Yodeling and Meaning in American Music
Yodeling and Meaning in American Music

Author: Timothy E. Wise

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2016-10-28

Total Pages: 255

ISBN-13: 149680581X

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Timothy E. Wise presents the first book to focus specifically on the musical content of yodeling in our culture. He shows that yodeling serves an aesthetic function in musical texts. A series of chronological chapters analyzes this musical tradition from its earliest appearances in Europe to its incorporation into a range of American genres and beyond. Wise posits the reasons for yodeling's changing status in our music. How and why was yodeling introduced into professional music making in the first place? What purposes has it served in musical texts? Why was it expunged from classical music? Why did it attach to some popular music genres and not others? Why does yodeling now appear principally at the margins of mainstream tastes? To answer such questions, Wise applies the perspectives of critical musicology, semiotics, and cultural studies to the changing semantic associations of yodeling in an unexplored repertoire stretching from Beethoven to Zappa. This volume marks the first musicological and ideological analysis of this prominent but largely ignored feature of American musical life. Maintaining high scholarly standards but keeping the general reader in mind, the author examines yodeling in relation to ongoing cultural debates about singing, music as art, social class, and gender. Chapters devote attention to yodeling in nineteenth-century classical music, the nineteenth-century Alpine-themed song in America, the Americanization of the yodel, Jimmie Rodgers, and cowboy yodeling, among other topics.

How to Yodel
How to Yodel

Author: Wylie Gustafson

Publisher: Gibbs Smith

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 102

ISBN-13: 9781423602132

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Big secrets of great yodelers ; Relax ; Singing exercise ; Find your voice break ; Basic yodel lesson ; Styles, rhythms, and tongue tricks ; Happy trails!

Yodel in Hi-Fi
Yodel in Hi-Fi

Author: Bart Plantenga

Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres

Published: 2013-02-08

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 0299290530

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Yodel in Hi-Fi explores the vibrant and varied traditions of yodelers around the world. Far from being a quaint and dying art, yodel is a thriving vocal technique that has been perennially renewed by singers from Switzerland to Korea, from Colorado to Iran. Bart Plantenga offers a lively and surprising tour of yodeling in genres from opera to hip-hop and in venues from cowboy campfires and Oktoberfests to film soundtracks and yogurt commercials. Displaying an extraordinary versatility, yodeling crosses all borders and circumvents all language barriers to assume its rightful place in the world of music. “If Wisconsin wasn’t on the yodel music map before, this book puts it there.”—Wisconsin State Journal

Meeting Jimmie Rodgers
Meeting Jimmie Rodgers

Author: Barry Mazor

Publisher: Oxford University Press on Demand

Published: 2009-05-15

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 0195327624

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Here is the first book to explore the legacy of Jimmie Rodgers, offering a lively look at Rodgers' career, tracing his rise from working-class obscurity to the pinnacle of renown. As Mazor shows, Rodgers brought emotional clarity and a unique sense of narrative drama to every song he performed. But more than anything else, Mazor suggests, it was Rodgers' shape-shifting ability to assume many public personas--working stiff, decked-out cowboy, suave ladies' man--that connected him to a broad public and set the stage for the stars who followed.

Resistance
Resistance

Author: Tori Amos

Publisher: Atria Books

Published: 2020-05-05

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 1982104155

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AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A timely and passionate call to action for engaging with our current political moment, from the Grammy-nominated and multiplatinum singer-songwriter and New York Times bestselling author Tori Amos. Since the release of her first, career-defining solo album Little Earthquakes, Tori Amos has been one of the music industry’s most enduring and ingenious artists. From her unnerving depiction of sexual assault in “Me and a Gun” to her post-September 11 album, Scarlet’s Walk, to her latest album, Native Invader, her work has never shied away from intermingling the personal with the political. Amos began playing piano as a teenager for the politically powerful at hotel bars in Washington, DC, during the formative years of the post-Goldwater and then Koch-led Libertarian and Reaganite movements. The story continues to her time as a hungry artist in Los Angeles to the subsequent three decades of her formidable music career. Amos explains how she managed to create meaningful, politically resonant work against patriarchal power structures—and how her proud declarations of feminism and her fight for the marginalized always proved to be her guiding light. She teaches us to engage with intention in this tumultuous global climate and speaks directly to supporters of #MeToo and #TimesUp, as well as young people fighting for their rights and visibility in the world. Filled with compassionate guidance and actionable advice—and using some of the most powerful, political songs in Amos’s canon—this book is for anyone determined to steer the world back in the right direction.

Hidden in the Mix
Hidden in the Mix

Author: Diane Pecknold

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2013-07-10

Total Pages: 391

ISBN-13: 0822351633

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Country music's debt to African American music has long been recognized. Black musicians have helped to shape the styles of many of the most important performers in the country canon. The partnership between Lesley Riddle and A. P. Carter produced much of the Carter Family's repertoire; the street musician Tee Tot Payne taught a young Hank Williams Sr.; the guitar playing of Arnold Schultz influenced western Kentuckians, including Bill Monroe and Ike Everly. Yet attention to how these and other African Americans enriched the music played by whites has obscured the achievements of black country-music performers and the enjoyment of black listeners. The contributors to Hidden in the Mix examine how country music became "white," how that fictive racialization has been maintained, and how African American artists and fans have used country music to elaborate their own identities. They investigate topics as diverse as the role of race in shaping old-time record catalogues, the transracial West of the hick-hopper Cowboy Troy, and the place of U.S. country music in postcolonial debates about race and resistance. Revealing how music mediates both the ideology and the lived experience of race, Hidden in the Mix challenges the status of country music as "the white man’s blues." Contributors. Michael Awkward, Erika Brady, Barbara Ching, Adam Gussow, Patrick Huber, Charles Hughes, Jeffrey A. Keith, Kip Lornell, Diane Pecknold, David Sanjek, Tony Thomas, Jerry Wever

Country
Country

Author: Nick Tosches

Publisher: Da Capo Press

Published: 2009-08-05

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 0786750987

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Celebrating the dark origins of our most American music, Country reveals a wild shadowland of history that encompasses blackface minstrels and yodeling cowboys; honky-tonk hell and rockabilly heaven; medieval myth and musical miscegenation; sex, drugs, murder; and rays of fierce illumination on Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, and others, famous and forgotten, whose demonology is America's own. Profusely and superbly illustrated, Country stands as one of the most brilliant explorations of American musical culture ever written.

The Blues: A Very Short Introduction
The Blues: A Very Short Introduction

Author: Elijah Wald

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2010-08-03

Total Pages: 153

ISBN-13: 0199750793

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Praised as "suave, soulful, ebullient" (Tom Waits) and "a meticulous researcher, a graceful writer, and a committed contrarian" (New York Times Book Review), Elijah Wald is one of the leading popular music critics of his generation. In The Blues, Wald surveys a genre at the heart of American culture. It is not an easy thing to pin down. As Howlin' Wolf once described it, "When you ain't got no money and can't pay your house rent and can't buy you no food, you've damn sure got the blues." It has been defined by lyrical structure, or as a progression of chords, or as a set of practices reflecting West African "tonal and rhythmic approaches," using a five-note "blues scale." Wald sees blues less as a style than as a broad musical tradition within a constantly evolving pop culture. He traces its roots in work and praise songs, and shows how it was transformed by such professional performers as W. C. Handy, who first popularized the blues a century ago. He follows its evolution from Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith through Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix; identifies the impact of rural field recordings of Blind Lemon Jefferson, Charley Patton and others; explores the role of blues in the development of both country music and jazz; and looks at the popular rhythm and blues trends of the 1940s and 1950s, from the uptown West Coast style of T-Bone Walker to the "down home" Chicago sound of Muddy Waters. Wald brings the story up to the present, touching on the effects of blues on American poetry, and its connection to modern styles such as rap. As with all of Oxford's Very Short Introductions, The Blues tells you--with insight, clarity, and wit--everything you need to know to understand this quintessentially American musical genre.