Transatlantic Roots Music

Folk, Blues, and National Identities

Jill Terry, Neil A. Wynn

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781628460643
• eBook ISBN: 9781496834935
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

This book presents a collection of essays on the debates about origins, authenticity, and identity in folk and blues music. The essays had their origins in an international conference on the Transatlantic routes of American roots music, out of which emerged common themes and questions of origins and authenticity in folk music, black and white, American and British. The central theme is musical influences, but issues of identity—national, local, and racial—are also recurring subjects. The extent to which these identities were invented, imagined, or constructed by the performers, or by those who recorded their work for posterity, is also a prominent concern and questions of racial identity are particularly central. The book features a new essay on the blues by Paul Oliver alongside an essay on Oliver's seminal blues scholarship. There are also several essays on British blues and the links between performers and styles in the United States and Britain and new essays on critical figures such as Alan Lomax and Woody Guthrie. This volume uniquely offers perspectives from both sides of the Atlantic on the connections and interplay of influences in roots music and the debates about these subjects drawing on the work of eminent established scholars and emerging young academics who are already making a contribution to the field. Throughout, the contributors offer the most recent scholarship available on key issues.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Historical and Social Background of Transatlantic Roots Music Revivals
• 2. “Early Morning Blues”: The Early Years of the Transatlantic Connection
• 3. Dreaming Up the Blues: Transatlantic Blues Scholarship in the 1950s
• 4. American Balladry and the Anxiety of Ancestry
• 5. Woody Guthrie at the Crossroads
• 6. “It’s Not British Music, It’s American Music”: Bob Dylan and Britain
• 7. Alan Lomax: An American Ballad Hunter in Great Britain
• 8. Putting the Blues in British Blues Rock
• 9. That White Man, Burdon: The Animals, Race, and the American South in the British Blues Boom
• 10. Born in Chicago: The Impact of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band on the British Blues “Network,” 1964–1970
• 11. “When Somebody Take Your Number and Use It”: The 1960s, British Blues, and America’s Racial Crossroads
• 12. Groove Me: Dancing to the Discs of Northern Soul
• 13. Some Reflections on “Celtic” Music
• Contributors
• Index