First published in 1980 and now available only from the University of New Mexico Press, this classic compilation of New Mexico folk music is based on thirty-five years of field research by a giant of modern music. Composer John Donald Robb, a passionate aficionado of the traditions of his adopted state, traveled New Mexico recording and transcribing music from the time he arrived in the Southwest in 1941.
The selection of songs was designed to give players a repertoire of the most common played tunes, as well as examples of the most commonly used techniques. The GUITAR collection contains a classic Bill Monroe tune Big Mon and 24 traditional tunes, ranging from Arkansas Traveler, Turkey in the Straw, Old Joe Clark, Sailor's Hornpipe, and Sally Goodin, to the less familiar Whiskey Before Breakfast and others. The book also contains a CD with each song recorded in a such a way that you can pan to hear the lead instrument alone, the backing track alone, or the two combined.
As part of the Works Progress Administration during the Depression, two women interviewers, Lou Sage Batchen and Annette Hesch Thorp, gathered womens stories or cuentosfrom many native ancianas to glean vivid details of a way of life now long disappeared.
... well-written and well-documented landmark study... " --Choice This book raises important ideological and esthetic questions about the interpretation of artistic and cultural manifestations in a given society."--Hispanic American Historical Review The present volume is provocative in direction and a refreshing addition to the extant literature on the Mexican corrido genre." --American Ethnologist [Herrera-Sobek's] refreshing approach to analyzing masculine attitudes toward the feminine as expressed in the Mexican corrido is not only insightful but courageous." --Inez Cardozo-Freeman, Southern Folklore ... well-researched, insightful, clearly written, and well-illustrated study of a genre familiar in Hispanic culture." --Journal of the American Studies Association ... provides tantalizing insights into the inner workings and meanings of Mexico's favorite folk ballads..." --Journal of Third World Studies Challenging the stereotypical view of the passive Mexican/Chicana woman of the archetype, the author examines the portrayal of female figures in over three thousand corridos or Mexican ballads and shows that in spite of long-dominant patriarchal ideology, the corridos reveal the presence of self-confident women throughout Mexican history. Included are a discography, a detailed bibliography of corrido collections, and several photographs of soldaderas from the internationally famous Augustin Casasola collection.
The juxtaposition of thirty black-and-white remastered Lindbergh images and thirty contemporary color images, provides a fascinating survey of the area over nearly a century allowing a unique view of the multi-layered, cultural landscape of the American S
"The Strachwitz Frontera Collection is the largest repository of commercially produced Mexican and Mexican American vernacular recordings in existence. It contains more than 130,000 individual recordings. Many are rare, and some are one of a kind. Although border music is the focus of the collection, it also includes notable recordings of other Latin forms, including salsa, mambo, sones, and rancheras. More than 40,000 of the recordings, all from the first half of the twentieth century, have been digitized with the help of the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center and are available online through the University of California's Digital Library Program. Agustin Gurza explores the Frontera Collection from different viewpoints, discussing genre, themes, and some of the thousands of composers and performers whose work is contained in the archive. Throughout he discusses the cultural significance of the recordings and relates the stories of those who have had a vital role in their production and preservation. Rounding out the volume are chapters by Jonathan Clark, who surveys the recordings of mariachi ensembles, and Chris Strachwitz, the founder of the Arhoolie Foundation, who reflects on his six decades of collecting the music that makes up the Frontera Collection."--Publisher description.
Around 1930, a highly popular and distinctive type of accordion music, commonly known as conjunto, emerged among Texas-Mexicans. Manuel Peña's The Texas-Mexican Con;unto is the first comprehensive study of this unique folk style. The author's exhaustive fieldwork and personal interviews with performers, disc jockeys, dance promoters, recording company owners, and conjunto music lovers provide the crucial connection between an analysis of the music itself and the richness of the culture from which it sprang. Using an approach that integrates musicological, historical, and sociological methods of analysis, Peña traces the development of the conjunto from its tentative beginnings to its preeminence as a full-blown style by the early 1960s. Biographical sketches of such major early performers as Narciso Martínez (El Huracán del Valle), Santiago Jiménez (El Flaco), Pedro Ayala, Valerio Longoria, Tony de la Rosa, and Paulino Bernal, along with detailed transcriptions of representative compositions, illustrate the various phases of conjunto evolution. Peña also probes the vital connection between conjunto's emergence as a powerful symbolic expression and the transformation of Texas-Mexican society from a pre-industrial folk group to a community with increasingly divergent socioeconomic classes and ideologies. Of concern throughout the study is the interplay between ethnicity, class, and culture, and Peña's use of methods and theories from a variety of scholarly disciplines enables him to tell the story of conjunto in a manner both engaging and enlightening. This important study will be of interest to all students of Mexican American culture, ethnomusicology, and folklore.
A representative anthology of Texas folklore from the first half of the twentieth century, including legends, ghost stories, songs, proverbs, and other writings.