Abstract
This book about music is also a story about looking, observing, and perception. It tells the story of the manner in which the collectors, advocates, and patrons of French Louisiana music saw its traditions and performers in the context of social, political, and cultural debates in the United States from the mid-1920s to the early 1970s. It is about the outsider’s gaze as it fell on a regional culture, and the insights and misperceptions of ethnomusicologists and commercial promoters as they struggled to understand a regional music that appeared to exist on the outskirts of American musical culture and outside the traditional scope of folk and popular music scholarship. French Louisiana music, a harmonically simplistic, ballad-based music that developed on the bayous and prairies of Southwest Louisiana in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is dissonant, raucous, exuberant and haunting, and although Southwest Louisianans listened to and performed a whole range of musical genres and styles, including jazz, blues, and country, old-time French-language music was a unique cultural expression of the region and played a powerful and enduring role in rural community life.
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Notes
- 1.
Benjamin Filene, Romancing the Folk: Public Memory & American Roots Music (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 36; 4–5.
- 2.
Ryan André Brasseaux, Cajun Breakdown: The Emergence of an American-Made Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 25. Brasseaux argues that Cajun music is not, in any case, folk music (a term Brasseaux finds pejorative and exploitative).
- 3.
Regina Bendix, In Search of Authenticity, The Formation of Folklore Studies (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 122.
- 4.
Louisiana Folk-Tales, In French Dialect and Translation, collected and edited by Alcée Fortier, The American Folklore Society (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1895): Preface.
- 5.
Phillips Barry, quoted in Bendix, In Search of Authenticity, 144–145.
- 6.
Bendix, In Search of Authenticity, 151.
- 7.
Alan Lomax quoted in Bendix, In Search of Authenticity, 147.
- 8.
Roger D. Abrahams, “The Public, The Folklorist, and the Public Folklorist” in Public Folklore, ed. Robert Baron and Nick Spitzer (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2007), 24.
- 9.
Bendix, In Search of Authenticity, 150.
- 10.
Richard J. Blaustein, “Traditional Music and Social Change: The Old Time Fiddlers Association Movement in the United States” (Ph.D. dissertation, Indiana University, 1975), 22.
- 11.
Old-time California fiddler Kelley Kirksey, quoted in Blaustein, “Traditional Music,” 86.
- 12.
Missouri fiddler Jake Hughes, quoted in Blaustein, “Traditional Music,” 30.
- 13.
Alabama fiddler Bill Harrison, quoted in Blaustein, “Traditional Music,” 83.
- 14.
Missouri fiddler Jake Hughes, quoted in Blaustein, “Traditional Music,” 66.
- 15.
Blaustein, Traditional Music, 6.
- 16.
Phillip J. Johnson, “The Limits of Interracial Compromise: Louisiana, 1941,” The Journal of Southern History, Volume LXIX, No. 2 (May 2003): 324.
- 17.
Karl Hagstrom Miller, Segregating Sound, Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 1–2; 12.
- 18.
Christopher A. Waterman, “Race Music: Bo Chatmon, “Corrine, Corrina” and the Excluded Middle,” in Music and the Racial Imagination, edited by Ronald Radano and Philip Bohlman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 167–168; 182; 199.
- 19.
Sylvie Dubois and Barbara M. Horvath, “Creoles and Cajuns: A Portrait in Black and White,” American Speech 78.2 (2003): 197.
- 20.
Benjamin Filene, Romancing the Folk: Public Memory & American Roots Music (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 4.
- 21.
Alan Lomax, quoted in “Lomax in Louisiana: Trials and Triumphs,” Barry Jean Ancelet, Folklife in Louisiana, Louisiana’s Living Traditions http://www.louisianafolklife.org/LT/Articles_Essays/LFMlomax.html.
Bibliography
Filene, Benjamin. Romancing the Folk: Public Memory & American Roots Music. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.
Brasseaux, Ryan André. Cajun Breakdown, The Emergence of an American-Made Music. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Bendix, Regina. In Search of Authenticity, The Formation of Folklore Studies. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1997.
Fortier, Alcée, ed. Louisiana Folk-Tales, In French Dialect and Translation. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1895.
Roger D. Abrahams. “The Public, The Folklorist, and the Public Folklorist” in Public Folklore, ed. Robert Baron and Nick Spitzer. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2007.
Blaustein, Richard J. “Traditional Music and Social Change: The Old Time Fiddlers Association Movement in the United States.” Ph.D. dissertation, Indiana University, 1975.
Johnson, Phillip J. “The Limits of Interracial Compromise: Louisiana, 1941.” The Journal of Southern History, Volume LXIX, No. 2 (May 2003): 319–348.
Lomax, Alan, quoted in “Lomax in Louisiana, Trials and Triumphs,” Barry Jean Ancelet, Folklife in Louisiana. http://www.louisianafolklife.org/LT/Articles_Essays/LFMlomax.html.
Miller, Karl Hagstrom. Segregating Sound, Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.
Waterman, Christopher A. “Race Music: Bo Chatmon, “Corrine Corrina” and the Excluded Middle.” In Music and the Racial Imagination, edited by Ronald Radano and Philip Bohlman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.
Dubois, Sylvie, and Barbara M. Horvath. “Creoles and Cajuns: A Portrait in Black and White.” American Speech 78.2 (2003): 192–207.
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Peknik, P. (2019). Introduction: “A Wild and Ferocious Waltz”. In: French Louisiana Music and Its Patrons. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97424-8_1
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