Best selling author and illustrator and May Gibbs children's Literature Trust Fellow, Norah Kersh, presents her next book in the Outback series. Following the success of Outback Alphabet and Outback Countout, Outback Songs will not only teach young Australians and visitors some of our best Australian songs, but also provide hours of entertainment. Well-known songs such as Waltzing Matilda and Home Among the Gum Trees are mixed with more recent songs like School of the Air by Kevin Wilson and Arnhem Land Lullaby by Ted Egan and Dick Mununggu.
“A ground-breaking study of the songs of the pied butcherbird . . . intellectually engaging and also very entertaining as a fieldwork memoir.” —The Music Trust How and when does music become possible? Is it a matter of biology, or culture, or an interaction between the two? Revolutionizing the way we think about the core values of music and human exceptionalism, Hollis Taylor takes us on an outback road trip to meet the Australian pied butcherbird. Recognized for their distinct timbre, calls, and songs, both sexes of this songbird sing in duos, trios, and even larger choirs, transforming their flute-like songs annually. While birdsong has long inspired artists, writers, musicians, and philosophers, and enthralled listeners from all walks of life, researchers from the sciences have dominated its study. As a field musicologist, Taylor spends months each year in the Australian outback recording the songs of the pied butcherbird and chronicling their musical activities. She argues persuasively in these pages that their inventiveness in song surpasses biological necessity, compelling us to question the foundations of music and confront the remarkably entangled relationship between human and animal worlds. Equal parts nature essay, memoir, and scholarship, Is Birdsong Music? offers vivid portraits of the extreme locations where these avian choristers are found, quirky stories from the field, and an in-depth exploration of the vocalizations of the pied butcherbird. “Hollis Taylor has given us one of the most serious books ever written on animal music. Is Birdsong Music? is so engaging that all who care about humanity’s place on Earth should read it. We are certainly not the only musicians on this planet.” —David Rothenberg, author of Why Birds Sing
"Listening to the Beat of the Bomb" UPK author Charles Wolfe discusses his work and his new book Country Music Goes to War in the NEW YORK TIMES. While Toby Keith suggests that Americans should unite in support of the president, the Dixie Chicks assert their right to criticize the current administration and its military pursuits. Country songs about war are nearly as old as the genre itself, and the first gold record in country music went to the 1942 war song "There's a Star Spangled Banner Waving Somewhere" by Elton Britt. The essays in Country Music Goes to War demonstrate that country musicians' engagement with significant political and military issues is not strictly a twenty-first-century phenomenon. The contributors examine the output of country musicians responding to America's large-scale confrontation in recent history: World War II, the Korean War, Vietnam, the cold war, September 11, and both conflicts in the Persian Gulf. They address the ways in which country songs and artists have energized public discourse, captured hearts, and inspired millions of minds. Charles K. Wolfe, professor of English and folklore at Middle Tennessee State University, is the author of numerous books and articles on music. James E. Akenson, professor of curriculum and instruction at Tennessee Technological University, is the founder of the International Country Music Conference. Together they have edited the collections The Women of Country Music, Country Music Annual 2000, Country Music Annual 2001, and Country Music Annual 2002.
Approaches country music through an interdisciplinary lens, Features close analyses of gendered and racial disparities in country music, Examines politics of both the performance of country music and the scholarship surrounding it Book jacket.
Beginning in the early 1980s Aboriginal Australians found in music, radio, and filmic media a means to make themselves heard across the country and to insert themselves into the center of Australian political life. In The Voice and Its Doubles Daniel Fisher analyzes the great success of this endeavor, asking what is at stake in the sounds of such media for Aboriginal Australians. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research in northern Australia, Fisher describes the close proximity of musical media, shifting forms of governmental intervention, and those public expressions of intimacy and kinship that suffuse Aboriginal Australian social life. Today’s Aboriginal media include genres of country music and hip-hop; radio requests and broadcast speech; visual graphs of a digital audio timeline; as well as the statistical media of audience research and the discursive and numerical figures of state audits and cultural policy formation. In each of these diverse instances the mediatized voice has become a site for overlapping and at times discordant forms of political, expressive, and institutional creativity.
In its 114th year, Billboard remains the world's premier weekly music publication and a diverse digital, events, brand, content and data licensing platform. Billboard publishes the most trusted charts and offers unrivaled reporting about the latest music, video, gaming, media, digital and mobile entertainment issues and trends.
This landmark book tells the story of one of the most enduring forms of popular culture in Australia. Prior to the 1950s, country music was called hillbilly music. Hillbilly was the rock ‘n’ roll of its day. The latest craze, straight from America, it was young, exciting and glamorous. This book traces the journey hillbilly took to become country: the rural nationalistic form it is known as today. Yodelling Boundary Riders is the first book to contextualise country music into a broader story about Australian history. Not just concerned with the development of music itself, it is also a history of the ways in which Australians have responded to the rapid rate of change in the twentieth century and the global fascination with “authenticity”. True to its subject matter, the writing is colourful and entertaining. Along the way Martin introduces some wonderful characters and events: yodelling stockmen, singing cowgirls, sentimental cowboys, coo-ees in Nashville, hobos on the mail train, the Sheik of Scrubby Creek and Australia’s craziest hillbillies.
The Gift of Song: Performing Exchange in Western Arnhem Land tells the story of the return of physical and digital cultural materials through song and dance. Drawing on extensive, first-person ethnographic fieldwork in western Arnhem Land, Australia, Brown examines how Bininj/Arrarrkpi (Aboriginal people of this region) enact change and innovate their performance practices through ceremonial exchange. As Indigenous communities worldwide confront new social and environmental challenges, this book addresses the questions: How do Indigenous communities come to terms with legacies of taking and collecting? How are cultural materials in digital formats received and ritualised? How do traditional forms of exchange continue to mediate relationships? Combining ethnomusicological analysis and linguistically and historically informed ethnography, this book reveals how multilingualism and musical diversity are maintained through kun-borrk/manyardi, a major genre of Indigenous Australian song and dance. It retheorises the core anthropological concept of ‘exchange’ and enriches understanding of repatriation as a process of re-embedding tangible objects through intangible practices of ceremony and language.
There was something interesting around every corner, be it brumbies and wild donkeys disappearing through the bush, or a little waterhole where the snakes and kangaroos came to drink. Toni's childhood isn't like other kids'. She is only five years old when her mum packs a small suitcase and takes the family over 300 kilometres on a scratchy dirt track to live at Killarney, a remote cattle station in the Northern Territory. Toni grows up among the cattle and horses, with the wild Territory climate and even wilder native animals around her. She has adventures with Old Dora and Daisy, the Aboriginal women who help raise her and her brothers and sisters. They teach her about bush tucker and tell her stories of debil debils. My Outback Childhood is the story of Toni's unconventional upbringing on Killarney - stalking goannas, helping in the cattle yards, riding horses and sleeping under the stars. Young readers will be captivated by this true story of a childhood filled with Outback adventures. Fascinating for city kids and country children alike, this is a unique story that educates as well as entertains.
