The How and the Tao of Old Time Banjo by Patrick Costello is a comprehensive guide for all banjo lovers. Novices and old-timers alike will benefit from clear and easy to understand presentations on subjects like the basic strum, melody, rhythm, scales, modes, playing by ear, playing while singing, drop thumb and much more. The author also entertains readers with many heart warming and sometimes amusing accounts of his musical adventures.
Jerry Silverman has taken the best songs from Songs of England, Songs of Ireland, and Songs of Scotland and has arranged them for voice with piano accompaniment and guitar chords. A new section on Songs of Wales is also included.
Over 50 songs that stir the American spirit, grouped by historical era for easy reference, will make readers want to tap their feet, clap their hands, and sing along.
Alabamians have always been a singing people. The settlers who moved into the various sections of the state brought with them songs which reflected their national origins and geographical backgrounds, and as they spread into the hills and over the lowlands they created new songs out of the conditions under which they lived. Also, they absorbed songs from outside sources whenever these pieces could be adapted to their sentiments and ways of life. Thus, by a process of memory, composition and recreation they developed a rich body of folk songs. The following collection a part of the effort to discover and preserve these songs.
In The Late Victorian Folksong Revival: The Persistence of English Melody, 1878-1903, E. David Gregory provides a reliable and comprehensive history of the birth and early development of the first English folksong revival. Continuing where Victorian Songhunters, his first book, left off, Gregory systematically explores what the Late Victorian folksong collectors discovered in the field and what they published for posterity, identifying differences between the songs noted from oral tradition and those published in print. In doing so, he determines the extent to which the collectors distorted what they found when publishing the results of their research in an era when some folksong texts were deemed unsuitable for "polite ears." The book provides a reliable overall survey of the birth of a movement, tracing the genesis and development of the first English folksong revival. It discusses the work of more than a dozen song-collectors, focusing in particular on three key figures: the pioneer folklorist in the English west country, Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould; Frank Kidson, who greatly increased the known corpus of Yorkshire song; and Lucy Broadwood, who collected mainly in the counties of Sussex and Surrey, and with Kidson and others, was instrumental in founding the Folk Song Society in the late 1890s. The book includes copious examples of the song tunes and texts collected, including transcriptions of nearly 300 traditional ballads, broadside ballads, folk lyrics, occupational songs, carols, shanties, and "national songs," demonstrating the abundance and high quality of the songs recovered by these early collectors.
Many of the great songs that have inspired performers around the world in the last 50 years come from the English folk song tradition. This book provides words and melodies for nearly 100 songs, along with an exploration of their history and meaning, the context in which they arose, and their value to writers and performers around the world.
