Selling Folk Music

An Illustrated History

Ronald D. Cohen, David Bonner

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781496837936
  9781628462159
• eBook ISBN:
  9781626745841
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Folk Music

Selling Folk Music: An Illustrated History highlights commercial sources that reveal how folk music has been packaged and sold to a broad, shifting audience in the United States. Folk music has a varied and complex scope and lineage, including the blues, minstrel tunes, Victorian parlor songs, spirituals and gospel tunes, country and western songs, sea shanties, labor and political songs, calypsos, pop folk, folk-rock, ethnic, bluegrass, and more. The genre is of major importance in the broader spectrum of American music, and it is easy to understand why folk music has been marketed as America's music.

Selling Folk Music presents the public face of folk music in the United States via its commercial promotion and presentation throughout the twentieth century. Included are concert flyers; sheet music; book, songbook, magazine, and album covers; concert posters and flyers; and movie lobby cards and posters, all in their original colors. The 1964 hootenanny craze, for example, spawned such items as a candy bar, pinball machine, bath powder, paper dolls, Halloween costumes, and beach towels.

The almost five hundred images in Selling Folk Music present a new way to catalog the history of folk music while highlighting the transformative nature of the genre. Following the detailed introduction on the history of folk music, illustrations from commercial products make up the bulk of the work, presenting a colorful, complex history.

Cecil J. Sharp, ed., One Hundred English Folksongs (Philadelphia: Oliver Ditson Co., 1916).

“Rain: A Negro Folk Song Collected by the Misses Turner,” sheet music, 1915.

Old Favorite Songs (Lawrenceburg, IN: Lawrenceburg Roller Mills Co., ca. 1915).

Harvey P. Moyer, Songs of Socialism (Chicago: Co-Operative Printing Co., 1911).

“The Advancing Proletaire,” sheet music, ca. 1915.

Henry Edward Krehbiel, Afro-American Folksongs: A Study in Racial and National Music (New York: G. Schirmer, Inc., 1914).

I. W. W. Songs to Fan the Flames of Discontent Joe Hill edition (Cleveland: I. W. W. Publishing Bureau, December 1914).

Carl Sandburg, The American Songbag (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1927).

Victor Records, flyer, “Popular Ballads and Mountaineer Tunes,” 1927.

Lorraine d’Oremieulx Warner, A Kindergarten Book of Folk-Songs (Boston: E. C. Schirmer Music Co., 1922).

Archibald T. Davison and Thomas Whitney Surette, 140 Folk-Songs: Rote Songs for Grades I, II, and III (Boston: E. C. Schirmer Music Co., 1921).

Bascom Lamar Lunsford and Lamar Stringfield, 30 and 1 Folk Songs from the Southern Mountains (New York: Carl Fischer, Inc., 1929).

The Hobo in Song and Poetry (Cincinnati: V. C. Anderson, ca. 1920).

Harry “Mac” McClintock, “Halleluiah! I’m a Bum,” sheet music (Villa Moret, 1928).

Tom Mix, Western Songs (Chicago: M. M. Cole Pub. Co., 1935).

Sixth Annual Ber...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Introduction
• Selling Folk Music
• Notes on Illustrations
• Index