teacher. He was the father of iconic American folk singer Pete Seeger (b. 1919).
He graduated from Harvard University in 1908, then studied in Cologne, Germany and conducted with the Cologne Opera. He left Europe to take a position as Professor of Music at the University of California at Berkeley, where he taught from 1912 to 1916 before being dismissed for his public opposition to U.S. entry into World War I. His brother Alan Seeger was killed in action on July 4, 1916, while serving as a member of the French Foreign Legion. Charles Seeger then took a position at Juilliard before teaching at the Institute of Musical Art in New York from 1921 to 1933 and the New School for Social Research from 1931 to 1935. In 1936, he was in Washington, DC, working as a technical advisor to the Music Unit of the Special Skills Division of the Resettlement Administration (later renamed the Farm Security Administration). From 1957 to 1961, he taught at the University of California Los Angeles. From 1961 to 1971 he was a research professor at the Institute of Ethnomusicology at UCLA. In 1949-50 he was Visiting Professor of the Theory of Music in the School of Music at Yale University. From 1935 to 1953 he held positions in the federal government's Resettlement Administration, Works Projects Administration (WPA), and Pan American Union, including serving as an administrator for the WPA's Federal Music Project, for which his wife also worked, from 1938 to 1940.
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Chet Atkins
Chester Burton Atkins (June 20, 1924 – June 30, 2001), known as Chet Atkins, was an American guitarist and record producer who, along with Owen Bradley, created the smoother country music style known as the Nashville sound, which expanded country's appeal to adult pop music fans as well.
Atkins's picking style, inspired by Merle Travis, Django Reinhardt, George Barnes and Les Paul, brought him admirers within and outside the country scene, both in the United States and internationally. Atkins produced records for The Browns, Porter Wagoner, Norma Jean, Dolly Parton, Dottie West, Perry Como, Elvis Presley, the Everly Brothers, Eddy Arnold, Don Gibson, Jim Reeves, Jerry Reed, Skeeter Davis, Waylon Jennings and many others.
Among many honors, Atkins received 14 Grammy Awards as well as the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, nine Country Music Association Instrumentalist of the Year awards, and was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum.
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Clarence Ashley
"Tom" Clarence Ashley (September 29, 1895 – June 2, 1967) was an American clawhammer banjo player, guitarist and singer. He began performing at medicine shows in the Southern Appalachian region as early as 1911, and gained initial fame during the late 1920s as both a solo recording artist and as a member of various string bands. After his "rediscovery" during the folk revival of the 1960s, Ashley spent the last years of his life playing at folk music concerts, including appearances at Carnegie Hall in New York and at the Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island.
Clarence Ashley was born Clarence Earl McCurry in Bristol, Tennessee in 1895, the only child of George McCurry and Rose-Belle Ashley. Those who knew George McCurry described him variously as a "one-eyed fiddler, hell-raiser, and big talker." Shortly before Clarence was born, Rose-Belle's father, Enoch Ashley, discovered that George was an adulterer, and George was forced to leave town. Rose-Belle moved back in with her father, and around 1900, the family relocated to Shouns, Tennessee, a crossroads just south of Mountain City, where Enoch ran a boarding house. When Clarence was very young, he was nicknamed "Tommy Tiddy Waddy" (after a nursery rhyme) by his grandfather Enoch, and thus became known to friends and acquaintances as 'Tom'. As he was raised by the parents of his mother, the name "McCurry" was dropped in favour of "Ashley".
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Dave Alvin
Dave Alvin (born November 11, 1955, in Downey, California), is a Grammy award winning guitarist, singer and songwriter and a proponent of Americana music. He is a former member of The Blasters, X, and The Knitters.
Alvin and his older brother Phil grew up in Downey, California. As teenagers, they attended blues, rockabilly, and country venues and heard musicians such as T-Bone Walker, Big Joe Turner, and Lee Allen.
In 1979 Alvin and his brother formed a roots rock band called The Blasters with fellow residents Bill Bateman and John Bazz. Despite an enthusiastic local following and dedicated fans across the United States and Europe, Alvin left the band in 1986 and became the lead guitarist of the band, X. Alvin left X to work on a solo project after they recorded their album See How We Are. Alvin became a member of country band The Knitters and appeared on their 1987 album Poor Little Critter on the Road and their 2005 follow-up, The Modern Sounds of The Knitters.
In the early 1980s Alvin, along with fellow Blasters members Bill Bateman and Steve Berlin, performed on several albums with the Los Angeles punk band The Flesh Eaters. Alvin also played with the The Gun Club and on two songs from their 1984 album, The Las Vegas Story.
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Dave Guard
Donald David "Dave" Guard (born October 19, 1934, San Francisco, California - died March 22, 1991) was an American folk singer, songwriter, arranger and recording artist. Along with Nick Reynolds and Bob Shane, he was one of the founding members of The Kingston Trio.
Guard was educated in Honolulu, Hawaii, at Punahou School in what was then the pre-statehood U.S. Territory of Hawaii. Upon completion of his final year of high school in 1952 at Menlo School, a private prep school in Menlo Park, California, he matriculated at nearby Stanford University, graduating in 1957 with a degree in economics.
While an undergraduate at Stanford, Guard started a pickup group with Nick Reynolds and Bob Shane. Guard called his group Dave Guard and the Calypsonians, with a Weavers-style signature sound that was principally two guitars, a banjo, and rollicking vocals. Guard kept the group together after Reynolds and Shane left, changing the name of the Calypsonians to The Kingston Quartet. Then in 1957, when Reynolds and Shane agreed to team up with Guard again, the group changed its name to The Kingston Trio. Under contract with Capitol Records, the Trio became a huge commercial and influential success.
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Dick Gaughan
Richard Peter Gaughan usually known as Dick Gaughan (born 17 May 1948, Glasgow) is a Scottish musician, singer, and songwriter, particularly of folk and social protest songs.
Gaughan was born in Glasgow's Rottenrow Maternity Hospital, when his father was working in Glasgow as an engine driver. He spent the first year-and-a-half of his life in Rutherglen, South Lanarkshire, after which the whole family moved to Leith, a port on the outskirts of Edinburgh. He has never returned to Rutherglen, and is proud to be a Leither. His mother was a Macdonald from Lochaber, and was a native speaker of Gaelic. As a child in the 1930s she won a silver medal at the Gaelic Mod. His father was born in Leith, and his paternal grandfather was an Irish speaker from Mayo, who played the fiddle. The three children, of whom Dick was the eldest, grew up surrounded by the music of both Scotland and Ireland. The family experienced considerable poverty, which had a very strong influence on Gaughan's chosen path in life and his political views.
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Dinesh Subasinghe
Dinesh Subasinghe is a composer, violinist and music producer from Sri Lanka. He composed the first Buddhist Oratorio in the world and introduced the ancient instrument Ravanahatha to Sri Lanka.
Dinesh Subasinghe composed the first ever Buddhist oratorio, written with the western oratorio traditions. He composed a symphony, trio, sonata, two A cappella pieces and one oratorio based on the Buddha's story, a string quartet, a concerto for trumpet and a piece for viola (The Dance of Salome).
His String Quartet “Night Before The Battle” Selected Grammy Winning Orchestra of our Time Joel Thome –New York – Selected from 100 compositions from the world.
He composed music for 37 Sri Lankan TV series, seven movies and fourteen stage plays etc. He introduced Ravanahatha, based on an ancient string instrument, to Sri Lankan electronic media for the first time.
Dinesh won Best Music Director at the 2009 Sri Lankan SIGNIS Awards, formally known as the OCIC Awards for a television version of Mark Twain 's Tom Sawyer.
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Doc Watson
Arthel Lane "Doc" Watson (March 3, 1923 – May 29, 2012) was an American guitarist, songwriter and singer of bluegrass, folk, country, blues and gospel music. Watson won seven Grammy awards as well as a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. Watson's flatpicking skills and knowledge of traditional American music are highly regarded. He performed with his son Merle for over 15 years until Merle's death in 1985, in an accident on the family farm.
Watson was born in Deep Gap, North Carolina. According to Watson on his three-CD biographical recording Legacy, he got the nickname "Doc" during a live radio broadcast when the announcer remarked that his given name Arthel was odd and he needed an easy nickname. A fan in the crowd shouted "Call him Doc!" presumably in reference to the literary character Sherlock Holmes's sidekick Doctor Watson. The name stuck ever since.
An eye infection caused Doc Watson to lose his vision before his first birthday. Despite this, he was taught by his parents to work hard and care for himself. He attended North Carolina's school for the visually impaired, The Governor Morehead School, in Raleigh, North Carolina.
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Dock Boggs
Moran Lee "Dock" Boggs (February 7, 1898 – February 7, 1971) was an influential old-time singer, songwriter and banjo player. His style of banjo playing, as well as his singing, is considered a unique combination of Appalachian folk music and African-American blues. Contemporary folk musicians and performers consider him a seminal figure, at least in part because of the appearance of two of his recordings from the 1920s, "Sugar Baby" and "Country Blues", on Harry Smith's 1951 Anthology of American Folk Music collection. Boggs was initially recorded in 1927 and again in 1929, although he worked primarily as a coal miner for most of his life. He was "rediscovered" during the folk music revival of the 1960s, and spent much of his later life playing at various folk music festivals and recording for Folkways Records.
Boggs was born in West Norton, Virginia in 1898, the youngest of ten children. In the late 1890s, the arrival of railroads in Central Appalachia brought large-scale coal mining to the region, and by the time Dock was born, the Boggs family had transitioned from a susbsistence farming family to a wage-earning family living in mining towns. Dock's father, who worked as a carpenter and blacksmith, loved singing and could read sheet music. He taught his children to sing, and several of Dock's siblings had learned to play banjo.
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Dolly Parton
Dolly Rebecca Parton (born January 19, 1946) is an American singer-songwriter, author, multi-instrumentalist, actress and philanthropist, best known for her work in country music. As a songwriter, she has composed over 3,000 songs, the best known of which include "I Will Always Love You" (a two-time U.S. country chart-topper for Parton, as well an international pop hit for Whitney Houston), "Jolene", "Coat of Many Colors", "9 to 5" and "My Tennessee Mountain Home". As an actress, she starred in the movies 9 to 5, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, Steel Magnolias, Straight Talk, Unlikely Angel and Joyful Noise. She is one of the most successful female country artists of all time; with an estimated 100 million in album sales, Dolly Parton is also one of the best selling artists of all time. She is known as "The Queen of Country Music".
She was born in Sevierville, Tennessee, the fourth of twelve children of Avie Lee Parton (née Owens; October 5, 1923 – December 5, 2003) and Robert Lee Parton (March 22, 1921 – November 12, 2000), a tobacco farmer. Her siblings are: Willadeene Parton (born March 24, 1940), David Wilburn Parton (born March 30, 1942), Coy Denver "Denver" Parton (born August 16, 1943), Bobby Lee Parton (born February 18, 1948), Stella Mae Parton (born May 4, 1949), Cassie Nan Parton (February 12, 1951), Randel Huston "Randy" Parton (born December 15, 1953), Larry Gerald Parton (born and died July 6, 1955), Floyd and Frieda Estelle Parton (born June 1, 1957), and Rachel Ann Parton (born August 31, 1959). Her family was, as she has described them, "dirt poor". She outlined her family's lack of money in a number of her early songs, notably "Coat of Many Colors" and "In the Good Old Days (When Times Were Bad)". They lived in a rustic, dilapidated one-room cabin in Locust Ridge, Tennessee, a hamlet just north of the Greenbrier Valley, in the Locust Ridge area of the Great Smoky Mountains in Sevier County, a predominantly Pentecostal area.
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Don Reno
Don Wesley Reno (February 21, 1927 – October 16, 1984) was an American bluegrass and country musician best known as a banjo player in partnership with Red Smiley, and later with guitarist Bill Harrell.
Born in Buffalo, South Carolina, Don Reno grew up on a farm in Haywood County, North Carolina. He began playing the banjo at the age of five. His father gave him a guitar four years later; and in 1939 12-year-old Reno joined the Morris Brothers in performing at a local radio station. He left one year later to join Arthur Smith, with whom he would years later record "Feudin' Banjos". In 1943 he received an offer from Bill Monroe to become a member of the Bluegrass Boys, but chose instead to enlist in the United States Army. Trained as a horse soldier at Fort Riley, Kansas, he was sent to the Pacific Theater to fight on foot. He eventually served in Merrill's Marauders and was wounded in action.
Influenced by old-time banjo player Snuffy Jenkins and others, Reno developed his own three finger "single-string" style that allowed him to play scales and complicated fiddle tunes note-for-note. The Reno style encompasses much more than just single-string picking; double-stops, double-time picking, triple-pull offs—all of these, and other techniques make Reno's playing recognizable. According to his son, Don Wayne Reno, "My dad told me more than once that the reason he started his own style of banjo picking was this: When he came out of the service, many people said 'You sound just like Earl Scruggs.' He said that really bothered him considering he never played a banjo while he was in the service, and when he returned to the U.S., he continued to play in the style he had always played before."
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Donovan
Donovan (born Donovan Philips Leitch, 10 May 1946) is a Scottish singer, songwriter and guitarist. Initially labelled as an imitator of Bob Dylan, Donovan quickly developed an eclectic and distinctive style that blended folk, jazz, pop, psychedelia, and world music (notably calypso). He has variously lived in Scotland, London, California and Ireland, and currently lives with his family in County Cork in Ireland.
Emerging from the British folk scene, Donovan shot to fame in the United Kingdom in early 1965 with a series of live performances on the pop TV series, Ready Steady Go!. Initially signing with the British label Pye Records in 1965, he recorded a handful of singles and two albums in the folk music vein, but after signing a new contract with the US label Epic Records his popularity rapidly spread to the US and other countries. After extricating himself from his original management contract, he began a long and successful collaboration with Mickie Most, one of the leading British independent record producers of the era, scoring a string of hits in the UK, the US, Australia and other countries. His successful records in the 1960s included the UK hits "Catch the Wind" and "Colours" in 1965, while "Sunshine Superman" topped the US Billboard Hot 100 chart the following year, and reached #2 in Britain. Donovan was the first artist to be signed to CBS/Epic Records by then-new Administrative Vice President Clive Davis, who later became head of the CBS Record empire.
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Earl Scruggs
Earl Eugene Scruggs (January 6, 1924 – March 28, 2012) was an American musician noted for perfecting and popularizing a three-finger banjo-picking style (now called "Scruggs style") that is a defining characteristic of bluegrass music. Although other musicians had played in three-finger style before him, Scruggs shot to prominence when he was hired by Bill Monroe to fill the banjo slot in his group, the Blue Grass Boys.
Scruggs was born near Shelby, Cleveland County, North Carolina, to Georgia Lula Ruppe and George Elam Scruggs, a farmer and bookkeeper, who played banjo and died when Scruggs was four years old. His older brothers, Junie and Horace, plus his two older sisters, Eula Mae and Ruby, all played banjo and guitar. Scruggs' mother played the organ. He grew up in Cleveland County, North Carolina.
Scruggs joined Bill Monroe's Blue Grass Boys in late 1945, and quickly popularized his syncopated, three-finger picking style. In 1948 Scruggs and guitarist Lester Flatt left Monroe's band and formed the Foggy Mountain Boys, also later known simply as Flatt and Scruggs. In 1969, they broke up, and he started a new band, the Earl Scruggs Revue, featuring several of his sons.
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Edvard Grieg
Edvard Hagerup Grieg /ˈɛdʋɑɖ ˈhɑːgəɾʉːp gɾiːg/ (15 June 1843 – 4 September 1907) was a Norwegian composer and pianist. He is best known for his Piano Concerto in A minor, for his incidental music to Henrik Ibsen's play Peer Gynt (which includes Morning Mood and In the Hall of the Mountain King), and for his collection of piano miniatures Lyric Pieces.
Edvard Hagerup Grieg was born in Bergen, Norway on 15 June 1843. His parents were Alexander Grieg (1806–1875), a merchant and vice consul in Bergen, and Gesine Judithe Hagerup (1814–1875), a music teacher and daughter of Edvard Hagerup. The family name, originally spelled Greig, has Scottish origins. After the Battle of Culloden in 1746, Grieg's great-grandfather traveled widely, settling in Norway about 1770, and establishing business interests in Bergen.
Edvard Grieg was raised in a musical area. His mother was his first piano teacher and taught him to play at the age of 6. Grieg studied in several schools,[clarification needed] including Tank's School. He often brought in samples of his music to class.[citation needed]
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Eliza Carthy
Eliza Carthy (born 23 August 1975) is an English folk musician known for both singing and playing fiddle. She is the daughter of English folk musicians singer/guitarist Martin Carthy and singer Norma Waterson.
Carthy was born in Scarborough, North Yorkshire, England. At the age of thirteen Carthy formed the Waterdaughters with her mother, aunt (Lal Waterson) and cousin Maria Knight. She has subsequently worked with Nancy Kerr, with her parents as Waterson:Carthy, and as part of the "supergroup" Blue Murder, in addition to her own solo work. She went to school at Fyling Hall School in North Yorkshire.
Eliza Carthy led the vocals as a member of Blue Murder on the song "I Bid You Goodnight" found on the CD tribute to the music of Joseph Spence & the Pinder family called Out On the Rolling Sea (1994) (Green Linnet). Along with Eliza are Lal Waterson, Norma Waterson, Jim Boyes, Martin Carthy, Barry Coope, Lester Simpson and Mike Waterson.
She has twice been nominated for the Mercury Music Prize for UK album of the year: in 1998 for Red Rice, and again in 2003 for Anglicana. Eliza was a guest on the album Mermaid Avenue by Billy Bragg and Wilco. Eliza and Billy also recorded together on the song "My Father's Mansions" which appeared on the Pete Seeger tribute album called Where Have All The flowers Gone (1998).
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Enrique Granados
Enrique Granados y Campiña (27 July 1867 – 24 March 1916) was a Spanish pianist and composer of classical music. His music is in a uniquely Spanish style and, as such, is representative of musical nationalism. Enrique Granados was also a talented painter in the style of Francisco Goya.
He was born in Lleida, Catalonia, the son of Calixto Granados, an army captain, and Enriqueta Campiña. As a young man he studied piano in Barcelona, where his teachers included Francisco Jurnet and Joan Baptista Pujol. In 1887 he went to Paris to study. He was unable to become a student at the Paris Conservatoire, but he was able to take private lessons with a conservatoire professor, Charles-Wilfrid de Bériot, whose mother, the famed soprano Maria Malibran, was of Spanish ancestry. Bériot insisted on extreme refinement in tone production, which strongly influenced Granados’s own teaching of pedal technique. He also fostered Granados's abilities in improvisation. Just as important were his studies with Felip Pedrell. He returned to Barcelona in 1889. His first successes were at the end of the 1890s, with the zarzuela Maria del Carmen, which attracted the attention of King Alfonso XIII.
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Erik Darling
Erik Darling (September 25, 1933 – August 3, 2008) was an American songwriter and a folk music artist. He was an important influence on the folk scene in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Darling was born in Baltimore, Maryland. Inspired by the folk music group The Weavers, in the '50s, he formed The Tunetellers, which evolved into The Tarriers with actor/singer Alan Arkin. Their version of the "Banana Boat Song" reached #4 on the Billboard charts.
In April 1958 Darling replaced Pete Seeger in The Weavers, although he continued working club dates with The Tarriers until November 1959. Darling also recorded three solo albums. His second solo effort, True Religion for Vanguard in 1961 was influential on younger folkies of the day. Darling left the Weavers in June 1962 to work as a soloist on the emerging coffeehouse circuit. That summer he formed a jazz-folk trio, The Rooftop Singers, with longtime friend Bill Svanoe and jazz singer Lynn Taylor. Intended as a studio-only project for Vanguard, the group landed an unexpected number one pop hit with the song "Walk Right In." Don McLean who became friends with Darling in 1961, looked back on Darling as “a genuine philosopher and perfectionist.” He said, “I appreciated the time he spent with me so long ago. Undivided mental attention to every aspect of music making and performing is a hallmark of Erik’s work, and I believe some of that rubbed off on me.”.
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Ewan MacColl
Ewan MacColl (25 January 1915 – 22 October 1989) was a British folk singer, songwriter, socialist, actor, poet, playwright, and record producer. He was married to theatre director Joan Littlewood, and later to American folksinger Peggy Seeger. He collaborated with Littlewood in the theatre and with Seeger in folk music. He was the father of the late singer/songwriter Kirsty MacColl. Ewan sang Sacred Harp with Calum MacColl and Mike Seeger.
MacColl was born as James Henry Miller in Broughton, Salford, Lancashire to Scottish parents, William Miller and Betsy Miller née Hendry. Both of his parents were socialists and William Miller was an iron-moulder and militant trade unionist who had moved to Salford with his wife to look for work after being blacklisted in almost every foundry in Scotland. They lived amongst a group of émigré Scots and Jimmy, their only surviving child of four, was brought up in an atmosphere of fierce political debate interspersed with the large repertoire of songs and stories his parents had brought from Scotland. He left school in 1930 during the Great Depression and, joining the ranks of the unemployed, began a life-long programme of self education whilst keeping warm in the Manchester Public Library.
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Fernando Sor
Josep Ferran Sorts i Muntades (baptized 14 February 1778 – died 10 July 1839) was a Spanish classical guitarist and composer. While he is best known for his guitar compositions, he also composed music for a wide range of genres, including opera, orchestra, string quartet, piano, voice, and ballet. His ballet score Cendrillon (Cinderella) received over one hundred performances. Sor’s works for guitar range from pieces for beginning players to advanced players such as Variations on a Theme of Mozart.
Sor gave concerts throughout Europe, including in England, Paris, Berlin, and Warsaw. Before the early 19th century, the guitar was little-known in England. Sor seems to have created a market for himself there and then met the demand. Sor’s contemporaries considered him to be the best guitarist in the world, and his works for guitar have been widely played and reprinted since his death.
As Sor's works were published in various countries, his name was translated, leading to variations in the spelling. Variations have included Joseph Fernando Macari Sors, Fernando Sor, Ferran Sor, Ferdinand Sor, and Ferdinando Sor.
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Francis James Child
Francis James Child (February 1, 1825 – September 11, 1896) was an American scholar, educator, and folklorist, best known today for his collection of folk songs known as the Child Ballads. Child was Boylston professor of rhetoric and oratory at Harvard University, where he produced influential editions of English poetry. In 1876 he was named Harvard's first Professor of English, a position which allowed him to focus on academic research. It was during this time that he began work on the Child Ballads.
The Child Ballads were published in five volumes between 1882 and 1898. They are a major contribution to the study of English-language folk music.
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Frank Proffitt
Frank Proffitt (June 1, 1913 – November 24, 1965) was an Appalachian old time banjoist and performer at the 1963 Newport Folk Festival. He was a key figure in inspiring musicians of the 1960s and 1970s to play the banjo. He recorded the ballad "Tom Dooley", learned from his aunt Nancy Prather. Prather learned the song from her mother Edy Adeline (Pardue) Proffitt, who had known both Dula (locally pronounced "Dooley") and Laura Foster. Frank Warner, a folksong collector and a good friend of Frank Proffitt, shared the song with Alan Lomax, who included it in his book, "Folksong U.S.A."
Frank was born in Laurel Bloomery, Tennessee and was raised in the Reese area of Watauga County, North Carolina where he worked in a variety of jobs and lived on a farm with his wife and six children. He grew tobacco, worked as a carpenter and in a spark plug factory. He was known for his carpentry skill, Proffitt's fretless banjos and dulcimers were homemade.
In 1937, Frank Proffitt met Frank Warner. Warner was searching out a dulcimer builder and thus began a 30 year friendship and song swapping. The Kingston Trio learned "Tom Dooley" from a recording Frank Warner made of the ballad that he learned from Proffitt, and they were eventually required by court judgement to acknowledge their debt to Proffitt and pay him royalties for the use of the song.[citation needed]
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Franz Liszt
Franz Liszt (German: [fʁant͡s lɪst]); Hungarian: Liszt Ferencz, in modern use Liszt Ferenc) (October 22, 1811 – July 31, 1886) was a 19th-century Hungarian composer, pianist, conductor, and teacher.
Liszt became renowned in Europe during the nineteenth century for his virtuosic skill as a pianist. He was said by his contemporaries to have been the most technically advanced pianist of his age. In the 1840s he was considered by some to be perhaps the greatest pianist of all time. He was also a well-known composer, piano teacher, and conductor. He was a benefactor to other composers, including Richard Wagner, Hector Berlioz, Camille Saint-Saëns, Edvard Grieg and Alexander Borodin.
As a composer, Liszt was one of the most prominent representatives of the "Neudeutsche Schule" ("New German School"). He left behind an extensive and diverse body of work in which he influenced his forward-looking contemporaries and anticipated some 20th-century ideas and trends. Some of his most notable contributions were the invention of the symphonic poem, developing the concept of thematic transformation as part of his experiments in musical form and making radical departures in harmony. He also played an important role in popularizing a wide array of music by transcribing it for piano.
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Fred Hellerman
Fred Hellerman, born in Brooklyn, New York (May 13, 1927) and educated at Brooklyn College, is an American folk singer, guitarist, producer and song writer, primarily known as one of the members of The Weavers, together with Pete Seeger, Lee Hays, and Ronnie Gilbert. Fred Hellerman is also known for producing the record album Alice's Restaurant (1967) for Arlo Guthrie.
In 1948, Fred Hellerman formed the Weavers with Seeger, Ronnie Gilbert and Lee Hays. Hellerman wrote and co-wrote some of their hits. Because of his involvement with left-wing groups during the 1930s and 1940s, Fred Hellerman came under suspicion of Communist sympathies during the McCarthy era.
In 1950, Fred Hellerman was named, along with the rest of the Weavers, in the anti-communist tract Red Channels and was placed on the industry blacklist. The Weavers, unable to perform on television, radio, or in most music halls, broke up in 1952, although they periodically held reunion concerts, the last in 1981, shortly before Lee Hays' death.
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Glenn Yarbrough
Glenn Yarbrough (born January 12, 1930) is an American folk singer. He was the lead singer with The Limeliters between 1959 and 1963, and had a prolific solo career, recording on various labels.
Glenn was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and attended St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland.
In 1957, he was one of the first singers to record the traditional "The House of the Rising Sun" for Elektra Records. Among other career highlights, Yarbrough provided vocals for the Rankin/Bass animated versions of The Hobbit (1977) singing songs such as The Greatest Adventure, The Road Goes Ever On as well as The Return of the King (1980) singing "Frodo of the Nine Fingers" in addition to singing the title song in the 1966 holiday classic, The Christmas That Almost Wasn't. His most popular single, and the one for which he is most well-known today is "Baby the Rain Must Fall" (the theme tune from the film of the same name), which reached #12 pop and #2 easy listening in 1965. According to Chartmasters of Covington, Louisiana, the song was one of the all time top 100 of the year.
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Gordon Lightfoot
Gordon Meredith Lightfoot, Jr. CC OOnt (born November 17, 1938) is a Canadian singer-songwriter who achieved international success in folk, folk-rock, and country music, and has been credited for helping define the folk-pop sound of the 1960s and 1970s. He has been referred to as Canada's greatest songwriter and internationally as a folk-rock legend.
Lightfoot's songs, including "For Lovin' Me", "Early Morning Rain", "Steel Rail Blues", "Ribbon of Darkness"—a number one hit on the U.S. country charts with Marty Robbins' cover in 1965— and the 1967 Detroit riot-generated "Black Day In July" brought him international recognition in the 1960s. He experienced chart success in Canada with his own recordings, beginning in 1962 with the Number 3 hit "(Remember Me) I'm the One". Lightfoot's recordings then made an impact on the international music charts as well in the 1970s, with songs such as "If You Could Read My Mind" (1970) (Number 5 on the US charts), "Sundown" (1974), "Carefree Highway" (1974), "Rainy Day People" (1975), all reaching number 1, and "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" (1976) (reaching number 2).
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Harry Belafonte
Harold George "Harry" Belafonte, Jr. (born March 1, 1927) is an American singer, songwriter, actor and social activist. He was dubbed the "King of Calypso" for popularizing the Caribbean musical style with an international audience in the 1950s. Belafonte is perhaps best known for singing "The Banana Boat Song", with its signature lyric "Day-O". Throughout his career he has been an advocate for civil rights and humanitarian causes and was a vocal critic of the policies of the George W. Bush Administration.
Born Harold George Bellanfanti, Jr., at Lying-in Hospital, Harlem, New York, Belafonte was the son of Melvine (née Love) – a housekeeper of Jamaican descent – and Harold George Bellanfanti, Sr., a Martiniquan who worked as a chef in the National Guard. From 1932 to 1940, he lived with his grandmother in her native country of Jamaica. When he returned to New York City, he attended George Washington High School after which he joined the Navy and served during World War II. In the 1940s, he was working as a janitor's assistant in NYC when a tenant gave him, as a gratuity, two tickets to see the American Negro Theater. He fell in love with the art form and also met Sidney Poitier. The financially struggling pair regularly purchased a single seat to local plays, trading places in between acts, after informing the other about the progression of the play. At the end of the 1940s, he took classes in acting at the Dramatic Workshop of The New School in New York with the influential German director Erwin Piscator alongside Marlon Brando, Tony Curtis, Walter Matthau, Bea Arthur and Sidney Poitier, while performing with the American Negro Theatre. He subsequently received a Tony Award for his participation in the Broadway revue John Murray Anderson's Almanac.
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Hedy West
Hedy West (April 6, 1938 - July 3, 2005) was an American folksinger and songwriter.
West was of the same generation as Joan Baez, Judy Collins, and others of the American folk music revival. Her most famous song "500 Miles" is one of America's best loved and best known folk songs. She was described by the English folk musician AL Lloyd as "far and away the best of American girl singers in the [folk] revival."
She was born Hedwig Grace West in Cartersville in the mountains of northern Georgia in 1938. Her father, Don West, was a southern poet and coal mine labor organizer in the 1930s; his bitter experiences included seeing a close friend machine-gunned on the street by company goons in the presence of a young daughter. Later, he operated the Appalachian South Folklife Center in Pipestem, West Virginia and co-founded the Highlander Folk School in New Market, Tennessee.
Her great-uncle Augustus Mulkey played the fiddle; her paternal grandmother Lillie Mulkey West played the banjo. By her teens West was singing at folk festivals, both locally and in neighbouring states. In the mid-50s she won a prize for ballad-singing in Nashville, TN. Many of her songs, including the raw materials for "500 Miles", came from Lily, who passed on the songs she had learned as a child. She used her father's poetry in several songs, such as Anger in the Land.
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Henry Whitter
Henry Whitter (born April 6, 1892 near Fries, Grayson County, Virginia - died November 17, 1941 Morganton, North Carolina) was an early country musician.
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Inca Empire
The Inca Empire, or Inka Empire (Quechua: Tawantinsuyu), was the largest empire in pre-Columbian America. The administrative, political and military center of the empire was located in Cusco in modern-day Peru. The Inca civilization arose from the highlands of Peru sometime in the early 13th century.
From 1438 to 1533, the Incas used a variety of methods, from conquest to peaceful assimilation, to incorporate a large portion of western South America, centered on the Andean mountain ranges, including, besides Peru, large parts of modern Ecuador, western and south central Bolivia, northwest Argentina, north and central Chile, and southern Colombia into a state comparable to the historical empires of Eurasia.
The official language of the empire was Quechua, although hundreds of local languages and dialects of Quechua were spoken. The Inca referred to their empire as Tawantinsuyu which can be translated as The Four Regions or The Four United Provinces.
There were many local forms of worship, most of them concerning local sacred "Huacas", but the Inca leadership encouraged the worship of Inti—the sun god—and imposed its sovereignty above other cults such as that of Pachamama. The Incas considered their King, the Sapa Inca, to be the "child of the sun."
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Isaac Albéniz
Isaac Manuel Francisco Albéniz y Pascual (Spanish pronunciation: [iˈsak alˈβeniθ]) (29 May 1860, Camprodon – 18 May 1909, Cambo-les-Bains) was a Spanish pianist and composer best known for his piano works based on folk music idioms. However, many of his works have been transcribed by Miguel Llobet and others for guitar, and many of his pieces such as Asturias (Leyenda), Granada, Sevilla, Cadiz, Cordoba, Cataluña, and the Tango in D are amongst the most important pieces for classical guitar.
Born in Camprodon, province of Girona, to Ángel Albéniz (a customs official) and his wife Dolors Pascual, Albéniz was a child prodigy who first performed at the age of four. At age seven, after apparently taking lessons from Antoine François Marmontel, he passed the entrance examination for piano at the Paris Conservatoire, but he was refused admission because he was believed to be too young.
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Jackie Leven
Jackie Leven (18 June 1950 – 14 November 2011) was a Scottish songwriter and folk musician. After starting his career as a folk musician in the late 1960s, he first found success with new wave band Doll by Doll. He later recorded as a solo artist, releasing more than twenty albums under his own name or under the pseudonym Sir Vincent Lone.
Leven started his musical career in the late 1960s under the pseudonym "John St Field", and recorded one album, Control, between 1973 and 1975.
He formed the band Doll by Doll in 1977. They released four albums between 1979-82. After Doll by Doll disbanded in 1983, Leven began a solo career. He suffered a street assault and near strangulation during the recording of his first solo album in 1984, which left him unable to speak for nearly two years. During this time he became addicted to heroin. He also collaborated with fellow ex-Doll by Dolls members Joe Shaw and David Macintosh, plus ex-Sex Pistol Glen Matlock to release the single "Big Tears" under the band name Concrete Bulletproof Invisible. The record was a Melody Maker single of the week in 1988. Leven was credited on the 1997 album Shifting City by John Foxx for the title of an electronic dance track called "Concrete Bulletproof Invisible". With Doll by Doll, Leven supported Ultravox at several gigs on their UK tour in October 1978.[citation needed]
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Jean Ritchie
Jean Ritchie (born December 8, 1922) is an American folk music singer, songwriter, and Appalachian dulcimer player.
Abigail and Balis Ritchie of Viper, Kentucky had 14 children, and Jean was the youngest. Ten girls slept in one room of the farming family's house in the Cumberland Mountains.
Jean Ritchie quickly memorized songs and performed at local dances and the country fair in Hazard. In the late 1940s the family acquired a radio and discovered that what they were singing was hillbilly music, a word they had never heard before. In the mid-thirties Alan Lomax recorded in Kentucky for the Library of Congress's Archive of Folk Song. Among the people he recorded were The Singing Ritchies.[dubious – discuss]
Ritchie attended Cumberland College (Now the University of the Cumberlands) in Williamsburg, Kentucky and later the University of Kentucky in Lexington. At college she joined the glee club and choir and learned to play piano. In 1946 she graduated with a BA in social work. During the war, she taught in elementary school.
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Jean Sibelius
Jean Sibelius ( pronunciation (help·info); 8 December 1865 – 20 September 1957) was a Finnish composer of the later Romantic period. His music played an important role in the formation of the Finnish national identity. His mastery of the orchestra has been described as "prodigious."
The core of Sibelius's oeuvre is his set of seven symphonies. Like Beethoven, Sibelius used each successive work to further develop his own personal compositional style. His works continue to be performed frequently in the concert hall and are often recorded.
In addition to the symphonies, Sibelius's best-known compositions include Finlandia, the Karelia Suite, Valse triste, the Violin Concerto in D minor and The Swan of Tuonela (one of the four movements of the Lemminkäinen Suite). Other works include pieces inspired by the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala; over 100 songs for voice and piano; incidental music for 13 plays; the opera Jungfrun i tornet (The Maiden in the Tower); chamber music; piano music; Masonic ritual music; and 21 separate publications of choral music.
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Jeannie Robertson
Jeannie Robertson (1908 – 13 March 1975) was a Scottish folk singer.
It is not known where Jeannie Robertson was born but she did live at 90, Hilton Street in Aberdeen, where a plaque now commemorates her. Like many of the Scottish Travellers from Aberdeen, Glasgow and Ayrshire, she went to Blairgowrie to pick raspberries once a year. Hamish Henderson was born in Blairgowrie and tried to track down the best singers there. In 1953 he followed her reputation to her doorstep in Aberdeen. According to legend Jeannie was reluctant to let him in. She challenged him to tell her the opening line of Child ballad no 163, The Battle of Harlaw and he complied. In November of the same year she was staying in the London apartment of Alan Lomax. In preparation for a TV appearance, Jean Ritchie, Margaret Barry and Isla Cameron were also there. They swapped songs with each other, while the tape rolled. It is sometimes stated that she made the first recording of The Battle of Harlaw but this is not so. The first recording was made in 1936 by the Bothy Ballad singer, Willie Kemp (for the Beltona label) and it may be from this that she learnt the song. Another of the songs she sang was Andrew Lammie (Mill o' Tifty's Annie) lasting over 13 minutes. At the end she told Alan Lomax about the parts of the story that she had not sung. Many of the 1953 recordings were issued as "The Queen Among the Heather" in 1975. They later reappeared along with other songs on a CD of the same name.
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Jerry Garcia
Jerome John "Jerry" Garcia (August 1, 1942 – August 9, 1995) was an American musician who was best known for his lead guitar work, singing and songwriting with the band the Grateful Dead. Though he disavowed the role, Garcia was viewed by many as the leader or "spokesman" of the group.
One of its founders, Garcia performed with the Grateful Dead for their entire three-decade career (1965–1995). Garcia also founded and participated in a variety of side projects, including the Saunders-Garcia Band (with longtime friend Merl Saunders), Jerry Garcia Band, Old and in the Way, the Garcia/Grisman acoustic duo, Legion of Mary, and the New Riders of the Purple Sage (which Garcia co-founded with John Dawson and David Nelson). He also released several solo albums, and contributed to a number of albums by other artists over the years as a session musician. He was well known by many for his distinctive guitar playing and was ranked 13th in Rolling Stone's "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time" cover story.
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Joan Baez
Joan Chandos Baez ( /ˈbaɪ.ɛz/) (born January 9, 1941 as Joan Chandos Báez) is an American folk singer, songwriter, musician and a prominent activist in the fields of human rights, peace and environmental justice.
Baez has a distinctive vocal style, with a strong vibrato. Her recordings include many topical songs and material dealing with social issues.
Baez began her career performing in coffeehouses in Boston and Cambridge, and rose to fame as an unbilled performer at the 1959 Newport Folk Festival. She began her recording career in 1960, and achieved immediate success. Her first three albums, Joan Baez, Joan Baez, Vol. 2, and Joan Baez in Concert all achieved gold record status, and stayed on the charts for two years.
Baez has had a popular hit song with "Diamonds & Rust" and hit covers of Phil Ochs's "There but for Fortune" and The Band's "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down". Other songs associated with Baez include "Farewell, Angelina", "Love Is Just a Four-Letter Word", "Joe Hill", "Sweet Sir Galahad" and "We Shall Overcome". She performed three of the songs at the 1969 Woodstock Festival, helped to bring the songs of Bob Dylan to national prominence, and has displayed a lifelong commitment to political and social activism in the fields of nonviolence, civil rights, human rights and the environment.
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Joe Strummer
John Graham Mellor (21 August 1952 – 22 December 2002), best remembered by his stage name Joe Strummer, was an English musician who was the co-founder, lyricist, rhythm guitarist and lead vocalist of the British punk rock band The Clash. His musical experience included his membership of The 101ers, Latino Rockabilly War, The Mescaleros and The Pogues, in addition to his own solo music career. Strummer's work as a musician allowed him to explore other interests, which included acting, creating film scores for television and movies, songwriting, radio broadcasting, and a position as a radio host. Strummer is one of the iconic figures of the British punk movement.
Strummer and The Clash were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in January 2003. In his remembrance, Strummer's friends and family have established the Strummerville Foundation for the promotion of new music, and each year there are many festivals and both organised and spontaneous ceremonies worldwide to celebrate his memory.
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Johannes Brahms
Johannes Brahms (pronounced [joːˈhanəs ˈbʁaːms]; 7 May 1833 – 3 April 1897) was a German composer and pianist, and one of the leading musicians of the Romantic period. Born in Hamburg, Brahms spent much of his professional life in Vienna, Austria, where he was a leader of the musical scene. In his lifetime, Brahms's popularity and influence were considerable; following a comment by the nineteenth-century conductor Hans von Bülow, he is sometimes grouped with Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven as one of the Three Bs.
Brahms composed for piano, chamber ensembles, symphony orchestra, and for voice and chorus. A virtuoso pianist, he premiered many of his own works; he also worked with some of the leading performers of his time, including the pianist Clara Schumann and the violinist Joseph Joachim. Many of his works have become staples of the modern concert repertoire. Brahms, an uncompromising perfectionist, destroyed many of his works and left some of them unpublished.
Brahms is often considered both a traditionalist and an innovator. His music is firmly rooted in the structures and compositional techniques of the Baroque and Classical masters. He was a master of counterpoint, the complex and highly disciplined art for which Johann Sebastian Bach is famous, and also of development, a compositional ethos pioneered by Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven. Brahms aimed to honour the "purity" of these venerable "German" structures and advance them into a Romantic idiom, in the process creating bold new approaches to harmony and melody. While many contemporaries found his music too academic, his contribution and craftsmanship have been admired by subsequent figures as diverse as Arnold Schoenberg and Edward Elgar. The diligent, highly constructed nature of Brahms's works was a starting point and an inspiration for a generation of composers.
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John Hockenberry
John Charles Hockenberry (born June 4, 1956) is an American journalist and author. A four-time Emmy Award winner and three-time Peabody Award winner, Hockenberry has worked in media since 1980.
Hockenberry has reported from all over the world, has anchored programs for network TV, cable, and radio, and has reported for magazines, newspapers, and online media. He is a prominent figure in the disability rights movement; Hockenberry sustained a spinal cord injury in a car crash at the age of 19, which left him with paraplegia from the chest down.
In 2007, he was named a Distinguished Fellow at the MIT Media Lab. Since April 2008, Hockenberry has been host of The Takeaway, a live national morning news program created by Public Radio International and WNYC New York. He is author of the nonfiction book Moving Violations: War Zones, Wheelchairs and Declarations of Independence and the novel A River Out Of Eden.
Hockenberry was born in Dayton, Ohio and grew up in upstate New York and Michigan. He graduated in 1974 from East Grand Rapids High School in East Grand Rapids, Michigan. In 1976, he was paralyzed while hitchhiking on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. The driver of the car fell asleep and crashed, killing herself. Hockenberry's spinal cord was damaged, and he remains paralyzed without sensation or voluntary movement from the mid-chest down. At the time he was a mathematics major at the University of Chicago, but after his spinal cord injury, he transferred to the University of Oregon in 1980 and studied harpsichord and piano.
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John Prine
John Prine (born October 10, 1946, in Maywood, Illinois) is an American country/folk singer-songwriter. He has been active as a recording artist and live performer since the early 1970s.
Prine is the son of William Prine and Verna Hamm. Prine started playing guitar at age 14, taught by his brother, David. Prine attended Proviso East High School, and was a member on the school's gymnastic team. He was a postman for five years and served in the Army during the Vietnam War era, serving in Germany, before beginning his musical career in Chicago.
In the late 1960s, while Prine was delivering mail in Maywood, Illinois, he began to sing at open mic evenings at the Fifth Peg on Armitage Avenue. Prine was initially a spectator, reluctant to perform, but eventually did so in response to a "You think you can do better?" comment made to him by another performer. Chicago Sun-Times movie critic Roger Ebert heard him there and wrote the first review Prine ever received, calling him a great songwriter. He became a central figure in the Chicago Folk Revival, which also included such singer-songwriters as Steve Goodman, Bonnie Koloc, Jim Post and Fred Holstein. Joined by such established musicians as Jethro Burns and Bob Gibson, Prine performed frequently at such clubs as the Earl of Old Town, the Quiet Knight, Somebody Else's Troubles, The 5th Peg, and the Bulls.
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Joni Mitchell
Joni Mitchell, CC (born Roberta Joan Anderson; November 7, 1943) is a Canadian musician, singer songwriter, and painter. Mitchell began singing in small nightclubs in Saskatchewan and Western Canada and then busking in the streets and dives of Toronto. In 1965 she moved to the United States and, touring constantly, began to be recognized when her original songs ("Urge for Going," "Chelsea Morning," "Both Sides, Now," "The Circle Game") were covered by notable folk singers, allowing her to sign with Reprise Records and record her own debut album in 1968. Settling in Southern California, Mitchell and her popular songs like "Big Yellow Taxi" and "Woodstock" helped define an era and a generation. Her more starkly personal 1971 recording Blue has been called one of the best albums ever made. Musically restless, Mitchell switched labels and began moving toward jazz rhythms by way of lush pop textures on 1974's Court and Spark, her best-selling LP, featuring her radio hits "Help Me" and "Free Man in Paris."
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Joseph Haydn
Franz Joseph Haydn ( /ˈdʒoʊzəf ˈhaɪdən/; German pronunciation: [ˈjoːzɛf ˈhaɪdən] ( listen); 31 March 1732 – 31 May 1809), known as Joseph Haydn, was an Austrian composer, one of the most prolific and prominent composers of the Classical period. He is often called the "Father of the Symphony" and "Father of the String Quartet" because of his important contributions to these forms. He was also instrumental in the development of the piano trio and in the evolution of sonata form.
A lifelong resident of Austria, Haydn spent much of his career as a court musician for the wealthy Esterházy family on their remote estate. Isolated from other composers and trends in music until the later part of his long life, he was, as he put it, "forced to become original". At the time of his death, he was one of the most celebrated composers in Europe.
Joseph Haydn was the brother of Michael Haydn, himself a highly regarded composer, and Johann Evangelist Haydn, a tenor. He was also a close friend of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and a teacher of Ludwig van Beethoven.
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Judy Collins
Judith Marjorie "Judy" Collins (born May 1, 1939) is an American singer and songwriter, known for her eclectic tastes in the material she records (which has included folk, show tunes, pop, rock and roll and standards); and for her social activism. She is an alumna of the University of Colorado.
Collins was born and raised in Seattle, Washington. As a child, Collins studied classical piano with Antonia Brico, making her public debut at age 13, performing Mozart's Concerto for Two Pianos. Dr. Brico took a dim view, both then and later, of Collins's developing interest in folk music, which led her to the difficult decision to discontinue her piano lessons. Years later, when Collins had become internationally known through her music, she invited Dr. Brico to one of her concerts in Denver. When they met after the performance, Brico took both of Judy's hands in hers, looked wistfully at her fingers and said, "Little Judy—you really could have gone places." Still later, Collins discovered that Brico herself had made a living when she was younger playing jazz and ragtime piano (Singing Lessons, pp. 71–72). She also had the fortune of meeting many musicians through her blind father, a Seattle radio program host.
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Julie Fowlis
Julie Fowlis (born 1979) is a Scottish folk singer and multi-instrumentalist who sings primarily in Scottish Gaelic.
Fowlis grew up in North Uist, an island in the Outer Hebrides, in a Gaelic-speaking community. She and has been involved in singing, piping and dancing since she was a child.
She is a member of the Scottish sextet, Dòchas, who were voted winners of Best Newcomer award at the Scots Trad Music Awards in 2004, where Fowlis herself was nominated for the Best Gaelic Singer award. In 2005, Fowlis released her first solo album Mar a Tha Mo Chridhe (As My Heart Is). The album was produced by Iain MacDonald and Fowlis and instantly gained her worldwide acclaim. It was the busiest year until then in her career, with the release of a new album with Dòchas as well. Fowlis has travelled worldwide with the group and as a solo artist with her own live band.
Her second solo album Cuilidh was released in March 2007, becoming a worldwide top-seller in the Traditional and World Music charts. Her album is a collection of songs from her native North Uist home. Her husband, Éamon Doorley plays bouzouki on the album and is a member of Irish traditional group Danú.
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Jānis Cimze
Jānis Cimze (born 3 July 1814, Rauna parish — died 22 October 1881, Valka) was a Latvian pedagogue, collector and harmoniser of folk songs, organist, founder of Latvian choral music and initiator of professional Latvian music. He is buried at the Lugaži Cemetery.
Jānis Cimze was born at the Cimze Manor in the family of a manor overseer. His initial education came from Rauna Parish School where he also learned to play the organ. From the age of sixteen he worked as a private tutor; later he was a teacher at Valmiera Parish School and an organist.
In 1836 Cimze went to Germany to study at Weissenfels Teachers' Seminary which he finished in 1838. This was were he learned to play the violin and piano and improved his skills as an organist. In 1838—39 he was an external student at Berlin University where he attended lectures on mathematics, didactics and the theory of music. His music professor was Ludwig Christian Erk, a collector, harmoniser, publisher and researcher of German folk songs.
Upon returning from Germany, from 1839 and to the end of his life, Cimze headed Vidzeme Teachers' Seminary where he taught future teachers the conducting of choirs and harmonisation of folk songs. Cimze followed the principles of Johann Pestalozzi and Adolph Diesterweg and all education was conducted in German.
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Karine Polwart
Karine Polwart (born 23 December 1970) is a Scottish singer-songwriter. She writes and performs music with a strong folk and roots feel, her songs dealing with a variety of issues from alcoholism to genocide. She has been most recognised for her solo career, winning three awards at the BBC Folk Awards in 2005, and was previously a member of Malinky and Battlefield Band.
Polwart is currently a member of The Burns Unit, and collaborated with The Fruit Tree Foundation on its debut album, First Edition.
Polwart grew up in the small Stirlingshire town of Banknock and had an interest in music from an early age. She has described her whole family as being interested in music and one of her brothers, Steven, is also a professional musician who plays guitar in the Karine Polwart band, whilst her sister Kerry is developing her own musical career with the group The Poems.
Despite an active musical career from a young age, including forming her own band KP and the Minichips at age 10, Polwart was discouraged from studying music at school and ended up studying politics and philosophy at the University of Dundee. After graduating with a First Class Degree in Philosophy Polwart moved to Glasgow to study for a Masters in Philosophical Inquiry.
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Kate Rusby
Kate Anna Rusby (born 4 December 1973) is an English folk singer and songwriter from Penistone, South Yorkshire. Sometimes known as The Barnsley Nightingale, she has headlined various British national folk festivals, and is regarded as one of the most famous English folk singers of contemporary times. In 2001 The Guardian described her as "a superstar of the British acoustic scene." In 2007 the BBC website described her as "The first lady of young folkies". She is one of the few folk singers to have been nominated for the Mercury Prize.
Rusby was born into a family of musicians in 1973 in Sheffield, England. After learning to play the guitar, the fiddle, and the piano, as well as to sing, she played in many local folk festivals as a child and adolescent, before joining (and becoming the lead vocalist of) the all-female Celtic folk band The Poozies. Her break-through album came in 1995. A collaboration with her friend and fellow Barnsley folk singer Kathryn Roberts was simply titled Kate Rusby & Kathryn Roberts. In 1997, with the help of her family, she recorded and released her first solo album, Hourglass. Since then she has gone on to receive acclaim in her home country and abroad, and her family continues to help her with all aspects of her professional career.
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Korpiklaani
Korpiklaani (Finnish: Wilderness Clan) is a folk metal band from Finland who were formerly known as Shaman.
While other folk metal bands began with metal before adding folk music, Korpiklaani started with folk music before turning metal. The roots of Korpiklaani can be traced back to a Sami folk music group under the name of Shamaani Duo, an "in house restaurant band" created by Jonne Järvelä in 1993. An album of folk music (Hunka Lunka) was released under this name before Järvelä relocated and formed a new band Shaman. The folk metal act Shaman was based on the folk music of Shamaani Duo. Two albums were released in 1999 and 2001 before Shaman changed their name to Korpiklaani. The change in name was accompanied by a change in the music. The traditional yoik vocals and the use of the Sámi language were dropped while the synthesizer was replaced with real folk instruments. Jonne Järvelä credits his work with Finntroll as the catalyst for the shift in emphasis from folk to metal. Their song lyrics are often related to alcohol and partying.
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Lee Hays
Lee Hays (March 14, 1914 – August 26, 1981), was an American folk-singer and songwriter, best known for singing bass with The Weavers. Throughout his life, he was concerned with overcoming racism, inequality, and violence in society. Hays wrote or co-wrote "Wasn't That a Time?", "If I Had a Hammer, "and "Kisses Sweeter than Wine", which became Weavers' staples. He also familiarized audiences with songs of the 1930s labor movement, such as "We Shall Not be Moved".
Lee Hays came naturally by his interest in folk music since his uncle was the eminent Missouri and Arkansas folklorist Vance Randolph, author of the bestselling Pissing in the Snow and Other Ozark Folktales and Who Blewed Up the Church House?, among other works. Hays' social conscience was ignited when at age five he witnessed public lynchings of African-Americans.
He was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, the youngest of the four children of William Benjamin Hays, a Methodist minister, and Ellen Reinhardt Hays, who before her marriage had been a court stenographer. William Hays's vocation of ministering to rural areas took him from parish to parish, so as a child, Lee lived in several towns in Arkansas and Georgia. He learned to sing sacred harp music in his father's church. Both his parents valued learning and books. Mrs. Hays taught her four children to type before they began learning penmanship in school and all were excellent students. There was a gap in age of ten years between Lee and next oldest sibling, his brother Bill. In 1927, when Lee was thirteen, his childhood came to an abrupt end as tragedy struck the family. The Reverend Hays was killed in an automobile accident on a remote road and soon afterward Lee's mother had to be hospitalized for a mental breakdown from which she never recovered. Lee's sister, who had begun teaching at Hendrix-Henderson College, also broke down temporarily and had to quit her job to move in with their oldest brother in Boston, Massachusetts.
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Leonard Cohen
Leonard Norman Cohen, CC GOQ (born 21 September 1934) is a Canadian singer-songwriter, musician, poet, and novelist. His work often explores religion, isolation, sexuality, and interpersonal relationships. Cohen has been inducted into the American Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and both the Canadian Music Hall of Fame and the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame. He is also a Companion of the Order of Canada, the nation's highest civilian honour.
While giving the speech at Cohen's induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on 10 March 2008, Lou Reed described Cohen as belonging to the "highest and most influential echelon of songwriters."
Cohen was born on 21 September 1934 in Westmount, Montreal, Quebec, into a middle-class Jewish family. He attended Roslyn Elementary School. His mother, Marsha Klinitsky, of Lithuanian Jewish ancestry, emigrated from Lithuania while his great-grandfather emigrated from Poland. He grew up in Westmount on the Island of Montreal. His grandfather was Lyon Cohen, founding president of the Canadian Jewish Congress. His father, Nathan Cohen, who owned a substantial Montreal clothing store, died when Cohen was nine years old. On the topic of being a Kohen, Cohen has said that, "I had a very Messianic childhood." He told Richard Goldstein in 1967. "I was told I was a descendant of Aaron, the high priest." Cohen attended Westmount High School, beginning in 1948 where he was involved with the Student Council and studied music and poetry. He became especially interested in the poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca. As a teenager, he learned to play the guitar, and formed a country-folk group called the Buckskin Boys. Although he initially played a regular acoustic guitar as a teenager, he soon switched to playing a classical guitar after meeting a young Spanish flamenco guitar player who taught him "a few chords and some flamenco."
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Lily May Ledford
Lily May Ledford (March 17, 1917 – July 14, 1985) was an American clawhammer banjo and fiddle player. After gaining regional radio fame in the 1940s and 1950s as head of the Coon Creek Girls— one of the first all-female string bands to appear on radio— Ledford went on to gain national renown as a solo artist during the American folk music revival of the 1960s. In 1985, she was awarded a National Heritage Fellowship.
Ledford was born along the banks of the Red River in rural Powell County, Kentucky in 1917. She was the seventh of fourteen children born to tenant farmer Daw White Ledford and wife Stella May Tackett. Her father taught her to play banjo at a young age, and by age 12 she had learned to play the fiddle. Lily loved the traditional dance tunes, and she often had to sneak off to play at area dances, as her mother considered this type of music to be "old drunkard songs."
In 1936, Ledford won a music competition at Mount Vernon, Kentucky, and the following year made her radio debut on WLS Chicago's National Barn Dance. Shortly after this appearance, she was recruited by John Lair for his new radio program, Renfro Valley Barn Dance, which was initially broadcast from Cincinnati and later moved to Mount Vernon. Ledford and Lair formed the Coon Creek Girls (Lair provided the band's name, even though there was no such place as Coon Creek, as it was typical for early country music producers to give bands colorful rural-sounding names). The Coon Creek Girls originally consisted of Ledford on banjo and vocals, Ledford's sister Rosie on guitar, Evelyn Daisy Lange on bass, and Esther Violet Koehler on mandolin. Lange and Koehler left in 1939, and were replaced by Ledford's sister, Minnie. The group performed at the White House in 1939 for President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his guests, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. The group made regular appearances on Renfro Valley Barn Dance until disbanding in 1957.
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Linda Solomon
Linda Solomon (b. May 10, 1937, Boston, Massachusetts) is an American music critic and editor. Although she has written about various aspects of popular culture, her main focus has been on folk music, blues, R&B, jazz and country music. Living at 95 Christopher Street in Greenwich Village during the early 1960s, she became a columnist for The Village Voice, capturing Village night life in club reviews for the weekly "Riffs" column.
"The Bet" is a memoir by Ted White describing Harlan Ellison, Linda Solomon and others involved in a curious incident at 95 Christopher in 1960. White wrote:
A dispute over the bandleader on one record in Solomon's collection prompted Ellison to bet his entire record collection against a single album in White's collection.
She began doing record reviews in the early 1960s. Her Village Voice review of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963) has been quoted in several books, including David Hajdu's Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina and Richard Farina (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001):
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Loretta Lynn
Loretta Lynn (born Loretta Webb April 14, 1932), is an American country music singer-songwriter, author and philanthropist. Born in Butcher Hollow, near Paintsville, Kentucky in Johnson County to a coal miner father, Lynn married at 15 years old, was a mother soon after, and moved to Washington with her husband, Oliver Vanetta Lynn, Jr. (1926–1996), nicknamed "Doo". Their marriage was sometimes tumultuous; he had affairs and she was headstrong. Their experiences together became inspiration for her music.
On her 21st birthday, Lynn's husband bought her a $17.00 Harmony guitar. She taught herself to play and when she was 24, on her wedding anniversary, Doo encouraged her to become a singer. She learned the guitar better, started singing at the Delta Grange Hall in Washington State with the Pen Brothers' band, The Westerners, then eventually cut her first record in February, 1960. She became a part of the country music scene in Nashville in the 1960s, and in 1967 charted her first of 16 number-one hits (out of 70 charted songs as a solo artist and a duet partner) that include "Don't Come Home A' Drinkin' (With Lovin' on Your Mind)", "You Ain't Woman Enough", "Fist City", and "Coal Miner's Daughter". She focused on blue collar women's issues with themes of philandering husbands and persistent mistresses, and pushed boundaries in the conservative genre of country music by singing about birth control ("The Pill"), repeated childbirth ("One's on the Way"), double standards for men and women ("Rated "X""), and being widowed by the draft during the Vietnam War ("Dear Uncle Sam"). Country music radio stations often refused to play her songs. Nonetheless, she became known as "The First Lady of Country Music" and continues to be one of the most successful vocalists of all time.
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Louis Gottlieb
Dr. Louis Gottlieb (October 10, 1923 – July 11, 1996) was bassist and lofty comic spokesman for The Limeliters. He was considered one of the so-called "new comedy" performers such as Mort Sahl, Nichols and May, and Lenny Bruce: a new generation of unabashed intellectuals.
Lou's special trademark on stage was a delightful burlesquing of the university pedant, the sort of teacher who knocks himself out over the jokes in Chaucer while his restless and puzzled class has nothing on its collective mind that happened earlier than last night's date. "Many of the things I have been enthusiastic about," agreed Gottlieb, "mean absolutely nothing to most people."
Gottlieb's doctoral thesis on 15th century cyclic masses was completed when he heard Hassilev and Yarbrough sing together at Hollywood's Cosmo Alley nightclub. He joined the group, which named themselves after the Limelite Club in Aspen, Colorado.
In July 1959, The Limeliters appeared as a trio for the first time at the hungry i in San Francisco, with Gottlieb as "the comic-arranger- musicologist, Glenn the golden-voiced tenor and guitarist, and Alex the instrumental virtuoso" (to quote from one of their song collections, "Cheek In Our Tongue"). San Francisco music critic John Wasserman said the Limeliters "attained a stature equalled perhaps only by the Kingston Trio and the Weavers." The group's biggest hit was "A Dollar Down" in 1961, but was well known for its 15 records albums and its concerts during the 1960s. The group disbanded after a near-fatal plane crash in Colorado in December 1962.
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Manuel de Falla
Manuel de Falla y Matheu (23 November 1876 – 14 November 1946) was a Spanish Andalusian composer. With Isaac Albéniz, Enrique Granados and Joaquín Turina he is one of Spain's most important musicians of the first half of the 20th century.
Falla was born as Manuel María de los Dolores Falla y Matheu in Cádiz. He was the son of José María Falla y Franco and María Jesús Matheu y Zabal. His early teachers in music were his mother and grandfather; at the age of nine he was introduced to his first piano professor, Eloísa Galluzo. Little is known of that period of his life, but his relationship with his teacher was soon ended after she decided to then enter in a convent, Sisters of Charity, to become a nun. In 1889 he continued his piano lessons with Alejandro Odero and learned the techniques of harmony and counterpoint from Enrique Broca. At age 15 he became interested in literature and journalism and founded the literary magazines El Burlón and El Cascabel. In 1893 he was inspired by a concert of Edvard Grieg's works, later saying that at the time he felt that "my definitive vocation is music".
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Martin Carthy
Martin Carthy MBE (born 21 May 1941) is an English folk singer and guitarist who has remained one of the most influential figures in British traditional music, inspiring contemporaries such as Bob Dylan and Paul Simon and later artists such as Richard Thompson since he emerged as a young musician in the early days of the folk revival.
He was born in Hatfield and grew up in Hampstead, North London. After leaving school, he worked behind the scenes at the open air theatre at Regent's Park as a prompter, then an assistant stage manager (ASM) on a tour of The Merry Widow, and then at Theatre in the Round in Scarborough[citation needed]. He then sang in coffee bars. He became a resident at The Troubadour folk club in Earls Court in the early 1960s. He joined Redd Sullivan's Thameside Four in 1961.
He is a renowned solo performer of traditional songs in a very distinctive style, accompanying himself on acoustic guitar; his style is marked by the use of alternative tunings, and a strongly percussive picking style that emphasizes the melody. His debut album, Martin Carthy, was released in 1965, and also featured Dave Swarbrick playing fiddle on some tracks, although he was not mentioned in the album's sleeve notes. Carthy's arrangement of the traditional ballad "Scarborough Fair" was adapted, without acknowledgment, by Paul Simon on the Simon and Garfunkel album recording Parsley Sage Rosemary and Thyme in 1966.
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Mary Travers
Mary Allin Travers (November 9, 1936 – September 16, 2009) was an American singer-songwriter and member of the folk music group Peter, Paul and Mary, along with Peter Yarrow and Noel (Paul) Stookey. Peter, Paul and Mary was one of the most successful folk-singing groups of the 1960s. Unlike most folk musicians who were a part of the early 1960s Greenwich Village music scene, Travers grew up in that New York City neighborhood.
Mary Travers was born in Louisville, Kentucky, to Robert Travers and Virginia Coigney, both journalists and active organizers for The Newspaper Guild, a trade union. In 1938, the family moved to Greenwich Village in New York City. Travers attended the Little Red School House there, but left in the 11th grade to pursue her singing career.
While in high school, Travers joined the Song Swappers, which sang backup for Pete Seeger when Folkways Records reissued a union song collection, Talking Union, in 1955. The Song Swappers recorded four albums for Folkways in 1955, all with Seeger. Travers regarded her singing as a hobby and was shy about it, but was encouraged by fellow musicians. She also was in the cast of the Broadway show The Next President.
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Maud Karpeles
Maud Karpeles (12 November 1885 – 1 October 1976) was a collector of folksongs and dance teacher.
Maud Karpeles was born in London in 1885 to Jewish parents . In Berlin at the "Hochschule für Musik" she studied piano for six months. In 1892 a women's settlement had been created in Cumberland Road, Canning Town in 1892. The purpose was to enable the poorest girls to take part in sport and cultural activities. Karpeles became a Fabian and joined the settlement as a social worker. She began look for "something creative for a girls' club to do".
Together with her sister Helen Karpeles (1887–1976) she went to the Stratford-upon-Avon Festival in 1909, where they first encountered folk dances and songs. This inspired Maud to create a folk dance club at the Canning Town Settlement. When Cecil Sharp gave lectures on folk dance, it was her folk dance club that demonstrated them. The English Folk Dance Society (EFDS) was founded in 1911, with Karpeles' dancers at the heart of it. Karpeles became as much interested in the songs as the dances, and joined Sharp on collecting expeditions. Sharp, a married man with children, allowed Karpeles to share his house for long periods.
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Maurice Ravel
Joseph-Maurice Ravel (March 7, 1875 – December 28, 1937) was a French composer known especially for his melodies, orchestral and instrumental textures and effects. Much of his piano music, chamber music, vocal music and orchestral music has entered the standard concert repertoire.
Ravel's piano compositions, such as Jeux d'eau, Miroirs, Le tombeau de Couperin and Gaspard de la nuit, demand considerable virtuosity from the performer, and his orchestral music, including Daphnis et Chloé and his arrangement of Modest Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, uses a variety of sound and instrumentation.
Ravel is perhaps known best for his orchestral work Boléro (1928), which he considered trivial and once described as "a piece for orchestra without music".
According to SACEM, Ravel's estate earns more royalties than that of any other French composer. According to the law of most countries (including all members of the World Trade Organization), Ravel's works have been in the public domain since January 1, 2008, in most countries.
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Millard Lampell
Millard Lampell (January 23, 1919 - October 3, 1997) was an American movie and television screenwriter who first became publicly known as a member of the Almanac Singers in the 1940s.
He was born in Paterson, New Jersey and studied at the West Virginia University, where he gained his first exposure to folk music. In 1940 he formed the Almanac Singers with Pete Seeger and Lee Hays, later adding Woody Guthrie. Lampell wrote songs with both Seeger and Guthrie, and adapted traditional songs into labor anthems and pro-union messages. During the period of the Hitler-Stalin pact from 1939 to 1941, the group also sang songs attacking Franklin D. Roosevelt as a warmonger and opposing Britain's war against Nazi Germany.
After the Almanac Singers disbanded in 1942, Lampell wrote the lyrics for The Lonesome Train, a ballad opera on the death of Abraham Lincoln. He went on to a career as a scriptwriter for movies and, later, television. In the 1950s, he refused to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee and was blacklisted. He wrote the screenplay for the marriage guidance film This Charming Couple (1950) using the pseudonym H. Partnow. Some other of his screenplays were Chance Meeting (1959) and The Idol (1962).
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Miranda Stone
Miranda Stone is a Canadian singer-songwriter originating from the Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario region and currently based in Toronto where she operates independent record label Earthdress Productions.
The title track of her album Seven Deadly Sins won the 2004 songwriting prize of the Ontario Council of Folk Festivals.
As of 2003 she had sold more than 10,000 copies of her first two discs.[citation needed]
Her paintings were among those on display at the Riverdale Art Walk, Toronto in June 2005.
During her career, she has toured in Canada, India and the United States. She is married to Chris Hale of Aradhna.
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Márta Sebestyén
Márta Sebestyén (born 19 August 1957, Budapest) is a Hungarian folk vocalist, as well as a composer and actress.
Sebestyén's mother is a composer, and was a music student of Zoltán Kodály. Her father was an economist and author. When Sebestyén was seven years old, her father, returning from a trip to the U.S. as a visiting professor (under a grant from the Ford Foundation), brought home a large collection of ethnic music recordings from the Smithsonian Institution.
Sebestyén was educated at Miklós Radnóti Grammar School, Budapest. She has sung regularly and recorded with the Hungarian folk group Muzsikás. She is known for adaptations of Somogy and Erdély folk songs, some of which appear in Deep Forest's Boheme album, which received the Grammy Award for Best World Music Album in 1996. She has also adapted Hindi, Yiddish, Serbian, Bulgarian, Slovak etc. folk songs to traditional Hungarian style.
Sebestyén sang in the movie The English Patient (Szerelem, szerelem). Three songs recorded together with Muzsikás appeared in the Japanese animated movie Only Yesterday. She also sang in and contributed material to the album Kaddish by Towering Inferno (Richard Wolfson and Andy Saunders, 1993).
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Ned Kelly
Edward "Ned" Kelly (June 1854/June 1855 – 11 November 1880) was an Irish Australian bushranger. He is considered by some to be merely a cold-blooded cop killer — others, however, consider him to be a folk hero and symbol of Irish Australian resistance against the Anglo-Australian ruling class.
Kelly was born in Victoria to an Irish convict father, and as a young man he clashed with the Victoria Police. Following an incident at his home in 1878, police parties searched for him in the bush. After he killed three policemen, the colony proclaimed Kelly and his gang wanted outlaws.
A final violent confrontation with police took place at Glenrowan on 28 June 1880. Kelly, dressed in home-made plate metal armour and helmet, was captured and sent to jail. He was convicted of three counts of capital murder and hanged at Old Melbourne Gaol in November 1880. His daring and notoriety made him an iconic figure in Australian history, folklore, literature, art and film.
In August 2011, anthropologists announced that a skeleton found in a mass grave in Pentridge Prison had been confirmed as Kelly's. Kelly's skull, however, remains at large.
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Nick Reynolds
Nick Reynolds (July 27, 1933 San Diego, California - October 1, 2008 San Diego, California) was an American folk musician and recording artist. Reynolds was one of the founding members of The Kingston Trio, whose largely folk-based material captured international attention during the late fifties and early sixties.
Growing up in Coronado, California, his passions as a boy growing up were tennis, skin-diving and singing with his family. His father, a Navy captain, was an avid guitar player who brought back songs from his travels around the world. He taught Nick the guitar and ukulele, and the family spent many nights singing and harmonizing for pure enjoyment. Nick enrolled in Menlo College in 1954 as a business major, and met Bob Shane in an accounting class. They soon started hanging out, drinking, and chasing women together, and this, in turn, led to playing music, initially as a way of being popular at parties — Shane's guitar and Reynolds' bongos became a fixture at local frat gatherings, and after a few weeks of this, Shane introduced Reynolds to Dave Guard.
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Odetta
Odetta Holmes, (December 31, 1930 – December 2, 2008) known as Odetta, was an American singer, actress, guitarist, songwriter, and a human rights activist, often referred to[who?] as "The Voice of the Civil Rights Movement". Her musical repertoire consisted largely of American folk music, blues, jazz, and spirituals. An important figure in the American folk music revival of the 1950s and 1960s, she was influential to many of the key figures of the folk-revival of that time, including Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Mavis Staples, and Janis Joplin. Time included her song "Take This Hammer" on its list of the All-Time 100 Songs, stating that "Rosa Parks was her No. 1 fan, and Martin Luther King Jr. called her the queen of American folk music."
Odetta was born in Birmingham, Alabama, grew up in Los Angeles, California, attended Belmont High School, and studied music at Los Angeles City College while employed as a domestic worker. She had operatic training from the age of 13. Her mother hoped she would follow Marian Anderson, but Odetta doubted a large black girl would ever perform at the Metropolitan Opera. Her first professional experience was in musical theater in 1944, as an ensemble member for four years with the Hollywood Turnabout Puppet Theatre, working alongside Elsa Lanchester; she later joined the national touring company of the musical Finian's Rainbow in 1949.
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Ola Belle Reed
Ola Belle Campbell Reed (August 18, 1916 – August 16, 2002) was an American folk singer, songwriter and banjo player. Born in Lansing, North Carolina, Reed's songs often speak of Appalachian life and traditions. Her best known songs have been recorded by mainstream bluegrass and country artists. High on a Mountain, has been recorded by Del McCoury, Tim O'Brien, and Marty Stuart.I've Endured, has been recorded by Del McCoury as well as Tim O'Brien. The annual Ola Belle Reed Music Festival in Lansing, NC celebrates her life and music.
In 1986, Reed was awarded an NEA National Heritage Fellowship.
In 2010, Smithsonian Folkways released Rising Sun Melodies, a collection of 11 songs that appeared on her previous Folkways recordings, plus eight previously unreleased tracks that were recorded at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in the 1970s. Among the musicians accompanying her on the album were her brother Alex Campbell, her husband Bud Reed, her son Dave Reed, and the husband and wife team of John Coffey and Betsy Rutherford.
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Olive Dame Campbell
Olive Dame Campbell (1882–1954) was an American folklorist.
Born Olive Arnold Dame in West Medford, Massachusetts, she married John C. Campbell, American educator, in 1907. After his death, she co-founded and directed the John C. Campbell Folk School in Brasstown, North Carolina in 1925. Further, she helped in the formation of the Southern Highland Craft Guild.
After a 1909 grant, she compiled Tennessee and Kentucky folk song lyrics with her husband. These were published in the seminal work, English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians by Cecil Sharp and Olive Campbell (1917, New York). This loosely served as the basis for the film Songcatcher.
In 2008, Revels Repertory Company created a tribute to her and the music she collected, entitled Voices of the Mountain, which has been and will be performed throughout eastern Massachusetts during the 2008/2009 and 2009/2010 seasons.
Olive Dame Campbell (1882–1954) was born Olive Dame and was raised in Medford, Massachusetts. From a young age, education played an important role in her life, as her father was the head of a private high school. She graduated from Tufts College in 1900 during a time when most women did not pursue higher education. Three years after graduating, she met her future husband John Charles Campbell, fifteen years her senior, who was a missionary school teacher.
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Paban Das Baul
Paban Das Baul (born 1961) is a noted baul singer and musician from India, who also plays a dubki, a small tambourine and sometimes an ektara as an accompaniment. He is known for pioneering traditional Baul music on the international music scene and for establishing a genre of folk-fusion music.
Born in Mohammedpur, a small village in the Murshidabad district of West Bengal, where his early musical influences were his father, and wandering baul singers.
In 1988, Das Baul started collaborating with Sam Mills, a London-born guitarist who had performed with experimental, avant garde group 23 Skiddoo between 1979 and 1982. Their collaboration resulted in the acclaimed album "Real Sugar" (1997), a Peter Gabriel's Real World Records release, it marked one of the first fusions of Bengali music and Western pop music. He has also collaborated with the London-based State of Bengal and Susheela Raman. In 2005, the Baul tradition was included in the list of "Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity" by UNESCO.
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Paul Simon
Paul Frederic Simon (born October 13, 1941) is a grammy award winning American singer-songwriter, poet and guitarist.
Simon's international fame and success began as part of the duo Simon & Garfunkel, launched in 1964 with musical partner Art Garfunkel. Simon wrote most of the pair's songs, including three that reached No. 1 on the U.S. singles charts: "The Sound of Silence", "Mrs. Robinson", and "Bridge Over Troubled Water". The duo split up in 1970 at the height of their popularity, and Simon began a successful solo career, recording three highly acclaimed albums over the next five years. In 1986, he released Graceland, an album inspired by South African township music. Simon also wrote and starred in the film One-Trick Pony in 1980 and co-wrote the Broadway musical The Capeman in 1998.
Simon has earned 12 Grammys for his solo and collaborative work, including the Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2001, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and in 2006 was selected as one of the "100 People Who Shaped the World" by Time magazine. Among many other honors, Simon was the first recipient of the Library of Congress' Gershwin Prize for Popular Song in 2007. In 1986 Simon was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Music degree from Berklee College of Music where he currently serves on the Board of Trustees.
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Paul Stookey
Noel Paul Stookey (born December 30, 1937 in Baltimore, MD) is a singer-songwriter best known as "Paul" in the folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary. He took the stage name "Paul" as part of the trio Peter, Paul and Mary, but he has been known as Noel (his first name) otherwise, throughout his life. Since the death of Mary Travers, he has continued to work as a solo singer and activist.
Stookey's family moved to Birmingham, Michigan when he was about 12. Stookey graduated from Birmingham High School (now Seaholm High School) in 1955. Stookey is an alumnus of Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan. While attending MSU, he joined Delta Upsilon fraternity.[citation needed] He was raised Buddhist by his parents.[citation needed]
As Paul in the Peter, Paul and Mary trio, he participated in one of the best known mass media ensembles of the 1960s phase of the American folk music revival, and included some of his solo songs and extended monologues in their performances and recordings.
In addition to his recordings with the trio, he released a number of solo works, several albums with the ensemble Bodyworks, and some anthologies. He was an important artist in the young Jesus music movement, which would later bloom into the Christian music industry, although his generally liberal political views distinguish him from many such artists.
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Percy Grainger
George Percy Aldridge Grainger (8 July 1882 – 20 February 1961), known as Percy Grainger, was an Australian-born composer, arranger and pianist. In the course of a long and innovative career he played a prominent role in the revival of interest in British folk music in the early years of the 20th century. He also made many adaptations of other composers' works. Although much of his work was experimental and unusual, the piece with which he is most generally associated is his piano arrangement of the folk-dance tune "Country Gardens".
Grainger left Australia at the age of 13 to attend the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt. Between 1901 and 1914 he was based in London, where he established himself first as a society pianist and later as a concert performer, composer and collector of original folk melodies. As his reputation grew he met many of the significant figures in European music, forming important friendships with Frederick Delius and Edvard Grieg. He became a champion of Nordic music and culture, his enthusiasm for which he often expressed in private letters in explicitly racist and anti-Semitic terms.
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Pete Seeger
Peter "Pete" Seeger (born May 3, 1919) is an American folk singer and an iconic figure in the mid-20th-century American folk music revival. A fixture on nationwide radio in the 1940s, he also had a string of hit records during the early 1950s as a member of The Weavers, most notably their recording of Lead Belly's "Goodnight, Irene", which topped the charts for 13 weeks in 1950. Members of The Weavers were blacklisted during the McCarthy Era. In the 1960s, he re-emerged on the public scene as a prominent singer of protest music in support of international disarmament, civil rights, and environmental causes.
As a song writer, he is best known as the author or co-author of "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?", "If I Had a Hammer (The Hammer Song)", (composed with Lee Hays of The Weavers), and "Turn, Turn, Turn!", which have been recorded by many artists both in and outside the folk revival movement and are still sung throughout the world. "Flowers" was a hit recording for The Kingston Trio (1962); Marlene Dietrich, who recorded it in English, German and French (1962); and Johnny Rivers (1965). "If I Had a Hammer" was a hit for Peter, Paul & Mary (1962) and Trini Lopez (1963), while The Byrds popularized "Turn, Turn, Turn!" in the mid-1960s, as did Judy Collins in 1964, and The Seekers in 1966. Seeger was one of the folksingers most responsible for popularizing the spiritual "We Shall Overcome" (also recorded by Joan Baez and many other singer-activists) that became the acknowledged anthem of the 1960s American Civil Rights Movement, soon after folk singer and activist Guy Carawan introduced it at the founding meeting of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1960. In the PBS "American Masters" episode Pete Seeger: The Power of Song, Seeger states it was he who changed the lyric from the traditional "We will overcome" to the more singable "We shall overcome".
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Peter Yarrow
Peter Yarrow (born May 31, 1938) is an American singer who found fame with the 1960s folk music trio Peter, Paul and Mary. Yarrow co-wrote (with Leonard Lipton) one of the group's most famous songs, "Puff, the Magic Dragon". He is also a political activist and has lent his support to causes that range from opposition to the Vietnam War to the creation of Operation Respect.
Peter Yarrow was born in New York City, New York. He graduated from New York City's High School of Music and Art, which is now called LaGuardia High School. His singing career began after he graduated from Cornell University, in 1959. Soon, Yarrow met Noel "Paul" Stookey and Mary Travers in New York City's Greenwich Village, center of the mid-20th century American folk music revival. By 1962, Warner Bros. Records released the trio's first album, the eponymous Peter, Paul & Mary. The album remained in the Top Ten for ten months, in the Top Twenty for two years and sold more than two million copies. The group has toured extensively and recorded numerous albums, both live and in the studio. In October 1969, Yarrow married Mary Beth McCarthy of Willmar, Minnesota. Paul wrote "The Wedding Song (There is Love)", as his gift for their wedding and first performed it at St. Mary's Church in Willmar. He has two adult children. In 2000, he founded Operation Respect.
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Phil Ochs
Philip David Ochs ( /ˈoʊks/; December 19, 1940 – April 9, 1976) was an American protest singer (or, as he preferred, a topical singer) and songwriter who was known for his sharp wit, sardonic humor, earnest humanism, political activism, insightful and alliterative lyrics, and distinctive voice. He wrote hundreds of songs in the 1960s and released eight albums in his lifetime.
Ochs performed at many political events, including anti-Vietnam War and civil rights rallies, student events, and organized labor events over the course of his career, in addition to many concert appearances at such venues as New York City's Town Hall and Carnegie Hall. Politically, Ochs described himself as a "left social democrat" who became an "early revolutionary" after the protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago led to a police riot, which had a profound effect on his state of mind.
After years of prolific writing in the 1960s, Ochs's mental stability declined in the 1970s. He eventually succumbed to a number of problems including bipolar disorder and alcoholism, and took his own life in 1976.
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Quechua people
Quechuas (also Runakuna, Kichwas, and Ingas) is the collective term for several indigenous ethnic groups in South America who speak a Quechua language (Southern Quechua mainly), belonging to several ethnic groups in South America, especially in Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia and Argentina.
The Quechuas of Ecuador call themselves as well as their language Kichwa–Kichwas or Quichuas. In Colombia, the Kichwa-speaking group calls themselves the Ingas. Other Quechua speakers call themselves Runakuna ("People"' in Junín and parts of Ancash, Peru: Nunakuna; singular: Runa or Nuna).
Some historic Quechua peoples include:
The speakers of Quechua, who total some 9-14 million people in Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Chile, Colombia and Argentina, have so far only slightly developed a common sense of identity. The various Quechua dialects are in some cases so different that no mutual understanding is possible. Quechua was not only spoken by the Incas, but in some cases also by long-term enemies of the Inca Empire. These include the Huanca (Wanka is a Quechua dialect spoken today in the Huancayo area) and the Chanka (the Chanca dialect of Ayaqcucho) of Peru, and the Kañari (Cañar) in Ecuador. Quechua was spoken by some of these peoples, for example, the Wanka, before the Incas of Cusco, while other peoples, especially in Bolivia but also in Ecuador, adopted Quechua only in Inca times or afterward.
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Ralph McTell
Ralph McTell (born Ralph May in Farnborough, Kent, England, 3 December 1944 and raised in Croydon) is an English singer-songwriter and acoustic guitar player who has been an influential figure on the UK folk music scene since the 1960s.
Ralph McTell is best known for the song "Streets of London", which has been covered by over two hundred artists around the world. In the 1980s he wrote and played songs for two TV children's programmes, Alphabet Zoo, which also featured Nerys Hughes, followed by Tickle On The Tum, featuring Jacqueline Reddin. Albums were also released from both series. He also recorded the theme song to Cosgrove Hall's adaptation of The Wind in the Willows with Keith Hopwood, and this was released as a single in 1984 after the series was aired on ITV.
McTell's guitar playing has been modelled on the style of the US's country blues guitar players of the early 20th century, including Blind Blake, Robert Johnson and Blind Willie McTell. These influences led a friend to suggest that he change his professional name to McTell as his career was beginning to take shape.
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Randy Sparks
Randy Sparks (b. 29 July 1933, Leavenworth, Kansas) is a musician, singer-songwriter and founder of The New Christy Minstrels and The Back Porch Majority. Prior to that, in the late 1950s he had a solo career and released two albums on the Verve label, a self-titled album in 1958 and Walking the Low Road in 1959. In 1960 he formed a trio called "The Randy Sparks Three" and had an album by that same name. He wrote the song "Today" which was a hit for the New Christy Minstrels for their 1964 album of the same title for Columbia Records (CL 2159/CS 8959) and he wrote "Green, Green" with Barry McGuire for the 1963 album Ramblin (CL 2055/CS 8855).
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Richard Wagner
Wilhelm Richard Wagner ( /ˈvɑːɡnər/; German pronunciation: [ˈʁiçaʁt ˈvaːɡnɐ]; 22 May 1813 – 13 February 1883) was a German composer, conductor, theatre director and polemicist primarily known for his operas (or "music dramas", as he later called them). Wagner's compositions, particularly those of his later period, are notable for their complex texture, rich harmonies and orchestration, and the elaborate use of leitmotifs: musical themes associated with individual characters, places, ideas or plot elements. Unlike most other opera composers, Wagner wrote both the music and libretto for every one of his stage works. Perhaps the two best-known extracts from his works are the Ride of the Valkyries from the opera Die Walküre, and the Wedding March (Bridal Chorus) from the opera Lohengrin.
Initially establishing his reputation as a composer of works such as The Flying Dutchman and Tannhäuser which were broadly in the romantic vein of Weber and Meyerbeer, Wagner transformed operatic thought through his concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk ("total work of art"). This would achieve the synthesis of all the poetic, visual, musical and dramatic arts and was announced in a series of essays between 1849 and 1852. Wagner realized this concept most fully in the first half of the monumental four-opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen. However, his thoughts on the relative importance of music and drama were to change again, and he reintroduced some traditional operatic forms into his last few stage works, including Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.
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Robin Hood
Robin Hood was a heroic outlaw in English folklore. A highly skilled archer and swordsman, he is known for "robbing from the rich and giving to the poor", assisted by a group of fellow outlaws known as his "Merry Men". Traditionally, Robin Hood and his men are depicted wearing Lincoln green clothes. The origin of the legend is claimed by some to have stemmed from actual outlaws, or from ballads or tales of outlaws.
Robin Hood became a popular folk figure in the medieval period continuing through to modern literature, films and television. In the earliest sources, Robin Hood is a yeoman, but he was often later portrayed as an aristocrat wrongfully dispossessed of his lands and made into an outlaw by an unscrupulous sheriff.
In popular culture, Robin Hood and his band of "merry men" are usually portrayed as living in Sherwood Forest, in Nottinghamshire, where much of the action in the early ballads takes place. So does the very first recorded Robin Hood rhyme, four lines from the early 15th century, beginning: "Robyn hode in scherewode stod." However, the overall picture from the surviving early ballads and other early references suggest that Robin Hood may have been based in the Barnsdale area of what is now South Yorkshire (which borders Nottinghamshire).
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Ronnie Gilbert
Ronnie Gilbert (born September 7, 1926) is an American folk-singer. She is one of the original members of the Weavers with Pete Seeger, Lee Hays, and Fred Hellerman.
The Weavers were an influential folk-singing group that was blacklisted in the early 1950s, during a period of widespread anti-communist feeling, because of the group's left-wing sympathies.
Following the Weavers' dissolution in 1953 due to the blacklist, Gilbert continued her activism on a personal level, traveling to Cuba in 1961 on a trip that brought her back to the United States on the same day that country banned travel to Cuba. She also participated in the Parisian protests of 1968 after traveling to that country to work with British theatrical director Peter Brook. In the 1970s, Gilbert earned an M.A. in clinical psychology and worked as a therapist for a few years.
Various well-known younger singers honor Ms. Gilbert for the example she set for them, and the influence she had on their careers, particularly Holly Near, with whom Gilbert has released three duet albums: 1983's Lifelines, 1989's Singing With You, and 1997's The Train Still Runs. Near and Gilbert also joined Arlo Guthrie and Pete Seeger for the 1984 quartet album HARP (an acronym for "Holly, Arlo, Ronnie and Pete"). During that period, Gilbert wrote and appeared in a one-woman show about Mary Harris "Mother" Jones, the American labor organizer, and in a second work based on author Studs Terkel's book Coming Of Age. In 1992 she accompanied the Vancouver Men's Chorus on the song Music in My Mother's House from their album Signature.
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Roscoe Holcomb
Roscoe Holcomb, (born as Roscoe Halcomb September 5, 1912 – died February 1, 1981) was an American singer, banjo player, and guitarist from Daisy, Kentucky. A prominent figure in Appalachian folk music, Holcomb was the inspiration for the term "high, lonesome sound," coined by folklorist and friend John Cohen. The term is now used to describe bluegrass singing, although Holcomb was not, strictly speaking, a bluegrass performer.
Holcomb's repertoire included old-time music, hymns, traditional music and blues ballads. He was a competent harmonica player and sang many of his most memorable songs a cappella.
Holcomb sang in a falsetto deeply informed by the Old Regular Baptist vocal tradition. Bob Dylan, a fan of Holcomb, described his singing as possessing "an untamed sense of control." He was also admired by the Stanley Brothers, and Eric Clapton cited Holcomb as his favorite country musician.
A coal miner and farmer for much of his life, Holcomb was not recorded until 1958, after which his career as a professional musician was bolstered by the folk revival in the 1960s. Holcomb gave his last live performance in 1978. Suffering from asthma and emphysema as a result of working in coal mines, he died in 1981 at the age of 68.
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Roy Acuff
Roy Claxton Acuff (September 15, 1903 – November 23, 1992) was an American country music singer, fiddler, and promoter. Known as the "King of Country Music," Acuff is often credited with moving the genre from its early string band and "hoedown" format to the star singer-based format that helped make it internationally successful.
Acuff began his music career in the 1930s, and gained regional fame as the singer and fiddler for his group, the Smoky Mountain Boys. He joined the Grand Ole Opry in 1938, and although his popularity as a musician waned in the late 1940s, he remained one of the Opry's key figures and promoters for nearly four decades. In 1942, Acuff co-founded the first major Nashville-based country music publishing company—Acuff-Rose Music—which signed acts such as Hank Williams, Roy Orbison, and The Everly Brothers. In 1962, Acuff became the first living inductee into the Country Music Hall of Fame.
Roy Acuff was born in Maynardville, Tennessee to Ida (née Carr) and Simon E. Neill Acuff, the third of five children. The Acuffs were a fairly prominent Union County family. Roy's paternal grandfather, Coram Acuff, had been a Tennessee state senator, and Roy's maternal grandfather was a local physician. Roy's father was an accomplished fiddler and a Baptist preacher, his mother was proficient on the piano, and during Roy's early years the Acuff house was a popular place for local gatherings. At such gatherings, Roy would often amuse people by balancing farm tools on his chin. He also learned to play harmonica and jaw harp at a young age.
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Roy Harper
Roy Harper (born 12 June 1941) is an English folk/rock singer-songwriter and guitarist who has been a professional musician since 1964. He has released a large catalogue of albums (21 studio albums and 10 live albums) most of which are available on his record label Science Friction (as CD and / or Music download).
Musically, American blues musician Leadbelly and folk singer Woody Guthrie were his earliest influences, and whilst in his teens, jazz musician Miles Davis. Harper was also exposed to classical music in his childhood and has pointed to the influence of Jean Sibelius' Karelia Suite. Lyrical influences include the 19th century Romantics (especially Percy Shelley), and John Keats poem Endymion. Harper has also cited the Beat poets as being highly influential, particularly Jack Kerouac. As a musician, Harper is known for his distinctive fingerstyle playing and lengthy, lyrical, complex compositions, a result of his love of jazz and Keats.
His influence has been acknowledged by many musicians including Jimmy Page and Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin (who named the song "Hats Off to (Roy) Harper" after him), Pete Townshend of The Who, Kate Bush, Pink Floyd (who invited him to sing guest lead vocals on their song "Have a Cigar"), and Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull; who stated Harper was his "...primary influence as an acoustic guitarist and songwriter."
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Russian Red
Russian Red is the stage name of Lourdes Hernández (Madrid, 1985), a Spanish indie and folk singer-songwriter.
Known by many as the Spanish Feist, in reference to the Canadian singer-songwriter who inspires her in many of her attitudes on the microphone, Hernández—who writes and sings all of her compositions in English—states that she sings in that language instinctively because she has always listened to music in English. Her voice and performing style are also reminiscent of the childlike and simple, poetic approach utilized by California singer-songwriter Joanna Newsom.
Russian Red's project began when Hernández met Brian Hunt, a musician with an English father and Spanish mother, with whom she recorded a demo (which included tracks that remain unpublished like "Reason", "The Night of the Paper", and "Sadie") that reached more than 70,000 visits on her MySpace page by 2008.
The name Russian Red comes from the colour of a lipstick that Hernández herself usually wears. When asked how she chose the name, Hernández stated: "I had a band without a name some time ago. Since then, I was haunted by an obsession: to find the ideal artistic name. One day, I fell in love with this colour that a girl was wearing. I pronounced its name, and now it is my pseudonym."
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Scottish people
The Scottish people (Scots Gaelic: Albannaich), or Scots, are a nation and ethnic group native to Scotland. Historically they emerged from an amalgamation of the Picts and Gaels, incorporating neighbouring Britons to the south as well as invading Germanic peoples such as the Anglo-Saxons and the Norse. Later the Normans also had some influence.
In modern use, "Scottish people" or "Scots" is used to refer to anyone whose linguistic, cultural, family ancestral or genetic origins are from within Scotland. The Latin word Scotti originally applied to a particular, 5th century, Goidelic tribe that inhabited Ireland. Though sometimes considered archaic or pejorative, the term Scotch has also been used for the Scottish people, though this usage is current primarily outside Scotland.
There are people of Scottish descent in many countries other than Scotland. Emigration, influenced by factors such as the Highland and Lowland Clearances, Scottish participation in the British Empire, and latterly industrial decline and unemployment, resulted in Scottish people being found throughout the world. Large populations of Scottish people settled the new-world lands of North and South America, Australia and New Zealand. There is a Scottish presence at a particularly high rate in Canada, which has the second largest population of descended Scots ancestry, after the United States. They took with them their Scottish languages and culture.
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Si Kahn
Si Kahn (born April 23, 1944) is an American singer-songwriter, activist, and founder and former executive director of Grassroots Leadership.
Kahn grew up in State College, Pennsylvania. When he was 15 his family moved to the Washington, DC area, where he graduated from Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School. His grandfather Gabriel Kahn, his mother Rosalind Kahn, and his father Benjamin Kahn, a rabbi, instilled a strong sense of the family's Jewish heritage as well as teaching him the rudiments of rhythm and harmony as a child. His uncle, Arnold Aronson, executive secretary of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, helped inspire and shape Kahn's career. Kahn earned a bachelors degree from Harvard University. In 1995 he completed a Ph.D. in American Studies from the Union Institute.
Kahn moved to the south as an activist in the Civil Rights Movement, and he now lives in Charlotte, North Carolina. Kahn is the founder and former director of Grassroots Leadership, a non-profit organization that advocates for several causes, including prison reform, improved immigration detention policies, and violence prevention. He retired May 1, 2010. Most of the profits from Kahn's musical performances benefit this group. He has also been involved with Save Our Cumberland Mountains, an environmentalist group opposed to strip mining in Appalachia.
wn.com/Si_Kahn -
Smothers Brothers
The Smothers Brothers are Thomas ("Tom" - born February 2, 1937) and Richard ("Dick" - born November 20, 1939), American singers, musicians, comedians and folk heroes. The brothers' trademark act was performing folk songs (Tommy on acoustic guitar, Dick on string bass), which usually led to arguments between the siblings. Tommy's signature line was, "Mom always liked you best!" Tommy (the elder of the two) acted "slow", and Dick, the straight man, acted "superior".
In the 1960s, the brothers frequently appeared on television variety shows and issued several popular record albums of their stage performances. Their own television variety show, The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, became one of the most controversial American TV programs of the Vietnam War era. Despite popular success, the brothers' penchant for material that was critical of the political mainstream and sympathetic to the emerging counterculture led to their firing by the CBS network in 1969. One show was left unaired.
The brothers continued to work, both independently and as a team, on stage and television, and in films during subsequent decades.
wn.com/Smothers_Brothers -
Society
A society, or a human society, is a group of people related to each other through persistent relations, or a large social grouping sharing the same geographical or virtual territory, subject to the same political authority and dominant cultural expectations. Human societies are characterized by patterns of relationships (social relations) between individuals who share a distinctive culture and institutions; a given society may be described as the sum total of such relationships among its constituent members. In the social sciences, a larger society often evinces stratification and/or dominance patterns in subgroups.
Insofar as it is collaborative, a society can enable its members to benefit in ways that would not otherwise be possible on an individual basis; both individual and social (common) benefits can thus be distinguished, or in many cases found to overlap.
A society can also consist of like-minded people governed by their own norms and values within a dominant, larger society. This is sometimes referred to as a subculture, a term used extensively within criminology.
wn.com/Society -
Spiers and Boden
Spiers and Boden are an English folk duo. John Spiers plays melodeon and concertina, while Jon Boden sings and plays fiddle and guitar while stamping the rhythm on a stomp box.
They began playing together in 1999 and their first album as a duo was Through & Through (2001). In 2002 they were both session musicians on Eliza Carthy's album Anglicana, and toured with her as part of her band The Ratcatchers. However it was their second album, Bellow, in 2003 that drew significant attention. The tunes and songs were mostly traditional, grounded in the Morris tradition. In the same year they won the "Horizon Award" in the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards, followed by the "Best Duo" category in 2004.
An album called simply Tunes came out in summer 2005 and another, and Songs followed in October of the same year.
Vagabond was released in 2008.
The Works was released on 11th July 2011. It's an album of re-recorded tracks from their 5 albums made as a duo. The album features a number of special guests, including: Fay Hield, James Fagan, Nancy Kerr, Maddy Prior, Martin Carthy, Martin Simpson and Eliza Carthy.
wn.com/Spiers_and_Boden -
Stephen Foster
Stephen Collins Foster (July 4, 1826 – January 13, 1864), known as the "father of American music", was the pre-eminent songwriter in the United States of the 19th century. His songs — such as "Oh! Susanna", "Camptown Races", "Old Folks at Home" ("Swanee River"), "Hard Times Come Again No More", "My Old Kentucky Home", "Old Black Joe", "Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair", and "Beautiful Dreamer" — remain popular over 150 years after their composition.
Foster attended private academies in Allegheny, Athens, and Towanda, Pennsylvania. He received an education in English grammar, diction, the classics, penmanship, Latin and Greek, and mathematics. In 1839, his elder brother William was serving his apprenticeship as an engineer at nearby Towanda and thought Stephen would benefit from being under his supervision. The site of the Camptown Races is 30 miles from Athens, and 15 miles from Towanda. Stephen attended Athens Academy from 1839 to 1841. He wrote his first composition, Tioga Waltz, while attending Athens Academy, and performed it during the 1839 commencement exercises; he was 14. It was not published during the composer's lifetime, but it is included in the collection of published works by Morrison Foster. In 1842, Athens Academy was destroyed in a fire.
wn.com/Stephen_Foster -
Steve Earle
For the drummer Steve Earle, see Afghan Whigs
Stephen Fain "Steve" Earle ( /ˈɜrl/; born January 17, 1955) is an American singer-songwriter known for his rock, folk and Texas Country as well as his political views. He is also a producer, author, a political activist, and an actor, and has written and directed a play.
Earle was born on January 17, 1955, at Fort Monroe in Hampton, Virginia. He is the eldest son of Jack Earle, an air traffic controller, and Barbara Earle. Although he was born in Virginia where his father was stationed in the military, the family returned to Texas before Earle's second birthday. His ancestry is Irish Catholic on his mother's side and Scots-Irish on his father's side. They moved often during his childhood, primarily within Texas, but spent several of his formative years in and around San Antonio, Texas including East Terrell Hills, Converse, and Schertz. He dropped out of school in the 9th grade to move to Houston and learn more about the music business. Earle released his first album, Guitar Town, in 1986. His sister, Stacey Earle, is also a musician, having toured with her brother in the 1990s and sung on the song "When I Fall" on Earle's 2000 album, Transcendental Blues.
wn.com/Steve_Earle -
Steve Goodman
Steve Goodman (July 25, 1948 – September 20, 1984) was an American folk music singer-songwriter from Chicago, Illinois. The writer of "City of New Orleans", made popular by Arlo Guthrie and Willie Nelson, Goodman won two Grammy Awards.
Born on Chicago's North Side to a middle-class Jewish family, Goodman began writing and performing songs as a teenager, after his family had moved to the near north suburbs. He graduated from Maine East High School in Park Ridge, Illinois in 1965, where he was a classmate of Hillary Rodham (Clinton). In the fall of 1965, he entered the University of Illinois and pledged Sigma Alpha Mu (Sammies) fraternity where he, Ron Banyon, and Steve Hartmann formed a popular rock cover band, "The Juicy Fruits". He left college after one year to pursue his musical career. In the early spring of 1967 Goodman went to New York, staying for a month in a Greenwich Village brownstone across the street from the Cafe Wha? where Goodman performed regularly during his brief stay there. Returning to Chicago he intended to restart his education but he dropped out again to pursue his musical dream full time after discovering the cause of his continuous fatigue was actually leukemia, the disease that would be present during the entirety of his recording career, until his death in 1984. In 1968 Goodman began performing at the Earl of Old Town in Chicago and attracted a following. By 1969, Goodman was a regular performer in Chicago, while attending Lake Forest College. During this time Goodman supported himself by singing advertising jingles.
wn.com/Steve_Goodman -
The Pogues
The Pogues are an Irish rock band from London, formed in 1982 and fronted by Shane MacGowan. The band reached international prominence in the 1980s and early 1990s. MacGowan left the band in 1991 due to drinking problems but the band continued first with Joe Strummer and then with Spider Stacy on vocals before breaking up in 1996. The band reformed in 2001, and has been playing regularly ever since, most notably on the US East Coast around St Patrick's Day and across the UK and Ireland every December. The group has yet to record any new music and, according to Spider Stacy on Pogues.com, has no inclination to do so.
Their politically tinged music was informed by MacGowan and Stacy's punk backgrounds, yet used traditional Irish instruments such as the tin whistle, cittern, mandolin and accordion.
The Pogues were founded in Kings Cross, a district of North London, in 1982 as Pogue Mahone—pogue mahone being the Anglicisation of the Irish póg mo thóin, meaning "kiss my arse".
The roots of The Pogues were formed when MacGowan (vocals), Peter "Spider" Stacy (tin whistle), and Jem Finer (banjo) were together in an occasional band called The Millwall Chainsaws in the late 1970s after MacGowan and Stacy met in the toilets at a Ramones gig at The Roundhouse in 1977. MacGowan was already with The Nips, though when they broke up in 1980 he concentrated a bit more on Stacy's Millwall Chainsaws who changed their name to The New Republicans. During this period MacGowan and Finer auditioned unsuccessfully for a licence to busk at Covent Garden. In 1982 James Fearnley (accordion) joined MacGowan, Stacy, and Finer, calling the band Pogue Mahone. The new group played their first gig at The Pindar of Wakefield on 4 October 1982.
wn.com/The_Pogues -
Tom Paxton
Thomas Richard "Tom" Paxton (born October 31, 1937) is an American folk singer and singer-songwriter who has been writing, performing and recording music for fifty years. In 2009, Paxton received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.
Paxton's songs have demonstrated enduring appeal, including modern standards such as "The Last Thing on My Mind", "Bottle of Wine", "Whose Garden Was This", "The Marvelous Toy", and "Ramblin' Boy". Paxton's songs have been recorded by Pete Seeger and The Weavers, Judy Collins, Sandy Denny, Joan Baez, Doc Watson, Harry Belafonte, Peter, Paul and Mary, Marianne Faithfull, The Kingston Trio, The Chad Mitchell Trio, John Denver, Dolly Parton and Porter Wagoner, Willie Nelson, Flatt & Scruggs, The Move, The Fireballs, and many others (see covers). He has performed thousands of concerts around the world in such places as Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Hong Kong, Scandinavia, France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Holland, England, Scotland, Ireland, Canada, and all over the United States; and his songs have been translated into various languages. Paxton enjoys a strong relationship with fans throughout the world.
wn.com/Tom_Paxton -
Voyageurs
The Voyageurs were the people who engaged in the transportation of furs by canoe during the fur trade era. Voyageur is a French word which literally means "traveler". This article covers the emblematic meaning of the term which applies to places (Canada and the upper Midwest of the US) and times (zenith in the 18th and early 19th centuries) where transportation was for longer distances, and this major and challenging task of the fur trading business was done by canoe and largely by French Canadians. The term in its fur trade context applied to a lesser extent to other fur trade activities (such as trading and soldiering), to those in the fur trade industry that traveled by dog sled, those engaged in fur trade travel on inland waterways in other parts of what is now the US, to the individuals who practiced it even when they were not doing so, and to individuals engaged in wilderness exploration whose involvement in fur trade was secondary to that. The emblematic meaning at the time also included being a part of a licensed, organized effort, a distinction that sets them apart from the Coureur des bois engaged in the fur trade at that time.
wn.com/Voyageurs -
William Thoms
William John Thoms (November 16, 1803 – August 15, 1885) was a British writer credited with coining the term "folklore" in the 1840s. Thoms's investigation of folklore and myth led to a later career of debunking longevity myths. Hence, he is the "father of age validation research" to demographers.
Thoms was an antiquary, and miscellaneous writer, for many years a clerk in the secretary's office of Chelsea Hospital. He was made a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and became secretary to the Camden Society in 1838. In 1845 he was appointed Clerk, and subsequently Deputy Librarian, to the House of Lords. He was the founder in 1849 of Notes and Queries, which for some years he also edited.
Thoms is credited with inventing the word 'folklore' in an 1846 letter to the Athenaeum.[citation needed] He invented this compound word to replace the various other terms used at the time, including "popular antiquities" or "popular literature". He was fond of the works of Jacob Grimm, which he considered remarkable.
wn.com/William_Thoms -
William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth (7 April 1770 – 23 April 1850) was a major English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with the 1798 joint publication Lyrical Ballads.
Wordsworth's magnum opus is generally considered to be The Prelude, a semiautobiographical poem of his early years which he revised and expanded a number of times. It was posthumously titled and published, prior to which it was generally known as the poem "to Coleridge". Wordsworth was Britain's Poet Laureate from 1843 until his death in 1850.
The second of five children born to John Wordsworth and Ann Cookson, William Wordsworth was born on 7 April 1770 in Wordsworth House in Cockermouth, Cumberland—part of the scenic region in northwest England, the Lake District. His sister, the poet and diarist Dorothy Wordsworth, to whom he was close all his life, was born the following year, and the two were baptised together. They had three other siblings: Richard, the eldest, who became a lawyer; John, born after Dorothy, who went to sea and died in 1805 when the ship of which he was Master, the Earl of Abergavenny, was wrecked off the south coast of England; and Christopher, the youngest, who entered the Church and rose to be Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. Their father was a legal representative of James Lowther, 1st Earl of Lonsdale and, through his connections, lived in a large mansion in the small town. Wordsworth, as with his siblings, had little involvement with their father, and they would be distant from him until his death in 1783.
wn.com/William_Wordsworth -
Woody Guthrie
Woodrow Wilson "Woody" Guthrie (July 14, 1912 – October 3, 1967) is best known as an American singer-songwriter and folk musician, whose musical legacy includes hundreds of political, traditional and children's songs, ballads and improvised works. He frequently performed with the slogan This Machine Kills Fascists displayed on his guitar. His best-known song is "This Land Is Your Land." Many of his recorded songs are archived in the Library of Congress. Such songwriters as Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Bruce Springsteen, John Mellencamp, Pete Seeger, Joe Strummer, Billy Bragg and Tom Paxton have acknowledged Guthrie as a major influence.
Guthrie traveled with migrant workers from Oklahoma to California and learned traditional folk and blues songs. Many of his songs are about his experiences in the Dust Bowl era during the Great Depression, earning him the nickname the "Dust Bowl Troubadour." Throughout his life Guthrie was associated with United States communist groups, though he was seemingly not a member of any.
wn.com/Woody_Guthrie
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Fast Food Folk Song - Rhett & Link
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:00
- Updated: 28 Feb 2013
Yes! the guy's reaction is totally authentic. He had no idea we were coming, and he really got the order right (almost right). We couldn't believe it either, so we understand the questions.... LYRICS: Iʼll start with a taco, soft like a cloud I want mine crunchy, I like to eat loud. Iʼll choose a chalupa, Iʼll grab a gordita, and two taco salads for our senoritas. And a Burrito Supreme, with extra sour cream Itʼs a cylindrically shaped seasoned beef dream. A taquito. An enchirito. Some cinnamon twists. A chicken border bowl. Are you gettinʼ all this? And you know that nothing beats a hmmm, mmmm...Mexican Pizza... Weʼll take two of those, but please hold the diced tomatoes. And I admit, Iʼve always felt, like Iʼm in love with the meximelt. Make mine with a little extra love, and think of me... as the cheese drops from your Taco Bell glove. and thatʼs it. No! Iʼm not done...Iʼll also take a... Double-decker taco cause Iʼm feeling wild And make my sauce Fire. Uh, heʼll take mild. and weʼll take two Mt. Dew Baja blasts for a chance at 25 dollars cash Iʼm told thereʼs a winner for every 5 minutes Iʼm stealing your online code if you win it. Why would you do that? You owe me 25 bones I owe you 5. Plus interest--it was a loan. And I think weʼll be satisfied, if we get some mexican rice on the side. And thatʼs it.
http://wn.com/Fast_Food_Folk_Song_Rhett_Link
Yes! the guy's reaction is totally authentic. He had no idea we were coming, and he really got the order right (almost right). We couldn't believe it either, so we understand the questions.... LYRICS: Iʼll start with a taco, soft like a cloud I want mine crunchy, I like to eat loud. Iʼll choose a chalupa, Iʼll grab a gordita, and two taco salads for our senoritas. And a Burrito Supreme, with extra sour cream Itʼs a cylindrically shaped seasoned beef dream. A taquito. An enchirito. Some cinnamon twists. A chicken border bowl. Are you gettinʼ all this? And you know that nothing beats a hmmm, mmmm...Mexican Pizza... Weʼll take two of those, but please hold the diced tomatoes. And I admit, Iʼve always felt, like Iʼm in love with the meximelt. Make mine with a little extra love, and think of me... as the cheese drops from your Taco Bell glove. and thatʼs it. No! Iʼm not done...Iʼll also take a... Double-decker taco cause Iʼm feeling wild And make my sauce Fire. Uh, heʼll take mild. and weʼll take two Mt. Dew Baja blasts for a chance at 25 dollars cash Iʼm told thereʼs a winner for every 5 minutes Iʼm stealing your online code if you win it. Why would you do that? You owe me 25 bones I owe you 5. Plus interest--it was a loan. And I think weʼll be satisfied, if we get some mexican rice on the side. And thatʼs it.
Scottish folk music
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 4:50
- Updated: 27 Feb 2013
Scottish folk music performed in the streets of Edinburgh for international festival (Edinburgh Fringe 2007) Thx to Albannach band. www.albannachonline.com
http://wn.com/Scottish_folk_music
Scottish folk music performed in the streets of Edinburgh for international festival (Edinburgh Fringe 2007) Thx to Albannach band. www.albannachonline.com
- published: 07 Sep 2007
- views: 886507
- author: kumararun85
Sakura - Japanese Folk Music
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 4:14
- Updated: 28 Feb 2013
Very famous Japanese folk music
http://wn.com/Sakura_Japanese_Folk_Music
American folk music
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 214:54
- Updated: 27 Feb 2013
American folk music is a musical term that encompasses numerous genres, many of which are known as traditional music, traditional folk music, contemporary folk music or roots music. Roots music is a broad category of music including bluegrass, country music, gospel, old time music, jug bands, Appalachian folk, blues, Cajun and Native American music. The music is considered American either because it is native to the United States or because it developed there, out of foreign origins, to such a degree that it struck musicologists as something distinctly new. It is considered "roots music" because it served as the basis of music later developed in the United States, including rock and roll, rhythm and blues, and jazz.
http://wn.com/American_folk_music
American folk music is a musical term that encompasses numerous genres, many of which are known as traditional music, traditional folk music, contemporary folk music or roots music. Roots music is a broad category of music including bluegrass, country music, gospel, old time music, jug bands, Appalachian folk, blues, Cajun and Native American music. The music is considered American either because it is native to the United States or because it developed there, out of foreign origins, to such a degree that it struck musicologists as something distinctly new. It is considered "roots music" because it served as the basis of music later developed in the United States, including rock and roll, rhythm and blues, and jazz.
- published: 11 Jan 2013
- views: 929
- author: BlulightGallery
Songs Of Mashangva
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 62:22
- Updated: 28 Feb 2013
Songs of Mashangva traces the music of the Tangkhul Naga and its return to the modern age as Naga Folk Blues. Rewben Mashangva travels through the villages of the Tanghkul Naga and talks to the old people and collects songs and instruments.The rhythms, melodies and lyrics help form his own music which he describes as Naga Folk Blues.
http://wn.com/Songs_Of_Mashangva
Songs of Mashangva traces the music of the Tangkhul Naga and its return to the modern age as Naga Folk Blues. Rewben Mashangva travels through the villages of the Tanghkul Naga and talks to the old people and collects songs and instruments.The rhythms, melodies and lyrics help form his own music which he describes as Naga Folk Blues.
- published: 22 Sep 2012
- views: 8087
- author: jungleefilmclub
El condor pasa - PERU
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 4:45
- Updated: 01 Mar 2013
Peruvian melody
http://wn.com/El_condor_pasa_PERU
Orthodox Celts - Star Of The County Down
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:23
- Updated: 01 Mar 2013
Belgrade's most popular Irish & Celtic music band playing an Irish traditional, arranged by Ana Djokic (the violin player in the video). They are very popular in Serbia and neighbouring states, mainly for their vibrant live shows. A music video from 1997, directed by Darko Debelic www.darkodebelic.com
http://wn.com/Orthodox_Celts_Star_Of_The_County_Down
Belgrade's most popular Irish & Celtic music band playing an Irish traditional, arranged by Ana Djokic (the violin player in the video). They are very popular in Serbia and neighbouring states, mainly for their vibrant live shows. A music video from 1997, directed by Darko Debelic www.darkodebelic.com
- published: 16 Sep 2006
- views: 3918650
- author: mamasaid
Predrag Zivkovic TOZOVAC - Ovamo Cigani
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 4:35
- Updated: 28 Feb 2013
Most popular Serbian folk music singer Predrag Zivkovic Tozovac singing "Ovamo Cigani" Enjoy!
http://wn.com/Predrag_Zivkovic_TOZOVAC_Ovamo_Cigani
Most popular Serbian folk music singer Predrag Zivkovic Tozovac singing "Ovamo Cigani" Enjoy!
- published: 28 Nov 2008
- views: 1455256
- author: Muskelegger1990
Canadian Folk Song
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:10
- Updated: 26 Feb 2013
Final fantasy
http://wn.com/Canadian_Folk_Song
ELUVEITIE - Inis Mona
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 4:13
- Updated: 28 Feb 2013
www.myspace.com Taken from the album, Slania PURCHASE ALBUM AT: Nuclear Blast USA store.nuclearblastusa.com Nuclear Blast EUROPE www.nuclearblast.de eMUSIC www.emusic.com NAPSTER free.napster.com RHAPSODY www.rhapsody.com iTUNES itunes.apple.com AMAZON www.amazon.com FYE www.fye.com BARNES AND NOBLE music.barnesandnoble.com Check out EluTV, Eluveitie's very own free online documentary series at www.eluveitie.ch, and Eluveitie's official YouTube channel at www.youtube.com/eluveitieofficial
http://wn.com/ELUVEITIE_Inis_Mona
www.myspace.com Taken from the album, Slania PURCHASE ALBUM AT: Nuclear Blast USA store.nuclearblastusa.com Nuclear Blast EUROPE www.nuclearblast.de eMUSIC www.emusic.com NAPSTER free.napster.com RHAPSODY www.rhapsody.com iTUNES itunes.apple.com AMAZON www.amazon.com FYE www.fye.com BARNES AND NOBLE music.barnesandnoble.com Check out EluTV, Eluveitie's very own free online documentary series at www.eluveitie.ch, and Eluveitie's official YouTube channel at www.youtube.com/eluveitieofficial
- published: 30 Jan 2008
- views: 13310650
- author: NuclearBlastEurope
MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE: John Hawkes sings "Marcy's Song"
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:57
- Updated: 28 Feb 2013
Watch Academy Award-nominee John Hawkes sing a cover of Jackson C. Frank's "Marcy's Song" from the film MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE.
http://wn.com/MARTHA_MARCY_MAY_MARLENE_John_Hawkes_sings_Marcy's_Song
Watch Academy Award-nominee John Hawkes sing a cover of Jackson C. Frank's "Marcy's Song" from the film MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE.
- published: 24 Oct 2011
- views: 155485
- author: FoxSearchlight
Mumford and Sons - Little Lion Man
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 4:18
- Updated: 01 Mar 2013
The official video for Mumford and Sons' debut single, Little Lion Man. Click to buy the album, Sigh No More: zaphod.uk.vvhp.net
http://wn.com/Mumford_and_Sons_Little_Lion_Man
The official video for Mumford and Sons' debut single, Little Lion Man. Click to buy the album, Sigh No More: zaphod.uk.vvhp.net
- published: 04 Sep 2009
- views: 38099900
- author: islandrecords
Omnia - Pagan Folk Lore
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 57:29
- Updated: 28 Feb 2013
About DVD: * www.myspace.com Tracklist: 01. Intro/Bealtaine 02. Wytches' Brew 03. Richard Parker's Fancy 04. The Raven 05. Alive! 06. Dil Gaya 07. Entrezomp ni Kelted 08. Fairy Tale 09. Saltatio Vita Order DVD here: * www.worldofomnia.com
http://wn.com/Omnia_Pagan_Folk_Lore
About DVD: * www.myspace.com Tracklist: 01. Intro/Bealtaine 02. Wytches' Brew 03. Richard Parker's Fancy 04. The Raven 05. Alive! 06. Dil Gaya 07. Entrezomp ni Kelted 08. Fairy Tale 09. Saltatio Vita Order DVD here: * www.worldofomnia.com
- published: 11 Jan 2012
- views: 591394
- author: paganfolkvideos
Raja Baath Lamian Caran Full Video Song || Long Car
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:48
- Updated: 01 Mar 2013
Presenting the full video song of Raja Baath latest album "Long Car" Song Name: Lamian Caran Album Name: Long Car Singer: Raja Baath Lyrics: Veet Baljit Music: Gurmit Singh Video Director : Parmod Sharma Rana Music on T-Series Enjoy and stay connected with us!! SUSBCRIBE: www.youtube.com FB: www.facebook.com
http://wn.com/Raja_Baath_Lamian_Caran_Full_Video_Song_||_Long_Car
Presenting the full video song of Raja Baath latest album "Long Car" Song Name: Lamian Caran Album Name: Long Car Singer: Raja Baath Lyrics: Veet Baljit Music: Gurmit Singh Video Director : Parmod Sharma Rana Music on T-Series Enjoy and stay connected with us!! SUSBCRIBE: www.youtube.com FB: www.facebook.com
- published: 18 Feb 2013
- views: 354814
- author: tseriesapnapunjab
The Dubliners - Whiskey in the jar
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:43
- Updated: 28 Feb 2013
Live at Vicar Street
http://wn.com/The_Dubliners_Whiskey_in_the_jar
The Assumption Song
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 1:34
- Updated: 01 Mar 2013
Ever think dirty? Animation by Chris O'Neill. Music by The Arrogant Worms I DID THE ANIMATION I made this shaddap
http://wn.com/The_Assumption_Song
Ever think dirty? Animation by Chris O'Neill. Music by The Arrogant Worms I DID THE ANIMATION I made this shaddap
- published: 02 Dec 2008
- views: 22389000
- author: OneyNG
Perpetuum Jazzile - Avsenik Medley
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:26
- Updated: 28 Feb 2013
A proof that nearly every kind of music can be sung -- a jaw-dropping rendition of Slovenia's most renowned traditional folk music ensemble. Clap away! Arrangement: Tomaž Kozlevčar *** LOWEST RATES ON PERPETUUM JAZZILE MP3s ON PJvocal.com *** Recorded live at our annual Vokal Xtravaganzza concert in Ljubljana, November 9, 2010. A DVD release of the concert is scheduled for early 2011 so please keep in touch via PJvocal.com, Facebook or Twitter. In order to buy PJ goods such as our latest "Africa" CD or "Live" DVD from 2008 check our online shop. --- Official website PJvocal.com --- PJ shop www.perpetuumjazzile.si --- Facebook: www.facebook.com --- Twitter: twitter.com Perpetuum Jazzile. Vocal ecstasy.
http://wn.com/Perpetuum_Jazzile_Avsenik_Medley
A proof that nearly every kind of music can be sung -- a jaw-dropping rendition of Slovenia's most renowned traditional folk music ensemble. Clap away! Arrangement: Tomaž Kozlevčar *** LOWEST RATES ON PERPETUUM JAZZILE MP3s ON PJvocal.com *** Recorded live at our annual Vokal Xtravaganzza concert in Ljubljana, November 9, 2010. A DVD release of the concert is scheduled for early 2011 so please keep in touch via PJvocal.com, Facebook or Twitter. In order to buy PJ goods such as our latest "Africa" CD or "Live" DVD from 2008 check our online shop. --- Official website PJvocal.com --- PJ shop www.perpetuumjazzile.si --- Facebook: www.facebook.com --- Twitter: twitter.com Perpetuum Jazzile. Vocal ecstasy.
- published: 30 Dec 2010
- views: 4567955
- author: jantrost
Mumford and sons - White blank page (with lyrics)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 4:15
- Updated: 01 Mar 2013
*Up for the million views! Thank you all for watching, and sharing this song :) If you have any requests for a lyrics video, please send me a message! ^^ I also do nail art, so if you're interested, check it out: lilian-nailart.blogspot.com
http://wn.com/Mumford_and_sons_White_blank_page_with_lyrics
*Up for the million views! Thank you all for watching, and sharing this song :) If you have any requests for a lyrics video, please send me a message! ^^ I also do nail art, so if you're interested, check it out: lilian-nailart.blogspot.com
- published: 01 Jun 2010
- views: 1987390
- author: Lil106692
Beautiful Chinese Music【9】Traditional
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:50
- Updated: 01 Mar 2013
Beautiful Chinese Music Traditional Playlist www.youtube.com
http://wn.com/Beautiful_Chinese_Music【9】Traditional
Beautiful Chinese Music Traditional Playlist www.youtube.com
- published: 10 Aug 2010
- views: 4556800
- author: MadePossible
Mumford & Sons - Winter Winds
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:41
- Updated: 01 Mar 2013
The official video for 'Winter Winds'. Download your very own copy of the track here: zaphod.uk.vvhp.net
http://wn.com/Mumford_Sons_Winter_Winds
The official video for 'Winter Winds'. Download your very own copy of the track here: zaphod.uk.vvhp.net
- published: 18 Nov 2009
- views: 10536017
- author: MumfordandSons
The Daily Songer - Baby Belly Folk Song (Song #13)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:12
- Updated: 26 Feb 2013
LIKE Favorite, thumbs up! It helps me a lot! The Daily Songer #13 We decided to have a little more baby fun. Here's a song we came up with together today. I think you can guess what it's about! Baby Belly Folk Song By Dan Tulloh © 2011 Lyrics Hey Baby Whatcha doing in there? You ain't got no air But you're growing some hair called Lanugo Which is also on seals and elephants, you know I had a plush seal when I was a kid Did you know that another name for a baseball cap is a lid So anyway even without air you get hiccups Doesn't think it's quite fair ------- You do so much moving in there Dancing around like Fred Astaire Where do you think you're going to go the disco (pause) You're making your mother hungry So let's finish this song up We love you baby but would you please hurry up. The Social Links: • YouTube youtube.com • Twitter twitter.com • Facebook facebook.com • Google Plus plus.ly. • Dailybooth dailybooth.com
http://wn.com/The_Daily_Songer_Baby_Belly_Folk_Song_Song_13
LIKE Favorite, thumbs up! It helps me a lot! The Daily Songer #13 We decided to have a little more baby fun. Here's a song we came up with together today. I think you can guess what it's about! Baby Belly Folk Song By Dan Tulloh © 2011 Lyrics Hey Baby Whatcha doing in there? You ain't got no air But you're growing some hair called Lanugo Which is also on seals and elephants, you know I had a plush seal when I was a kid Did you know that another name for a baseball cap is a lid So anyway even without air you get hiccups Doesn't think it's quite fair ------- You do so much moving in there Dancing around like Fred Astaire Where do you think you're going to go the disco (pause) You're making your mother hungry So let's finish this song up We love you baby but would you please hurry up. The Social Links: • YouTube youtube.com • Twitter twitter.com • Facebook facebook.com • Google Plus plus.ly. • Dailybooth dailybooth.com
- published: 30 Oct 2011
- views: 13782
- author: tulleuchen
Mumford & Sons - I Will Wait
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 5:13
- Updated: 01 Mar 2013
The single 'I Will Wait' is now available from iTunes : tinyurl.com Order the new album 'Babel' at www.mumfordandsons.com Video directed by FRED & NICK Follow Mumford & Sons Facebook www.facebook.com Twitter: twitter.com www.mumfordandsons.com
http://wn.com/Mumford_Sons_I_Will_Wait
The single 'I Will Wait' is now available from iTunes : tinyurl.com Order the new album 'Babel' at www.mumfordandsons.com Video directed by FRED & NICK Follow Mumford & Sons Facebook www.facebook.com Twitter: twitter.com www.mumfordandsons.com
- published: 09 Sep 2012
- views: 20257641
- author: MumfordAndSonsVEVO
Adrian von Ziegler - Night Mist
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 20:12
- Updated: 28 Feb 2013
Please support the artist! Buy the songs here: adrianvonziegler.bandcamp.com His official channel: www.youtube.com Artist: Adrian von Ziegler Album: Wanderer The copyrights belong to Adrian von Ziegler. Album cover made by Carina Grimm.
http://wn.com/Adrian_von_Ziegler_Night_Mist
Please support the artist! Buy the songs here: adrianvonziegler.bandcamp.com His official channel: www.youtube.com Artist: Adrian von Ziegler Album: Wanderer The copyrights belong to Adrian von Ziegler. Album cover made by Carina Grimm.
- published: 10 Oct 2011
- views: 56889
- author: ShadowRealms666
photo: AP / Ibrahim Zayed
26 Feb 2013
Updated. February 26, 2013 8.35AM. LUXOR, Egypt — A hot air balloon flying over Egypt’s ancient city of Luxor caught fire and crashed into a sugar cane field on Tuesday, killing at least 19 foreign tourists in one of the world’s deadliest ballooning accidents and handing a new blow to Egypt’s ailing tourism industry ... The balloon then shot up in the air, the investigator said ... The security official said all 18 bodies have been recovered ... ....(size: 6.2Kb)
photo: Russian Presidential Press and Information Office
27 Feb 2013
Russian President Vladimir Putin told the country's top brass on Wednesday to drastically upgrade the armed forces in the next few years as part of response to attempts by the United States and NATO to "tip the strategic balance" in the world. In his address to Russia's defense ministry and top military officials, Putin said Russia is witnessing "insistent attempts" to change that balance and complained about U.S ... ....(size: 2.3Kb)
photo: AP / Michael Sohn
28 Feb 2013
Pope Benedict pledged his "unconditional reverence and obedience" to his successor Thursday, then left the Vatican as the first Roman Catholic Church leader to resign in 600 years. Benedict flew from the Vatican by helicopter to the papal residence of Castel Gandolfo near Rome, several hours before his eight-year papacy was to end officially at 8 p.m., local time (1900 UTC) ... Peter's Square after he left ... ....(size: 2.5Kb)
photo: USAF / Tech. Sgt. Effrain Lopez
26 Feb 2013
Article by WN.com Correspondent Dallas Darling. During the 19th and early 20th centuries developments in technology vastly transformed warfare. The age of machine guns, steam-powered battle ships, and tanks replaced the era of flintlock muskets, sailing wooden ships, and cannonballs. But these new and more lethal innovations also altered humanity and political systems ... World War I and II ... They will subversively disrupt entire societies....(size: 4.8Kb)
photo: AP / Mary Altaffer
26 Feb 2013
Jesus Diaz - . Scientists have found proof of a sunken continent in the Indian Ocean. According to a study published in Nature Geoscience, the continent “was separated from Madagascar and fragmented into a ribbon-like configuration by a series of mid-ocean ridge jumps during the opening of the Mascarene ocean basin.”. Its name is not Atlantis, though ... Image by Shutterstock ... UK ... CVGPC GamerGamesRadarTotal FilmMore...Music ... ....(size: 3.6Kb)
noodls
01 Mar 2013
(Source. Greater Geelong City Council) The Geelong Highland Gathering's move to Deakin University's Waurn Ponds campus will provide a picturesque location with the convenience of easy access and plenty of parking said Council's Major Events portfolio holder Cr Ron Nelson ... Saturday night's Concert for the Clans will showcase Celtic folk music at the K.D. Stewart Centre ... distributed by ... (noodl. 17718712) ....(size: 2.2Kb)
The Examiner
01 Mar 2013
The maple syrup producers are busy getting the sugar shacks ready for the first boil of sap over the next week or two. The weather this past week has been hovering around the freezing point and the sap has started to run. Tapping forecast ... Maple Syrup Festivals. Location. Toronto Ontario. 43.648559570312 ; -79.385322570801 ... There will be live animal demonstration, orse drawn wagon rides, bannock over the open fire and Live folk music ... Tweet....(size: 5.8Kb)
Houston Chronicle
28 Feb 2013
Up to 50 music professionals from various aspects of the industry use a blind listening platform to narrow down the finalist pool for the New Folk Concerts ... The Kerrville Folk Festival is owned by the Texas Folk Music Foundation, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization that is dedicated to the support and encouragement of emerging as well as established songwriters....(size: 8.5Kb)
The Australian
28 Feb 2013
Klezmer, originally a Hebrew word for musical instrument, is the traditional Jewish folk music of eastern Europe, a form of instrumental music most often heard at Jewish weddings but which is enjoying a renaissance worldwide outside its usual setting ... The London Klezmer Quartet is just one of many bands playing that form of music in Britain ... "It's folk music so it wasn't always thought worthy of documentation," she says....(size: 5.4Kb)
Yahoo Daily News
28 Feb 2013
Kerrville, Texas (PRWEB) February 28, 2013 Registration is now open for schools and workshops offered during the 42nd Annual Kerrville Folk Festival May 23rd through June 9th ... The Kerrville Folk Festival is owned by the Texas Folk Music Foundation, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization that is dedicated to the support and encouragement of emerging as well as established songwriters ... Kerrville Folk Festival....(size: 4.1Kb)
noodls
28 Feb 2013
Reid is known for addressing activist causes through music, which she has called "slam poetry meets folk." ... Reid received a Toronto Independent Music Award nomination for Best Acoustic Album (2010), was voted "Favorite New Discovery of 2009" by Penguin Eggs magazine critics (Canada's folk, roots and world music magazine) and received a Canadian Folk Music Award nomination for Best New/Emerging Artist of the Year (2009)....(size: 5.4Kb)
Yahoo Daily News
28 Feb 2013
Reid received a Toronto Independent Music Award nomination for Best Acoustic Album (2010), was voted “Favorite New Discovery of 2009” by Penguin Eggs magazine critics (Canada’s folk, roots and world music magazine) and received a Canadian Folk Music Award nomination for Best New/Emerging Artist of the Year (2009)....(size: 5.8Kb)
Huffington Post
28 Feb 2013
I went to the High School of Music and Art, one of the two so-called "fame" schools ... Rob.Do you think that your teachers realized that you had this gift, because obviously you've done amazing things in music? Do you remember thinking that you have this gift? ... I always listened to Classical music or Folk music ... Peter, Paul and Mary had the dominant place on the charts for about two years when Folk music really was the dominant music....(size: 16.1Kb)
Skiddle
28 Feb 2013
a night of live music, fun and dance, from the brilliant monthly night Barny Scott Presents Bloom ... Citing her influences as not only musically-based, Lillian Todd-Jones references Dolly Parton (emotions are your own, ... Susannah and the Crow perform English baroque folk music overlaid with decadent verse ... Music Genres.. Acoustic, Alternative, Folk, Indie....(size: 2.5Kb)
Yahoo Daily News
28 Feb 2013
Board of Directors and Sponsors Prepare for Second Awards Ceremony and Musical Gala on April 28th at Kodak Hall at Eastman Theatre. Rochester, NY (PRWEB) February 28, 2013 The Rochester Music Hall of Fame http.//rochestermusic.org/ will honor the 2013 class of inductees, which includes a myriad of iconic musical legends that have made their mark in the genres of classical, rock, pop, jazz and folk music ... Rochester Music Hall of Fame....(size: 6.3Kb)
York Press
28 Feb 2013
... vocals and violin, and Una Bergin, vocals and mandolin, a Dutch combination of opera diva, classical folk singer and dreamy jazz singer ... “The Blue Mosquitoes are making a big splash Down Under with their high-octane Celtic-driven folk music, “ says Nigel....(size: 1.3Kb)
Canberra Times
28 Feb 2013
The High Highs want their music not just to live in dreams, but to sound like them ... The sub-genre consisting of pirate songs and sea shanties is misunderstood and under-appreciated, and this collection emphasises that there's more to this strain of folk music than rollicking tunes about rum and the high seas ... and the folk blues of The Woodstore....(size: 6.9Kb)
Daily Press
28 Feb 2013
Turtle Island String Quartet has stretched classical forms far enough to make connections with jazz, rock, even the music of India ... Still, finding a common musical thread in such collaborations isn't always easy ... "Michael's from a whole other world, he's not reading music a lot," Summer said ... In it, Thompson combined classical orchestration with Cajun folk music....(size: 3.6Kb)
| Folk music | |
|---|---|
 Béla Bartók recording Slovak peasant singers in 1908 |
|
| Traditions | List of folk music traditions |
| Musicians | List of folk musicians |
| Instruments | Folk instruments |
Folk music includes both traditional music and the genre that evolved from it during the 20th century folk revival. The term originated in the 19th century but is often applied to music that is older than that. Certain types of folk music are also called world music.
Traditional folk music has been defined in several ways: as music transmitted by mouth, as music of the lower classes, and as music with unknown composers. It has been contrasted with commercial and classical styles. One meaning often given is that of old songs, with no known composers; another is music that has been transmitted and evolved by a process of oral transmission or performed by custom over a long period of time.
Starting in the mid-20th century a new form of popular folk music evolved from traditional folk music. This process and period is called the (second) folk revival and reached a zenith in the 1960s. This form of music is sometimes called contemporary folk music or folk revival music to distinguish it from earlier folk forms.[1] This type of folk music also includes fusion genres such as folk rock, folk metal, electric folk, and others. While contemporary folk music is a genre generally distinct from traditional folk music, in English it shares the same name, and it often shares the same performers and venues as traditional folk music. Even individual songs may be a blend of the two.
Contents
|
Traditional folk music[link]
| Traditional folk music | |
|---|---|
| Stylistic origins | Traditional music |
| Cultural origins | Individual nations or regions |
| Typical instruments | See Folk instruments |
| Mainstream popularity | Highly popular until recently |
| Derivative forms | Popular music • Contemporary music |
(complete list) |
|
| Fusion genres | |
| Electric folk • Folk metal • Folk rock • New Age music • Neofolk • Space music | |
| Other topics | |
| Roots revival | |
 |
Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Traditional music |
Definitions[link]
A consistent definition of traditional folk music is elusive. The terms folk music, folk song, and folk dance are comparatively recent expressions. They are extensions of the term folk lore, which was coined in 1846 by the English antiquarian William Thoms to describe "the traditions, customs, and superstitions of the uncultured classes."[2] The term is further derived from the German expression Volk, in the sense of "the people as a whole" as applied to popular and national music by Johann Gottfried Herder and the German Romantics over half a century earlier.[3] Traditional folk music also includes most indigenous music
However, despite the assembly of an enormous body of work over some two centuries, there is still no certain definition of what folk music (or folklore, or the folk) is.[4] Folk music may tend to have certain characteristics[2] but it cannot clearly be differentiated in purely musical terms. One meaning often given is that of "old songs, with no known composers",[5] another is that of music that has been submitted to an evolutionary "process of oral transmission.... the fashioning and re-fashioning of the music by the community that give it its folk character."[6] Such definitions depend upon "(cultural) processes rather than abstract musical types...", upon "continuity and oral transmission...seen as characterizing one side of a cultural dichotomy, the other side of which is found not only in the lower layers of feudal, capitalist and some oriental societies but also in 'primitive' societies and in parts of 'popular cultures'."[7] One widely used definition is simply "Folk music is what the people sing".[8]
For Scholes,[2] as well as for Cecil Sharp and Béla Bartók,[9] there was a sense of the music of the country as distinct from that of the town. Folk music was already "seen as the authentic expression of a way of life now past or about to disappear (or in some cases, to be preserved or somehow revived),"[10] particularly in "a community uninfluenced by art music"[6] and by commercial and printed song. Lloyd rejected this in favour of a simple distinction of economic class[9] yet for him true folk music was, in Charles Seeger's words, "associated with a lower class"[11] in culturally and socially stratified societies. In these terms folk music may be seen as part of a "schema comprising four musical types: 'primitive' or 'tribal'; 'elite' or 'art'; 'folk'; and 'popular'."[12]
Music in this genre is also often called traditional music. Although the term is usually only descriptive, in some cases people use it as the name of a genre. For example, the Grammy Award previously used "traditional music" for folk music that is not contemporary folk music.
Characteristics[link]
From a historical perspective, traditional folk music had these characteristics:[11]
- It was transmitted through an oral tradition. Before the twentieth century, ordinary farm workers and factory workers were usually illiterate. They acquired songs by memorizing them. Primarily, this was not mediated by books, recorded or transmitted media. Singers may extend their repertoire using broadsheets, song books or CDs, but these secondary enhancements are of the same character as the primary songs experienced in the flesh.
- The music was often related to national culture. It was culturally particular; from a particular region or culture. In the context of an immigrant group, folk music acquires an extra dimension for social cohesion. It is particularly conspicuous in the United States, where Polish Americans, Scottish Americans, Irish Americans, Asian Americans and others strive to emphasise their differences from the mainstream. They learn songs and dances that originate in the countries their grandparents came from.
- They commemorate historical and personal events. On certain days of the year, such as Easter, May Day and Christmas, particular songs celebrate the yearly cycle. Weddings, birthdays and funerals may also be noted with songs, dances and special costumes. Religious festivals often have a folk music component. Choral music at these events brings children and non-professional singers to participate in a public arena, giving an emotional bonding that is unrelated to the aesthetic qualities of the music.
- The songs have been performed, by custom, over a long period of time, usually several generations.
As a side-effect, the following characteristics are sometimes present:
- There is no copyright on the songs. Hundreds of folk songs from the nineteenth century have known authors but have continued in oral tradition to the point where they are considered traditional for purposes of music publishing. This has become much less frequent since the 1970s. Today, almost every folk song that is recorded is credited with an arranger.
- Fusion of cultures: In the same way that people can have a mixed background, with parents originating in different continents, so too music can be a blend of influences. A particular rhythmic pattern, or a characteristic instrument, is enough to give a traditional feel to music, even when it has been composed recently. It is easy to recognize the presence of a bagpipe or a tabla in a piece of music. The young are usually much less offended by the dilution or adaptation of songs this way. Equally an electric guitar can be added to an old song. The relevant factors may include instrumentation, tunings, voicings, phrasing, subject matter, and even production methods.
- Non-commercial.
Origins[link]
Throughout most of human prehistory and history, listening to recorded music was not possible. Music was made by common people during both their work and leisure. The work of economic production was often manual and communal. Manual labor often included singing by the workers, which served several practical purposes. It reduced the boredom of repetitive tasks, it kept the rhythm during synchronized pushes and pulls, and it set the pace of many activities such as planting, weeding, reaping, threshing, weaving, and milling. In leisure time, singing and playing musical instruments were common forms of entertainment and history-telling—even more common than today, when electrically enabled technologies and widespread literacy make other forms of entertainment and information-sharing competitive.[13]
Opinions differed over the origins of folk music: it was said by some to be art music changed and probably debased by oral transmission, by others to reflect the character of the race that produced it.[2] Traditionally, the cultural transmission of folk music is through learning by ear, although notation may also be used. The competition of individual and collective theories of composition set different demarcations and relations of folk music with the music of tribal societies on the one hand and of "art" and "court" music on the other. The traditional cultures that did not rely upon written music or had less social stratification could not be readily categorized. In the proliferation of popular music genres, some traditional folk music became also referred to "World music" or "Roots music".
The English term "folklore", to describe traditional folk music and dance, entered the vocabulary of many continental European nations, each of which had its folk-song collectors and revivalists.[2] The distinction between "authentic" folk and national and popular song in general has always been loose, particularly in America and Germany[2] - for example popular songwriters such as Stephen Foster could be termed "folk" in America.[2][14] The International Folk Music Council definition allows that the term "can also be applied to music which has originated with an individual composer and has subsequently been absorbed into the unwritten, living tradition of a community. But the term does not cover a song, dance, or tune that has been taken over ready-made and remains unchanged."[15]
The post–World War II folk revival in America and in Britain started a new genre, contemporary folk music and brought an additional meaning to the term folk music. The popularity of "contemporary folk" recordings caused the appearance of the category "Folk" in the Grammy Awards of 1959: in 1970 the term was dropped in favor of "Best Ethnic or Traditional Recording (including Traditional Blues)", while 1987 brought a distinction between "Best Traditional Folk Recording" and "Best Contemporary Folk Recording". After that they had a "Traditional music" category that subsequently evolved into others. The term "folk", by the start of the 21st century, could cover singer song-writers, such as Donovan from Scotland and American Bob Dylan, who emerged in the 1960s and much more. This completed a process to where "folk music" no longer meant only traditional folk music.[5]
Subject matter[link]
Apart from instrumental music that forms a part of traditional folk music, especially dance music traditions, much traditional folk music is vocal music, since the instrument that makes such music is usually handy. As such, most traditional folk music has meaningful lyrics.
Narrative verse looms large in the traditional folk music of many cultures. This encompasses such forms as traditional epic poetry, much of which was meant originally for oral performance, sometimes accompanied by instruments. Many epic poems of various cultures were pieced together from shorter pieces of traditional narrative verse, which explains their episodic structure and often their in medias res plot developments. Other forms of traditional narrative verse relate the outcomes of battles and other tragedies or natural disasters. Sometimes, as in the triumphant Song of Deborah found in the Biblical Book of Judges, these songs celebrate victory. Laments for lost battles and wars, and the lives lost in them, are equally prominent in many traditions; these laments keep alive the cause for which the battle was fought. The narratives of traditional songs often also remember folk heroes such as John Henry to Robin Hood. Some traditional song narratives recall supernatural events or mysterious deaths.
Hymns and other forms of religious music are often of traditional and unknown origin. Western musical notation was originally created to preserve the lines of Gregorian chant, which before its invention was taught as an oral tradition in monastic communities. Traditional songs such as Green grow the rushes, O present religious lore in a mnemonic form. In the Western world, Christmas carols and other traditional songs preserve religious lore in song form.
Work songs frequently feature call and response structures and are designed to enable the laborers who sing them to coordinate their efforts in accordance with the rhythms of the songs. They are frequently, but not invariably, composed. In the American armed forces, a lively tradition of jody calls ("Duckworth chants") are sung while soldiers are on the march. Professional sailors made use of a large body of sea shanties. Love poetry, often of a tragic or regretful nature, prominently figures in many folk traditions. Nursery rhymes and nonsense verse also are frequent subjects of traditional songs.
Folk song transformations and variations[link]
See also: List of folk music traditions
Music transmitted by word of mouth through a community, in time, develops many variants, because this kind of transmission cannot produce word-for-word and note-for-note accuracy. Indeed, many traditional singers are quite creative and deliberately modify the material they learn.
For example the words of "I'm a Man You Don't Meet Every Day" (Roud 975) are known from a broadside in the Bodleian Library.[16] The date is almost certainly before 1900, and it seems to be Irish. In 1958 the song was recorded in Canada (My Name is Pat and I'm Proud of That). Scottish traveler Jeannie Robertson from Aberdeen, made the next recorded version in 1961. She has changed it to make reference to "Jock Stewart", one of her relatives, and there are no Irish references. In 1976 Scottish artist Archie Fisher deliberately altered the song to remove the reference to a dog being shot. In 1985 The Pogues took it full circle by restoring all the Irish references.
Because variants proliferate naturally, it is naive to believe that there is such a thing as the single "authentic" version of a ballad such as "Barbara Allen". Field researchers in traditional song (see below) have encountered countless versions of this ballad throughout the English-speaking world, and these versions often differ greatly from each other. None can reliably claim to be the original, and it is quite possible that whatever the "original" was, it ceased to be sung centuries ago. Any version can lay an equal claim to authenticity, so long as it is truly from a traditional singing community and not the work of an outside editor.
Cecil Sharp had an influential idea about the process of folk variation: he felt that the competing variants of a traditional song would undergo a process akin to biological natural selection: only those new variants that were the most appealing to ordinary singers would be picked up by others and transmitted onward in time. Thus, over time we would expect each traditional song to become aesthetically ever more appealing — it would be collectively composed to perfection, as it were, by the community.
A literary interest in the popular ballad was not new; it dates back to Thomas Percy and William Wordsworth. English Elizabethan and Stuart composers had often evolved their music from folk themes, the classical suite was based upon stylised folk-dances and Joseph Haydn's use of folk melodies is noted. But the emergence of the term "folk" coincided with an "outburst of national feeling all over Europe" that was particularly strong at the edges of Europe, where national identity was most asserted. Nationalist composers emerged in Eastern Europe, Russia, Scandinavia, Spain and Britain: the music of Dvorak, Smetana, Grieg, Rimsky-Korsakov, Brahms, Liszt, de Falla, Wagner, Sibelius, Vaughan Williams, Bartók and many others drew upon folk melodies.
Regional forms[link]
While the loss of traditional folk music in the face of the rise of popular music is a worldwide phenomenon, it is not one occurring at a uniform rate throughout the world. While even many tribal cultures are losing traditional folk music and folk cultures, the process is most advanced "where industrialization and commercialisation of culture are most advanced".[17] Yet in nations or regions where traditional folk music is a badge of cultural or national identity, the loss of traditional music can be slowed; this is held to be true, for instance in the case of Bangladesh, Hungary, India, Ireland, Scotland, Latvia, Turkey, Portugal, Brittany, and Galicia, Greece and Crete all of which retain their traditional music to some degree, in some such areas the decline of traditional music and loss of traditions has been reversed. This is most obvious where tourist agencies brand some regions with the word "Celtic". Guide books and posters from Ireland, Scotland in Gaelic, English, Doric and Scots, Cornwall, Brittany and Nova Scotia refer to live music performances. Local government often sponsors and promotes performances during tourist seasons, and revives lost traditions.
Fieldwork and scholarship[link]
19th-century Europe[link]
Starting in the 19th century, interested people - academics and amateur scholars - started to take note of what was being lost, and there grew various efforts aimed at preserving the music of the people. One prominent such effort was the collection by Francis James Child in the late 19th century of the texts of over three hundred ballads in the English and Scots traditions (called the Child Ballads) most of which predated the sixteenth century.[8]
Contemporaneously with Child came the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould, and later and more significantly Cecil Sharp who worked in the early 20th century to preserve a great body of English rural traditional song, music and dance, under the aegis of what became and remains the English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS). Sharp also worked in America, recording the traditional songs of the Appalachian Mountains in 1916-1918 in collaboration with Maud Karpeles and Olive Dame Campbell and is considered the first major scholar covering American folk music.[18] Campbell and Sharp are represented under other names by actors in the modern movie Songcatcher. Throughout the 1960s and early to mid-1970s, American scholar Bertrand Harris Bronson published an exhaustive, four-volume collection of the then-known variations of both the texts and tunes associated with what came to be known as the Child Canon. He also advanced some significant theories concerning the workings of oral-aural tradition.
Similar activity was also under way in other countries. One of the most extensive was perhaps the work done in Riga by Krisjanis Barons who between the years between 1894 and 1915 published six volumes including the texts of 217 996 Latvian folk songs; the Latvju dainas. In Norway the work of collectors such as Ludvig Mathias Lindeman was extensively used by Edvard Grieg in his Lyric Pieces for piano and in other works, which became immensely popular.
Around this time, composers of classical music developed a strong interest in traditional song collecting, and a number of outstanding composers carried out their own field work on traditional song. These included Percy Grainger and Ralph Vaughan Williams in England and Béla Bartók in Hungary. These composers, like many of their predecessors, both made arrangements of folk songs and incorporated traditional material into original classical compositions. The Latviju dainas are extensively used in the classical choral works of Andrejs Jurāns, Jānis Cimze, and Emilis Melngailis.
North America[link]
Earliest American scholars were with the The American Folklore Society (AFS), which emerged in the late 1800s. Their studies expanded to include Native American music, but still treated folk music as a historical item preserved in isolated societies.[19] In North America, during the 1930s and 1940s, the Library of Congress worked through the offices of traditional music collectors Robert Winslow Gordon, Alan Lomax and others to capture as much North American field material as possible. Lomax was the first prominent scholar to study distinctly American folk music such as that of cowboys and southern blacks. His first major published work was in 1911, Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads.[20] and was arguably the most prominent US folk music scholar of his time, notably during the beginnings of the folk music revival in the 1930s and early 1940s.
People who studied traditional song sometimes hoped that their work would restore traditional music to the people. For instance, Cecil Sharp campaigned, with some success, to have English traditional songs (in his own heavily edited and expurgated versions) to be taught to school children.
One strong theme amongst folk scholars in the early decades of the 20th century was regionalism. This tended to recognize the diversity of folk music (and related cultures) based on regions of the US rather than based on just its roots. Later, a dynamic of class and circumstances was added to this.[21] The most prominent regionalists were literary figures with a particular interest in folklore. Carl Sandburg often traveled the USA as a writer and a poet. He also collected songs in his travels and, in 1927, published them in a book American Songbag. "In his collections of folk songs, Sandburg added a class dynamic to popular understandings of American folk music. This was the final element of the foundation upon which the early folk music revivalists constructed their own view of Americanism. Sandburg's working class Americans joined with the ethnically racially and regionally diverse citizens that other scholars, public intellectuals, and folklorists celebrated their own definitions of the American folk, definitions that the folk revivalists used in constructing their own understanding of American folk music, and an overarching American identity".[22]
Prior to the 1930s, larger scale themes and linkages between were mostly drawn by folk music scholars and collectors. The 1930s saw the beginnings of larger scale themes, commonalities, themes and linkages in folk music developing in the populace and practitioners as well, often related to the great depression.[23] Regionalism and cultural pluralism grew as influences and themes. During this time folk music began to become enmeshed with political and social activism themes and movements.[23] Two related developments were the U.S. Communist Party's interest in folk music as a way to reach and influence Americans,[24] and politically active prominent folk musicians and scholars seeing communism as a possible better system, through the lens of the Great Depression.[25] Woody Guthrie is a great example of a songwriter and artist with such an outlook.
Much of the folk music growth in the 1930s was in the area of live performance, particularly in folk festivals that began during the 1930s.[26] President Franklin Roosevelt was a fan of folk music, hosted folk concerts at the White House and often patronized folk festivals.[27]
The American folk music revivalists of the 1930s approached folk music in different ways.[28] "Traditionalists like Sarah Gertrude Knott and John Lomax viewed folk music as cultural traditions from a bygone era. Functionalist folklorists like Botkin and Alan Lomax recognize that, though rooted in the past, folk music remained culturally relevant for the communities that maintained the traditions. Left-wing revivalists like Charles Seeger and Lawrence Gellert interpreted folk music as a grass-roots cultural form that came from the people and was written for the people such that it could be used in 'people's' struggles for social and political rights. Despite the revivalists' various political views and different opinions regarding the nature of authentic folk music, they all shared an understanding of Americanism that grounded the nation's identity in cultural pluralism and political democracy"[28] By the end of the 1930s they along with the musicians and others had turned American folk music into a social movement.[28]
Sometimes folk musicians became scholars and advocates themselves. For example, Jean Ritchie (born in 1922) was the youngest child of a large family from Viper, Kentucky that had preserved many of the old Appalachian traditional songs. Ritchie, living in a time when the Appalachians had opened up to outside influence, was university educated and ultimately moved to New York City, where she made a number of classic recordings of the family repertoire and published an important compilation of these songs. (See also Hedy West)
In January 2012, the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, with the Association for Cultural Equity, announced that they would release Lomax's vast archive of 1946 and later recording in digital form. Lomax spent the last 20 years of his life working on an interactive multimedia educational computer project he called the Global Jukebox, which included 5,000 hours of sound recordings, 400,000 feet of film, 3,000 videotapes, and 5,000 photographs.[29] As of March, 2012 this has been accomplished. Approximately 17,400 of Lomax's recordings from 1946 and later have been made available free online. [30][31] This is material from Alan Lomax’s independent archive, begun in 1946, which has been digitized and offered by the Association for Cultural Equity. This is "distinct from the thousands of earlier recordings on acetate and aluminum discs he made from 1933 to 1942 under the auspices of the Library of Congress. This earlier collection—which includes the famous Jelly Roll Morton, Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, and Muddy Waters sessions, as well as Lomax’s prodigious collections made in Haiti and Eastern Kentucky (1937) — is the provenance of the American Folklife Center" [30] at the library of Congress
National and regional forms[link]
Africa[link]
Main article: Music of Africa
Africa is a vast continent and its regions and nations have distinct musical traditions. The music of North Africa for the most part has a different history from Sub-Saharan African music traditions.[32]
The music and dance forms of the African diaspora, including African American music and many Caribbean genres like soca, calypso and Zouk; and Latin American music genres like the samba, rumba, salsa; and other clave (rhythm)-based genres, were founded to varying degrees on the music of African slaves, which has in turn influenced African popular music.
Asia[link]
Many Asian civilizations distinguish between art/court/classical styles and "folk" music, though cultures that do not depend greatly upon notation and have much anonymous art music must distinguish the two in different ways from those suggested by western scholars. For example the late Alam Lohar is a good example of a classical South Asian folk singer of great repute.[citation needed]
Traditional folk music of Sri Lanka[link]
Main article: Music of Sri Lanka
The art, music and dances of Sri Lanka were derived from the elements of nature, has been enjoyed and developed under the Buddhist environment.[33] The music is of several types and uses only a few types of instruments. The folk songs and poems were used in social gatherings to work together. The Indian influenced classical music has grown to be unique.[34][35][36][37] The traditional drama, music and songs are typically Sri Lankan. The temple paintings and carvings used birds, elephants, wild animals, flowers and trees. The Traditional 18 Dances display the dancing of birds and animals. For example:
- Mayura Wannama - the dance of the Peacock
- Hanuma Wannama - The dance of the Monkey
- Gajaga Wannama - The dance of the elephant
Musical types include:
- Local drama music includes Kolam, Nadagam and Noorthy types. Kolam music is based on low country tunes and it is not a developed form of music. It is limited to approximately 3-4 notes and is used by the ordinary people for pleasure and entertainment.
- Nadagam music is a more developed form of drama influenced from South Indian street drama which was introduced by some south Indian Artists. Phillippu Singho from Negombo in 1824 Performed “Harishchandra Nadagama” in Hnguranketha which was originally written in Telingu language. Later “Maname”, “Sanda kinduru” and few others were introduced. Don Bastian of Dehiwala introduced Noorthy firstly by looking at Indian dramas and then John De Silva developed it and did Ramayanaya in 1886.
- Sinhala light music is currently the most popular type of music in Sri Lanka and enriched with the influence of folk music, kolam music, nadagam music, noorthy music, film music, classical music, western music and others. Some artists visited India to learn music and later started introducing light music. Ananda Samarakone was the pioneer of this and also composed the national anthem.
The classical Sinhalese Orchestra consists of five categories of instruments. But, the drum is the king of local percussion instruments and without it, there will be no dance. [38] The vibrant beat of the rhythm of the drums form the basic of the dance. The dances feet bounce off the floor and they leap and swirl in patterns that reflect the complex rhythms of the drum beat. This drum beat may seem simple on the first hearing but it takes a long time to master the intricate rhythms and variations, which the drummer sometimes can bring to a crescendo of intensity. There are six common types of drums falling within 3 styles (one faced. two faced, and flat faced):
- The typical Sinhala Dance is identified as the Kandyan dance and the Gatabera drum is indispensable to this dance.
- Yak-bera is the demon drum or the, drum used in low country dance in which the dancers wear masks and perform devil dancing, which has become a highly developed form of art.
- The Dawula is a barrel shaped drum, and it was used as a companion drum in the past, to keep strict time with the beat.
- The Thammattama is flat, two faced drum. The drummer strikes the drum on the two surfaces on top with sticks, unlike the others where you drum on the sides. This is a companion drum to the afore mentioned Dawula.
- A small double headed hand drum, used to accompany songs. It is mostly heard in the poetry dances (vannam).
- The Rabana is a flat faced circular drum and comes in several sizes. The large Rabana has to be placed on the floor like a circular short-legged table and several people (especially the womenfolk) can sit around it and beat on it with both hands. This is used in festivals such as the Sinhalese New Year and ceremonies such as weddings. The resounding beat of the Rabana symbolizes the joyous moods of the occasion. The small Rabana is a form of mobile drum beat since the player carries it wherever he goes and he produces patterns of back ground drum beat for his songs.
Other instruments include:
- The "Thalampata" - 2 small cymbals joined together by a string.
- The wind section, is dominated by an instrument akin to the clarinet. This is not normally used for the dances. This is important to not because the Sinhalese dance is not set to music as the western world knows it. Here, the primary sense of rhythm, and patterns of man in motion, is the music that is beaten out by the drummer.
- The flutes of metal such as silver & brass produce shrill music to accompany Kandyan Dances, while the plaintive strains of music of the reed flute may pierce the air in devil-dancing. The conch-shell (Hakgediya) is another form of a natural instrument, and the player blows it to announce the opening of ceremonies of grandeur.
- The Ravanahatha (ravanhatta, rawanhattha, ravanastron or ravana hasta veena) is a bowed fiddle popular in Western India. It is believed to have originated among the Hela civilisation of Sri Lanka in the time of King Ravana. The bowl is made of cut coconut shell, the mouth of which is covered with goat hide. A dandi, made of bamboo, is attached to this shell. The principal strings are two: one of steel and the other of a set of horsehair. The long bow has jingle bells[39][40] Srilankan composer Dinesh Subasinghe brought few changes in to this ancient instrument,he brought a unique style and technique to play it like a Sarangi, in year 2007 for the first time he brought this instrument to electronic media in Sri Lanka and in to the recording music industry, he also used this instrument for A.R.Rahman's rhymes school cd and for some Indian Tamil movies.[41][42][43][44][45]
Australia[link]
See also: Australian folk music and Indigenous Australian music
Folk song traditions were taken to Australia by early settlers from England, Scotland and Ireland and gained particular foothold in the rural outback. The rhyming songs, poems and tales written in the form of bush ballads often relate to the itinerant and rebellious spirit of Australia in The Bush, and the authors and performers are often referred to as bush bards.[46] The 19th century was the golden age of bush ballads. Several collectors have catalogued the songs including John Meredith whose recording in the 1950s became the basis of the collection in the National Library of Australia.[46] The songs tell personal stories of life in the wide open country of Australia. Typical subjects include mining, raising and droving cattle, sheep shearing, wanderings, war stories, the 1891 Australian shearers' strike, class conflicts between the landless working class and the squatters (landowners), and outlaws such as Ned Kelly, as well as love interests and more modern fare such as trucking.[47] The most famous bush ballad is [Waltzing Matilda]], which has been called "the unofficial national anthem of Australia."[48]
Indigenous Australian music includes the music of Australian Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, who are collectively called Indigenous Australians; it incorporates a variety of distinctive traditional music styles practiced by Indigenous Australian peoples, as well as a range of contemporary musical styles of and fusion with European traditions as interpreted and performed by indigenous Australian artists. Music has formed an integral part of the social, cultural and ceremonial observances of these peoples, down through the millennia of their individual and collective histories to the present day. The traditional forms include many aspects of performance and musical instrumentation unique to particular regions or Indigenous Australian groups. Equal elements of musical tradition are common through much of the Australian continent, and even beyond. The culture of the Torres Strait Islanders is related to that of adjacent parts of New Guinea and so their music is also related. Music is a vital part of Indigenous Australians' cultural maintenance.[49]
Europe[link]
See also: Turkish folk music, Greek folk music, French folk music, English folk music, Swedish folk music, Italian folk music, Icelandic folk music, Sami music, Nordic folk music, Romani music, Hungarian folk music, and Bard (Soviet Union)
Celtic traditional music[link]
See also: Folk music of Ireland
Celtic music is a term used by artists, record companies, music stores and music magazines to describe a broad grouping of musical genres that evolved out of the folk musical traditions of the Celtic peoples of Western Europe. These traditions include Irish, Scottish, Manx, Cornish, Welsh, Breton traditions. Galician music is often included, though significant research showing that this has any close musical relationship is lacking. Brittany's Folk revival began in the 1950s with the "bagadoù" and the "kan-ha-diskan" before growing to world fame through Alan Stivell's work since the mid-1960s.[50]
In Ireland, The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem (although its members were all Irish-born, the group became famous while based in New York's Greenwich Village), The Dubliners, Clannad, Planxty, The Chieftains, The Pogues, The Irish Rovers, and a variety of other folk bands have done much over the past few decades to revitalise and re-popularise Irish traditional music. These bands were rooted, to a greater or lesser extent, in a living tradition of Irish music and benefited from the efforts of artists such as Seamus Ennis and Peter Kennedy.[50] In Scotland, Capercaillie, Runrig, Jackie Leven, Julie Fowlis, Karine Polwart, Alasdair Roberts, Dick Gaughan, Wolfstone, Corries, Boys of the Lough, and Silencers[disambiguation needed 
] have keep Scottish folk vibrant and fresh by mixing traditional Scottsh and Gaelic folks songs with more contemporary genres. These artists have also been commercial successful in continental Europe and North America.
Eastern Europe[link]
See also: Music of Eastern Europe
During the Communist era national folk dancing was actively promoted by the state. Dance troupes from Russia and Poland toured Western Europe from about 1937 to 1990. The Red Army Choir recorded many albums. A female choir from Bulgarian State Radio recorded "Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares".
The Hungarian group Muzsikás played numerous American tours and participated in the Hollywood movie The English Patient while the singer Márta Sebestyén worked with the band Deep Forest. The Hungarian táncház movement, started in the 1970s, involves strong cooperation between musicology experts and enthusiastic amateurs.[citation needed] However, traditional Hungarian folk music and folk culture barely survived in some rural areas of Hungary, and it has also begun to disappear among the ethnic Hungarians in Transylvania. The ttáncházmovement revived broader folk traditions of music, dance, and costume together and created a new kind of music club. The movement spread to ethnic Hungarian communities elsewhere in the world.
Balkan music[link]
See also: Balkan music
The Balkan folk music was influenced by the mingling of Balkan ethnic groups in the period of Ottoman Empire. It comprises the music of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Bulgaria, Greece, Montenegro, Serbia, Romania, Slovenia, Republic of Macedonia, Albania, Turkey, the historical states of Yugoslavia or the State Union of Serbia and Montenegro and geographical regions such as Thrace. Some music is characterised by complex rhythm. An important part of the whole Balkan folk music is the music of the local Romani ethnic minority.
Nordic folk music[link]
See also: Nordic folk music, Traditional Nordic dance music, Swedish folk music, Icelandic folk music, Sami music, Yoik, Nyckelharpa, and Kantele
Nordic folk music includes a number of traditions in Northern European, especially Scandinavian, countries. The Nordic countries are generally taken to include Iceland, Norway, Finland, Sweden and Denmark. Sometimes it is taken to include Greenland and historically the Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
The many regions of the Nordic countries share certain traditions, many of which have diverged significantly. It is possible to group together the Baltic states (or, sometimes, only Estonia) and parts of northwest Russia as sharing cultural similarities, contrasted with Norway, Sweden, Denmark and the Atlantic islands of, Iceland and the Faroe Islands. Greenland's Inuit culture has its own musical traditions, influenced by Scandinavian culture. Finland shares many cultural similarities with both the Baltic nations and the Scandinavian nations. The Saami of Sweden, Norway, Finland and Russia have their own unique culture, with ties to the neighboring cultures.
Swedish folk music[link]
Swedish folk music is a genre of music based largely on folkloric collection work that began in the early 19th century in Sweden.[51] The primary instrument of Swedish folk music is the fiddle. Another common instrument, unique to Swedish traditions, is the nyckelharpa. Most Swedish instrumental folk music is dance music; the signature music and dance form within Swedish folk music is the polska. Vocal and instrumental traditions in Sweden have tended to share tunes historically, though they have been performed separately.[52] Beginning with the folk music revival of the 1970s, vocalists and instrumentalists have also begun to perform together in folk music ensembles.
Latin and South America[link]
Andean music comes from the general area inhabited by Quechuas, Aymaras and other peoples that roughly in the area of the Inca Empire prior to European contact. It includes folklore music of parts of Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Chile, Colombia, Peru and Venezuela. Andean music is popular to different degrees across Latin America, having its core public in rural areas and among indigenous populations. The Nueva Canción movement of the 70s revived the genre across Latin America and bought it to places where it was unknown or forgotten.
Nueva canción (Spanish for 'new song') is a movement and genre within Latin American and Iberian music of folk music, folk-inspired music and socially committed music. It some respects its development and role is similar to the second folk music revival. This includes evolution of this new genre from traditional folk music, essentially contemporary folk music except that that English genre term is not commonly applied to it. Nueva cancion is recognized as having played a powerful role in the social upheavals in Portugal, Spain and Latin America during the 1970s and 1980s.
Nueva cancion first surfaced during the 1960s as "The Chilean New Song" in Chile. The musical style emerged shortly afterwards in Spain and other areas of Latin America where it came to be known under similar names. Nueva canción renewed traditional Latin American folk music, and was soon associated with revolutionary movements, the Latin American New Left, Liberation Theology, hippie and human rights movements due to political lyrics. It would gain great popularity throughout Latin America, and is regarded as a precursor to Rock en español.
Cueca is a family of musical styles and associated dances from Chile, Bolivia, Peru, and Argentina.
Trova and Son are styles of traditional Cuban music originating in the province of Oriente that includes influences from Spanish song and dance such as Bolero and contradanza as well as Afro-Cuban rhythm and percussion elements.
North America[link]
United States[link]
See also: American folk music
File:Roscoeholcomb.JPG
Roscoe Holcomb
American traditional music is also called roots music. Roots music is a broad category of music including bluegrass, country music, gospel, old time music, jug bands, Appalachian folk, blues, Cajun and Native American music. The music is considered American either because it is native to the United States or because it developed there, out of foreign origins, to such a degree that it struck musicologists as something distinctly new. It is considered "roots music" because it served as the basis of music later developed in the United States, including rock and roll, contemporary folk music, rhythm and blues, and jazz.
Cajun music, an emblematic music of Louisiana, is rooted in the ballads of the French-speaking Acadians of Canada. Cajun music is often mentioned in tandem with the Creole-based, Cajun-influenced zydeco form, both of Acadiana origin. These French Louisiana sounds have influenced American popular music for many decades, especially country music, and have influenced pop culture through mass media, such as television commercials.
Appalachian music is the traditional music of the region of Appalachia in the Eastern United States. It is derived from various European and African influences, including English ballads, Irish and Scottish traditional music (especially fiddle music), religious hymns, and African-American blues. First recorded in the 1920s, Appalachian musicians were a key influence on the early development of Old-time music, country music, and bluegrass, and were an important part of the American folk music revival. Instruments typically used to perform Appalachian music include the banjo, American fiddle, fretted dulcimer, and guitar.[53]
Early recorded Appalachian musicians include Fiddlin' John Carson, Henry Whitter, Bascom Lamar Lunsford, the Carter Family, Clarence Ashley, Frank Proffitt, and Dock Boggs, all of whom were initially recorded in the 1920s and 1930s. Several Appalachian musicians obtained renown during the folk revival of the 1950s and 1960s, including Jean Ritchie, Roscoe Holcomb, Ola Belle Reed, Lily May Ledford, and Doc Watson. Country and bluegrass artists such as Loretta Lynn, Roy Acuff, Dolly Parton, Earl Scruggs, Chet Atkins, and Don Reno were heavily influenced by traditional Appalachian music.[53] Artists such as Bob Dylan, Jerry Garcia, and Bruce Springsteen have performed Appalachian songs or rewritten versions of Appalachian songs.
The Carter Family was a traditional American folk music group that recorded between 1927 and 1956. Their music had a profound impact on bluegrass, country, Southern Gospel, pop and rock musicians. They were the first vocal group to become country music stars; a beginning of the divergence of country music from traditional folk music. Their recordings of such songs as "Wabash Cannonball" (1932), "Will the Circle Be Unbroken" (1935), "Wildwood Flower" (1928), and "Keep On the Sunny Side" (1928) made them country standards.[54]
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Barbara Allen Barbara Allen is a traditional American folk ballad derived from a much older English song of the same name. - Problems listening to the files? See media help.
Canada[link]
See also: Music of Canada and French-Canadian music
Canada's traditional folk music is particularly diverse.[55] "Traditional folk music of European origin has been present in Canada since the arrival of the first French and British settlers in the 16th and 17th centuries."[55] "They fished the coastal waters and farmed the shores of what became Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and the St Lawrence River valley of Quebec."[55]
The fur trade and its voyageurs brought this farther north and west into Canada; later lumbering operations and lumberjacks continued this process.[55]
"Agrarian settlement in eastern and southern Ontario and western Quebec in the early 19th century established a favorable milieu for the survival of many Anglo-Canadian folksongs and broadside ballads from Great Britain and the USA. Despite massive industrialization, folk music traditions have persisted in many areas until today. In the north of Ontario, a large Franco-Ontarian population kept folk music of French origin alive. Populous Acadian communities in the Atlantic provinces contributed their song variants to the huge corpus of folk music of French origin centred in the province of Quebec. A rich source of Anglo-Canadian folk music can be found in the Atlantic region, especially Newfoundland. Completing this mosaic of musical folklore is the Gaelic music of Scottish settlements, particularly in Cape Breton, and the hundreds of Irish songs whose presence in eastern Canada dates from the Irish famine of the 1840s, which forced the large migrations of Irish to North America."[55]
"Knowledge of the history. of Canada is essential in understanding the mosaic of Canadian folk song. Part of this mosaic is supplied by the folk songs of Canada brought by European and Anglo-Saxon settlers to the new land. Cartier's historical journey, in 1535, to the territory that was to become Canada initiated the immigration of the French. Without too much delay people came from Great Britain, Germany, and other European countries to live in close proximity. Each brought a wealth of folk music from his homeland and some of it has survived to this day. Barbeau has estimated that well over ten thousand French folk songs and their variants have been collected in Canada. Many of the ancient ones have been forgotten in France."[11]
Folk music revivals[link]
"Folk music revival" refers to either a period of renewed interest in traditional folk music, or to an event or period which transforms it; the latter usually includes a social activism component. The most prominent instance of the former is the British folk revival of approximately 1890-1920. The most prominent and influential instance of the latter (to the extent that it is usually called "the folk music revival")is the folk revival of the mid 20th century, centered in the English-speaking world which gave birth to contemporary folk music. See the "Contemporary folk music" section for a description of this revival.
One earlier revival influenced western classical music. Such composers as Percy Grainger, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Béla Bartók, made field recordings or transcriptions of folk singers and musicians.
In Spain, Isaac Albéniz (1860–1909) produced piano works reflect his Spanish heritage, including the Suite Iberia (1906–1909). Enrique Granados (1867–1918) composed zarzuela, Spanish light opera, and Danzas Españolas - Spanish Dances. Manuel de Falla (1876–1946) became interested in the cante jondo of Andalusian flamenco, the influence of which can be strongly felt in many of his works, which include Nights in the Gardens of Spain and Siete canciones populares españolas ("Seven Spanish Folksongs", for voice and piano). Composers such as Fernando Sor and Francisco Tarrega established the guitar as Spain's national instrument. Modern Spanish folk artists abound (Mil i Maria, Russian Red, et al.) modernizing whilst respecting the traditions of their forebears.
Flamenco grew in popularity through the 20th century, as did northern styles such as the Celtic music of Galicia. French classical composers, from Bizet to Ravel, also drew upon Spanish themes, and distinctive Spanish genres became universally recognized.
Folk music revivals or roots revivals also encompass a range of phenomena around the world where there is a renewed interest in traditional music. This is often by the young, often in the traditional music of their own country, and often included new incorporation of social awareness, causes, and evolutions of new music in the same style. Nueva canción, a similar evolution of a new form of socially committed music occurred in several Spanish speaking countries.
First British folk revival[link]
The "first" British folk revival was a roots revival which occurred approximately 1890 -1920 and was marked by heightened interest in traditional music and its preservation. It arose from earlier developments, perhaps combined with changes in the nature of British identity, led to a much more intensive and academic attempt to record what was seen as a vanishing tradition, and is now usually referred to as the first English or British folk revival.
Contemporary folk music[link]
Starting in the mid-20th century a new form of popular folk music evolved from traditional folk music. This process and period is called the (second) folk revival and reached a zenith in the 1960s. The most common name for this new form of music is also "folk music", but is often called "contemporary folk music" or "folk revival music" to make the distinction.[1] This type of folk music also includes fusion genres such as folk rock, electric folk, and others. While contemporary folk music is a genre generally distinct from traditional folk music, it often shares the same English name, performers and venues as traditional folk music; even individual songs may be a blend of the two.
Definitions of "contemporary folk music" are generally vague and variable. Here it is taken to mean all music that is called folk that is not traditional music; a set of genres that began with and then evolved from the folk revival of the mid-20th century. According to Hugh Blumenfeld, for the American folk scene, in general it is:
- "Anglo-American, embracing acoustic and/or tradition-based music from the U.K. and the United States.
- Musically, it is mainly Western European in its origins; linguistically, it is predominantly English-based.
- The few exceptions to the above are based mainly on prevailing political/historical conditions in the Anglo-American world and the demographics of folk fans: Celtic music, blues, some Central and South American music, Native American music, and Klezmer."[56] With "folk music" being a particularly English term, this definition may have general relevance. This is the common use of the term contemporary folk music (and the subject of this section), but is not the only case of evolution of new forms of folk music from traditional folk music. Nueva canción, a similar evolution of a new form of socially committed music occurred in several Spanish speaking countries. New forms of traditional music emerge elsewhere to someday become themselves traditional folk music.
Contemporary country music descends ultimately from a rural American folk tradition, but has evolved differently. Bluegrass music is a professional development of American old time music, intermixed with blues and jazz.
Folk revival of the mid-20th century in Britain and America[link]
See also: American folk music revival and British folk revival
While the Romantic nationalism of the folk revival had its greatest influence on art-music, the "second folk revival" of the later 20th century brought a new genre of popular music with artists marketed by amplified concerts, recordings and broadcasting. This is the genre that remains as folk music even when traditional music is considered to be a separate genre. One of the earliest figures in this revival was Woody Guthrie.[57] The American Woody Guthrie collected folk music in the 1930s and 1940s and also composed his own songs, as did Pete Seeger. In the 1930s Jimmie Rodgers, in the 1940s Burl Ives, in the early 1950s Seeger's group The Weavers and Harry Belafonte, and in the late 1950s The Kingston Trio as well as other professional, commercial groups became popular. In 1963–1964, the ABC television network aired the Hootenanny television series devoted to this brand of folk music and also published the associated magazine ABC-TV Hootenanny. Starting in 1950 the Sing Out!, Broadside, and The Little Sandy Review magazines helped spread both traditional and composed songs, as did folk-revival-oriented record companies.
In the United Kingdom, the folk revival fostered young artists like The Watersons, Martin Carthy and Roy Bailey and a generation of singer-songwriters such as Bert Jansch, Ralph McTell, Donovan and Roy Harper; all seven entered the public eye in the 1960s. Bob Dylan, Paul Simon and Tom Paxton visited Britain for some time in the early 1960s, the first two, particularly, making later use of the traditional English material they heard.
In 1950, Alan Lomax came to Britain and met A.L. 'Bert' Lloyd and Ewan MacColl, a meeting credited as inaugurating the second British folk revival. In London the colleagues opened The Ballads and Blues Club, eventually renamed the Singers' Club, possibly the first folk club; it closed in 1991. As the 1950s progressed into the 1960s, the folk revival movement built up in both Britain and America. The mid and late 1960s saw fusion forms of folk (such as folk rock) achieve prominence never before seen by folk music, but the early 1960s were perhaps the zenith of non-fusion folk music prominence in the music scene.
Major performers who emerged from the 1940s to the early 1960s[link]
Some major folk music performers who emerged during 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s were:
- Woody Guthrie (1912 –1967) is best known as an American singer-songwriter and folk musician, whose musical legacy includes hundreds of political, traditional and children's songs, ballads and improvised works. He frequently performed with the slogan This Machine Kills Fascists displayed on his guitar. His best-known song is "This Land Is Your Land". Many of his recorded songs are archived in the Library of Congress.[58] In the 1930s Guthrie traveled with migrant workers from Oklahoma to California while learning, rewriting, and performing traditional folk and blues songs along the way. Many the songs he composed were about his experiences in the Dust Bowl era during the Great Depression, earning him the nickname the "Dust Bowl Balladeer".[59] Throughout his life, Guthrie was associated with United States communist groups, though he was never formally joined the Party.[60] Guthrie fathered American folk musician Arlo Guthrie. During his later years Guthrie served as a figurehead in the folk movement, providing inspiration to a generation of new folk musicians, including mentor relationships with Ramblin' Jack Elliott and Bob Dylan. Such songwriters as Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Bruce Springsteen, Pete Seeger, Joe Strummer and Tom Paxton have acknowledged their debt to Guthrie as an influence.
- The Almanac Singers Almanac members Millard Lampell, Lee Hays, Pete Seeger, and Woody Guthrie began playing together informally in 1940; the Almanac Singers were formed in December 1940.[60] They invented a driving, energetic performing style, based on what they felt was the best of American country string band music, black and white. They evolved towards controversial topical music. Two of the regular members of the group, Pete Seeger and Lee Hays, later became founding members of The Weavers.
- Burl Ives - as a youth, Ives dropped out of college to travel around as an itinerant singer during the early 1930s, earning his way by doing odd jobs and playing his banjo and guitar. In 1930, he had a brief, local radio career on WBOW radio in Terre Haute, Indiana, and in the 1940s he had his own radio show, titled The Wayfaring Stranger, titled after one of the popular ballads he sang. The show was very popular, and in 1946 Ives was cast as a singing cowboy in the film Smoky. Ives went on to play parts in other popular film as well. His first book, The Wayfaring Stranger, was published in 1948.[61]
- Pete Seeger had met and been influenced by many important folk musicians (and singer-songwriters with folk roots), such as Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly. Seeger had labor movement involvements, and he met Woody at a "Grapes of Wrath" migrant workers’ concert on March 3, 1940, and the two thereafter began a musical collaboration (which included the Almanac Singers) and then formed The Weavers. As a song writer, authored or co-authored "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?", "If I Had a Hammer (The Hammer Song)", (composed with Lee Hays of The Weavers), and "Turn, Turn, Turn!", which have been recorded by many artists both in and outside the folk revival movement and are still sung throughout the world. In 1948, Seeger wrote the first version of his now-classic How to Play the Five-String Banjo, an instructional book that many banjo players credit with starting them off on the instrument. He has recorded, sung, and performed for more than seventy years and has become the most powerful force in the American folk revival after Guthrie.[62]
- The Weavers were formed in 1947 by Pete Seeger, Ronnie Gilbert, Lee Hays, and Fred Hellerman. After they debuted at the Village Vanguard in New York in 1948, they were then discovered by arranger Gordon Jenkins and signed with Decca Records, releasing a series of successful but heavily-orchestrated single songs. The group's political associations in the era of the Red Scare forced them to break up in 1952; they re-formed in 1955 with a series of successful concerts and album recordings on Vanguard Records. A fifth member, Erik Darling, sometimes sat in with the group when Seeger was unavailable and ultimately replaced Seeger in The Weavers when the latter resigned from the quartet in a dispute about its commercialism in general and its specific agreement to record a cigarette commercial.[63]
- Harry Belafonte, another influential performer, started his career as a club singer in New York to pay for his acting classes. In 1952, he signed a contract with RCA Victor and released his first record album, Mark Twain and Other Folk Favorites. His breakthrough album Calypso (1956) was the first LP to sell over a million copies. The album spent 31 weeks at number one, 58 weeks in the top ten, and 99 weeks on the US charts. It introduced American audiences to Calypso music and Belafonte was dubbed the "King of Calypso." Belafonte went on to record in many genres, including blues, American folk, gospel, and more. In 1959, he starred in Tonight With Belafonte a nationally televised special that introduced Odetta in her debut to a prime time audience. She sang Water Boy and performed a duet with Belafonte of There's a Hole in My Bucket that hit the national charts in 1961.[64]
- Odetta - In 1953 singers Odetta and Larry Mohr recorded an LP that was released in 1954 as Odetta and Larry, an album that was partially recorded live at San Francisco's Tin Angel bar. Odetta enjoyed a long and respected career with a repertoire of traditional songs and blues until her death in 2009.[64]
- The Kingston Trio was formed in 1957 in the Palo Alto, California area by Bob Shane, Nick Reynolds, and Dave Guard, who were just out of college. They were greatly influenced by the Weavers, the calypso sounds of Belafonte, and other semi-pop folk artists such as the Gateway Singers and The Tarriers. The unprecedented popularity and album sales of this group from 1957 to 1963 (including fourteen top ten and five number one LPs on the Billboard charts[65]) was a significant factor in creating a commercial and mainstream audience for folk-styled music where little had existed prior to their emergence.[66] The Kingston Trio's success was followed by other highly successful pop-folk acts, such as The Limeliters.
- The Limeliters are an American folk music group, formed in July 1959 by Lou Gottlieb (bass), Alex Hassilev (baritone), and Glenn Yarbrough (tenor). The group was active from 1959 until 1965, when they disbanded. After a hiatus of sixteen years Yarbrough, Hassilev, and Gottlieb reunited and began performing as The Limeliters again.
- Joan Baez’s career got started in 1958 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where at 17 she gave her first coffee-house concert. She was invited to perform at the premiere Newport Folk Festival in 1959 by pop folk star Bob Gibson, after which Baez was sometimes called "the barefoot Madonna," gaining renown for her clear voice and three-octave range. She recorded her first album for a Vanguard Records the following year – a collection of laments and traditional folk ballads from the British Isles, accompanying the songs with guitar. Her second LP release went gold, as did her next (live) albums. One record featured her rendition of a song by the then-unknown Bob Dylan. In the early 1960s, Baez moved into the forefront of the American folk-music revival. Increasingly, her personal convictions – peace, social justice, anti-poverty – were reflected in the topical songs that made up a growing portion of her repertoire, to the point that Baez became a symbol for these particular concerns.
- The Chad Mitchell Trio began in 1959 and emerged in the early 1960s.
- The Highwaymen were a circa 1960 "collegiate folk" group, which originated at Wesleyan University and had a Billboard number-one hit in 1961 with "Michael", a version of the African-American spiritual Michael, Row the Boat Ashore, and another Top 20 hit in 1962 with "Cottonfields". "Michael" sold over one million copies, and was awarded a gold record.[67][68]
- The Serendipity Singers, a nine-member folk group started at the University of Colorado and became known nationally in 1964.
- The New Christy Minstrels are an American folk music group founded by Randy Sparks in 1961.[69] They recorded over 20 albums and had several hits, including "Green, Green", "Saturday Night", "Today", "Denver", and "This Land is Your Land". Their 1962 debut album, Presenting The New Christy Minstrels won a Grammy Award and sat in the Billboard charts for two years.[70]
- The Rooftop Singers were an American progressive folk singing trio in the early 1960s, best known for the hit record "Walk Right In"
- Bob Dylan often performed, and sometimes toured, with Joan Baez, starting when she was a singer of mostly traditional songs. As Baez adopted some of Dylan's songs into her repertoire and even introduced Dylan to her avid audiences, a large following on the folk circuit, it helped the young songwriter to gain initial recognition. By the time Dylan recorded his first LP (1962) he had developed a style reminiscent of Woody Guthrie. He began to write songs that captured the "progressive" mood on the college campuses and in the coffee houses. Though by 1964 there were many new guitar-playing singer/songwriters, it is arguable that Dylan eventually became the most popular of these younger folk-music-revival performers.
- Peter, Paul and Mary debuted in the early 1960s and were a American trio who ultimately became one of the biggest musical acts of the 1960s. The trio was composed of Peter Yarrow, Paul Stookey and Mary Travers. They were one of the main folk music torchbearers of social commentary music in the 1960s. As the decade passed, their music incorporated more elements of pop and rock.
- Judy Collins debuted in the early 1960s. At first, she sang traditional folk songs or songs written by others — in particular the protest poets of the time, such as Tom Paxton, Phil Ochs, and Bob Dylan. She also recorded her own versions of important songs from the period, such as Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man" and Pete Seeger's "Turn, Turn, Turn."
- The Seekers an Australian folk and pop music group were formed in 1962.
The mid-1960s through the early 1970s[link]
The large musical, political, lifestyle, and counterculture changes most associated with "the 60s" occurred during the second half of the 1960s and the first year or two of the 1970s. Folk music underwent a related rapid evolution and expansion at that same time. Large changes occurred through the evolution of established performers such as Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Judy Collins, The Seekers and Peter Paul and Mary, and also through the creation of new fusion genres with rock and pop. Dylan's use of electric instruments helped inaugurate the genres of folk rock and country rock, particularly by his album John Wesley Harding. The Seekers emerged in 1963 and blended traditional music, contemporary folk music and pop, an illustration of the rapid evolution and diversification of folk music than began in the mid 1960s. These changes represented a further departure from traditional folk music. The Byrds with hits such as Seeger's "Turn, Turn, Turn" were emblematic of a new term folk rock. Other performers such as Simon & Garfunkel and The Mamas & the Papas created new hard-to-classify music that is folk inspired or styled. During this period, the term "protest music" was often used to characterize folk music with topical political themes. Folk singers and songwriters such as Phil Ochs, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Arlo Guthrie and Tom Paxton followed in Woody Guthrie's footsteps, writing "protest music" and topical songs and expressing support for various causes including the American Civil Rights Movement and anti-war causes associated with the Vietnam War. Bonnie Koloc is a Chicago-based American folk music singer-songwriter who made her recording debut in 1971. The Canadian performers Gordon Lightfoot, Leonard Cohen, Bruce Cockburn and Joni Mitchell represented such fusions and were all invested with the Order of Canada. A number of performers who'd begun their careers singing largely traditional material, as typified by Baez and Collins, began to write their own material. Many of the acid rock bands of San Francisco began by playing acoustic folk and blues. Barry McGuire left The New Christie Minstrels and recorded Eve of Destruction in 1965. The Smothers Brothers television shows featured many folk performers, including formerly blacklisted ones such as Pete Seeger and Harry Belafonte.[71]
The late 1960s saw the advent of electric folk groups. This is a form of folk rock, with a focus on indigenous (European, and, emblematically, English) songs. A key electric folk moment was the release of Fairport Convention's album Liege and Lief. Guitarist Richard Thompson declared that the music of the band demanded a corresponding "English Electric" style, while bassist Ashley Hutchings formed Steeleye Span to pursue a more traditional repertoire performed in the electric folk style. Exponents of electric folk music such as Fairport Convention, Pentangle, Alan Stivell and Mr. Fox saw electrification of traditional musical forms as a means to reach a far wider audience.
Mid-1970s through present day[link]
Malicorne, a French electric folk group emerged in 1973, starting with traditional music and then later blended it with pop. Stan Rogers wrote and performed folk music with strong historical nautical themes, emerging in 1976. Si Kahn emerged in 1974 at the more political and topical end of the folk music spectrum.
In the 1980s, artists like The Knitters propagated cowpunk or folk punk, which eventually evolved into alt country. More recently the same spirit has been embraced and expanded on by artists such as Dave Alvin, Miranda Stone and Steve Earle.
Starting in the 1970s it was fueled by new singer-songwriters such as Steve Goodman, John Prine who emerged in the early 1970s, The Pogues in the early 1980s and Ireland's The Corrs the 1990s brought traditional tunes back into the album charts. Carrie Newcomer emerged with Stone Soup in 1984 and individually in 1991.
In the second half of the 1990s, once more, folk music made an impact on the mainstream music via a younger generation of artists such as Eliza Carthy, Kate Rusby and Spiers and Boden. Hard rock and heavy metal bands such as Korpiklaani, Skyclad, Waylander and Finntroll meld elements from a wide variety of traditions, including in many cases instruments such as fiddles, tin whistles, accordions and bagpipes. Folk metal often favours pagan-inspired themes. Viking metal is defined in its folk stance, incorporating folk interludes into albums (e.g., Bergtatt and Kveldssanger, the first two albums by once-folk metal, now-experimental band Ulver).
Specialty sub-genres[link]
Filk music can be considered folk music stylistically and culturally (though the 'community' it arose from, science fiction fandom, is an unusual and thoroughly modern one).[72] Neofolk began in the 1980s, fusing traditional European folk music with post-industrial music, historical topics, philosophical commentary, traditional songs and paganism. The genre is largely European.
Anti folk began in New York City in the 1980s. Folk punk, known in its early days as rogue folk, is a fusion of folk music and punk rock. It was pioneered by the London-based Irish band The Pogues in the 1980s. Industrial folk music is a characterization of folk music normally referred to under other genres, and covers music of or about industrial environments and topics, including related protest music.
Other sub-genres include Indie folk, Techno-folk, Freak folk and Americana and fusion genres such as folk metal, progressive folk, psychedelic folk, and neofolk.
Notable venues[link]
The National Folk Festival (USA) is an itinerant folk festival in the United States. Since 1934, it has been run by the National Council for the Traditional Arts (NCTA) and has been presented in 26 communities around the nation. After leaving some of these communities, the National Folk Festival has spun off several locally run folk festivals in its wake including the Lowell Folk Festival, the Richmond Folk Festival, the American Folk Festival and, most recently, the Montana Folk Festival.
The National Folk Festival (UK) in England has been running for over thirty five years - starting off as a festival organized in Keele University.
The National Folk Festival is Australia’s premier folk festival event and is attended by over 50,000 people.
The four-day Philadelphia Folk Festival began in 1962. It is sponsored by the non-profit Philadelphia Folksong Society. The event hosts contemporary and traditional artists in genres including World/Fusion, Celtic, Singer/Songwriter, Folk Rock, Country, Klezmer, and Dance. It is held annually on the third weekend in August. The event now hosts approximately 12,000 visitors, presenting bands on 6 stages.
The Newport Folk Festival is an annual folk festival held near Newport, Rhode Island. It ran most year from 1959 to 1970, and 1985 to the present, with an attendance of approximately 10,000 persons.
It is sometimes claimed that the earliest folk festival was the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival, 1928, in Asheville, North Carolina, founded by Bascom Lamar Lunsford. Sidmouth Festival began in 1954, and Cambridge Folk Festival began in 1965. The Cambridge Folk Festival in Cambridge, England is noted for having a very wide definition of who can be invited as folk musicians. The "club tents" allow attendees to discover large numbers of unknown artists, who, for ten or 15 minutes each, present their work to the festival audience.
Stan Rogers is a lasting fixture of the Canadian folk festival Summerfolk, held annually in Owen Sound, Ontario, where the main stage and amphitheater are dedicated as the "Stan Rogers Memorial Canopy". The festival is firmly fixed in tradition, with Rogers' song "The Mary Ellen Carter" being sung by all involved, including the audience and a medley of acts at the festival.
The Canmore Folk Music Festival is Alberta's longest running folk music festival. The Feast of the Hunters' Moon in Indiana draws approximately 60,000 visitors per year.
Folk music is popular among some audiences today, with folk music clubs meeting to share traditional-style songs, and there are major folk music festivals in many countries, e.g. the Woodford Folk Festival, National Folk Festival and Port Fairy Folk Festival are amongst Australia's largest major annual events, attracting top international folk performers as well as many local artists.
Urkult Näsåker, Ångermanland held August each year[73] is purportedly Sweden's largest world-music festival.
See also[link]
- List of folk festivals
- Ethnomusicology
- Roud Folk Song Index
- Indigenous music
- Canadian Folk Music Awards
- The Voice of the People (anthology of UK folk songs)
- List of art music traditions
- Folklore
- Anthology of American Folk Music
- Folk process
Notes and references[link]
- ^ a b Ruehl, Kim. "Folk Music". About.com definition. http://folkmusic.about.com/od/glossary/g/FolkMusic.htm. Retrieved August 18, 2011.
- ^ a b c d e f g Percy Scholes, The Oxford Companion to Music, OUP 1977, article "Folk Song".
- ^ A.L.Lloyd, Folk Song in England, Panther Arts, 1969, p. 13.
- ^ Richard Middleton, Studying Popular Music, Philadelphia: Open University Press (1990/2002). ISBN 0-335-15275-9, p. 127.
- ^ a b Ronald D. Cohen Folk music: the basics (CRC Press, 2006), pp. 1-2.
- ^ a b International Folk Music Council definition (1954/5), given in Lloyd (1969) and Scholes (1977).
- ^ Charles Seeger (1980), citing the approach of Redfield (1947) and Dundes (1965), quoted in Middleton (1990) p.127.
- ^ a b Donaldson, 2011 page 13
- ^ a b A. L. Lloyd, Folk Song in England, Panther Arts, 1969, pp. 14-5.
- ^ Middleton, Richard 1990, p. 127. Studying Popular Music. Milton Keynes; Philadelphia: Open University Press. ISBN 0-335-15276-7 (cloth), ISBN 0-335-15275-9 (pbk)
- ^ a b c Mills, Isabelle (1974). http://cjtm.icaap.org/content/2/v2art5.html The Heart of the Folk Song, Canadian Journal for Traditional Music Vol. 2
- ^ Charles Seeger (1980) quoted in Middleton (1990) p. 127.
- ^ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hr9FP93o8Ro Alan Lomax's 1947 Documentary narrated by Pete Seeger
- ^ A.L.Lloyd, Folk Song in England, Panther Arts, 1969
- ^ Quoted by both Scholes (1977) and Lloyd (1969).
- ^ Bodley24 OX.ac.uk
- ^ Alison Vardy, et al., About Traditional Music Page, Celtic Harp Sheet Music site. Accessed 16 February 2007.
- ^ Donaldson, 2011 p 20
- ^ Donaldson, 2011, p 22-23
- ^ Donaldson, 2011, p 24-26
- ^ Donaldson, 2011, p 32-37
- ^ Donaldson, 2011, page needed)
- ^ a b Donaldson, 2011, p 39-55
- ^ Donaldson, 2011, p 72-74
- ^ Donaldson, 2011, p 67-70
- ^ Donaldson, 2011, p 44-52
- ^ Donaldson, 2011, p 42-43
- ^ a b c Donaldson, 2011, p 87
- ^ "The Premiere of the Global Jukebox". Radio interview with Don Fleming by John Hockenberry on PRI's The Takeaway.
- ^ a b http://research.culturalequity.org/home-audio.jsp Association for Cultural Equity's main overview and search page for Lomax's 1946-on recordings Retrieved March 28, 2012
- ^ http://www.npr.org/blogs/therecord/2012/03/28/148915022/alan-lomaxs-massive-archive-goes-online March 28, 2012 story on the Lomax's 1946-on recordings now being available free on line. Retrieved March 28,2012
- ^ GCSE Music - Edexcel Areas of Study, Coordination Group Publications, UK, 2006, page 34, quoting examination board syllabus.
- ^ http://serendib.btoptions.lk/article.php?issue=29&id=734
- ^ http://www.naadro.com/#home
- ^ http://www.sundayobserver.lk/2001/pix/PrintPage.asp?REF=/2009/11/29/mon05.asp
- ^ http://www.sundayobserver.lk/2009/11/15/mon50.asp
- ^ http://www.dailynews.lk/2010/09/11/fea50.asp
- ^ http://www.info.lk/srilanka/sightsandsoundsofsrilanka/srilankanmusicandsounds/index.htm
- ^ http://www.dailynews.lk/2001/pix/PrintPage.asp?REF=/2011/02/09/art21.asp
- ^ http://www.dailynews.lk/2008/02/13/art01.asp
- ^ http://www.india-forums.com/news/srilanka/76066-sri-lankan-revives-ravana-musical-instrument-feature.htm
- ^ http://www.island.lk/2008/03/09/news11.html
- ^ http://www.dailynews.lk/2008/02/13/art01.asp
- ^ http://85.227.250.116/search?q=ravanhatta
- ^ http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P3-1681722361.html
- ^ a b Kerry O'Brien December 10, 2003 7:30 Report, abc.net.au
- ^ G. Smith, Singing Australian: A History of Folk and Country Music (Pluto Press Australia, 2005), p. 2.
- ^ Who'll come a waltzing Matilda with me?", The National Library of Australia, retrieved 14 March 2008.
- ^ Wilurarra Creative (2010). Music
- ^ a b Sawyers, June Skinner (2000). Celtic Music: A Complete Guide. Da Capo Press. ISBN 0-306-81007-7.
- ^ Kaminsky, David (2005) pages 33-41. "Hidden Traditions: Conceptualizing Swedish Folk Music in the Twenty-First Century." Ph.D. Dissertation, Harvard University.
- ^ Jersild,Margareta (1976) pages 53-66. "Om förhållandet mellan vokalt och instrumentalt i svensk folkmusik. Svensk tidskrift för musikforskning 58(2): 53-66. (Swedish)
- ^ a b Ted Olson, "Music — Introduction". Encyclopedia of Appalachia (Knoxville, Tenn.: University of Tennessee Press, 2006), pp. 1109—1120.
- ^ Heatley, Michael (2007). The Definitive Illustrated Encyclopedia of Rock. London, United Kingdom: Star Fire. ISBN 978-1-84451-996-5.
- ^ a b c d e http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/index.cfm?PgNm=TCE&Params=A1ARTU0001240 An article on folk music from the Encyclopedia of Music in Canada
- ^ www.balladtree.com/folk101/001a_def.htm Definitions of folk music by Hugh Blumenfeld, www.balladtree.com
- ^ Traditional songs - Folk song lyrics of the world
- ^ Library of Congress. Related Material - Woody Guthrie Sound Recordings at the American Folklife Center. Retrieved on November 27, 2007.
- ^ University of Virginia: Crossroads: Woody Guthrie
- ^ a b Spivey, Christine A. This Land is Your land, This Land is My Land: Folk Music, Communism, and the Red Scare as a Part of the American Landscape. The Student Historical Journal 1996–1997, Loyola University New Orleans, 1996.
- ^ Cultural Equality - Alan Lomax profile Burl Ives (1909–1995) by Ellen Harold and Peter Stone
- ^ Peter Dreier, "Pete Seeger Deserves One More Honor -- the Nobel Peace Prize"The Huffington Post 5/4/09.
- ^ David King Dunaway, How Can I Keep From Singing?
- ^ a b Clarke, SP, "Odetta- American Folk Music Pioneer"
- ^ Rubeck, Shaw, Blake et al., The Kingston Trio On Record (Naperville IL: KK Inc, 1986), p. 11 ISBN 978-0-9614594-0-6
- ^ Eder, Bruce. "Biography of The Kingston Trio". AllMusic Guide. http://www.allmusic.com/artist/p2038/biography. Retrieved July 17, 2009.
- ^ Murrells, Joseph (1978). The Book of Golden Discs (2nd ed.). London: Barrie and Jenkins Ltd. p. 136. ISBN 0-214-20512-6.
- ^ "Wesfiles.wesleyan.edu". Wesfiles.wesleyan.edu. https://wesfiles.wesleyan.edu/courses/musc108/2002FaFin/Mag/articles/features/highwaymen.html. Retrieved 2011-08-17.
- ^ Bogdanov, Vladimir; Woodstra, Chris; Erlewine, Stephen Thomas, All music guide: The Definitive Guide to Popular Music, Hal Leonard Corporation, 2001. Cf. p.793
- ^ Eder, Bruce. "The New Christy Minstrels". AllMusic. http://www.allmusic.com/artist/p2089. Retrieved 2010-07-13.
- ^ Bianculli, David (2009). Dangerously Funny: The Uncensored Story of the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. New York: Touchstone (Simon & Schuster). p. 382. ISBN 978-1-4391-0116-2.
- ^ Definition of filk by FilkOntario
- ^ http://www.urkult.se/ Festival website
References[link]
These are the references with multiple abbreviated cites with varying page numbers
- Donaldson, Rachel Clare, 2011 Music for the People: the Folk Music Revival And American Identity, 1930-1970, Ph.D. Dissertation, Vanderbilt University, May, 2011, Nashville, Tennessee
Further reading[link]
(does not include those used as references)
Traditional folk music[link]
- Bayard, Samuel Preston (1950). "Prolegomena to a Study of the Principal Melodic Families of British-American Folksong", Journal of American Folklore pp. 1–44. Reprinted in McAllester, David Park (ed.) (1971) Readings in ethnomusicology New York: Johnson Reprint. OCLC 2780256
- Bearman, C. J. (2000). "Who Were the Folk? The Demography of Cecil Sharp's Somerset Folk Singers." The Historical Journal (September 2000) Vol. 43 No.3 pp. 751–75. JSTOR 3020977
- Bevil, Jack Marshall (1984). Centonization and Concordance in the American Southern Uplands Folksong Melody: A Study of the Musical Generative and Transmittive Processes of an Oral Tradition. PhD Thesis, North Texas University, Ann Arbor: University Microfilms International. OCLC 12903203
- Bevil, Jack Marshall (1986). "Scale in Southern Appalachian Folksong: a Reexamination", College Music Symposium Vol. 26, 77-91.[verification needed]
- Bevil, Jack Marshall (1987). "A Paradigm of Folktune Preservation and Change Within the Oral Tradition of a Southern Appalachian Community, 1916-1986." Unpublished. Read at the 1987 National Convention of the American Musicological Society, New Orleans.
- Bronson, Bertrand Harris. The Ballad As Song (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969).
- Bronson, Bertrand Harris. The Singing Tradition of Child's Popular Ballads (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976).
- Bronson, Bertrand Harris. The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads, with Their Texts, According to the Extant Records of Great Britain and North America, 4 volumes (Princeton and Berkeley: Princeton University and University of California Presses, 1959, ff.).
- Cartwright, Garth (2005). Princes Amongst Men: Journeys with Gypsy Musicians. London: Serpent's Tail. ISBN 1-85242-877-5
- Carson, Ciaran (1997). Last Night's Fun: In and Out of Time with Irish Music. North Point Press. ISBN 978-0-86547-515-1
- Cowdery, James R. (1990). The Melodic Tradition of Ireland. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press. ISBN 978-0-87338-407-0
- Farsani, Mohsen (2003) Lamentations chez les nomades bakhtiari d'Iran. Paris: Université Sorbonne Nouvelle.
- Harker, David (1985). Fakesong: The Manufacture of British 'Folksong', 1700 to the Present Day. Milton Keynes [Buckinghamshire]; Philadelphia: Open University Press. ISBN 0-335-15066-7
- Jackson, George Pullen (1933). White Spirituals in the Southern Uplands: The Story of the Fasola Folk, Their Songs, Singings, and "Buckwheat Notes". Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. LCCN 33-003792 OCLC 885331 Reprinted by Kessinger Publishing (2008) ISBN 978-1-4366-9044-7
- Matthews, Scott (2008). "John Cohen in Eastern Kentucky: Documentary Expression and the Image of Roscoe Halcomb During the Folk Revival". Southern Spaces. http://southernspaces.org/2008/john-cohen-eastern-kentucky-documentary-expression-and-image-roscoe-halcomb-during-folk-revival. (August 6)[page needed]
- Karpeles, Maud. An Introduction to English Folk Song. 1973. Oxford. Oxford University Press.
- Keller, Marcello Sorce (1984). "The Problem of Classification in Folksong Research: A Short History", Folklore Vol. 95, no. 1:100–104. JSTOR 1259763
- Poladian, Sirvart. "Melodic Contour in Traditional Music," Journal of the International Folk Music Council III (1951), 30-34.
- Poladian, Sirvart. "The Problem of Melodic Variation in Folksong," Journal of American Folklore (1942), 204-211.
- Rooksby, Rikky, Dr Vic Gammon et al. The Folk Handbook. (2007). Backbeat
- Sharp, Cecil. Folk Song: Some Conclusions. 1907. Charles River Books
- Sharp, Cecil English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians. Collected by Cecil J. Sharp. Ed. Maud Karpeles. 1932. London. Oxford University Press.
- Warren-Findley, Jannelle (1980). "Journal of a Field Representative : Charles Seeger and Margaret Valiant" Ethnomusicology, Vol. 24, No. 2 (May, 1980), pp. 169–210 JSTOR 851111
Contemporary folk music[link]
- Cantwell, Robert. When We Were Good: The Folk Revival. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996. ISBN 0-674-95132-8
- Cohen, Ronald D., Folk music: the basics, Routledge, 2006.
- Cohen, Ronald D., A history of folk music festivals in the United States, Scarecrow Press, 2008
- Cohen, Ronald D. Rainbow Quest: The Folk Music Revival & American Society, 1940-1970. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002. ISBN 1-55849-348-4
- Cohen, Ronald D., ed. Wasn't That a Time? Firsthand Accounts of the Folk Music Revival. American Folk Music Series no. 4. Lanham, Maryland and Folkstone, UK: The Scarecrow Press, Inc. 1995.
- Cohen, Ronald D., and Dave Samuelson. Songs for Political Action. Booklet to Bear Family Records BCD 15720 JL, 1996.
- Cray, Ed, and Studs Terkel. Ramblin Man: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie. W.W. Norton & Co., 2006.
- Cunningham, Agnes "Sis", and Gordon Friesen. Red Dust and Broadsides: A Joint Autobiography. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999. ISBN 1-55849-210-0
- De Turk, David A.; Poulin, A., Jr., The American folk scene; dimensions of the folksong revival, New York : Dell Pub. Co., 1967
- Denisoff, R. Serge. Great Day Coming: Folk Music and the American Left. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971.
- Denisoff, R. Serge. Sing Me a Song of Social Significance. Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1972. ISBN 0-87972-036-0
- Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. London: Verso, 1996.
- Dunaway, David. How Can I Keep From Singing: The Ballad of Pete Seeger. [1981, 1990] Villard, 2008. ISBN 0-306-80399-2
- Eyerman, Ron, and Scott Barretta. "From the 30s to the 60s: The folk Music Revival in the United States". Theory and Society: 25 (1996): 501-43.
- Eyerman, Ron, and Andrew Jamison. Music and Social Movements. Mobilizing Traditions in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge University Press, 1998. ISBN 0-521-62966-7
- Filene, Benjamin. Romancing the Folk: Public Memory & American Roots Music. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000. ISBN 0-8078-4862-X
- Goldsmith, Peter D. Making People's Music: Moe Asch and Folkways Records. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998. ISBN 1-56098-812-6
- Hajdu, David. Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña and Richard Fariña. New York: North Point Press, 2001. ISBN 0-86547-642-X
- Hawes, Bess Lomax. Sing It Pretty. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008
- Jackson, Bruce, ed. Folklore and Society. Essay in Honor of Benjamin A. Botkin. Hatboro, Pa Folklore Associates, 1966
- Lieberman, Robbie. "My Song Is My Weapon:" People's Songs, American Communism, and the Politics of Culture, 1930-50. 1989; Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995. ISBN 0-252-06525-5
- Lomax, Alan, Woody Guthrie, and Pete Seeger, eds. Hard Hit Songs for Hard Hit People. New York: Oak Publications, 1967. Reprint, Lincoln University of Nebraska Press, 1999.
- Lynch, Timothy. Strike Song of the Depression (American Made Music Series). Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001.
- Middleton, Richard (1990). Studying Popular Music. Milton Keynes; Philadelphia: Open University Press. ISBN 0-335-15276-7 (cloth), ISBN 0-335-15275-9 (pbk).
- Reuss, Richard, with [finished posthumously by] Joanne C. Reuss. American Folk Music and Left Wing Politics. 1927-1957. American Folk Music Series no. 4. Lanham, Maryland and Folkstone, UK: The Scarecrow Press, Inc. 2000.
- Rubeck, Jack; Shaw, Allan; Blake, Ben et al. The Kingston Trio On Record. Naperville, IL: KK, Inc, 1986. ISBN 978-0-9614594-0-6
- Scully, Michael F. (2008). The Never-Ending Revival: Rounder Records and the Folk Alliance. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
- Seeger, Pete. Where Have All the Flowers Gone: A Singer's Stories. Bethlehem, Pa.: Sing Out Publications, 1993.
- Willens, Doris. Lonesome Traveler: The Life of Lee Hays. New York: Norton, 1988.
- Weissman, Dick. Which Side Are You On? An Inside History of the Folk Music Revival in America. New York: Continuum, 2005. ISBN 0-8264-1698-5
- Wolfe, Charles, and Kip Lornell. The Life and Legend of Leadbelly. New York: Da Capo [1992] 1999.
Covering both traditional music and contemporary folk music[link]
- Pegg, Carole (2001). "Folk Music". The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell. London: Macmillan.
- Van der Merwe, Peter (1989). Origins of the Popular Style: The Antecedents of Twentieth-Century Popular Music. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ISBN 0-19-316121-4.
External links[link]
- The World and Traditional Music section at the British Library Sound Archive
- The Traditional Music in England project, World and Traditional Music section at the British Library Sound Archive Dead link
- The Mudcat Cafe and Digital Tradition song database
- Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture - Folk Music
- The Crooked Road: Heritage music trail-A 243-mile historical music oriented trail.
- Folk Alley A Non-Profit Listener Supported Folk Music Resource, Streaming online since 2004
- Traditional songs - Folk song lyrics of the world
- Ben Gray Lumpkin Digital Folk Music Collection Howard B. Waltz Music Library, University of Colorado Boulder
- Free scores of Folk music in the Choral Public Domain Library (ChoralWiki)
- Free scores (songs) at www.traditional-songs.com
- Folk Radio UK - Playing folk music of the British Isles and beyond + the latest Folk Music News and Reviews
- The short film "To Hear Your Banjo Play (1947)" is available for free download at the Internet Archive [more]
- Welsh Ballads Website
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