Traditional Music in Coastal Louisiana

Traditional Music in Coastal Louisiana PDF

Author: Joshua Clegg Caffery

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2013-11-05

Total Pages: 451

ISBN-13: 080715203X

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Alan Lomax's prolific sixty-four-year career as a folklorist and musicologist began with a trip across the South and into the heart of Louisiana's Cajun country during the height of the Great Depression. In 1934, his father John, then curator of the Library of Congress's Archive of American Folk Song, took an eighteen-year-old Alan and a 300-pound aluminum disk recorder into the rice fields of Jennings, along the waterways of New Iberia, and behind the gates of Angola State Penitentiary to collect vestiges of African American and Acadian musical tradition. These recordings now serve as the foundational document of indigenous Louisiana music. Although widely recognized by scholars as a key artifact in the understanding of American vernacular music, most of the recordings by John and Alan Lomax during their expedition across the central-southern fringe of Louisiana were never transcribed or translated, much less studied in depth. This volume presents, for the first time, a comprehensive examination of the 1934 corpus and unveils a multifaceted story of traditional song in one of the country's most culturally dynamic regions. Through his textual and comparative study of the songs contained in the Lomax collection, Joshua Clegg Caffery provides a musical history of Louisiana that extends beyond Cajun music and zydeco to the rural blues, Irish and English folk songs, play-party songs, slave spirituals, and traditional French folk songs that thrived at the time of these recordings. Intimate in its presentation of Louisiana folklife and broad in its historical scope, Traditional Music in Coastal Louisiana honors the legacy of John and Alan Lomax by retrieving these musical relics from obscurity and ensuring their understanding and appreciation for generations to come. Includes: Complete transcriptions of the 1934 Lomax field recordings in southwestern Louisiana Side-by-side translations from French to English Photographs from the 1934 field trip and biographical details about the performers

French Louisiana Music and Its Patrons

French Louisiana Music and Its Patrons PDF

Author: Patricia Peknik

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-09-10

Total Pages: 223

ISBN-13: 3319974246

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French Louisiana music emerged from the bayous and prairies of Southwest Louisiana in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Pioneered by impoverished Acadian and Afro-Caribbean settlers, the sound is marked by a high-pitched fiddle playing loud and fast above the bellow of a diatonic accordion. With lyrics about disaster and heartache sung cheerfully in a French dialect, the effect is dissonant and haunting. French Louisiana music was largely ignored in mainstream music culture, except by a handful of collectors, scholars, and commercial promoters who sought to popularize it. From the first recordings in the 1920s to the transformation of the genre by the 1970s, the spread of this regional sound was driven by local, national, and international elites who saw the music’s traditions and performers in the context of larger social, political, and cultural developments, including the folk revival and the civil rights and ethnic revival movements. Patricia Peknik illuminates how the music’s history and meaning were interpreted by a variety of actors who brought the genre onto a national and global stage, revealing the many interests at work in the popularization of a regional music.

Last Stand of the Louisiana Shrimpers

Last Stand of the Louisiana Shrimpers PDF

Author: Emma Christopher Lirette

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2022-08-24

Total Pages: 173

ISBN-13: 1496841425

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In recent years, shrimpers on the Louisiana coast have faced a historically dire shrimp season, with the price of shrimp barely high enough to justify trawling. Yet, many of them wouldn’t consider leaving shrimping behind, despite having transferrable skills that could land them jobs in the oil and gas industry. Since 2001, shrimpers have faced increasing challenges to their trade: an influx of shrimp from southeast Asia, several traumatic hurricane seasons, and the largest oil spill at sea in American history. In Last Stand of the Louisiana Shrimpers, author Emma Christopher Lirette traces how Louisiana Gulf Coast shrimpers negotiate land and blood, sea and freedom, and economic security and networks of control. This book explores what ties shrimpers to their boats and nets. Despite feeling trapped by finances and circumstances, they have created a world in which they have agency. Lirette provides a richly textured view of the shrimpers of Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana, calling upon ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, interdisciplinary scholarship, and critical theory. With evocative, lyrical prose, she argues that in persisting to trawl in places that increasingly restrict their way of life, shrimpers build fragile, quietly defiant worlds, adapting to a constantly changing environment. In these flickering worlds, shrimpers reimagine what it means to work and what it means to make a living.

Way Down in Louisiana

Way Down in Louisiana PDF

Author: Todd Mouton

Publisher: University of Louisiana

Published: 2015-09

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 9781935754732

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With Clifton Chenier's amazing life and career as the centerpiece, this collection of profiles gathered across two decades unites some of the world's most innovative creative forces.

A New History of American and Canadian Folk Music

A New History of American and Canadian Folk Music PDF

Author: Dick Weissman

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2019-09-05

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 150134417X

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Building on his 2006 book, Which Side Are You On?, Dick Weissman's A New History of American and Canadian Folk Music presents a provocative discussion of the history, evolution, and current status of folk music in the United States and Canada. North American folk music achieved a high level of popular acceptance in the late 1950s. When it was replaced by various forms of rock music, it became a more specialized musical niche, fragmenting into a proliferation of musical styles. In the pop-folk revival of the 1960s, artists were celebrated or rejected for popularizing the music to a mass audience. In particular the music seemed to embrace a quest for authenticity, which has led to endless explorations of what is or is not faithful to the original concept of traditional music. This book examines the history of folk music into the 21st century and how it evolved from an agrarian style as it became increasingly urbanized. Scholar-performer Dick Weissman, himself a veteran of the popularization wars, is uniquely qualified to examine the many controversies and musical evolutions of the music, including a detailed discussion of the quest for authenticity, and how various musicians, critics, and fans have defined that pursuit.

Franco-America in the Making

Franco-America in the Making PDF

Author: Jonathan K. Gosnell

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2018-07-01

Total Pages: 365

ISBN-13: 0803285272

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"A study of the manifestation and persistence of hybrid Franco-American literary, musical, culinary, and media cultures in North America, particularly New England and southern Louisiana"--

In the Creole Twilight

In the Creole Twilight PDF

Author: Joshua Clegg Caffery

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2015-09-07

Total Pages: 99

ISBN-13: 080716156X

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Many of the recurring motifs found in south Louisiana's culture spring from the state's rich folklore. Influenced by settlers of European and African heritage, celebrated customs like the Courir de Mardi Gras and fabled creatures like the Loup-Garou grow out of the region's distinctive oral tradition. Joshua Clegg Caffery's In the Creole Twilight draws from this vibrant and diverse legacy to create an accessible reimagining of the state's traditional storytelling and songs. A scholar and Grammy-nominated musician, Caffery borrows from the syllabic structures, rhyme schemes, narratives, and settings that characterize Louisiana songs and tales to create new verse that is both well-researched and refreshingly inventive. Paired with original pen-and-ink illustrations as well as notes that clarify the origins of characters and themes, Caffery's compositions provide a link to the old worlds of southern Louisiana while constructing an entirely new one.

Jazz à la Creole

Jazz à la Creole PDF

Author: Caroline Vézina

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2022-11-29

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 1496842456

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During the formative years of jazz (1890–1917), the Creoles of Color—as they were then called—played a significant role in the development of jazz as teachers, bandleaders, instrumentalists, singers, and composers. Indeed, music penetrated all aspects of the life of this tight-knit community, proud of its French heritage and language. They played and/or sang classical, military, and dance music as well as popular songs and cantiques that incorporated African, European, and Caribbean elements decades before early jazz appeared. In Jazz à la Creole: French Creole Music and the Birth of Jazz, the author describes the music played by the Afro-Creole community since the arrival of enslaved Africans in La Louisiane, then a French colony, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, emphasizing the many cultural exchanges that led to the development of jazz. Caroline Vézina has compiled and analyzed a broad scope of primary sources found in diverse locations from New Orleans to Quebec City, Washington, DC, New York City, and Chicago. Two previously unpublished interviews add valuable insider knowledge about the music on French plantations and the danses Créoles held in Congo Square after the Civil War. Musical and textual analyses of cantiques provide new information about the process of their appropriation by the Creole Catholics as the French counterpart of the Negro spirituals. Finally, a closer look at their musical practices indicates that the Creoles sang and improvised music and/or lyrics of Creole songs, and that some were part of their professional repertoire. As such, they belong to the Black American and the Franco-American folk music traditions that reflect the rich cultural heritage of Louisiana.

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