This VSI offers readers something no other introduction to folk music does: a cross-cultural, comparative approach, a survey of the basic issues as they have unfolded over time, and specific examples from widely differing sites of how folk musicians themselves, as well as corporations, non-governmental organizations, and governments have made full use of the available resources, older and newer strategies, and multiple agendas that keep the folk music...

"From Washington Square Park and the Gaslight Café to WNYC Radio and Folkways Records, New York City's cultural, artistic, and commercial assets helped to shape a distinctively urban breeding ground for the folk music revival of the 1950s and 60s. Folk city explores New York's central role in fueling the nationwide craze for folk music in postwar America. It involves the efforts of record company producers and executives, club owners, concert promoters,...

"Lament from Epirus is an unforgettable journey into a musical obsession, which traces a unique genre back to the roots of song itself. As King hunts for two long-lost virtuosos?one of whom may have committed a murder?he also tells the story of the Roma people who pioneered Epirotic folk music and their descendants who continue the tradition today. King discovers clues to his most profound questions about the function of music in the history of humanity:...

This is an anecdotal history of Greenwich Village, the prodigiously influential and infamous New York City neighborhood, from the 1600s to the present. The most famous neighborhood in the world, Greenwich Village has been home to outcasts of diverse persuasions, from "half-free" Africans to working-class immigrants, from artists to politicians, for almost four hundred years. In this book, the author weaves a narrative history of the Village, a tapestry...

"A candid memoir by folk legend Judy Collins of her lifelong struggle with compulsive overeating and the spiritual solution that saved her. Since childhood, Judy Collins has been preoccupied, haunted, seduced, and taunted by food, a problem that nearly cost her her career and her life. For decades she thought her food issues were moral issues--lack of self-will, lack of discipline--and she worked hard at controlling what she thought of as her shameful...

A fascinating history that examines how real estate, gentrification, community, and the highs and lows of New York City itself shaped the city's music scenes--from folk to house music--and how those scenes shaped the city. Take a walk through almost any neighborhood in Manhattan and you'll likely pass some of the most significant clubs in American music history. But you won't know it--almost all of these venues have been demolished or repurposed,...

"When a musician's new song hits a political nerve, he finds himself in the crosshairs of Spanish nationalists' ire, and it's up to Bruno to track down the extremists who seem ready to take deadly measures, in another delightful installment of the internationally acclaimed series featuring Bruno, Chief of Police. Les Troubadours, a folk music group that Bruno has long supported, go viral with their new number, "Song for Catalonia," when the Spanish...

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