| Description |
1 online resource (xii, 220 pages) |
| Series |
American popular music |
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American popular music (Amherst, Mass.)
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| Contents |
Introduction: Hidden in plain sight: Lawrence Gellert and "Negro songs of protest" -- The roads to perdition : Lawrence Gellert's early biography and emergence -- Free radical : Lawrence Gellert's early collecting and rise to prominence -- "Songs about the White man" : Black protest and White denial -- "The great red heart of the American Revolution" : Lawrence Gellert, the Lomaxes, and the leftwing folksong revival -- Big white fog : controversy and containment in the postwar -- Scholarly rigors : propaganda or protest in the Gellert archive? -- Epilogue: Freedom songs, sixties revivalism, and the tragedy of White denial |
| Summary |
"Lawrence Gellert has long been a mysterious figure in American folk and blues studies, gaining prominence in the left-wing folk revival of the 1930s for his fieldwork in the U.S. South. A 'lean, straggly-haired New Yorker,' as Time magazine called him, Gellert was an independent music collector, without formal training, credentials, or affiliation. At a time of institutionalized suppression, he worked to introduce white audiences to a tradition of black musical protest that had been denied and overlooked by prior white collectors. By the folk and blues revival of the 1960s, however, when his work would again seem apt in the context of the civil rights movement, Gellert and his collection of Negro Songs of Protest were a conspicuous absence. A few leading figures in the revival defamed Gellert as a fraud, dismissing his archive of black vernacular protest as a fabrication-an example of left-wing propaganda and white interference. A Sound History is the story of an individual life, an excavation of African American musical resistance and dominant white historiography, and a cultural history of radical possibility and reversal in the defining middle decades of the U.S. twentieth century."-- Provided by publisher |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references and index |
| Notes |
Online resource; title from digital title page (JSTOR, viewed June 21, 2021) |
| Subject |
Gellert, Lawrence, 1898-1979.
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| SUBJECT |
Gellert, Lawrence, 1898-1979
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Gellert, Lawrence, 1898-1979 fast |
| Subject |
African Americans -- Music -- History and criticism.
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Folk music -- United States -- History and criticism
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Protest songs -- United States -- History and criticism
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Music -- Historiography.
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African Americans -- Historiography
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Music -- Political aspects -- United States -- History -- 20th century
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SOCIAL SCIENCE / General
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Protest songs
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Music -- Political aspects
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Music -- Historiography
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Folk music
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African Americans -- Music
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African Americans -- Historiography
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United States
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| Genre/Form |
History
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Criticism, interpretation, etc.
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| Form |
Electronic book
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| ISBN |
9781613767795 |
|
161376779X |
|
